Anyone here can explain why is Peter Thiel so dedicated to conservatism and the culture war?
I don't get how bankrolling people who actively support policies that hurt minorities (like the LGBT community) can bring any upside to him. What is his endgame here?
My theory is this is a distraction tactic. These are real issues for real people, but Thiel feels that there are bigger issues that he can't make traction on with the Democratic party. So he funds outrageous candidates and they push culture war narratives and don't do anything other than rile up both bases. I am asserting that Trump was ineffective, his cabinet turnover was unprecedented, and maybe that's why Thiel lost interest the second time around. But Thiel feels that doing nothing by the Republicans is better than the something that Democrats do. He's just running interference for progress by the other party, progress which he feels is detrimental.
I mean this is the standard Republican playbook. You missed tax cuts and well cronyism.
However, Thiel needs defense contracts and wants to be a power broker of political power.
For that he needs to get congressional reps and senators.
Trump and the tea party MAGAs are a way to get that influence since it is a "new world order" and displaces Koch and Murdoch as the principal power brokers. The reason Tucker is so pro-Trump is because Murdoch wants to keep his power.
The pro-Putin stance is also a direct play to the MAGAs which is an evolution of the get the US out of Nato crap.
The policies that hurt minorities aren't any policy he's personally affected by, thanks to his wealth and age. His wealth also insulates him from experiences that would foster empathy in others.
Meanwhile, conservative policies favour those who have a lot of money, like him.
Thiel is a multi-billionaire, so the same rules don't apply to him as the masses. Even the most anti-LGBT politicians will fawn over you if you have such money and power despite being what they supposedly detest.
You have to take another moral compass that reflects the personal reality. For example someone can be super supportive and volunteer to help immigrants. But on the other hand support hardcore anti-immigrant regulation.
Why?
Because he realises that people are selfish and he would act in the immigrants situation the same opportunistic way thus feels sympathy. But at the same way sees opportunistic immigration is a mayor problem for society thus supports hard regulation.
That way leads to situations where you are personal friends with people that you on a systemic level attack, without having a true moral conflict.
It's probably more accurate to call him a "fellow traveler". That is, he isn't someone who espouses the ideology of fascism outright.
But he's definitely willing to walk down same road with those who are much more clearly and visibly on the fascistoid spectrum (such as the candidate he supported for president in 2016 and 2020) in order to advance his own goals. All while being smart enough to understand the sociopolitical landscape, the parallels to history and all that.
Search for "dark enlightenment" -- Pete has a lot of uncomfortable connections to reactionary theorists.
See also: Frederick The Great, who was power hungry, belligerent, effective, and gay as hell. That whole Prussian discipline thing? Oh yeah, basically ramped up to 11 with Fred. Aside from loving opera and fashion, he also was all about large men and large horses.
> So, let’s sum up. Peter Thiel believes he belongs to an elite group, often understood in implicitly or explicitly racial terms, that is entitled to set aside democratic governance in favor of pursuing a program of technological progress and national restoration. He believes the political means to accomplish this is through a charismatic leader with manipulative, populist appeals to past national glory and against parasitic immigrants and culturally decadent liberalism. For him, even the most milquetoast, reformist liberalism is “tantamount to communism.” He’s obsessed with romanticized fantasies of absolute power, domination, and control. He dreams of wielding the the national security state against enemies both foreign and domestic. He envisioned a kind of imperialist world-state controlled not through deliberative bodies like the U.N. but directly by the intelligence and secret police bureaus. He combines the ideology of white collar, petit-bourgeois intermediary class with its emphases direct management techniques and closely-held ownership with the grandiose, world-spanning designs of an industrial titan. There’s really no contradiction within Peter Thiel’s politics, they are quite consistent: he’s just realized, more clearly than his opponents often, that there’s ultimately a contradiction between the rule of capital and democracy, and the way to deal with this contradiction, as far as he’s concerned, is to do away with democracy.
I'm going to try and explain how I understand Peter Thiel's worldview here, which I've learned from listening to him talk and reading what he writes. You can downvote this all you want, but I believe it's an accurate interpretation. I'll try to keep my own opinions out of it.
To understand Thiel's position, you have to broaden your idea of harm past immediate harm to a single group of people.
While I'm sure Thiel has personal economic concerns, his stated primary moral concern is preventing wealth redistribution, socialism, and the mass-scale violence that those programs have caused in the past. You can choose to believe him as to whether this is his true motivation or not, but you asked for an explanation of this worldview and that's what he's stuck with over 10+ years now.
