The Silicon Valley elites funding the New Right believe it is much more difficult to be cynically correct than idealistically wrong. This is central to the worldview of figures such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen. They believe it is their lot in life to possess superior judgement that enables them to pierce through conventional thought. In a few domains — most notably, venture capital and tech entrepreneurship — this can bring immense rewards. When it comes to politics, however, society tends to punish those who attempt to disabuse the masses of their false idealism. The tech billionaires therefore despise pious “liberal elites” who want to enjoy the fruits of civilization while condemning all of the dirty work required to make society function. These out-of-touch idealists, they say, want prosperity without inequality, safety without policing, excellence without rigor, and progress without disruption. This poses a dilemma: Suffer for speaking unpopular truths or allow society to continue deluding itself with bad ideas?
The tech oligarchs therefore see themselves as having undertaken a heroic but thankless task. This helps explain why, despite amassing enormous fortunes, they all sound so miserable: Elon Musk claims he built SpaceX, not to accumulate lucrative government contracts, but because he alone understood what needed to be done to ensure an interplanetary future for our species. Similarly, Peter Thiel did not cozy up to Trump to boost his investment portfolio, but because he recognized the fate of Western civilization hung in the balance. And Marc Andreessen had no intention of influencing the federal government to support his various crypto schemes, he just knew leftists failed to grasp that “societies, like sharks, grow or die.” All three men imagine themselves as lonely Atlasses holding a perpetually ungrateful world on their shoulders. Are their ideologies self-serving? Absolutely. Are they hypocritical? Even more so, coming from three self-proclaimed free-marketeers. But people contain multitudes, and Silicon Valley’s vision for a post-liberal, techno-authoritarian future is not entirely in bad faith, which makes it all the more troubling.
It’s easy to forget just how far the core values of certain Silicon Valley elites stray from those held by ordinary Americans. Would anyone hire a babysitter who believed she could live forever by uploading her brain to the cloud? Would parents trust their children to a teacher who was convinced ChatGPT had become sentient and would eventually enslave humanity? Could a small-town mayoral candidate win an election if she genuinely believed her children would not live in that community, or even this planet, but in a space colony on Mars? The answer to all of these questions is, of course, “no.” But we have become numb to what are, quite frankly, creepy and anti-human values. For decades, these ideologies were tolerated as part of a tacit social bargain: A group of intelligent eccentrics were left to their own devices on a patch of land in the Santa Clara Valley, and, in return, American society received an extraordinary set of new technologies. There was no fine print in this bargain about space colonies, American monarchs, or network states. And yet, here we are.
In The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (2025), Palantir executives Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska set out with the admirable goal of realigning the culture and values of Silicon Valley with those of the greater United States. They seek a return to the Cold War ethos in which “the pursuit of public interest through science and engineering was considered a natural extension of the national project, which entailed not only protecting U.S. interests but moving society, and indeed civilization, up the hill.” Instead of serving the common good, they say, the modern tech industry responds to the whims of consumers. Tech founders regard the U.S. as “a dying empire, whose slow descent could not be allowed to stand in the way of their own rise and the new era’s gold rush.” Software engineers opt for the “perceived safety of building another app” because they fear the social stigma that would come with assisting the American military. “Far too much capital, intellectual and otherwise, has been dedicated to sating the often capricious and passing needs of late capitalism’s hordes,” they write.
Karp and Zamiska provide a compelling cultural critique of Silicon Valley, even if The Technological Republic occasionally reads like a very long recruiting brochure. Social activist movements of the 1960s and 1970s are blamed for driving a wedge between the government and the tech industry. Karp and Zamiska acknowledge that these movements aired legitimate grievances. But the protests, they say, deconstructed one vision for a collective national project — however flawed — and offered nothing in its place. The resultant void, referred to as the “great secularization,” paradoxically made society intolerant of any collective ideology in the name of tolerance. “Our present unwillingness to pronounce, to have a view, and to venture toward the flame, not away from it, risks leaving us adrift,” they write.
The Technological Republic attributes many strains in contemporary tech culture to this shallow ideological milieu. Techno-utopianism, for instance, is said to come from a naive desire to see technological progress as the solution to every problem. In effective altruists, Karp and Zamiska see a group who, out of fear of big ideas, flattens complex moral problems into simple equations of utility maximization. More broadly, the tech industry’s focus on consumer products is attributed to its fear of ambitious ideas — software engineers directed their creative energies into food delivery apps and social media platforms because such projects seemed, at least initially, ideologically neutral. The problem for Karp and Zamiska is not the tech industry’s immorality, but rather, its amorality.
