Q&A: New book shows how innovation inequality fuels America’s political divide

With the presidential election just weeks away, American political divides have once again taken center stage. While this chasm is most often attributed to disagreements on social issues, a new book argues otherwise.

“U.S. Innovation Inequality and Trumpism: The Political Economy of Technology Deserts in a Knowledge Economy” focuses on how former President Donald Trump — like other populists that came before him — exploits what the authors call ‘innovation inequality’. Trump has been successful, they argue, because Americans are split between highly innovative and less innovative regions, or because of the gap between areas that are more technologically advanced and those that aren’t. The book analyzes the origins and political implications of these divides.

Written by Victor Menaldo and Nicolas Wittstock, the book forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Menaldo is a University of Washington professor of political science while Wittstock received his doctorate in political science from the UW this year.

UW News spoke with Menaldo to discuss his book, the upcoming election and Trump’s campaigns in 2016 and 2020.

What made you want to write a book on this topic?

Victor Menaldo: There were three motivations. The first is that I was not satisfied with the conventional explanations for why former President Donald Trump won in 2016 and lost in 2020. The second motivation is that all the explanations focused on Trump as an individual instead of a larger phenomenon — some people call it populism, but there are other names for it. If it wasn’t Trump, it would have been someone else. Third, I felt that the approaches I’d seen to explaining Trump’s success and then his failure were not very historic. There are instances of populism in the past that could shed light on this. It’s not just a recent thing.

People offer many different explanations for America’s political divides, but you write in the book that America is actually divided along economic lines. Can you explain this concept?

VM: There has always been a difference between less innovative and more innovative places. The more innovative places are areas like Silicon Valley or the North Carolina Research Triangle. These places are very technologically advanced in terms of clusters of universities, companies and other organizations that are really on the cutting edge of research and development and innovation. But these differences have always been a thing, since the very beginning of the republic. Right after colonialism, Boston, Philadelphia and New York City were like the Silicon Valleys of their day. That’s where a lot of the innovations around industrialization took place. But even though other places in the vicinity weren’t as technologically advanced, the gap between them in terms of their contributions to innovation and the country’s economic dynamism wasn’t as wide as it is today.

There have been populist movements throughout our history that nonetheless exploited that divide. For example, we talk in the book about William Jennings Bryan, who was a populist at the turn of the 20th century. He was nominated three times by the Democratic Party and lost all three times. If you think about Bryan, a lot of that political movement was about how agriculture had been left behind by industrialization or rural areas had been forgotten. He didn’t make it explicit, but that was about the technology divide or what we call “innovation inequality” in the book. Technological change was embedded in industrialization and some manufacturing centers got ahead while many rural areas fell behind.

What we think explains Trump phenomenon is that there’s been much more of a polarization economically between high-tech places, those that make big contributions to the globalized knowledge economy, and places that are more peripheral. It’s like comparing Silicon Valley to the agricultural regions of the Central Valley in California. There is just a very stark difference. It gets expressed socially or culturally as well, but the underlying roots are the economic and technological divide in terms of places’ differing contributions to innovation or cutting-edge industries.

What analysis do you offer in the book of Trump’s win in 2016 and loss in 2020?

VM: For 2016, we write about two sides. There is the negative side, where Trump was very antagonistic toward big tech, universities and the highly educated, skilled labor forces that are integral to those industries. One example is he spoke out against visas for skilled immigrants, so he burned bridges quickly with a lot of tech firms, tech workers and highly educated skilled workers in technologically advanced industries.

Then there is the other side of it. It’s not just aggravating the tech industry, it’s also appealing to folks that are not part of the knowledge economy by talking about things like coal, energy jobs, manufacturing or agriculture: industries that have probably not benefited as much from technological change. He’s speaking against big tech and appealing directly to folks who are not involved in those industries who might feel they were left behind.

What we find in 2020 is places that flipped from Trump to Biden were more technologically advanced areas — key counties that flipped in North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona became more technologically advanced in terms of their integration to the global knowledge economy in the previous four years.

What stands out to you about this election cycle?

VM: In some senses, Republicans have narrowed the gulf with tech firms. Not all of them, but some, such as Elon Musk’s alliance with Trump or venture capitalists who disagree with President Joe Biden’s policies. This polarization has also been reduced in some ways by Trump and vice-presidential candidate JD Vance speaking to select tech firms or sectors such as cryptocurrency. It’s almost like they read our book and were like, “Oh, maybe we can co-opt some of these folks.”

On the other hand, I do think presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ policies are very much in line with President Biden’s and Hillary Clinton’s policies regarding technology and are part in parcel of a now decades long “Atari Democrats” transition: pro-high-skilled labor, pro-high-skilled immigration, pro-education, a lot of investment in green energy and so on. The Democratic Party hasn’t really changed all that much, as much as they’d like to appeal to their older blue-collar roots. But the one place they have changed, or at least returned to these roots, I think since President Biden, is being pro-technology but also pro-manufacturing in ways they were forced to by Trump. For example, a lot of the CHIPS and Science Act is focused on building semiconductor plants in the U.S. I think Biden was reacting to Trump’s appeal in the blue wall states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

So, what I see in this election is lessons learned by both parties. Trump learned that he can’t alienate all of tech. The Democratic side is saying they can be pro-Silicon Valley and innovation while also splitting the difference and talking about bringing back manufacturing jobs to the Rust Belt. In fact, at least in this regard the parties are less polarized than they were in either 2016 or 2020.

For more information, contact Menaldo at [email protected]