Revealing Peter Thiel essay on his anti-democratic beliefs – Boing Boing

On his essay site, Unpopular Front, writer John Ganz argues that tech billionaire, venture capitalist, and radical libertarian, Peter Thiel, is not as complicated and enigmatic as he's often made out to be. According to Gantz, he's a straight-up fascist.

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.

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Revealing Peter Thiel essay on his anti-democratic beliefs - Boing Boing