Peter Thiel is my intellectual hero. He's influenced my thinking more than any other single person, so I’d like to explain some of the core concepts that inform his thinking and how they relate to debates about public policy.
Determinate vs. Indeterminate Optimism
In Zero to One, Thiel proposes a distinction between two types of optimism:
Determinate optimism - Concrete, specific beliefs about how the world will improve.
Indeterminate optimism - A general belief that things are getting better without a clear sense of exactly how.
In discussing how American attitudes have shifted, Thiel has claimed that the America of the 1960’s was defined by determinate optimism. The U.S. had ambitious - and specific - plans for space exploration and infrastructure. The federal budget was geared more towards discretionary spending than entitlements, the latter of which Thiel sees as a way of outsourcing economic decision-making to transfer payment recipients, so that policymakers can avoid forming firm convictions about the country’s needs.
An example that Thiel often cites is President Nixon’s promise to initiate a war on cancer, on par with Apollo. In the 1970’s, this didn’t sound quixotic. It sounded like a sensible national priority.
Juxtapose this to a particular episode from the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Early in the race, Joe Biden made his own pledge to seek a cancer cure during his administration. It was surprising, audacious, and extremely poignant when one considers the loss the Biden family had suffered just a few years prior. It was the most I ever liked Joe Biden.
And of course, the media lambasted him for it. This reaction was emblematic of all the ways in which American culture had become hostile to ambitious, long-term projects, particularly those that concern progress in the physical world.
Which leads me to…
Atoms vs. Bits
While America is ostensibly in the midst of a revolution in software and social media, these technologies haven’t enhanced our mastery over nature to the same extent as the skyscraper or the car. Thiel has often argued that, while we’ve seen tremendous progress in “the world of bits,” we’ve seen far less in “the world of atoms.”
As a result, even the word “technology” has come to mean “information technology" exclusively. That wasn’t always the case. Cars, aircraft, and vaccines were once regarded as high tech. But we no longer associate these domains with technological progress because they haven’t been centers of technological progress for a long time.
Unfortunately for us, we’re biological beings who, at least for now, are consigned to the world of atoms. Predictably, many of the business models that have emerged in the information technology space have done less to produce positive-sum gains and more to capture value in a way that’s parasitic on older industries, mainly by leveraging scale, disrupting past business models, and sometimes finding new efficiencies.
Mimesis
Thiel has often noted the influence of Rene Girard on his thinking. Girard’s philosophy centers on the concept of mimeses, or imitation. Girard understand man as an imitative animal. This proneness to imitation leads people to desire things not because they’re intrinsically valuable, but because others desire them. Zero-sum contests for the objects of mimetic desire result, and this is the source of much conflict.
Thiel applies this insight to his understanding of markets. In the late 90’s, investors weren’t clamoring for tech stocks because the underlying businesses made sense. They bought them because that’s what other investors were doing. Similarly, Thiel ascribes our reluctance to ask hard questions about public policy, in part, to the madness of crowds. No one else seems particularly worried about the housing market, the dysfunctional education system, or America’s destabilizing interventions in the middle east, so why should I be?
This is closely related to the temptation to slip into indeterminate optimism. It’s easy to believe that things are basically fine as long as those around you feel the same way. The problem is that these people generally aren’t thinking things through either. If not quite the blind leading the blind, this is the impressionable leading the impressionable.
Thiel in the Trump Era
In 2016, in a move that shocked many of his admirers, Thiel endorsed Trump for president. He even spoke at the Republican National Convention.
While his convention speech was interesting, a party convention wasn't the sort of event that lent itself to Thiel's communication style and strengths as a thinker. But between the applause lines, he brought up a number of under-considered points.
While many in the mainstream media saw the Trump movement, in part, as a revolt against technological progress, Thiel argues that Trump rose in response to a dearth of technological progress.
Thiel implies that the vision of middle-class life that Trump harked back to was dependent on a level of growth that the United States no longer seemed capable of achieving. Silicon Valley's success, in Thiel's thinking, is the exception to the broader norm of stagnation.
