“Jetsons on the Prairie”: Fusing Futurist Libertarianism and Social Conservatism within Right-Wing Think Tanks, 1972–96

Speaking at the 1994 Progress and Freedom Foundation Conference, the former Reagan staffer Frank Gregorsky described his hopes for the Internet Age, claiming it would offer “glad tidings to conservatives, Christians, capitalists, and libertarians.” Articulating a vision of futurist libertarianism fused with deep social conservatism, Gregorsky argued the Internet, and digital technologies more broadly, would offer Americans “a future like the Jetsons...but potentially with the values of the Little House on the Prairie...the 2040s and the 1840s coming together.” This ideological fusion was widely embraced and supported at similar venues throughout the mid-1990s, events that ultimately helped shape the 1990s deregulatory efforts in telecommunications. This raises the question: how did this set of ideas emerge and spread?

This presentation examines how a socially conservative, futurist libertarianism was articulated, and legitimated, through a series of magazines and newsletters in Silicon Valley in the 1980s and 1990s. Specifically, we can look to Forbes ASAP (a quarterly insert for Forbes subscribers), created in 1992, which spoke to the fast-growing community of technology industry businessmen. Together, these magazines presented readers with an ideological commitment to free markets and limited government, as well as a rejection of multiculturalism and welfare. They also applied the Reagan-era ideal of the “entrepreneur” to the tech industry, creating a libertarian hero in the form of the tech “startup founder.”

Just as notably, these magazines brought together new networks of activists, writers, and businessmen, ranging from the public intellectual William F. Buckley, to the anti-feminist, techno-utopian writer George Gilder, to Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. Understanding the specific dimensions of this network, and the ideology it came to promote, can better help us understand both libertarianism at the end of the century, and the nature of the tech industry that libertarians helped usher into the new millennium.