The Present and Its Enemies
Stasists and dynamists vs. technocrats
I’ve been doing some reading lately about Silicon Valley in the 1990s. This led me to Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies (1999), a book I vaguely knew had popularized the term “dynamist,” still used as a positive self-ascription by many tech-world types who see themselves as the future’s friends, and as a descriptor by commentators including New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.
Postrel’s book was an early and prescient contribution to a debate that has taken on new prominence recently. There are more localized versions of it, such as the conflict over regulation of artificial intelligence, but also a broader struggle between what investor Marc Andreessen called “techno-optimism” in his 2023 manifesto and a number of varyingly tech-critical factions, from those within Silicon Valley worried about existential risk from AI to the “degrowthers” of the left.
The techno-optimist or dynamist camp became firmly aligned with MAGA this election cycle, as evident in the constant presence of not just Andreessen but, of course, Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago. Reading Postrel’s account of the conflict pitting dynamists against what she calls “stasists” in the ‘90s makes Trump’s attractiveness to leading figures in the first camp seem even more remarkable to me than it had previously.
The usual explanation of what they have in common, going back to noted dynamist Peter Thiel’s endorsement of Trump in 2016, is that Trump, like the tech moguls he has drawn into his orbit, is a “builder” (Andreessen titled a previous manifesto, from well before his MAGA turn, “It’s Time to Build.”) But there’s no getting around the fact that Trump is a more thorough-going stasist than perhaps any other major public figure. For Postrel, dynamism is driven above all by non-zero-sum logic; Trump is a zero-sum guy. He even famously thinks exercise is bad for you because the human body is like a battery, with a limited amount of energy to be expended over a lifetime.
This is the outlook informs his view on an issue on which he has been doggedly consistent for half a century: trade. Contrary to the stance of promoters of markets going back centuries, Trump holds firm to the mercantilist view that it simply can’t be good for America to ever give its money to any other countries under any circumstances. He evidently conceives of any expenditure on foreign goods as a loss to America.
One of Postrel’s main exemplars of 1990s “stasism” is the man often seen as Trump’s major ideological precursor: Pat Buchanan, who shared the president-elect’s inclination to seal the borders to the greatest extent possible to both goods and people. As Postrel notes, this put Buchanan at odds with other Republicans, but he found unexpected allies elsewhere, including in labor unions and the left-wing anti-globalization movement (a history recently examined by Helen Andrews in Compact).
An early passage in Postrel’s book discusses Buchanan’s appearance on Crossfire in 1995 with the environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin. The two were meant to be sparring partners representing the right and left, but as Postrel says, they “turned out to be soulmates.” “Both men,” she recounts, “were deeply pessimistic about the future … and desperate to find government policies to restore the good old days.” The stasist horseshoe bromance of Rifkin and Buchanan looks, thirty years later, like a surprising precursor of Trump’s dalliance with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
To the extent MAGA now unites factions of labor and environmentalism with economic and cultural nativism, it brings together all of the major strains of 1990s stasism highlighted by Postrel. This shared inclination sheds some light not only on Trump’s embrace of RFK, but on his recent statement of support for the International Longshoremen’s Association after a meeting with the union’s leader, Harold Dagget. The president-elect made a firm statement against the automation of American ports, declaring: “I’d rather these foreign companies spend it on the great men and women on our docks, than machinery, which is expensive, and which will constantly have to be replaced.” This is the zero-sum logic anathema to dynamists: either Americans or foreigners, men or machines, come out on top, never both.
Again, all this makes the presence of some of our most prominent dynamists—Musk, Andreessen, and their allies—in the same political camp a striking fact. My sense is what explains the strange convergence of dynamists and stasists is a shared opposition to a third camp also identified by Postrel: the technocrats.
For Postrel, technocrats are a synthetic formation, an attempted compromise between stasism and dynamism that can satisfy the demands of neither. Technocrats often look like dynamists because they welcome, rather than fear, the future, but according to Postrel, they hamper its full realization by attempting to impose centralized control. Although she identifies technocracy with the postwar US economy defined by the nexus of big government and big business, she sees in various 1990s political entrepreneurs, from Ross Perot to Al Gore, an attempt to reinvigorate technocracy and thereby constrain “the unruly vitality of contemporary life.”
The George W. Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations might all be seen as distinct attempts to realize a new technocratic synthesis to succeed the moribund 20th-century one (which, as an aside, deserves far more credit than Postrel’s libertarian account allows, but that’s a topic for another day). All three came to bad ends, and have bequeathed us a world that makes both stasists and dynamists unhappy: characterized by rapid change and chaotic disruption, but also by stagnation and decline. Perhaps the real question for the new administration is whether its motley coalition of radical stasists and radical dynamists can somehow break with this pattern of mediocrity and failure, or whether it will end up as another failed technocratic synthesis.
This week in Compact
It’s been another rich and varied week in the pages of Compact. A brief recap:
Bruna Frascolla on how American-style “woke racism” took hold in Brazil.
Justin Vassallo on the obstacles facing reformers in the Democratic Party.
Marco d’Eramo on the limits of the anti-tourism politics sweeping Europe.
Reinaldo Laddaga on the ideological inflections of two museum renovations.
Ashley Frawley on the gender-stratified reaction to a recent school shooting.
David Schaengold offers an agenda for renewing American civic architecture.
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Thanks as always for reading!
Is this “stasist” and “dynamist” terminology serious? Is this from some sociology or pop poli sci? I guess this is not supposed to be class analysis, though.