The Sudden, Inevitable Rewiring of the American Left

When the Democratic Party gave up on technology, progressivism malfunctioned. Now, technophile liberals are preparing to fix a movement.

In 1962, the year President John F. Kennedy promised a crowd of Rice University students the moon, 2.6 percent of the federal budget was allocated for non-defense research and development. By 1967, that number sat at 5.8 percent, and JFK lay under an eternal flame. Neil Armstrong took his lunar stroll in 1969, and returned to slash budgets as non-defense research had crashed to 4.3 percent on its way toward today’s 1.6 percent. The American government currently spends $67.8 billion annually on the quest for knowledge, at least $40 billion less than China, against the $78.9 billion it spends lubing the Defense Departments sprawling skunkworks.

The privatization of innovation runs counter to broadly accepted narratives of progress, the leftist, Enlightenment-era idea that “natural orders” are perpetually ripe for disruption. The technological half of this premise drove American policy through the 1960s, with Eisenhower embracing the pill, and rejecting the pre-JFK military industrial complex. But when workplace computing and consumer...