I struggle these days whenever someone asks me for my political affiliation. But if you really force me, I’d describe myself as a “Waymo Democrat.” Waymos are the self-driving electric taxis started by Google. My party’s bumper sticker would read, “A chicken in every pot and a Waymo in every city.” And our TV ads would say: “Trump is for he/him — his grievances, his revenge, his corruption — and for bringing old stuff back ‘again,’ like coal and gasoline cars. Waymo Democrats are for ‘We the People’ and reinventing American industry anew.”
Why am I bringing this up now? It’s because, as my colleague David Brooks likes to say, Donald Trump is often the wrong answer to the right question. Trump today is offering America a spectacularly wrong answer — a tariff war against the whole world and a revival of 1960s assembly lines — to a very valid question: How do we get more Americans making stuff again?
So, then, what’s the right answer? I admire the fiery protest campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I love their ability to get people out to push back on Trump’s destroy-America-in-100-days campaign. God bless them for that.
But when I listen to A.O.C. and Sanders, I don’t hear them solving for the future. So much of what they are about is lazily bashing billionaires, along with defending Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from the Trump-Elon Musk chain saw. Please, save all of that.
But if Democrats are going to again be the party of the working class, and unify the country more, they need a strategy for expanding the pie of work by expanding new industries — not just protecting the pie of benefits. At a time when Trump Republicans have so given up on the future, Democrats should be for reinventing it. And that requires a strategy to push advanced manufacturing in America into wholly new realms. And that is why I am a Waymo Democrat. It is the right answer to the right question: How can we create more good jobs in advanced manufacturing?
I say this for three reasons. First, robotaxis are going to be a huge industry, not just because I use only Waymos whenever I am in San Francisco, but because I am not alone. In just San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Los Angeles — the four cities where Waymo offers its fully autonomous ride-hailing service — it’s now racking up a whopping 200,000 paid rides a week. That’s a growth industry.
