Since 1997, billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and conservative political activist Peter Thiel has donated tens of millions of dollars to political candidates and causes in U.S. elections, the nonpartisan nonprofit Open Secrets revealed. In the 2022 midterm elections alone, he donated around $32.5 million to the Senate campaigns and political action committees of far-right conservatives J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona.
While significant on its own terms, the mounting intensity of Thiel’s political spending traces his evolution from an economic and social libertarian to a “Dark Enlightenment” and Christian-nationalist authoritarian. (As a reactionary philosophical and political movement, the Dark Enlightenment is anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian.)
Thiel’s donations fall into three distinct time frames: 1997 to 2011, 2012 to 2020 and 2021 to 2022. His donations to candidates and causes increased to more than $13 million in the 2012 to 2020 election years, compared with less than $1.5 million from 1997 to 2011.
Then, in the 2022 midterm election cycle, Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, ramped it up dramatically. His donations to Vance and Masters averaged more than $16 million each. What did he see in Vance, who won, and Masters, who lost? How did they fit into his Christian political vision?
Consider an immensely long Amazon review of journalist Max Chafkin’s recent biography of Thiel, “The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power.” The reviewer, who goes by the name “Kristin,” has written no other Amazon reviews and provides no profile information. Kristin’s review, titled “When the Son of Man Comes, Will He Find Faith on Earth?” — a reference to Luke 18:8 — is an exegesis of Thiel’s Christianity, which Kristin believes is central to understanding “Peter.”
As Kristin writes: Thiel believes globalization is the Antichrist, the Antichrist is the antecedent to the Apocalypse foretold in the Book of Revelations and only a turn toward Jesus Christ can save humanity from annihilation.
In 2004, Thiel organized a conference at Stanford University to honor his mentor, philosopher and political anthropologist René Girard. The paper he wrote for that conference, “The Straussian Moment,” was a metaphysical effort to assign meaning to 9/11 and its aftermath.
Thiel experienced 9/11 as a day of judgment when violence revealed itself to be the essence of our nature as humans, cracking and cratering forever the carapace of the Enlightenment’s indifference to what and who we are.
The quandary we face in the 21st century post-9/11, Thiel writes, begins with the death of God in the West. Having lost any commitment to the Christian philosophical and religious traditions that once prevailed, we no longer question ourselves in the right way — if we question ourselves at all. Thiel argues that we need to reclaim those traditions in the West or face destruction.
Thiel borrowed iconic names from the Christian fable “The Lord of the Rings” to name his surveillance technology companies, financial holding companies and venture capital funds. We may be inclined to see in Thiel’s interpretation of the decline of Western civilization an elegiac longing for hearth fire, warm ale and pipe smoke — ties and traditions celebrated and mourned in “The Lord of the Rings.”
But we would be wrong. Because, as Thiel tells us, what people learn from all religions, particularly from the Abrahamic faiths, is that culture and tradition are founded not on warm ale and pipe smoke but on violence and murder. Echoing Girard, Thiel tells us that all civilization originates from a crime.
The “Christian statesman or stateswoman,” the audience for which it turns out Thiel is writing, lingers in “the twilight of the modern age, waiting on Christ’s return, for that glorious day when all will be revealed, all injustices will be exposed, all those who perpetrated them will be held to account.”
While these Christians wait, they serve as stewards, protecting and healing when they can, killing and destroying when they must, but always alert to the knife’s edge on which they walk. That knife’s edge has always been the way of the world, but in the 21st century, globalization, religious violence and nuclear weapons have perilously narrowed the room for error.
A model of the Christian steward-statesman depicted in “The Lord of the Rings” is that of Aragorn, noble heir to the throne of Gondor. However, Thiel’s vision also echoes the eschatology of Christian Reconstructionists who believe Christ’s return, following an “Age of Enlightenment,” will require active, and almost-assuredly violent, political intervention.
Thiel wrote “The Straussian Moment” nearly 20 years ago. There are a million ways we might dismantle it. The essay is riven with misstatements, contradictions, ironies and assumptions about the nature and destiny of the human race that most Americans would dismiss as ludicrous.
Nonetheless, we can learn much from the essay. “The Straussian Moment” was written for the initiated elites who will inherit and claim sovereignty over the wreckage that awaits us.
It was written for traditionalist Catholic conservatives such as Masters and Vance, and for others like them, these once and future kings of Gondor.
