Angel Jaramillo Torres
The brain behind US Vice President J. D. Vance
In his speech at the Munich Security Conference, US Vice-President J. D. Vance criticized European culture for having betrayed liberal democracy. With its bureaucratic structures, its intolerance of the free expression of ideas, its politically correct language, and its phobia of disruption, the European Union has entered a period of unreason and decadence in recent years. Not the old continent, but the new America envisioned by Donald Trump is the true heir to Western civilization, according to Vance.
Few, however, know that behind Vance’s ideas is his most important economic, political, and ideological promoter. His name is Peter Thiel, and his story should be better known to those who want to learn more about what determines Trumpism and the Trump administration.
Born in Germany, Thiel was brought to the United States at a very young age, despite which he maintained his family’s German, which he speaks fluently. In Max Chafkin’s extraordinary biography The Contrarian, Thiel appears as a politically, intellectually, and erotically non-conformist who, from a very young age, attempted a theoretical assault on liberalism, which he associates with the progressive hegemony of political structures in the United States.
A man fundamentally of ideas, Thiel studied for his degree in philosophy at Stanford University and later obtained his Juris Doctor in law from the same institution. While at Stanford, he edited the Stanford Review magazine, in which he attacked the American left and its woke culture. These were the winds of things to come.
After spending a short period in a law firm in Manhattan, which he considered a stint in hell, Thiel decided to try his luck as an investor and entrepreneur. In these endeavors, he met Elon Musk, with whom he founded the company PayPal, whose ambition was to challenge the banking and financial system—an Ayn Rand dream.
Philosophically influenced by Leo Strauss and René Girard, whose mimetic theory greatly influenced him, Thiel is also an enthusiast of J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels and the Lord of the Rings saga. Many initiatives and companies he has spearheaded are named after characters or places in Tolkien’s books.
From the beginning, his ideology has been a motley combination of several elements: conservatism, libertarian ideas, the esotericism of Leo Strauss and his critique of Modernity, as well as the cultural vision of René Girard. With this amalgamation, he has exercised a critique of what he considers the liberal elites in the United States.
He has also gained a reputation as a guru of disruptive entrepreneurship. In the excellent HBO comedy Silicon Valley, a character inspired by Thiel appears in front of an audience of young people whom he encourages to abandon their university careers and start their own companies. The real Peter Thiel went further: he offered funding to brilliant students to leave their studies. That is undoubtedly part of his battle against university education, which, according to him, is no longer fulfilling its function.
In 2012, Thiel taught a course at his alma mater that later became the book Zero to One: Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future. There, he presented several ideas that would become his hobby horses. Thiel distinguishes between globalization and technology. While the latter thrives on innovation, the former thrives on imitation. Thus, there are no elective affinities between globalization and technological development.
Another of his ideas is that monopolies benefit the economy in general because they are, in many cases, the product of innovation. On the other hand, economic competition takes place in areas where the zero moment has already occurred: creativity from nothing. Thiel is the author of the aphorism, “We wanted flying cars, and what we got were 140 characters”. This means that humanity has innovated almost nothing in the physical world of atoms but has done so in the fictitious world of bits. The entire Trumpian program of reindustrialization of the United States could be condensed into this sentence.
In 2016, he approached Trump and, in fact, had the responsibility Elon Musk now has for some time: to reduce the size and influence of bureaucracy. This did not work because Thiel introduced him to Trump with ideas and people that were too disruptive for the real estate magnate’s taste.
Vance met Thiel at Yale University. From there, he worked for one of Thiel’s investment companies in San Francisco. Sometime later, Thiel financed Vance’s campaign for the Senate. With a fortune estimated at approximately 17 billion dollars, Thiel is less important for this than for his willingness to risk money on projects that some would consider extravagant. He was the first investor in Zuckerberg’s Facebook and has influenced the US national security services through his company Palantir. He is famous for investing in research projects for life extension and is said to be one of the first to consume promising products in this regard. Lately, he has said that he converted to Christianity and has become closer to fundamentalist groups in the United States. His road to Damascus has had as many twists and turns as that of Saint Paul. Between them, he and Musk have brought the libertarian and conservative ideology of Silicon Valley to the very doors of power in Washington. If not their ideology, at least their bold, risky, and disruptive ethos — combined with an aversion to procedural liberal democracy — is making its mark in the early days of the Trump administration. It would be a good idea to recognize the contours of this ethos that aspires to be revolutionary and to change the United States from its foundations.
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