“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.” It was 1966 when Joan Didion wrote that about California, and since then it’s become almost axiomatic that America's future starts on the West Coast — whether built by Silicon Valley or scripted by Hollywood or imported from across the Pacific Rim. And now after a campaign that started out looking like a Queens vs. Scranton rematch, Americans are all but certain to be asked to choose between two visions of the future shaped by California. One is the pioneering candidacy of Vice President (and former U.S. Senator from California) Kamala Harris, a Bay Area-born politician who would become both the first woman president and woman president of color. The other is, yes, former President Donald Trump, whose campaign is now increasingly powered by the idiosyncratic right-wing politics of key Silicon Valley thought leaders. That raises a perhaps unexpectedly complicated question: That of which candidate can most credibly represent the future, personally. Trump has won over high-profile voices on Silicon Valley’s right like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen by embracing their favored policies on cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, manufacturing and geopolitics. His culture war obsessions also reflect their ideas about how growth occurs in American society, driven by iconoclastic “builders” rather than collaborative rule-followers. Of course, Trump now would be the oldest president ever inaugurated, should he win another non-consecutive term, so for the Silicon Valley futurists who have embraced Trump as one of their own, that makes for a slightly more awkward argument than it did when he was running against the even older Joe Biden. Harris has a clearer claim on the future, as a spry, plugged-in 59-year-old. (Born in 1964, she’s almost young enough to be Gen X.) Having been in the race for only roughly 24 hours, she doesn’t have quite as sketched-out of an agenda for the future yet. As vice president, however, she has led Biden’s push to expand broadband access and supported government regulation of artificial intelligence. She’s also already garnered serious support in Silicon Valley, with venture capital titan Ron Conway pleading on X, “The tech community must come together to defeat Donald Trump and save our democracy by uniting behind Vice President @KamalaHarris,” and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman leading a major fundraising charge after Biden left the race Sunday. California’s idea-generating role in American life extends not just to those technological innovations, but to politics itself. Hollywood helped create the persona of the late President Ronald Reagan, who owed his initial fame to the movie business, experienced conversion to a then-novel, subversive school of Goldwater conservative politics and upended expectations for what practitioners of either art could achieve by becoming president at 69 years of age in 1980. Trump, like Reagan, redefined not just what it means to be a conservative but what kind of person is allowed to become president in the first place, powered by the revolutionary nature of social media communication. That comparison helps explain how Silicon Valley’s futurists might credibly claim that a septuagenarian real estate mogul from the outer boroughs of New York would represent the dynamist politics of the future. What Harris represents politically remains much less clear. Her 2020 presidential primary campaign leaned into the progressive racial politics that helped power the “resistance” to the Trump presidency, but after the campaign fizzled early, she’s largely reinvented her political persona and broadened her policy portfolio as vice president. (She’s also become something of a social media phenomenon in her own right in the past 24 hours.) Now she’ll seek to define and articulate her vision for America’s future once again, with the transformative potential of AI, the shifting political winds in Silicon Valley and her own California roots looming over a presidential campaign that’s already broken records for novelty in the news cycle. While it remains to be seen where she’ll stand in that landscape, her ascent to the top of the presidential ticket guarantees that the Californian ethos of renewal will be at the heart of this year’s argument about where the nation is headed.
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