The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara · 8 Jul 2019
much influence on our ideologies and our philosophies and our way of life,” one resident remarked as Election Day 1980 neared, “God help us.”2 ATARI DEMOCRATS The same August that Apple fever seized Wall Street, pinstriped stockbrokers flipping through The Wall Street Journal on the morning commuter train would have encountered
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change it from within. The group’s collective enthusiasm for the high-tech sector eventually prompted the Washington press corps to bestow a sardonic moniker: “Atari Democrats.” Those so named didn’t like it much. “We prefer Apple Democrats,” Wirth remarked wryly. “It sounds more American.” But once the pundits got going
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next door to Silicon Valley. Plus, he was a subcommittee chairman on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, giving him power that few Atari Democrats could match. Those two things brought Steve Jobs into Stark’s orbit in early 1982, making a pitch for a new tax break. By this
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at ease at the Wagon Wheel or The Oasis. He was one of them. Silicon Valley’s congressman approached high-tech advocacy differently than the Atari Democrats. People like Tsongas and Wirth might represent high-tech districts, but they’d never run high-tech companies. Their vision of industrial policy was big
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the new generation of tech-friendly politicians. But it was hard to get traction in the middle of the Reagan Revolution, no matter how many Atari Democrats popped up on Capitol Hill. Jobs’s misadventures with the Apple Bill hadn’t helped. And having “Silicon Valley’s Congressman” hard at work in
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with very different ideas about what Washington needed to do to support the tech industry. * * * — So whatever happened to industrial policy? Jerry Brown pushed it; Atari Democrats couldn’t stop yapping about it. Republicans like Ed Zschau could barely stand the idea, even while agreeing that something had to change. Japan was
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house party.13 THE GENTLEMAN FROM TENNESSEE Enter Al Gore. The onetime House backbencher was now a U.S. Senator. Unlike many of his fellow Atari Democrats, Gore long had been a computer user as well as computer advocate. When the personal-computer market was still in its infancy, he declared that
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to speak to the Conservative Opportunity Society, a group he’d helped to organize that was something of a GOP analogue to the tech-centric Atari Democrats. While the Tofflers didn’t share Gingrich’s conservatism on social issues—their take on sexual freedom and unconventional family structures always raised eyebrows on
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, 257 Association for Computing Machinery, 125 AT&T, 61–64, 118, 129, 167, 193, 238, 305, 328 Atari, 106–8, 147, 149, 154, 185, 201 Atari Democrats, 193–94, 216, 217, 221, 222, 224, 290, 325 @Home, 306 Atlantic, 20, 58 Augmentation Research Center, 91 Auletta, Ken, 364 Ayres, Judith, 263 Azure
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris · 14 Feb 2023 · 864pp · 272,918 words
composite index grew from under 200 in the 1982 recession to over 5,000 in the spring of 2000. With support from the so-called Atari Democrats such as Paul Tsongas, Gary Hart, and Al Gore, the tech industry sealed the precepts of the Reagan Revolution into new and seemingly permanent layers
Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age
by Leslie Berlin · 7 Nov 2017 · 615pp · 168,775 words
Democrats, led by Gary Hart, Tim Wirth, and Michael Dukakis, were such outspoken advocates for entrepreneurial high-tech industry that they were collectively known as “Atari Democrats.” For the first time in decades, the White House hosted a conference on small business. President Reagan established a Commission on Industrial Competitiveness chaired by
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle · 14 Oct 2022 · 655pp · 156,367 words
. Calls for reorienting the Democratic Party toward free market ideology that had first appeared during Jimmy Carter’s presidency intensified across the 1980s. Self-styled “Atari Democrats” were among the vanguard of Democrats arguing that their party had to reorient. They regarded information technology industries as the future and were alarmed that
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Deal liberal (and disciple of New Deal standard-bearer Hubert Humphrey) lost by a wide margin to Reagan in the presidential election of 1984, the Atari Democrats joined a larger group of frustrated Democratic officials to found the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The DLC’s intent was to put distance between the
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of signals that others were slower to receive and decipher. In this context, it is not surprising that Clinton had joined the phalanx of New (Atari) Democrats of the 1980s that organized itself in the aftermath of Walter Mondale’s 1984 defeat at the hands of Reagan. Clinton embraced the New Democrats
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, integration of minorities into the labor force, and the mild redistribution of income, wealth and power.” Robert Lekachman, “Atari Democrats,” New York Times, October 10, 1982, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/10/opinion/atari-democrats.html, accessed July 26, 2021. 61.Paul E. Tsongas, “Atarizing Reagan,” New York Times, March 1, 1983, https