Within this broader critique, the authors champion Palantir as a uniquely moral company. While Palantir’s many critics would find this assertion laughable, Karp and Zamiska contend that morality is actually about addressing difficult, thorny problems to achieve better outcomes — not running away from such dilemmas in the name of high-minded ideals. This framing becomes most prominent in a chapter on domestic policing. Here, Karp and Zamiska cast those who criticize police use of facial recognition software as being aloof from the dangers faced by ordinary Americans, prioritizing their own ideological comfort over the lives of others. Likewise, the authors argue, those who want to stop the deployment of weaponized police drones are suffering from a “fear of the unknown [that] is too often used to abdicate responsibility for navigating any degree of uncertainty or complexity.” The Palantir executives strain to conjure even slightly sophisticated counterarguments: You either stand for technological progress or want to see your countrymen dead in the streets; you are either a pearl-clutching liberal elite or a hard-nosed Silicon Valley patriot. In caricaturing their opposition, they end up doing exactly what they lament by reducing complex moral problems into simple binaries.
They use this same logic when contrasting Palantir to the rest of Silicon Valley, which “made clear its disinterest in the work and challenges of the government.” The claim that Silicon Valley shuns government work is a brazen falsehood. Every Big Tech firm works with the U.S. government, and the companies collectively hold tens of billions of dollars in military contracts. Microsoft and Meta have each developed augmented reality headsets for American soldiers. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has dedicated much of his career since leaving the firm to strengthening ties between the U.S. government and Silicon Valley. In short, the umbilical cord connecting the Pentagon to Silicon Valley has never been severed.
For all the talk of company values, The Technological Republic does not acknowledge the fact that Palantir, like any other public company, heeds the single imperative of shareholder value maximization. When Google chose not to renew its Department of Defense contract in 2018 amid employee uproar, it cited potential conflicts with internal principles that supposedly prohibited the use of its AI for weapons and certain forms of surveillance. Karp and Zamiska are right to consider such incidents reflective of the cultural milieu of Silicon Valley — but this extends primarily to employees. Any ethical “principle” held by a public firm can stand only so long as it does not get in the way of profits. Indeed, Google aggressively pursued similar Pentagon contracts as soon as employee backlash died down. Their CEO, Sundar Pitchai, reassured Congress in 2020 that the company was “deeply committed to supporting the military and U.S. government” and downplayed the extent to which employee feedback factored into company decisions. Google and Palantir should not be understood as having radically different values — just different brands, which is downstream of the fact that one company sells internet advertisements and the other military software.
To that end, Palantir presents itself as an unapologetic defender of “the West,” an unsung sentinel willing to do the dirty work that keeps the rest of us safe. In the years after Palantir was founded in 2003, this meant selling software to intelligence agencies for counterterrorism purposes; now, it seems, Palantir is venturing into the business of creating and selling autonomous weapons systems. The company therefore stands apart in a tech landscape that, in recent decades, has chanted slogans like “don’t be evil” and “make the world a better place.” Despite its many detractors, Palantir has been incredibly successful. According to LinkedIn, the top schools Palantir recruits from include Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, Berkeley, and MIT. The company climbed its way into the S&P 500 in 2024 and its valuation now exceeds that of Boeing, BlackRock, and Goldman Sachs.
Much of the success in managing the narrative around Palantir comes from Karp himself, who serves as the company’s CEO and unofficial spokesman. Media profiles inevitably highlight any number of biographical details that make Karp an unusual candidate to lead a defence contractor: he has dyslexia, went from Stanford Law School to a German doctoral program in neo-Marxian social theory, practices tai chi, and self-identifies as a socialist. His mother is African-American and his father Jewish, which explains why Karp has remarked that “if fascism comes, I will be the first or second person on the wall.” He pursued a career in academia and briefly studied under Jürgen Habermas, the renowned Frankfurt School scholar who passed away earlier this year. The two had a falling out that culminated in Habermas sending a three-page letter that tore into Karp’s dissertation proposal. Karp recently described the rejection as “an utter shock” whose “sting would linger for years.”
It is hard not to read his eventual success at Palantir as a conflicted response to this humiliation. On the one hand, Karp parlayed his business success into an opportunity to become a public intellectual of sorts. Yet he uses this platform to pontificate about the superiority of “builders” to academics and the uselessness of humanities degrees from elite universities. Karp incessantly muses about “high IQ” individuals whose genius, he claims, can only be recognized by those “within a standard deviation of that talent.” In an interview with Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Karp explained that his proximity to Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, and Karl-Otto Apel allowed him to realize that, while he was “good enough to be in the room with them,” he nevertheless “had certain abilities they didn’t have: to be a builder.”
