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Wait, Wasn't Peter Thiel a Libertarian?

Rejected submission by aristarchus at 2020-08-09 18:33:41 from the Peter Thiel? dept.
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From the Libertarian rag, Reason [reason.com], some interesting exposition on the New Right in America.

Eleven days after the first case of an American suffering from COVID-19 was reported, an essayist at an online journal run by the Claremont Institute—whose stated purpose is to "restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life"—argued that a sensible response would be to prohibit humans from crossing oceans. "The obvious solution to an emerging pandemic," wrote Curtis Yarvin in The American Mind, "is cutting off flights to China, then all air travel across the Pacific, then across the Atlantic."

Yes, closing borders has always been a libertarian policy, right?

Who is Curtis Yarvin, and what was this atavistic assertion doing under the aegis of Claremont, a staid conservative institution founded by disciples of the late political philosopher Harry Jaffa? The Claremont Review of Books, for most of its two-decade run, has been a polite repository for intellectual conservatism.

But it seems the Young Turks are already inside the gates.

Claremont's web journal The American Mind, though, was launched in 2018 with a more provocative agenda: to "rethink the ideological framework of the American Right." The animating idea, founding editor Matthew Peterson explains, is that traditional right-of-center groups are out of touch: They don't even realize that their own staffs include "people under 35" who "fundamentally disagree with supposedly fundamental [classical liberal] tenets of their organization. No one wants to hear or deal with it. They want to stick their heads in the sand." A vibrant and ideologically adventurous new conservative movement, Peterson says, is "bubbling beneath the surface, or even online all over the place. We are not supposed to talk about these things or engage that movement?"

And then things get interesting.

Yarvin is perhaps better known for the pen name under which he rose to internet fame in the late 2000s and early 2010s: "Mencius Moldbug." At his Unqualified Reservations blog, Moldbug, a software entrepreneur by day, unspooled head-spinningly long-winded "neoreactionary" screeds, wielding a broadsword of abandoned pre-Enlightenment wisdom against the squalid lies of equality, democracy, and the smothering tyranny of what he called the communist-progressive "Cathedral." Back then, the Cathedral ruled the discourse so totally and viciously that it wasn't prudent—perhaps wasn't even safe—to burden Moldbug's true identity with his brutally honest thoughts. But TechCrunch outed Moldbug as Yarvin in 2013, and in the Trump era he seems happy enough to publicly be himself.

Oh, Moldybug!

Yarvin, a follower of the 19th century British polemicist Thomas Carlyle, is the type of outside-the-box thinker who argues that monarchy is inherently better than democracy, that street crime is more of a danger to his readers' lives than all of government's depredations, and that one of the worst sins of modernity is that people refuse to speak candidly about IQ differences across human types. Such notions are by no means new to the American right, but they feel fresh again in 2020 not only because libertarianism has made some inroads against conservative traditionalism over the last few decades but also because Yarvin's extreme anti-cosmopolitanism comes with a genuinely modern twist: He is connected, via friendship, venture capital, and at least some ideological affinity, with one of America's wealthiest and most controversial men, the tech tycoon Peter Thiel.

Thiel, whom the George Mason economist Tyler Cowen in 2019 called "the most influential conservative intellectual with other conservative and libertarian intellectuals," is co-founder of PayPal, the big data analytics firm Palantir Technologies, and the trailblazing venture capital group Founders Fund.

So, not libertarian at all, then? Monarchists? Racists? Papists?

What Does Thiel Want?
Through his overlapping social and intellectual worlds of venture capital, goal-oriented philanthropy, and Overton window–moving conservatism, Thiel has helped create a kind of rolling debate society in which entrepreneurs and technologists trade ideas with politicians and theorists. This "Thielosphere," says Patri Friedman, is "more willing to engage with deliberately transgressive ideas" than are most groups aiming for concrete power and influence in America.

Friedman, son of anarcho-capitalist David and grandson of Nobelist Milton, established the Thiel-funded Seasteading Institute in 2008 to develop the concept of sovereign seaborne micro-competitors to the nation-state. Yet he happily coexists in the Thielite ecosystem with such aggressively nationalist politicians as Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), to whom Thiel has donated. The key, Friedman says, is that the thinkers and doers surrounding Thiel don't tend to be yes men, and the loose group conversation tends to "grapple with [ideas] in different ways," with participants getting "value in parts even if they don't agree with all the goals."

Rather in-depth article, from a traditionalist libertarian view, but does lay out the idea and the players. We even get a bit on "Bronze Age Pervert." Fine bunch of Reubens, as Cap't Mal would say.


Original Submission