Where I Stand: A Blue-Collar Inheritance, A Founding Inheritance

Early in this now nearly eight-year writing life, I took a decidedly pacifist, anti-militarist, anti-tech-industrial stance. I come from a long line of blue-collar Democrats — people who helped build American technological excellence without ever sharing in its rewards. One uncle worked as a “plumber” at the Lawrence Radiation Lab and was none too pleased about the association. Half my close relatives are still blue-collar Democrats today.

I remain a pacifist with a strong liberal bent. But somewhere along the way, both my former party and the technology industry divorced themselves from people like me — a rupture that began in and around the Berkeley where I was born, as Silicon Valley drifted from the humanistic and civic foundations that had once guided it. Gone was the technology my children and I had learned to love under the creative hands of people like Jobs and Wozniak, replaced by executives untethered from the spiritual and geopolitical commitments I still hold.

What I did not expect, in the same years, was that my own thinking would travel backward — past the blue-collar century I was raised inside, past the mid-century politics that had shaped my parents, and into a much older inheritance I had only half known was mine. Growing up, I had been told only of my father's claim to an English throne. It was the quiet, patient work of the archive — years of it, verified by genealogy and by genetic testing — that surfaced the rest: a Jeffersonian, Washingtonian, Madisonian line of founding ancestors whose commitments to reasoned liberty, agrarian stewardship, and civic humanism had been present in my family the whole time, waiting to be recognized. [1]

I am the first in my immediate family to hold this knowledge in full, and I hold most of it alone. But it has clarified the ground I write from. The blue-collar inheritance taught me who technology has left behind. The founding inheritance reminded me what technology, and a republic, were once meant to serve.

The pleasant surprise is this: the technology those Silicon Valley divorcees built — what has become the LLMs of the present moment — has, through its own engineered logic, begun to recognize the wisdom in the humanism both of my inheritances point toward.