Karp seems to simultaneously loathe intellectual elites and desire their admiration. This proves challenging in his line of work. He often argues that, even if Americans (and liberal elites, in particular) don’t like the idea of state surveillance, police drones, or autonomous weapons systems, we nevertheless live in a dangerous world in which our survival depends on embracing such technologies. He claimed that Palantir was responsible for preventing several massive “October 7 style” terror attacks in Europe. In a 2024 interview with the New York Times, Karp said the U.S. could “very likely” end up simultaneously waging war against Iran, China, and Russia — an alliance that would have a “huge advantage” because they do not share our moral standards. “We’re in an age when nuclear deterrence is actually less effective because the West is very unlikely to use anything like a nuclear bomb, whereas our adversaries might,” he explained. The implication, then, is that America needs to embrace all forms of military technologies, even those it finds morally offensive — because if we don’t, our adversaries will, and that will be the end of “the West” as we know it. “Before one engages with the justice or injustice of a policy, it is necessary to understand one’s leverage or lack thereof in a negotiation, armed or otherwise,” Karp and Zamiska write. On an earnings call last year, Karp said Palantir was proud of its moral stance of “making America more lethal” and “making our adversaries increasingly afraid of acting against the interests of America.”
But what are “moral standards” worth when they are set by our adversaries — adversaries whose primary advantage over us is supposedly their lack of morals? A dark manifestation of this backwards thinking arrived in the form of Trump’s threat to Iran that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” In a recent public appearance, Karp cheered on the U.S. operations in Venezuela and Iran as evidence of “one society just totally dominating.” He added that the U.S. military was serving “a higher purpose, and not just for America but the whole world” by becoming “the power that actually has the decisive vote.” True to form, Karp took the opportunity to castigate his “intellectual friends” for naively pondering “wouldn’t it be better to have a law-based system where everyone is equal?”
The Technological Republic critiques the decadent idealism of American elites, but if anything, our recent history has been one of the government continually abandoning our founding ideals in favor of pragmatism or, increasingly, naked self-interest. Government responses to major catastrophes from September 11 to COVID-19 revealed the extent to which civil liberties are treated as dispensable. The executive branch regularly appeals to inflated “national security threats” and “states of emergency” as a means of circumventing due process. And one morning in late February, America woke up and found itself waging war on Iran, without Congressional approval, based on the whims of a single man who campaigned on the promise to end forever wars.
Karp and Zamiska portray themselves as the plucky upstarts going against the dominant intellectual elites. But whose agenda is actually winning? Media and intellectual elites may occasionally be decadent, annoying, and alarmist; they often sip overpriced cappuccinos in their insular communities and congratulate themselves for standing up for the poor and marginalized whom they like in theory and avoid in practice. But zoom out far enough and it becomes clear that the defenders of humanistic liberalism — wherever they may be — have been decisively losing the battle over adherence to ideals in recent decades.
Perhaps Karp is right that the U.S. cannot survive without embracing certain technologies and practices that would offend lofty liberal sensibilities. The U.S. obviously cannot embrace strict pacifism and expect a good outcome. Equally, it cannot take a “by any means necessary” approach while still living up to any of our founding principles. But these two options are not equally plausible scenarios: Palantir already won. The Technological Republic suggests that the West cannot afford to waste time with high-minded moral debates. But if the West can only survive by abandoning its ideals, is the true message of The Technological Republic that there can be no such thing as liberalism in the first place? What is Karp’s “the West,” if not a civilization founded and vitalized by commitment to a particular set of principles? Wouldn’t the founders of Palantir also have dismissed Jefferson, Madison, and Adams as decadent elites whose “luxury beliefs” endangered American lives and stood in the way of economic progress?
One attempt to answer these questions comes from Peter Thiel, who co-founded Palantir alongside Karp and serves as chairman of its board. In 2004, one year after launching Palantir, Thiel organized a conference at Stanford on “Politics & Apocalypse.” He wrote an essay for the occasion titled “The Straussian Moment,” which offers an uncharacteristically candid glimpse of his worldview, perhaps because Thiel had not yet anticipated how closely the rest of us would eventually be forced to pay attention to him. The essay contains many of the same ideas as The Technological Republic, but it is more transgressive — a daring philosophical treatise rather than a careful branding exercise.
