My impression is that the cosmocialists have played at least as large a role, if not a larger one. According to the Silicon Valley Competitiveness and Innovation Project Report, 57 percent of the technology work force in the Bay Area is foreign-born. Although conservative immigration-reform proposals would likely allow for high levels of skilled immigration, it is easy to see why elite technology entrepreneurs, many of whom are immigrants or second-generation Americans themselves, would look upon immigrants favorably. Silicon Valley donors have played a mostly unheralded but enormously important role in mainstreaming the case for more-open borders, through support for immigration-advocacy groups such as FWD.us and for academic research devoted to the same cause.

And most surprisingly, perhaps, elite technology entrepreneurs are cheering on the Democratic party’s headlong rush to the left. The cavalcade of would-be Democratic presidential candidates scrambling to co-sponsor Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’s single-payer health-care bill are of course hoping to appeal to the party’s activist Left. But let’s not discount the possibility that they are also looking to woo billionaire cosmocialists who, if properly flattered, will supercharge their fundraising.

Needless to say, the rise of the cosmocialists is not the only important development in the Democratic party’s ongoing evolution.