It’s odd: Regardless of whether they view him as a benevolent futurist or scheming magnate, most people, it seems, perceive Peter Thiel as very, very smart. It’s this assumption of intelligence, along with the sheer iconoclasm of the stance, that’s made Thiel’s support for Trump fascinating to journalists and tech observers: Surely he has a sophisticated and convincing argument for supporting the silliest and most incoherent presidential candidate in living memory.
But every speaking engagement Thiel has taken over the past few months, and every interview he’s given (all exclusively to the New York Times), has revealed that Thiel — much like the rest of Silicon Valley — loves speaking in broad platitudes and few specifics. His analysis, of the election and the problems facing the country, is no more sophisticated than any other Trump supporter or political reporter: He subscribes to the general idea that politics is broken and only an outsider can fix it. “We’re voting for Trump because we judge the leadership of our country to have failed,” Thiel said, aligning himself with the 40 percent or so that support the GOP candidate and positioning himself, as he often does, as a perpetual outsider.
The problem may be that the media is taking Thiel seriously without taking him literally. That is: His support for Trump isn’t a down payment on the alt-right or a long-shot bet on political favors. Thiel doesn’t support Trump because he’s a super-genius who can see deep into the future. He supports Trump for exactly the reasons he keeps telling us: because he’s a crank who doesn’t have a very deep understanding of politics.
Thiel is cracked. But just like Trump, who has tapped into the angst of a large fragment of the US populace, Thiel is the willing front man for a bizarro strand of techno-libertarianism, a bunch that believes the world would be a better place if we could sidestep the inconveniences of democracy and let the technocrats run things.
Consider this exchange between serial entrepreneur and Silicon Valley mouthpiece, Jason Calacanis, and ex-Facebooker and angel Chamath Palihapitiya, chatting about the government shutdown in 2013:
Palihapitiya: The government, they’re completely useless.
Calacanis: The government got shut down today and the stock market went up 1 percent.
Palihapitiya: We’re in this really interesting shift. The center of power is here, make no mistake. I think we’ve known it now for probably four or five years. But it’s becoming excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else that where value is created is no longer in New York, it’s no longer in Washington, it’s no longer in LA. It’s in San Francisco and the Bay Area. And when you look at sort of, like, how markets react to things like that, and when there’s no reaction, it should be taken as a very subtle signal that the power dynamics have changed. Because markets value meaningful events, markets discount meaningless events. And so the functional value of the government is effectively discounted to zero …
Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence, and capital structures that matter. If companies shut down, the stock market would collapse. If the government shuts down, nothing happens and we all move on, because it just doesn’t matter. Stasis in the government is actually good for all of us. It means they can neither do anything semi-useful nor anything really stupid. They just sit there and they just kind of, you know …
[Applause.]
Calacanis: There you have it.
Thiel is supporting Trump for the same reason Putin is: he would like to disrupt democracy in the US and promote dysfunctional government. It’s equivalent to shrinking government, because a dysfunctional government accomplishes nothing, and such a government will not disrupt techno-globalism from expanding.
And if you want more on how dangerously unhinged Peter Thiel is, see Peter Thiel, Techno-Utopian, and Beware Peter Thiel.
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/152811804292
