What are the politics of Silicon Valley? The New York Times can't seem to give a straight answer.
An article in the Sunday Review section reports, or claims:
The rise of Google and the other giant businesses of Silicon Valley have been driven by a libertarian culture that paid only lip service to notions of diversity...Viewers of the comedy series "Silicon Valley" note that uber-libertarianism and uber-geek machismo go hand in hand.
Elsewhere in the same day's newspaper, the front page of the Times Sunday Styles section reports on what it calls "overwhelmingly liberal Silicon Valley, where supporters of President Trump are nearly nonexistent and few think populism would improve their lives."
So which is it? "Liberal"? Or "libertarian"? Do the Times journalists even understand that there is a difference between these two things? Have they suddenly started using the word "liberal" in the classical, European, 18th century sense? There may be some overlap between contemporary American liberals and libertarians — both take a live-and-let-live attitude when it comes to social issues — but the Times doesn't really get into that at all. Instead, the newspaper just runs two different stories on the same day offering conflicting accounts of Silicon Valley politics, and giving readers no guidance about which account is more accurate.
Back in the days when the Wall Street Journal had a conservative op-ed page and a liberal news section, people used to joke about getting "two papers for the price of one." In the case of the Times, it seems less of a Wall Street Journal style bargain or great deal, and more a situation where the paper's own credibility is eroded by running two articles that can't both be true simultaneously, or at the very least are "in tension with one another."