"the oligarchal dream of combining monopoly capitalism with dogmatic progressive orthodoxy turned into a political nightmare."

Joel Kotkin writes in City Journal,

...For a decade, the oligarchs of Silicon Valley and Puget Sound worked overtime to win over progressives. For the most part, they enthusiastically back the Left on its immigration, environmental, gender, and racial agendas. The merger of the tech oligarchs with the Democrats went swimmingly—until the contradictions became too obvious. Even as they muzzled conservatives both inside and outside their companies and donated heavily to President Obama and other Democrats, they have remained at their core ruthless capitalists, determined to crush competition and shape society to their liking.

...One can appreciate the economic benefits that firms like Uber, Lyft, Salesforce, and others have brought to San Francisco and other tech-oriented cities. Yet the concentration of high-end businesses has also helped create a neo-Dickensian reality: sky-high housing prices, widespread homelessness, and a rapidly shrinking middle class. There are now more drug addicts in San Francisco than high school students. Rising rents have undermined that city’s cherished bohemian culture and hastened a rapid decline in the minority population, both in the city and across the tech-dominated Bay Area. In 1970, 96,000 African-Americans lived in San Francisco; today, barely 46,000 make their homes there, constituting less than 5 percent of the city’s population. More than half of the Bay Area’s lower-income communities, notes a recent UC Berkeley study, are in danger of mass displacement. Amazon, it seemed to many progressives, threatened to bring the same conditions to New York.

...n New York, a tough political atmosphere at any time, the oligarchal dream of combining monopoly capitalism with dogmatic progressive orthodoxy turned into a political nightmare. Rather than win new allies, the tech titans have wound up bolstering the very groups that want to eliminate them. And this is likely to mark just the beginning of a process that will unveil—in a way that no doubt would have delighted Marx—the fundamental contradictions of combining socialist aspirations with even beneficial capitalist cupidity.

Read more here.