Abstract

"Risky Business: Industrial Policy and the Origins of the Democratic Party's Alliance with Silicon Valley, 1979-1992"

Henry Tonks, Kenyon College (tonks1@kenyon.edu)

In 1983, an executive at high-technology manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) wrote privately to California’s Democratic ex-governor Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown, Jr.: “The fact our country has no national industrial policy…is a void that must be filled.”
Jerry Brown represented what Bill Clinton later called “a new generation of Democrats,” who “don’t think the way the old [New Deal] Democratic Party did.” Among historians, “New Liberals” like Brown or Clinton are infamous for courting the political and financial support of businesses in the “knowledge economy,” notably Silicon Valley and Wall Street. These politicians, we are told, won support in such sectors by distancing themselves from intrusive, market-shaping policies – a rejection of “old” Democrats’ “big government” legacy. AMD’s plea for “national industrial policy,” however, compels a reconsideration of what brought these rising business sectors together with a transforming Democratic Party.
My paper will focus on two interconnected arenas of elite Democratic partnership with business in the 1980s: Congressional Democrats’ proposals for national industrial policy, and Brown’s work with Silicon Valley via his National Commission on Industrial Innovation. Brown’s commission forms a representative case study of regional political-business partnerships forged by “New Liberals” from Clinton’s Arkansas to Michael Dukakis’s Massachusetts.
I argue that the Democratic Party’s new partnership with up-and-coming business sectors arose not from shared interests in “market-friendly” (de)regulation, but instead from shared anxieties about the United States’ declining industrial “competitiveness.” These anxieties led high-tech manufacturers (which were distinct from Silicon Valley’s twenty-first-century shift into apps, services, and gimmickry) to seek out Democratic partners for expansive, market-shaping industrial policy. Thus, I argue that the modern Democratic Party’s transformative – ultimately Mephistophelean – partnership with high-tech businesses originated as an effort to co-engineer a technological upgrade of liberalism's developmental state.