While you might be more worried about Nazis, Thiel is more worried about things like 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions, the ensuing Red Terror, and mass starvation/poverty. About 20M people died in Russia during this time, mostly from starvation but up to 200,000 dead by being executed by the state for having the wrong political beliefs. And many more during the various violent uprisings and civil wars.
Some of you reading this are going to huff and just disregard it, but for Thiel, preventing potential massive tragedy in the future is likely worth a tradeoff of some people being "harmed" now.
Edit: the number of replies to your comment which basically amount to "he just doesn't care about others/he's rich so he's evil" indicate that even the Hacker News audience is not immune to believing in lazy explanations and supernatural forces. Google "The Myth of Pure Evil" for more on this.
> Thiel is more worried about things like 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions
If we wants to prevent revolutions, he should be advocating for gradual change and a reduction in inequality, not fomenting culture war. Extreme inequality leads to revolution, and the civil war his people seem eager to instigate also seems contrary to his goals.
The problem with Thiel's worldview is that it's not all that accurate. Yes, the Soviet Union was a horrible authoritarian state but the alternative to it isn't any better especially if you're not in the United States or of its preferred/default social classes. The damage done by the USSR and the Russian civil war pale in comparison to the yearly death toll of millions from medical deprivation and starvation even after the Green Revolution (we still have a distribution problem wrt food and medicine). His solutions are basically go back to some form of feudalism but without there being a singular sovereign to keep the nobles of our age in check (i.e. him and other billionaires). The reality is that capitalism has been limping along post Cold War and it's not getting any better, so without there being an outside threat to unify ourselves around, its flaws are seen more keenly and felt more closely than in the past. If Thiel wants to stop the second Bolshevik revolt then he should focus on making wealth distribution through market means viable and support ending monopolies and enclosures of various commons (weaken IP law, reform land rights, and so forth).
Interestingly social setups had 'billionaires' and 'everybody else' too, it was just way worse for everybody else. It's not like there was no unchecked ruling class there.
How many people die every year from medical deprivation? While that is a legitimate problem that we need to fix, I'm skeptical whether that could exceed the 100M who have been killed by Communism.
> How many people die every year from medical deprivation?
A quick search suggests figures ranging from 1 million to 40 million per year. So if you want to compare that to 100 million deaths by communism over the past 100 years, then preventable disease seems to kill at least roughly the same number of people, and possibly 40 times as many.
Victims of Communism and the authors of the Black Book of Communism's own figures are debated by experts of the history of Russia and the USSR, especially during Stalin's reign. Many of the deaths that the Black Book of Communism sites were mostly due to the invasion by Nazi Germany (somewhere around 10 or 20 million iirc). The rest are also mostly not direct deaths by the Bolsheviks or the USSR state apparatus (this is including the famines). And the biggest problem with the book is that it often makes up the figures whole cloth.
This isn't saying the USSR or the Bolsheviks weren't horrible, but one must put their crimes against humanity in the proper context and not turn them into super inhuman villains as much as we did with the Nazis (they too were horrible, but sadly they were very much a product of the mainstream values of their time).
Plus, the claim that allowing for social democratic policies like UBI, IP law reform, and the like to come to fruition isn't going to create another Red Terror. If anything, it's the most conservative thing you can do (see German Empire and the institution of Social Insurance by Otto von Bismarck) since it retains capitalism but tames its worse aspects for a time. This is why I roll my eyes at folks like Thiel since they rarely have anything that would be a viable alternative than status quo and lying about how bad things are for many people today. And I say this as someone who's far left of many folks being a Mutualist and an anarchist.
World population circa 1950 was like 2 billion. I don't know what the root study is that reaches that 100M figure, but the idea that communism killed one in twenty people on the whole planet seems a bit unlikely.
The really high end figures for the worst[0] man-made disaster of all time (the famine during the great leap forward) are 42 million, no idea where you'd get the rest of the numbers from.
[0]: edit: I thought it was the worst: apparently there were several previous famines in China in the 19th century that were more deadly.
> preventing wealth redistribution, socialism, and the mass-scale violence that those programs have caused in the past
> While you might be more worried about Nazis, Thiel is more worried about things like 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions, the ensuing Red Terror, and mass starvation/poverty.
That political violence was caused by competing authoritarian regimes, not socialism and wealth redistribution.
If socialism were the cause, the US would have had a violent revolution after WW2, a time of very high wealth redistribution and the implementation of programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Much of the current unrest in the US is caused by the stagnation of workers wages and quality of life in politically relevant places, not the opposite. That's far more like the situation in Germany prior to the rise of the Nazis.
