We should look to America’s founding principles, not a fantasy of strongman rule, to answer today’s political challenges.
We should look to America’s founding principles, not a fantasy of strongman rule, to answer today’s political challenges.
F or a man who has devoted much of his time in public life to calling for and promoting innovation, Peter Thiel seems content to repeat things. In a recent interview with Mary Harrington at UnHerd, Thiel revisits many of his favorite themes. Society is stagnating. The theoretical problems of new technology are less worthy of concern than the actual problems of social stasis. We need a better, more concrete vision for the future of civilization. And we need better sci-fi. Etc. Last summer, I touched on these and other questions in an essay about Thiel’s worldview. Rather than, like Thiel, repeating myself, I will simply link to it here.
Thiel is repetitive because the world hasn’t changed enough to his liking. But this ignores substantial changes. One of the most striking in the political arena is the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision. This act surprised, among others, presumably Peter Thiel, who in 2017 said, “even if you appointed a whole series of conservative Supreme Court justices, I’m not sure that Roe v. Wade would get overturned, ever.” (National Review was thrilled but less surprised, having long sought that outcome.)
There has also been a marked, welcome increase in conservative resistance to transgenderism. In a 2016 speech, Thiel dismissed the issue as part of the “fake” culture wars. “When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won,” he said. “Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?”
Little of what Thiel said in a conversation with Harrington is new or exciting to those who have read his work closely. Of greater interest are some of the conclusions Harrington herself draws from interviewing Thiel. She begins by making a striking comparison:
In our emerging post-liberal world of lords and princes, Thiel is a prime mover across many fields, and his interests and priorities affect a great many people. And this is perhaps the trait that, above all else, invites parallels to premodern figures such as Lorenzo De’ Medici, the Florentine statesman and banker who was also his era’s foremost patron of the arts.
The analogy initially seems a bit out of place; why Lorenzo specifically, rather than some more-contemporary plutocrat? But Harrington explains her logic further. Essentially, she believes that our time is starting to resemble the starkly unequal, aristocratic, pre-democratic age, and that the hoi polloi are again becoming playthings of the aristoi. With some exceptions, she writes, “the lot of writers is once again shaped by the intellectual and political preoccupations of the 21st century’s lords and princes.” And that Thiel, like Lorenzo de’ Medici, “reorders the cultural world around himself, like iron filings responding to magnetism,” makes him a “return to tradition”; not an “an aberration in an otherwise seamless march of democratic progress, but a reversion to the historic norm.”
If Thiel is the norm, what was the exception? That would be, er . . . democracy. Harrington is coming to the view that “the democratic era was a flash in the pan, and what’s now emerging is a 21st-century variation on an ancient form of power, more monarchic or feudal in character than ‘populist,’ let alone democratic.” Thus, she dismisses those “still committed to the democratic vision of politics,” who “may be tempted to treat figures such as [George] Soros or Thiel as exemplars of dangerously untrammeled power, exerting a malign influence over a political process otherwise characterized by democratic checks and balances.”
Indeed, Harrington believes that, if you have the right Medici, he might even be preferable to what passes for democracy nowadays. In a previous essay (though not in this one), Harrington explicitly draws on the work of Curtis Yarvin, a computer programmer, neo-reactionary writer, and friend of Peter Thiel, to explain why. Yarvin, who used to write pseudonymously as Mencius Moldbug, is getting increasingly recognized. His views are a bit of a potpourri. Recently, he proclaimed that “we are utter fools if we cannot learn from the success of the Chinese regime — despite its clear complicity in covering up the leak in the first place — in suppressing the novel coronavirus.” Over a decade ago, Yarvin, an atheist, pronounced that “gay marriage is unquestionably a natural relationship.” He is perhaps most famous as the chief means by which the simulation-liberating “red pill” from The Matrix became a (dubious) political metaphor for taking a hard-right turn politically.
Yarvin is also an UnHerd contributor. And — let’s face it — a bit of a LARPer. In “Only a monarch can control the elites,” he fantasized about a future British monarch taking over the United States:
The King is right there, on the inauguration podium. The President hands him the Bible and the nuclear football. He takes command and the President calls an Uber. From the river, a deep roar — a corps of Royal Marines, on enormous transatlantic Hovercraft, is cruising in formation up the Potomac . . .