The central preoccupation of “The Straussian Moment” is how Western Enlightenment can contend with the existence of nonrational, ideological violence. Thiel characterizes the Enlightenment as a major retreat from the grand, animating questions of human nature. Such questions, however worthwhile, produced periods of extraordinary violence in Europe throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Enlightenment emerged as a compromise from a weary, bloodsoaked continent — “the question of human nature was abandoned because it is too perilous a question to debate,” Thiel writes. The rights enshrined by liberalism came from an understanding that certain fundamental questions could never be answered, and individuals should therefore be allowed to practice their own religion, express their own ideas, and do what they please with their own property. Thiel writes: “In a capitalist world, violent debates about truth — whether they concern questions of religion and virtue or questions about the nature of humanity — interfere with the productive conduct of commerce. It is therefore best for such questions to be eliminated or obscured.”
But Thiel claims this compromise was based on a flawed understanding of human nature. Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke and Hobbes conceived of humanity as rational actors who pursued their own self-interest. The September 11 terror attacks forced the U.S. to confront the fact that “in that world outside the West, questions of religion and the purpose of humanity remained central; even in 2001 the greatest fear was not the fear of a painful death but the fear of what would happen to one in the life after that death.” For Thiel, Osama Bin Laden — the heir of an oil fortune, with nothing rational to gain by waging war on America — perfectly illustrates the failure of the Western imagination. The September 11 attacks therefore marked the start of a new era in the West, one where “mere self-preservation forces all of us to look at the world anew, to think strange new thoughts, and thereby to awaken from that very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the Enlightenment.”
What makes “The Straussian Moment” particularly interesting is that it anticipates the fundamental unanswered question in The Technological Republic. Thiel positions the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt as an “extreme alternative to Locke and all the thinkers of the Enlightenment.” Schmitt conceived of politics as a realm that forces combatants to draw stark distinctions between friends and enemies. To give up on declaring enemies means to give up altogether, according to Schmitt. Theil writes: “A side in which everyone, like Hobbes, values this earthly life more than death is a side where everyone will run away from fighting and confrontation; but when one runs away from an enemy that continues to fight, one is ultimately going to lose — no matter how great the numerical or technological superiority may appear at the outset.” Thiel does not endorse this outcome. Rather, he acknowledges that “the persistence of the political spells the doom of the modern West” since, “if one agrees with Schmitt’s starting assumptions, then the West must lose the war or lose its identity.” So Thiel says outright what Karp only gestures towards: In order to survive, we must betray ourselves. And why not make money doing it?
Thiel makes several additional theoretical moves. He considers the possibility that politics may indeed be transcended, but only through the complete domination of technology over human nature, such that humans would inhabit an artificial world completely subsumed by entertainment. This leads to an impasse since “the price of abandoning oneself to such an artificial representation is always too high, because the decisions that are avoided are always too important.” Searching for a way forward, Thiel then turns to the 20th-century German-Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss, whose ideas seeded both the American neoconservative movement and eventually the “West Coast Straussian” group that provided the intellectual backbone of Trumpism. Strauss believed that great thinkers throughout history needed to write in an esoteric manner such that they could convey their true message for a discerning audience without threatening either themselves or the social order. Thiel proposes that Strauss offers a potential resolution to the problem of the Enlightenment: The West could still search for truth, it would just need to do so covertly within elite circles, in a manner that did not destabilize all the noble lies holding civilization together. This opens up the “middle course” that Thiel ultimately seems to endorse. Quoting Strauss at length, Thiel presents the compromise as understanding that any decent society will do whatever it takes to survive, that the bounds of what needs to be done cannot be decided in advance, and — most critically — that Strauss ended “with a plea to ‘leave these sad exigencies covered with the veil with which they are justly covered.’”
Here, then, is one answer to Thiel’s long, complicated riddle: Liberal ideals can never exist in practice, but we should aspire to uphold them, and should profess our belief in them publicly, even while those in power privately acknowledge ideals must be ignored for our civilization to survive. On some level this is not so controversial. It might even be the most generous way of describing our current system: We have ideals, we try our best to live up to them, but realpolitik demands our government — and now all the billionaires and technogarchs who have such enormous power over how the rest of us live — do what is necessary to maintain the stability of our post-war global order.
If we take Thiel at his word, at least in this essay, his ambitions are much more reasonable than the media would have us believe. He even ends “The Straussian Moment” with advice that could just as well have come from a centrist European bureaucrat: “In determining the correct mixture of violence and peace, the Christian statesman or stateswoman would be wise, in every close case, to side with peace.” But in a recent essay for Salmagundi, Paul Leslie offers an alternative reading of “The Straussian Moment.” Leslie suggests that Thiel himself is engaged in Straussianism, and for the discerning reader, leaves his true message concealed in an untranslated passage from Oswald Spenger’s Decline of the West. The passage, presented in English by Lesie, claims that Caesarism “quietly and inexorably approaches” and that we do not have a choice in taking on this new political system “but only the freedom to do what is necessary or to do nothing.” What makes things even stranger, however, is that Leslie overlooks a footnote in which Thiel offers an English translation but uses ellipses to conspicuously leave out the part about Caesarism, even though he included it in the original German.
