One of the stranger sights of June was watching the titans of Silicon Valley meekly obeying Trump’s summons to a tech summit (dubbed his American Technology Council) at the White House. Those attending included Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Safra Catz of Oracle, Tim Cook of Apple, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins (the venture-capital firm), Brian Krzanich of Intel, Tom Leighton of Akamai, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Ginni Rometty of IBM, Eric Schmidt of Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Steve Mollenkopf of Qualcomm. The only tech leader who was invited but explicitly declined was Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and other ventures. (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg cited diary clashes as an explanation for his non-attendance.)

Some attendees looked pretty sheepish, as well they might. Many, if not most of them, abhor everything the president stands for. The meeting, as with many of Trump’s other round-table assemblies, brought to mind footage of Saddam Hussein’s cabinet in session. But while it was clear that many of those present would have preferred to have been elsewhere, they were also chary of being seen to snub a populist hero. So the aphrodisiac effect of power was much in evidence.

For politically-savvy observers, the delicious irony was that many of the tech crowd were known Democrat supporters and donors. We’ve known this for a while, after a pioneering survey by Greg Ferenstein was published last December. He found that most of them were Democrats – though of an unconventional kind – rather than the libertarians many of us had assumed. Unlike libertarians, for whom the best form of government is no government, they appeared to believe in the positive potential of government – so long as it invested in things such as schools, universities and infrastructure.

Silicon Valley's elite are highly cosmopolitan in outlook, favouring free trade and more permissive immigration rules

Ferenstein’s survey provided the first real insight we had into the prevailing Silicon Valley ideology, but it was very broad brush and raised as many questions as it answered. Now, with two colleagues from Stanford, he has returned to the fray with a more ambitious study that provides a more fine-grained picture of what tech elites really believe.

We know from the work of Lawrence Lessig, Jane Mayer and others the extent to which US politics has been skewed by a smallish number of fabulously rich reactionaries, led by the Koch brothers. And in a sense, the influence of these actors is predictable because they use their wealth to obtain the political results that best further their economic interests. So one of the most interesting things about the Silicon Valley elite revealed by the new research is that its members don’t conform to this template: their political views are not wholly aligned with their corporate interests.

The study shows, for example, that the Valley crowd are very liberal on social issues – opposed to the death penalty, in favour of a woman’s right to choose on abortion, gun-control laws and gay rights. They are also overwhelmingly in favour of policies that redistribute wealth (including taxing the rich individuals and providing universal healthcare for the poor). And they are highly cosmopolitan in outlook – in favour of free trade and more permissive immigration rules. In that sense, they appear to be well to the left of the mainstream Democratic party.

However, there are two areas where they part company with the Democrats – trade unions and government regulation. Technology entrepreneurs, the study reports, “are much more sceptical of government regulation than other Democrats; even technology entrepreneurs who identify as Democrats are much more opposed to regulation than are other Democrats. Technology entrepreneurs also overwhelmingly hope to see labour unions’ influence decline.” The vast majority would like to see trade unions have less influence – in both the private sector (76%) and the public sector (72%). In that sense, tech elites’ views on government regulation and labour much more closely resemble Republican donors and supporters views than Democrats’ views.

That figures. Individualism plays a central role in the thinking of most techies, not just in the way they run their enterprises, but also in their view of society. After all, many online services now prize “personalisation” above all else. And the last thing the entrepreneurs of the gig economy want is trade unions enforcing collective bargaining, bringing legal pressure to protect workers’ rights and generally putting sand in the gears of disruptive innovation.

The Silicon Valley moguls will doubtless eventually have their way with the Democrats, just as the Koch brothers have theirs with the Republicans. That kind of money always talks, especially in American politics. But for anyone interested in workers’ rights and labour solidarity the prospects don’t look good. In Silicon Valley, it seems, trade unionists are yesterday’s men and women.