> Some of you reading this are going to huff and just disregard it, but for Thiel, preventing potential massive tragedy in the future is likely worth a tradeoff of some people being "harmed" now.
Let's say I agree with Thiel on this matter. We agree so much that I intend to drone strike Thiel.
Is this position good or bad? How does it differ from that of Thiel?
If your argument is that directly murdering someone is equivalent to supporting politicians who support policies which you don't like, you've already lost. Why not just murder the people who voted for the politicians that Thiel supported while you're at it?
Now if I was to design, test, and debug these devices, then release the blueprints along with a manifesto that lists what I feel are problems in society and who I feel are causing the problems, how would that be different from what Thiel is doing?
You're right, I should more closely mimic Thiel by hiring some talking heads for social media platforms. One to disseminate the blueprints, and the other for the manifesto.
It's not my argument, it's the argument of the person I'm responding to.
> Some of you reading this are going to huff and just disregard it, but for Thiel, preventing potential massive tragedy in the future is likely worth a tradeoff of some people being "harmed" now.
What I'm asking is how many degrees of separation is needed to make what OP is saying Thiel is doing acceptable.
As far as I can tell, "harmed" is in quotes because the so-called harm would not even have been recognized as such in previous generations (unless you can provide counterexamples)
That doesn't make sense because the hypothetical alternative that Thiel is trying to prevent an atrocity by conducting less of atrocity. It's a the needs of the many out weigh the needs of the few argument.
If there wasn't something substantial on the table we wouldn't be having this discussion.
It's a mystery to me how those on the left get to spend so much time focusing on the threat of nazism whilst completely ignoring their own horrific history. I dont know how they get away with it.
How would I, as a native born US Midwesterner, view the USSR or the PRC as "my own history"? Not to mention that the USSR and PRC have both transitioned from economic socialism to capitalism while retaining political totalitarianism. So maybe the economic system and the political system are separate issues? There are plenty of countries in western/northern Europe that are more socialist, and indeed more democratic, than the US.
It's kind of like asking contemporary Christians how they get away with not focusing on the Spanish Inquisition. Why would someone today view that as "their own horrific history"?
The real problem for the oppression and deaths is the totalitarianism, rather than whether it's coming from the left of right. Both left and right-wing dictatorship have the capacity and opportunity for incredible cruelty. Healthy human rights-respecting democracies do not, regardless of their economic policies. Although extreme poverty can also be deadly and could be considered a form of oppression. There are good reasons why workers in capitalist countries fought hard for workers' rights 100 years ago.
I've no idea what the Spanish inquisition has to do with the clear and obvious tendency towards an oppressive totalitarianism by left-wing movements throughout history.
I think you have to be willfully blind to deny this.
I was going to just write this off as ridiculous whataboutism but it doesn’t do your comment justice. “The Left” frets about nazism because the BS fascist tones of the typical far-right-but-with-mainstream-appeal policy platform bare a far closer resemblance to the left-wing counterpart does to say…communistic dictatorships of times past. Pull your head in.
Do you have any links to first person evidence that "his stated primary moral concern is preventing wealth redistribution, socialism, and the mass-scale violence" .. I'd be interested in reading them.
Someone on this forum the other day suggested reading the book "Who Owns the Future?" by Jaron Lanier. I am only a few chapters in but it has been interesting to see the argument that Walmart prevented WW3 with China and at the same time the amassing of computation, digital networking and information is hollowing out the middle classes and driving economic inequality.
Fascinating stuff that any true capitalist should read.
For me his behaviour makes sense. I act in similar ways, as it shows that the person has higher moral standards than he can fulfil himself. He knows that his lifestyle is not according to his ideals, but to compensate this he funds initiatives that support those. Its basically carbon trading morality. And just because you can't live up to your own moral standards does not mean you see the point that these should be changed.
Everyone, ignoring reality, has the view that this is how the world should be. Of course, if you have money and power, you work to influence (enforce?) it in whatever way you can.
Simple: Thiel unironically believes in techno-feudalism and is willing to work with anti-LGBT forces to bring it about as an alternative to whatever the heck Barack Obama and Joe Biden have been doing.
In my mind there are broadly 2 types of conservatives, the rich self interest conservatives and the regular social issues conservatives. the rich have figured out a pretty efficient way of feeding the regular conservatives things that dont cost them money (like religion, guns, immigration, minorities etc) in exchange of things that make them money & power. it almost always boils down to that calculation. religion is easy way to keep masses in check and divert their attention on-demand.
I don't get how bankrolling people who actively support policies that hurt minorities (like the LGBT community) can bring any upside to him. What is his endgame here?