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The US government's expanding role in assisting businesses with the development of new technologies has significantly increased corporate dependence on the state. This dependence creates new opportunities for social movements to extract significant concessions from capital., The Left's standard theoretical tools are inadequate for making sense of US politics in the current period. They give us little leverage to explain the threat of authoritarian or neofascist [...]

This essay revisits an earlier article, published in 2008, that argued that the United States had created a "hidden developmental state" that helped move technologies from the laboratory to the marketplace. In the intervening fifteen years, this apparatus has become more elaborate with ever more government initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels. Moreover, the major pieces of legislation passed in the first two years of the Biden administration have added considerable new funding. Nevertheless, this set of programs has not yet become a part of political debates outside of the federal government. It remains hidden to most of the electorate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]