Ro Khanna represents Silicon Valley in Congress. Over the years, he has come to greatly admire the creativity of its entrepreneurs, their ability to get things done quickly (so unlike the sluggish pace of Congress), and their tremendous capacity for wealth generation. These, he believes, are qualities our democracy needs. And since ours is a digital age, our democracy particularly needs the work to achieve those qualities in Silicon Valley.
And yet Silicon Valley does not always work well for the democracy it inhabits. First, its creation of wealth and jobs currently benefits a narrow elite, and leaves not just many people but also many parts of the country, behind. Second, the Internet has proved to be a source not only of critical argument that enhances democracy but also, probably more often, of rumor-mongering, viral hate speech, and encouragements to bypass thought and listening in favor of venting and immediate preference-satisfaction .
Khanna’s own story, which he engagingly tells in an early chapter of his book Dignity in a Digital Age, orients the reader to the particular brand of political optimism cum pragmatism he favors. Khanna’s maternal grandfather was a freedom fighter in Gandhi’s Quit India movement, imprisoned for some years by the British Raj, and later an MP in India’s first Parliament. His mother moved to the United States to marry his father, already studying chemical engineering here. Their parents arranged the meeting, but they then fell in love, and the marriage was a happy one. Khanna’s father took a job with a chemical firm, staying with the same company for almost 30 years, and his mother taught special needs kids in school. Both benefited from the loosening of immigration restrictions against non-Europeans at that time, and from the policy of recruiting engineers and scientists during the Cold War.
Khanna was born in Philadelphia, but he spent his most formative years in Bucks County, in the economically mixed community of Holland, Pa. This background taught him great respect for non-elite communities and their people. Although the Khannas were among Holland’s wealthier residents, they still needed to be thrifty and save, and Ro’s friends in public school were often less affluent than he. He remembers little racism and expresses gratitude to the teachers who nourished his ability and the Little League coaches who made an effort to include and encourage him, although he was not a strong player. From this background he developed a belief in the American Dream at its best, and his new book is an effort to examine what it will take to make his story the story of every American in a digital age. His central aspiration is to foster digital jobs that strengthen local communities—“new jobs without cultural displacement”—and digital media that strengthen the sort of capacity for the give and take of critical argument that he learned from his high school, rather than making this give and take a vanishing rarity.