Harrington vaunts Yarvin as “perhaps the first thinker” to notice what she calls “the contemporary re-emergence of coordinated moral management” and what Yarvin calls “the Cathedral”: the distributed system of institutions, individuals, and networks, mainly existing outside of the realm of the explicitly political, that determines the parameters of a given society’s thought. As she puts it, quoting Yarvin:
Yarvin describes what he calls “the Cathedral” as comprising “all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions”: the politicians, journalists, academics, creatives and the institutions that amplify and grant them authority.
In a recent essay for Tablet, Yarvin put it this way:
Our cathedral looks nothing like an Orwellian dystopia. Instead of being centralized, cynical, and coercive, it is decentralized, sincere, and seductive. Yet its power to weave a narrative of universal illusion may be no less — and the illusion, not the coercion, is the heart of the dystopia.
Harrington is mistaken if she thinks Yarvin is the first to notice this. Writing in 1951 on the furious reaction to God and Man at Yale, William F. Buckley Jr. complained:
Much of what came was unexpected. I should have known better, of course, for I had seen the Apparatus go to work on other dissenters from the Liberal orthodoxy, and I respected the Apparatus and stood in awe of it.
Buckley would go on to found National Review as part of a network of institutions to challenge the “Apparatus” by returning to the principles from which said Apparatus had dislodged the country.
But if Harrington could agree with Buckley’s pre-Yarvin diagnosis, she prefers Yarvin’s prescription. Faced with the supposed choice between the diffuse arrangement that has entrenched a regime which is “militantly anti-aesthetic (and anti-human)” and amounts to a kind of “governance by a decentralised post-democratic swarm (analogous, perhaps, to what Thiel calls ‘Chinese Communist AI’),” might we not prefer Yarvin’s monarchist solution — a “Caesar,” as Harrington puts it, instead?
Given these options, we may yet conclude that the political return of human lords and princes — however unnervingly untrammelled their power, or remorselessly tech-optimist their worldview — is far from the worst option currently on the table . . . the available options for our future may be culturally vibrant human-led neo-feudalism, or aggressively anti-cultural swarm governance. And in this case, even those of us who mourn the passing of the liberal world may yet find ourselves, however ambivalently, on the side of Caesar.
She put it similarly in an earlier essay:
The lines are drawn between, on the one hand, those who hint — like the US Senate candidate JD Vance — at replacing what is left of electoral democracy with some kind of Caesar: perhaps, as Yarvin has suggested, even Elon Musk. And on the other, the artist formerly known as democracy: now an aggregate of pre- or supra-political institutions so averse to individual human authority it would rather see us ruled by a Twitter consensus, or by a hedge fund. Or, maybe, the most elegant solution of all: by an algorithm.
Yarvin, surveying the same choice, says: “Bizarre as it seems, human history’s most common form of government by far is still out there — waiting for us to get tired of living the way we live now.” His aforementioned LARPing is, in fact, representative of his views, though cloaked in deliberate hyperbole and irony (modes familiar to him). According to Harrington and Yarvin, then, these are our options: a diffuse yet oppressive network that enforces social tyranny, or a strongman (a “CEO” of America; a monarch), who can bust through the network and, paradoxically, by ruling monolithically, grant freedom to subjects in most matters.
We should reject this false choice, if I may invoke an expression of this age. There are many reasons to do so; only a few will suffice to rid us of the notion that we should be stuck in this binary. It is, for one thing, remarkably self-serving. Yarvin and Thiel, both acculturated in an environment where top-down, engineered solutions to problems were commonplace — even preferred — have been trained to see the rest of the world similarly. In this, they are not even very original. In prior decades, titans in similarly nonpolitical fields also came to view politics as an extension of their expertise. They thereby envisioned themselves or their proxies as having a right to rule. Frederick Winslow Taylor, a mechanical engineer whose principles of scientific management quickly spilled out from business and into politics, was one such predecessor. Taylor’s ideas melded quite well with the progressive, expertise-focused ethos of the early 20th century. As Yehouda Shenhav, quoting Robert Wiebe, describes the Taylorist mindset in Manufacturing Rationality: The Engineering Foundations of the Managerial Revolution:
Since the difference between the physical, social, and human realms was blurred by acts of translation, society itself was conceptualized and treated as a technical system. As such, society and organizations could, and should, be engineered as machines that are constantly being perfected. Hence, the management of organizations (and society at large) was seen to fall within the province of engineers. Social, cultural, and political issues . . . could be framed and analyzed as “systems” and “subsystems” to be solved by technical means . . .