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://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/01/opinion/atarizing-reagan.html, accessed July 26, 2021. 62.Leslie Wayne, “Designing a New Economics for the ‘Atari Democrats,’ ” New York Times, September 26, 1982, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/26/business/designing-a-new-economics-for-the
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-atari-democrats.xhtml, accessed March 20, 2019. 63.For a transcript of the “New Orleans Declaration,” see “Repost: The Manifesto of the Third Way Democrats—the New
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, 236 Apple, 279 Arab Israeli War (fourth), 60. see also Yom Kippur War Arendt, Hannah, 35–36 Aron, Raymond, 86–87 asylum seekers, 273–74 Atari Democrats, 135, 137, 155 Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 100–1 atomic bomb, 37, 42–43, 99–100 Aufderheide, Patricia, 167–68 Auletta, Ken, 131–32 authoritarianism, 2
The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley
by Leslie Berlin · 9 Jun 2005
so hard for high-tech industries to be the focus of the party’s industrial policies that the young men came to be known as “Atari Democrats.” In Sacramento, Governor Jerry Brown established and chaired a California Commission on Industrial Innovation. Charlie Sporck, along with Apple Computer’s Steve Jobs, served on
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consider actions that on first blush appeared departures from his much-ballyhooed free market, small government ideals and more in line with some of the Atari Democrats’ calls for industrial policy. At the same time, the SIA had to convince Democrats to support the semiconductor industry—perhaps over the heavy industries that
The Big Score
by Michael S. Malone · 20 Jul 2021
, these became known as Pac-Man mergers. A group of liberal congressmen with rather blue-sky ideas about revitalizing the American economy became known as Atari Democrats. At Atari, things had never seemed rosier. The company raced to $2 billion in sales and $320 million in profits. The company’s third wing
Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees
by Patrick Dillon and Carl M. Cannon · 2 Mar 2010 · 613pp · 181,605 words
information age, prominent Democrats hoped the moguls of these new industries would gravitate toward their party. The politicians trying to woo the techies called themselves Atari Democrats, after the company that invented Pong, one of the first video games. “We prefer Apple Democrats,” quipped tech-friendly Colorado congressman Timothy Wirth. “It sounds
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a passion for politics. Randlett believed he could make a name for himself—and do the Democratic Party a lot of good—by making the Atari Democrats’ long-standing dream come true. At age thirty-one, Randlett had established himself as one of the top “bundlers” in the Democratic Party. (Bundlers raise
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the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. On a bigger canvas, Proposition 211 did more in one fell swoop than all the position papers the Atari Democrats had ever put together. Never again would Silicon Valley be caught off guard in politics—and never again would its denizens be taken for granted
The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin · 14 Sep 2021 · 524pp · 130,909 words
since the days of David Starr Jordan. Thiel, then, was an outlier, in both his renewed vigor for politics and his separation from the squishy “Atari Democrats” like Gore. He’d been immersing himself in neoconservative thinking, reading Carl Schmitt, the conservative philosopher (and Nazi legal scholar) who is sometimes credited with
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
by Thomas Frank · 15 Mar 2016 · 316pp · 87,486 words
speech; he liked to mock old-school libs as “Eleanor Roosevelt Democrats.” Later on, Hart would lead the technology-minded politicians the media nicknamed the “Atari Democrats”; his 1984 run for the Democratic presidential nomination was celebrated as a blow against the New Deal past. It was also the occasion for the
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Altman, Roger Amazon American Prospect America: What Went Wrong (Barlett and Steele) Ameriquest Andreessen, Marc antitrust Apple, Inc. Archer Daniels Midland Argentière Capital Arnold, Thurman Atari Democrats Audacity of Hope, The (Obama) Austin, Texas Bai, Matt bailouts Bain Capital Baird, Zoë Balz, Dan banks. See also investment banks; Wall Street bailout of
Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
by Paris Marx · 4 Jul 2022 · 295pp · 81,861 words
infrastructure had influence over NSF decisions and the ears of powerful political figures. Senator Al Gore was among the prominent members of the group of “Atari Democrats” who believed US high-tech industries would generate economic growth and enhance the country’s global influence. When he introduced the National High-Performance Computer
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Computer, 36, 55, 72, 181, 230–1 Arizona Department of Transportation, 135–6 Assembly Bill 5 (California), 111 Association of Electric Vehicle Manufacturers, 66–7 Atari Democrats, 51 Australia, lithium and mining in, 75–6, 80 automobiles autonomous (See self-driving cars) change in traffic during Covid-19, 231 city planners’ perspectives
Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation
by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber · 29 Oct 2024 · 292pp · 106,826 words
Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
by George Packer · 14 Jun 2021 · 173pp · 55,328 words
What's the Matter with White People
by Joan Walsh · 19 Jul 2012 · 284pp · 85,643 words
Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies
by Judith Stein · 30 Apr 2010 · 497pp · 143,175 words
Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
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