If you want to understand the political positions held in Silicon Valley I think you need a understanding of how atrociously SF, the Bay and really all of California have been governed, and how viscerally this affects everyone here.
We are a rich region of a rich state and we don't have adequate public schools, or adequate roads, or adequate shelter or public services or law enforcement, and lately we do not even have consistent access to electricity.
I think a lot of the political stances you hear articulated by Silicon Valley and SF elites have, as their bedrock conviction, that the thing SF and more broadly California is doing *does not work* and that proposals to do more of it are *really alarming*.
People disagree on what "more of it" is. Zoning, not policing, overregulating, underregulating, not building affordable housing, car-centrism, letting people live here at all... but the politics of the Bay Area are the product of governance here being an embarrassing failure.
I think most people in the Bay are innately moderately liberals, but one-party Democratic rule was an ingredient in the evisceration of SF's working class & middle class & it's an ingredient in today's disasters& that drives people away, whether towards leftism or libertarianism.
If you try to write about how people in Silicon Valley see the world and you haven't actually tried to interact with the government in our cities, or tried to walk a stroller down our catastrophically bad sidewalks, or ride a bike on our streets, you are missing something.