So, it was natural, even predictable, that the computer nerds would have their turn. In his Tablet essay, Yarvin pulls the remarkably un-self-aware trick of describing someone as a “stereotypical programmer-libertarian” before, in the very next sentence, saying of methods of software design that “nothing binds these labels to the land of Linux.” As for Thiel, consult Zero to One, the book Thiel co-authored with now-longtime protégé Blake Masters, on whose Arizona Senate campaign Thiel spent $15 million (and to which Yarvin also donated; all three are friends). Thiel writes of tech start-up creators that “a unique founder can make authoritative decisions, inspire strong personal loyalty, and plan ahead for decades.” A few years earlier, he wrote that “the fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.” From such remarks, it’s easy to see that the Silicon Valley right-wing fantasy of a master programmer hacking reality was created of, by, and for Silicon Valley right-wing fantasists, who, if they ever succeeded in implementing it, would use it to impose their preferences on society without the pesky encumbrances of self-rule.
But self-rule is the proposition at the heart of this country, of its people. “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God,” Thomas Jefferson wrote. “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” Abraham Lincoln said. “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University,” William F. Buckley quipped (and not just because he was a Yale man). “From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people,” Ronald Reagan noted. “Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?” That goes for a couple of Silicon Valley would-be god-emperors as well.
The allure of a Caesar who will “cross the Rubicon” on our behalf depends on two false ideas: first, that he could provide more freedom than a “late-stage” political order, and second, that we are in such a political order. To embrace the first is to gamble against human nature and the record of history. The American Founders were quite conscious of the challenges they would face, but even they accepted that “enlightened statesmen would not always be at the helm.” Our system prefers them but can function without their constant presence, having distributed power vertically, between different levels of sovereignty, and horizontally, between the parts of government at each level. Caesarism, on the other hand, would depend on an indefinite succession of enlightened statesmen. It would exchange checks and balances and gridlock for the hope that the “right” person would somehow maintain power and wield it absolutely yet nobly. History is littered with the wreckage of such vain hopes. The rare situations where something like this can be said to have worked are, at best, both flawed and highly contingent, not political models — especially in a polity with such noble origins as our own. (Unless you, like Thiel, resent the “political paralysis embedded in” our system of government’s original design.)
Our political regime does not deny ambition, but sublimates and channels it. Yet those who have defended America have long seen the perils of those whose aims our institutions could not satisfy. From the beginning, Lincoln was worried about such people. Dissatisfied with the possibilities available to them in a merely republican system, they would seek greater offices. “Distinction” would be the “paramount object” of America’s would-be Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon. “And although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.” He was right to worry then; his diagnosis remains sound now.
And to embrace the second idea is to evince a lack of faith both in the American people and in the political principles that undergird our republican system — the option not touched upon in these ostensibly sophisticated ruminations. Acknowledging the extent of the challenges before us should not — must not — mean rejecting America itself.
Maybe I am naïve for thinking this foundation is still worthy. But the Caesarists are ignorant for not realizing they have placed themselves in a long — and suspect — line of theorists who think American self-government inadequate to some new challenge. “The old political formulas do not fit the present problems,” wrote Woodrow Wilson in 1914. “They read now like documents taken out of a forgotten age.” He added in the same work: “The Declaration of Independence did not mention the questions of our day.” But those who believe in America have proved doubters wrong and defeat challenges not by abandoning America’s principles but by embracing them, defending them, and restoring them via people and institutions who try to do the same. Writing decades before Wilson, Lincoln rebutted him, noting that the Declaration introduced “into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” And so it still is.
Harrington is right about at least one thing, however. What Thiel, Yarvin, and their fellow Rubiconservatives offer is not, in fact, unusual. It is quite normal in history, which is a kind of irony for someone like Thiel, so obsessed with novelty. If Harrington interprets him correctly, he is merely asking again the question that opens The Federalist Papers: “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” He, apparently, chooses to answer this question in the negative; I choose to answer it in the affirmative. Moreover, I share with Calvin Coolidge the belief that the only novel, worthwhile political arrangement for America derives from its Founding principles:
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
I’ll take that over Caesar any day.