Tech’s Liberal Economist Really Isn’t That Liberal at All

A Crisis Dispatch

The word “assimilation” does the work before the argument starts.

The moment you accept the frame — should immigrants assimilate? — you have already conceded the thing that should be in dispute. You have granted that there is a default culture with the authority to absorb others into itself. You have accepted that there is a mainstream, that the mainstream is the standard, and that the question is only how gently the standard should be applied. The question is not neutral. It is not innocent. It arrives pre-loaded with a conclusion, and the debate you are invited to join is about the terms of a surrender that has already been assumed.

I want to reject the frame entirely. Not because the concerns underneath it are illegitimate, but because the frame misidentifies what America actually is — and in misidentifying it, opens the door to demands that have nothing to do with living together in peace and everything to do with defining who gets to set the terms.

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Noah Smith published a piece this morning called “Yes, Assimilation Is Good.” Smith positions himself as a reasonable centrist — not Matt Walsh’s blood-and-soil nativism, not DeSantis’s anti-Sharia legislation, not Tucker Carlson’s demographic panic. Smith wants what he calls “gentle assimilation”: a natural blurring of cultural boundaries through shared media, intermarriage, friendships, slang, food. He wants his Shanghai-born friend to watch American TV and feel American. He thinks this is how multicultural societies survive.

Before I engage the argument, a question worth asking: who is Noah Smith talking to when he writes on his Substack?

Smith co-hosts Econ 102 with Erik Torenberg. Torenberg’s Turpentine podcast network was acquired by a16z. Torenberg is now a general partner at a16z, hired in April 2025 by Marc Andreessen, who credited him with having “played a valuable role in facilitating the vibe shift.” The vibe shift in question is Silicon Valley’s rightward turn toward the Trump movement.

Torenberg is also the founder of Chatham House — a private Signal group that, per Semafor’s reporting, two of its conservative participants described as “a way to shift centrist Trump-curious figures to the Republican side.” The group includes David Sacks, Ben Shapiro, Mark Cuban, and Marc Andreessen, who lurks. When the group’s conversations turned critical of Trump, Sacks wrote that it had “become worthless since the loudest voices have TDS” and asked Torenberg to create “a new one with just smart people.” The broader network of private Signal groups surrounding this apparatus includes Larry Summers, Niall Ferguson, Tucker Carlson, and Balaji Srinivasan — and has organized itself around the political movement that produced JD Vance’s claim that “America is not just an idea, it’s also a people.” That is the claim Smith’s assimilation argument services, however gently it is packaged.

Smith is a smart writer producing reasonable-sounding centrism for an audience whose coordinates have been set by this network. One wonders, reading his assimilation piece, whether he understands whose water he is carrying.

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There is also the matter of what Smith’s argument actually is, underneath the reasonableness.

Smith is a technological determinist. His evidence that assimilation “works” is that his Shanghai-born friend watched American TV, learned American slang, played American video games, and now feels American. The mechanism of belonging, in Smith’s account, is media consumption — the shared cultural substrate produced and distributed by the same tech-capital apparatus that employs his podcast co-host.

But notice what the friend from Shanghai actually assimilated into. Not “American culture” in any historically legible sense — not the evangelical tradition of the South, or the civic republicanism of New England, or the labor culture of the Rust Belt, or the Indigenous traditions that predate all of it. He assimilated into the consumer platform layer. Netflix. Fortnite. Spotify. The products of the same tech-capital apparatus whose investors are now reshaping American politics from private Signal groups.

The “culture” Smith is defending isn’t a culture. It’s a market.

This is not a neutral observation about how diverse societies find common ground. It is an argument that the products of Silicon Valley’s content infrastructure are the substance of national identity — that the pipeline from venture-backed platforms to your living room is the assimilation mechanism that holds the republic together. Follow the financial interest. It does not lie.

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Here is the distinction that Smith’s argument collapses, and that Shadi Hamid — writing in the Washington Post yesterday — correctly identifies.

I engaged with Hamid’s argument on X yesterday, and he endorsed what I said simply and directly: liberalism is not the culture. It is a moral system that accommodates a vast normative landscape of individual and collective meaning. And culture lives inside that landscape.

Liberalism — the actual American project, properly understood — is a political framework, not a culture. It is a system of rules for coexistence under conditions of radical normative diversity. It answers the question: how do people who disagree, profoundly and perhaps irreconcilably, about the good life, about God, about family, about community — how do they share a political space without killing each other?

The answer liberalism gives is deliberately thin. It specifies a set of political commitments — rights, laws, democratic participation, constitutional constraints on power — and it is aggressively neutral about everything else. What you eat. What language you speak at home. What you pray to. Who you marry. What you watch. These are not the framework’s business. The framework is thin on purpose. The thickness is where the coercion lives.

