Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen no longer makes the guest list of every dinner party in Silicon Valley, he said, as punishment for abandoning the Democratic Party to back Donald Trump.
The cofounder of venture capital firm a16z, also known as Andreessen Horowitz, said social isolation remains a common penalty for those who think differently about certain left-leaning circles in the tech mecca.
Andreessen said this year the same fissures that have split the country have caused a rupture in the once-monolithic Democratic stronghold, as nearly every demographic group abandoned the party to varying degrees.
“We’re going through the first profound political realignment probably since the 1960s,” Andreessen said in an interview with Joe Rogan posted on Tuesday, arguing the Republicans were now the party of common sense, no war, and the working class.
Fearing he’d be written off as a “crazy right-winger” for daring to celebrate that it was “morning in America” now that Trump had won the election, the cocreator of the world’s first mainstream internet browser said he—like many other constituencies that traditionally supported the Democrats—actually defected from the party.
“I was a Democrat in good standing,” he said, having backed Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Barack Obama previously.
He even recounted the shock and sadness he felt over dinner with other Silicon Valley friends immediately following Trump’s first victory. They had all voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016—Andreessen himself included.
Despite that long-standing voting record, his decision to now back Trump over Kamala Harris in this year’s race has resulted in doors being figuratively slammed in his face.
“This is actually true: There’s now two kinds of dinner parties in Silicon Valley—they fractured cleanly in half,” Andreessen told Rogan in a three-hour-long podcast interview.
On the one hand, there are gatherings he can still attend where he might run into other first-time Trump supporters such as Elon Musk.
But his presence is no longer welcome among what he labeled the “coastal elites.”
“There’s the ones where every person there believes every single thing that was in the New York Times that day … and that is what they talk about at the dinner party,” Andreessen claimed. “And I’m no longer invited to those, nor do I want to go to them.”
‘Lockstep conformity’
Andreessen’s abandonment of the Democratic Party primarily—but not exclusively—stemmed from what he called the Biden administration’s attempt to kill his business through the regulation of crypto, where a16z is the largest venture capital firm.
Rather than the state ensuring a level playing field so that it could focus on calling balls and strikes, he claimed federal agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), all sought to control the outcomes outright in various ways.
He alleges that the goal was to ensure that only a small number of large companies would survive, and all agreed to be completely regulated and controlled by the government.
“We had meetings this spring that were the most alarming meetings where [regulators] were taking us through their plans: Basically just full government control,” he claimed. “They told us, ‘Just don’t even start startups, don’t even bother, there’s no way they can succeed, there’s no way we’re going to permit that to happen.’”
One tactic he claimed he personally witnessed was the federal government’s attempt to coerce his business partners and even his own partner’s father, author and fellow Trump supporter David Horowitz, by pressuring banks to revoke their access to the financial system entirely.
Andreessen said the party no longer tolerated dissent within its ranks and instead demanded lockstep conformity enforced through cancel culture, effectively reducing the Democrats to a religious cult minus the opportunity for redemption.
“You might call [it] ‘soft totalitarianism,’ which is just rules and power exercised arbitrarily that just simply suppresses everything,” he continued, citing de-banking as just one example.
If the Democrats ever want to pull themselves out of the mess they are in, Andreessen advised them to promote prominent far-left critics like New York Congressman Ritchie Torres to positions of leadership.
Fortune has reached out to the White House for a response but had no reply.
