The Billionaires Are Abandoning Humanity

Among plutocratic reactionaries, Peter Thiel, who made his fortune as a cofounder of PayPal, is a trendsetter. In 2016, even billionaires who were hostile to liberalism and shared Thiel’s views on the necessity of radically reducing government to empower big business were hesitant to support Donald Trump, seeing the candidate’s populism as a threat to the established order. Thiel himself knew that betting on Trump was a gamble—but it was a bet he thought was not just wise but necessary. For many years, as he makes clear in a lengthy interview with Ross Douthat in The New York Times published last Thursday, Thiel has worried that Western civilization had entered a period of long-term stagnation in the 1970s which will continue unless there is a radical shake-up. This stagnation has many dimensions: lower economic growth, fewer world-changing scientific discoveries, and a general cultural malaise.

Trump, Thiel hoped, would at least open up a conversation about why progress was stalled. This was, he admits, “a preposterous fantasy.” Although his political investments haven’t quite paid off in overcoming stagnation as he’d hoped for, Thiel continued to invest in politicians—some of whom have been elevated to the national stage thanks to his largesse (he was a notable patron of Vice President JD Vance).

Thiel’s analysis of stagnation as requiring a radical right-wing political turn has also had a profound influence on his peers in Silicon Valley, who to greater and lesser degrees now share his worldview. They might be more circumspect than Thiel about how closely they are willing to align with figures like Trump and Vance, but they seem to have been won over to his broader analysis.

According to Thiel, he’s had debates about his stagnation thesis with Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) in 2012, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen in 2013 and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos in 2014. All three first rejected the idea that stagnation is a problem but, Thiel claims, “have, to varying degrees, updated and adjusted.” This shift, he asserts, is “deeply linked” to the turn of Silicon Valley elite away from supporting mainstream Democrats such as Barack Obama and toward embracing in varying degrees the Trump agenda.

The idea of stagnation is itself not an absurd one—nor inherently reactionary. Many left-wing historians and economists (notably the late Eric Hobsbawm in his magisterial 1994 study The Age of Extremes and the economic historian Robert Brenner in his crucial 2006 book The Economics of Global Turbulence) have analyzed a “long downturn” that began in the early 1970s when the major capitalist nations entered a period of slower technological innovation and lower economic growth. In order to roll back the labor victories of the postwar era (which had become harder to justify in the wake of falling profits), American elites both empowered finance capital (leading to a series of bubbles) and embraced deindustrialization, with many industries shifting to the Global South (notably China).

Even if one doesn’t accept every point made by Hobsbawm, Brenner, or similar Marxist thinkers, their analysis at least has a sturdy basis in political economy and material reality. By contrast, Thiel has a bizarrely cultural analysis of stagnation that doesn’t even pass the laugh test. The Western world, he claims, entered into five decades of anemic growth because of the counterculture of the 1960s. According to Thiel, “in my telling of the history of the 1970s…the hippies did win. We landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock started three weeks later and, with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won.” Thiel adds that “everyone became as deranged as Charles Manson.”

Because of the hippies, says Thiel, Western powers embraced an ideology of peace and safety that stalled technological growth.

More recently, the environmental movement has taken hold, which blocks progress even more. Thiel refers to climate change activist Greta Thunberg as the Antichrist. He is not being metaphorical in this description, since he makes clear that he believes the biblical account of the Antichrist is to be taken as a literal depiction of the dangers facing humanity. Thiel says, “In the 17th century, I can imagine a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type person taking over the world. In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.”

This is all too much for even so conservative a figure as Ross Douthat, who not unreasonably objects, “Greta Thunberg is on a boat in the Mediterranean, protesting Israel.”