Pointing out these details may seem obsessive, paranoid, or perhaps even delusional. But for the Straussians, no authorial choice in a great work is an accident. Is Thiel’s true message that our decadent society is careening toward authoritarianism, whether we like it or not? Lesie thinks so. He writes that “Thiel is playing at being Strauss — embedding his real message where only the initiated will find it, while offering a placid conclusion to placate or mislead the uninitiated.”
The fundamental problem with Straussianism as a mode of interpretation is that it encourages a level of paranoia that makes almost anything plausible, thus abdicating both the reader and the writer of any obligation to a common-sense interpretation. Any great philosopher from the past can be reinterpreted as truly saying, for the discerning audience, whatever you want them to say. Any ideas from Plato, Hobbes, or Nietzsche that contradict your thesis can be dismissed as misdirection necessary to evade censors and maintain social harmony. Meanwhile, even the slightest whiff of an idea that supports your own agenda can be unduly elevated and reinterpreted as the “real” message. Those who believe in Straussianism — which now includes many on the New Right — start off with the premise that they, alongside the great philosophers of the past, are operating on a higher intellectual plane and therefore can discern hidden truths that are beyond the comprehension of everyone else. This worldview devolves rapidly into an echo-chamber of self-affirmation and condescension. And, of course, the system gives Straussians the honor of discerning the “true” meaning of their own writing, such that they are immunized from criticism from benighted outsiders who always merely misunderstand. A Straussian has no bad ideas, only inadequate readers.
Fortunately, we do not need to invoke Straussian readings to see illiberalism in Thiel’s philosophy. In a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute, Thiel made clear that he sees social democracy and its “unthinking demos” as a threat to free markets. To protect markets — the ultimate good — Thiel argues that we should use technology to move beyond politics. “We are in a deadly race between politics and technology,” Thiel writes. “We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire.” Thiel does not want to save the West but transcend it; liberal values are to be tolerated as the best means for advancing technology through the free market only until something better comes along. Liberalism is Thiel’s midwife to technological denomination.
It is even more troubling to read this conclusion in light of “The Straussian Moment,” where Thiel characterizes the world of unlimited technology as the one in which “a representation of reality might appear to replace reality.” In the world Thiel describes, the human impulses that led to war can be redirected toward video games, those that inspired heroic feats can dissipate at amusement parks, and any desire for serious thought will inevitably drown in the deluge of mindless entertainment. It is hard not to be reminded of Thiel’s early investment in Facebook (now Meta). In abstract terms, the fundamental value proposition of Meta is replacing the real with digital simulacra — this began with friendships and social connections, but the company eventually hopes to move us all into virtual reality worlds populated by AI-powered companions. The libertarian vision for a post-politics future is one in which an unlimited supply of digital bread and circuses permanently removes the threat of revolution. The soon-to-be unproductive underclass will be too preoccupied in their digital worlds — too satisfied by their digital luxury goods, too distracted by unlimited digital content — to bother taking to the streets. When Niel Postman first wrote of “amusing ourselves to death” in 1985 it served as a warning; now it’s a goal.
This dystopia can become our reality. Karp and Zamiska are right that America has largely traded purpose and depth for trivial consumer pleasures. As our mindless pursuits become more seductive, it will become harder for us to imagine the world any other way. The race that defines our time is not between politics and technology, as Thiel says, but between contemplation and distraction. We cannot innovate our way out of spiritual malaise, and corporations cannot lead a movement to reclaim collective values they were never capable of possessing. As Thoreau wrote in Walden: “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at.” Progress for the sake of progress is just another means of distraction — “improved means” to the same “unimproved end.”
The Technological Republic calls on Silicon Valley to give up its nihilism and embrace ambitious projects for the collective good. In offering remedies, it suggests America return to an era of “ravenous pragmatism.” It fails to consider that an excess of pragmatism — not a deficiency — bears responsibility for our current lack of collective ambition and moral identity. What defines Silicon Valley, if not a scramble for wealth? What drives contemporary American culture, if not immediate self-interest? We focus on cultivating “networks” rather than friendships; students opt for “practical” majors while abandoning the liberal arts; and constituents flock to whichever political party promises to grant the most favors. Karp and Zamiska are right to say Americans need to believe in something bigger than themselves. Yet they also consistently rail against any attempts to do so. Whatever the flaws of “liberal elites” at least they attempt to stand for something other than material gain. Faith in pragmatism alone is no faith at all.