The Fascinating Role Ro Khanna Is Playing
Silicon Valley Congressman positions himself as the champion for factory towns
Politicians who want to develop a national profile sometimes like to carve out a specific positioning within the Democratic Party.
Bill Clinton positioned himself as the leader of the business friendly New Democrats to make clear he was breaking with the liberals in the party. Obama was the “there is no red America or blue America, there is just the United States of America” guy. Elizabeth Warren had the advantage of establishing a national brand as the leading critic of Wall Street before she even became a politician, so her positioning in the party was easy to build. Sherrod Brown established himself as the tough on trade, dignity at work guy, surviving in increasingly red Ohio long after other Democrats fell by the wayside.
One of the younger Democrats who is breaking new ground with a fascinating profile is Ro Khanna. Khanna is the Congressman who represents Silicon Valley, and knows the tech industry well. He was also a strong supporter of Bernie Sanders, and shares many of Bernie’s positions on economic issues – a strange combination to be sure. And to top it off, most interesting to someone like me, Khanna has become very focused on rebuilding American manufacturing and reviving the small and midsized factory towns that I know well.
It is a unique combination. To be blunt, most of the California Democrats who have ties to Silicon Valley don’t spend much time thinking about working class folks in the Rust Belt or South.
As an acolyte of Midwestern populists and the thinking of Louis Brandeis, who decried “the curse of bigness” in corporate America, you can imagine that I might be surprised by the positioning of Khanna, but I have come to appreciate him a great deal. For one thing, he is not just giving speeches about the importance of manufacturing in factory towns, he is doing the hard work of getting to know these places. And he is helping them in tangible ways: Khanna has worked with local governments, universities and businesses to get new non-profit projects started in Iowa, South Carolina, Mississippi, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New York, Arizona, West Virginia, Nevada, Michigan, Ohio, along with Historically Black Colleges and Universities. These projects are focused on scholarships and internships and training, but also on delivering computer hardware and software into the hands of young people who don’t have them.
Khanna’s blending of tech know-how and Sanders-style working class oriented populism, and his focus on older small and midsized factory towns that Trump has taken by storm holds a great deal of promise for Democrats. Our party needs to take a serious look at the positioning of people like Congressman Khanna, especially the blending of surprising elements like taking ideas and investment from Silicon Valley to the smaller towns and counties of the heartland.
One thing it is important for the progressive populist wing of the Democratic Party to remember is that Silicon Valley is not only people like Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos, billionaires many times over and competing to kiss Trump’s ass. The tech world still has entrepreneurs and inventors, still has start-ups and medium sized companies trying to establish a toehold against the giant monopolists. If innovative political entrepreneurs like Ro Khanna can forge an alliance with up and coming tech entrepreneurs and the working families desperately trying to gain their own toehold in the American economy, that is a political deal worth striking.