This is not a novel observation. John Rawls spent his career developing exactly this account of political liberalism — the idea that citizens can share an “overlapping consensus” on political principles while disagreeing, completely and legitimately, about everything else. A devout Muslim and a secular atheist can both affirm the Constitution, religious liberty, and democratic participation — for entirely different reasons, rooted in entirely different comprehensive worldviews. That is the system working. It does not require them to watch the same Netflix shows.

When Smith argues that immigrants should adopt “American habits, attitudes, and lifestyles” — that cultural blurring is necessary for multicultural survival — he has moved from the thin framework to the thick one. He has smuggled a comprehensive doctrine into what should be a purely political arrangement. The “gentleness” disguises the thickness. The demand is still a demand.

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Let me make this concrete, because the abstract version is too easy to dismiss.

Go to Dallas, Texas. Then go to Marin County, California. Tell me that America has one culture.

Dallas: evangelical, conservative, gun culture, football, barbecue, libertarian economics, pickup trucks. Marin: progressive, secular, yoga, organic food, tech wealth, environmental activism, farmers markets.

These are not minor variations on a shared theme. They are radically different ways of organizing a life. Nobody demands that Dallas assimilate into Marin, or that Marin assimilate into Dallas. They share the liberal framework — the Constitution, the elections, the laws, the courts — and they diverge, completely and legitimately, on everything else.

That is the American project. Applying a different standard to immigrants than we apply to the internal diversity that already exists is not a neutral observation about what multicultural societies require. It is a tell.

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I want to perform what I will call the Vin Sidious test, in honor of an interlocutor in my thread yesterday who made the assimilation argument with admirable directness.

His version: assimilation requires “only a bare minimum of good behavior.” I asked him for a concrete example — some person from some culture who was actually refusing to meet this minimum.

He retreated to the edge case: “Just don’t honor kill your daughter over a miniskirt.”

This is where every “gentle assimilation” argument ends up when you press it. The concrete examples are always one of two things:

First: criminal behavior already addressed by existing law. Honor killings are illegal. Female genital mutilation is illegal. Forced marriage is illegal. These are prosecuted. They have nothing to do with “assimilation” as a cultural program.

Second: cultural preferences presented as civic requirements. Speak English in public. Don’t wear hijab. Accept Prophet cartoons. Eat pork at school events. These are not requirements of the liberal framework. They are the preferences of the mainstream culture, elevated to the status of civic virtue by people who happen to share them.

The gap between these two categories is the entire argument. Smith occupies that gap and pretends it isn’t there.

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Hamid — writing in the Washington Post yesterday — put the correct position simply: a Muslim who prays five times daily and views homosexuality as sinful is not less American than a Muslim who consumes alcohol and hasn’t attended mosque. The right to be in America does not depend on cultural convergence with the mainstream.

Smith will say this risks balkanization. The answer is: the liberal framework is the integration. Political integration — shared commitment to rights, laws, democratic participation — is the only integration that a free society can legitimately require. Everything else is either chosen freely, or it is coercion.

The Spanish-speaking woman behind the counter in East LA smiled at me. I smiled at her. I paid for my Coke. Everything was okay. That transaction — that moment of ordinary human coexistence under a shared set of rules — is the American project functioning exactly as designed. Nobody needed to watch the same television shows to make it work.

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I want to say something about the moment, because Smith’s piece does not exist in a vacuum.

He published it on April 9, 2026 — while Trump is attempting to illegally withdraw from NATO, while Vance is in Budapest endorsing an authoritarian, while DeSantis is passing anti-Sharia legislation, while the administration is using “assimilation” as the conceptual scaffolding for deportation, Muslim exclusion, and cultural policing.

Smith is careful to distinguish his “gentle” version from the MAGA version. But you cannot defend the concept while remaining neutral about the regime that deploys it. “Assimilation” in April 2026 does not arrive as a blank slate for Smith to inscribe his reasonable intentions onto. It arrives pre-loaded with what Walsh, DeSantis, and Trump mean by it. The word has been claimed. The argument has been weaponized. And the network that produces Smith’s podcast has been, per Andreessen’s own account, instrumental in facilitating the political movement that weaponized it.

The building is on fire. Smith is defending gentle fire.

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The liberal framework does not ask you to assimilate. It asks you to coexist.

Coexistence is harder than assimilation. Assimilation resolves the tension by eliminating difference. Coexistence requires you to live with the tension — to share political space with people whose values you may find foreign, whose practices you may find strange, whose God you may not worship. It requires you to accept that the framework’s neutrality is not a bug but the point.

This is the American project. Not the easiest version. The correct one.

The word “assimilation” asks you to forget this. To imagine that there is a mainstream with the authority to absorb you, and that your belonging depends on your willingness to be absorbed. To imagine, in Smith’s version, that the mainstream is delivered via the content infrastructure of the same venture capital apparatus that employs his co-host and shapes his audience.

There is no such mainstream. There is only the framework, the rights, the laws, the democratic participation — and inside that framework, a vast normative landscape of individual and collective meaning where culture lives, in all its irreducible, unassimilable, American plurality.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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