[manfredo]

This idea that America is so heavily skewed conservative that the average American liberal is really a conservative by international - or as you put it "western average" - is not so clear cut. Fiscally the US government revenue as a percentage of GDP is not far off from many European countries, ~27% as compared to 32% in Canada and 33% in the UK and 28% in Switzerland. There are outliers like Denmark at 53% and Sweden at 49%, but the US is much closer to other western countries than you seem to believe. Likewise the ACA (aka "Obamacare") is much more similar to how healthcare works in most other western countries. The government subsidizes healthcare and citizens buy health insurance from private companies. Single payer systems like the NHS are the exception among western countries, not the norm. And on social issues like legal abortion and gay marriage the US is often ahead of other western countries, sometimes by decades. Abortion was illegal in Ireland until 2018, for instance. This insistence that a liberal in the US is conservative with respect to a "western average" is at best an exaggeration.

Furthermore the average Silicon Valley tech worker is also substantially more liberal than the average American Democrat. I say this having spent 5 years working in Silicon Valley, and another 4 years in university in Silicon Valley. The statements you're making about tech workers - profiting from inequality and free markets - applies just as much to Canada and most Western European countries. Arguably it applies even more to export-oriented European countries like Germany with economies that are much more dependent on globalized trade. And absent from your comment is tech workers' responses to these developments. I've seen many more people striving to tackle inequality in tech than elsewhere. The "different partition of society" is something much more popular in Silicon Valley tech companies than the rest of the country. Sanders got more donations from Silicon Valley than Clinton in the democrat primary in 2016, for instance. The average tech worker is substantially more liberal than the average person I met in Europe.

The characterizations you're making starkly contrast with both my firsthand experience, and the available empirical evidence. Your (and the above commenters') assertion that tech workers are not working to tackle inequality, environmental challenges, or other liberal causes seems to be rooted in an assumption that no wealthy demographic would every support those things, rather than conclusion based on evidence or experience. How long have you worked at a Silicon Valley tech company? How much firsthand experience do you have with the people you're characterizing?