JD Vance tries to mend the MAGA-Tech divide

On Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance publicly acknowledged a simmering “tension” between two warring factions inside the Republican party – the populist MAGA right and the tech billionaires who threw their support to Donald Trump – and called for a truce.

In remarks at Andreesen-Horowitz’s American Dynamism policy conference in Washington, DC, Vance, a former venture capitalist, and Peter Thiel, protege turned MAGA internet darling, sought to connect two sides of the coalition that got Trump into the White House, but found each other at philosophical odds. Throughout the transition and early administration, the populist right began heavily criticizing the new tech players and agendas that were now influencing the president – particularly Elon Musk, whose support of H1B1 visas drew a sharp rebuke from the anti-immigration Steve Bannon, and Marc Andreessen, who helped vet potential administration appointees.

“I’d like to speak to these tensions as a proud member of both tribes,” Vance said, in comments reported by the New York Times. “While this is a well-intentioned concern, I think it’s based on a faulty premise. This idea that tech-forward people and the populists are somehow inevitably going to come to a loggerheads is wrong.”

The thrust of Vance’s remarks sought to walk a tightrope between the MAGA right and the tech industry’s fundamental view on globalization: the MAGA movement has long viewed it as a threat to the American working class, while the tech industry has heavily relied on global economic expansion to scale their businesses. Instead, Vance proposed that it was, in fact, the U.S. government that had failed them both: “Not just the government of the last administration, but the government, in some ways, of the last 40 years.”

“And so I’d ask my friends, both on the tech-optimist side and on the populist side, not to see the failure of the logic of globalization as a failure of innovation,” he continued. “Both our working people, our populists, and our innovators gathered here today have the same enemy. And the solution, I believe, is American innovation. Because in the long run, it’s technology that increases the value of labor.”