Thiel contrasts Trump's honesty on questions of stagnation and decline with the culture war issues that dominate so much of our discourse.
The best speech he delivered during the 2016 cycle came months later, just after the Access Hollywood tape dropped. Here, he fleshed out more fully some of the themes he touched upon during the convention speech.
He focuses on two issues on which he judges the political establishment to have failed, trade and war, saying, "As much as Trump's agenda is about making America great, it's about making America a normal country. Normal countries don't have half-trillion-dollar trade deficits .. Normal countries don't fight five simultaneous, undeclared wars."
He describes these two policy failures as instantiations of the establishment's tendency to ignore difficult questions and to rely on received wisdom, rather than thinking things through from first principles.
Interestingly, given his past libertarian perspective, he rejects "free-market ideology," saying that it has been made to, "serve as an excuse for decline." He cites the Manhatten Project, the Interstate Highway System, and the Apollo Program as examples of competent governance.
And this is the theme that I'm most interested in, and which has done the most to influence my own written output. Debates about small government vs. big government are more contingent than either side is willing to admit on the basic competence of government.
The DMV is a large public institution, but no one would complain about it half as much if it worked as well as government agencies in Estonia or Singapore do. Here, there exists the potential for a bipartisan consensus around making government of any size work better.
On a similar note, Thiel has been quite critical of the doctrine of American Exceptionalism, describing it as the right-wing version of political correctness. Viewing the world through the lens of American Exceptionalism, one isn't allowed to ask hard questions. One can't say that America works less well in many respects than other countries, or than America itself did in the past. This is obviously unhealthy.
In my favorite line from Thiel's National Press Club speech, he says, "Trump points to a new Republican Party, beyond the dogmas of Reaganism. He points, even beyond the remaking of one party, to a new American politics, which rejects bubble thinking, overcomes denial, and reckons with reality. When the distracting spectacles of this election season are over and the history of our time is written, the only important question will be whether this new politics came too late."
Post-Trump Activities
In July of 2019, Thiel spoke at the first National Conservatism Conference. The event featured a lineup of national conservative fan-favorites, such as Tucker Carlson, Josh Hawley, and Oren Cass, and Thiel’s presence there seemed to signal his growing alignment with this new wing of the GOP.
Thiel’s speech, titled The Star Trek Computer Is Not Enough, eschews the temptation to codify a national conservative worldview and instead posits that a truly conservative approach would emphasize concrete problems. Here, he focuses on four such issues:
Big tech
Free trade
College
War
On each of these issues, he finds that the reigning orthodoxy is misaligned with the interests of the American nation-state. Tech giants not only fail to innovate in substantive ways but, in the case of Google, also work with America’s adversaries, namely China.
Free trade orthodoxy erodes America’s productive capacity, fuels the over-financialization of our economy, and renders international markets less functional by giving American policymakers an excuse to not vigorously negotiate in defense of American interests.
Universities function less as repositories of knowledge and places to learn remunerative skills and more as a wasteful signaling mechanism.
While not exhaustive, these four issues give us a sneak peek into what a Thielist faction of the GOP might look like. And the idea of a Thielist faction is no longer purely speculative; it’s in the process of emerging now.
Earlier this year, Thiel contributed $10 million to a super PAC called Protect Ohio Values, presumably with a view towards electing his former employee, J.D. Vance, to the U.S. Senate. Just a few months later, he funded a similar super PAC in support of another business associate, Thiel Capitol executive Blake Masters, who seems to be considering a Senate run in Arizona.
While Masters hasn’t been terribly vocal yet, Vance’s public statements align closely with what we might expect from a candidate attempting to usher in the “new American politics” Thiel described in his National Press Club speech. Common themes include the incompetence of America’s ruling class, the moral and practical bankruptcy of the university system, our economy’s bias against physical production, and the need to think of the state as a tool.
This vision of a new American politics is well worth pursuing. For this reason, I'm a Thielist.