On Thiel’s New American Regime

post by shawkisukkar · 2025-01-19T02:45:46.530Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

This is a link post for https://shawkisukkar.substack.com/p/thiel-new-american-regime

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Thiel attempts to do what he once criticized Locke for doing, but conservatives must not lose sight of the important questions again.

Peter Thiel, who will be known as the most consequential philosopher in this decisive moment in Western History, wrote a recent op-ed in the Financial Times arguing that Donald Trump’s return to the White House should create an apocalyptic unveiling of the long-buried secrets of what he described as the ancien regime. Thiel argues for a reconciliation in a Christian manner for the institution of a new order of the regime, because the ancien regime has failed to answer our deepest questions. This is not the first time where Thiel discusses the order of the American regime; he also addresses it—though only once elsewhere—in The Straussian Moment, where he delves into the crisis of the West and the apocalypse. To understand what he’s attempting to do in his op-ed, we must return to that essay.

For Thiel, the modern West has been defined by its abandonment of the very questions that once anchored Western civilization. Questions of virtue, faith, and human nature—leaving today’s West uncertain of its purpose. He singles out Locke for infusing the American regime with modern ideas that prioritize peace over deeper religious and philosophical inquiries. Thiel momentarily considers whether a return to an older Western tradition is still possible but concludes that the contemporary awareness of scapegoats prevents a reversion to the past. Strauss, who secretly blames Christianity for the decline of the West, attempted to reverse modernity through a hidden critique of Christianity, where he tells us that Jerusalem and Athens are not compatible, that Christianity hasn’t answered our deepest questions, because revelation is unreasonable. In Thiel’s view on the other side, is that the Christian statesman knows more through what the crucifixion of Christ had uncovered. Meanwhile, Thiel is equally dissatisfied with Girard's answer for us to retreat, whose call to wait patiently for an eventual revelation offers no potential for action.

Thiel concluded that what should be done about the crisis of the West is a return to early modernity. Thiel’s intellectual project over the past two decades, most prominently showcased in Zero to One, has been to restore the foundational belief in technological and scientific progress as an attempt to buy time. Machiavelli’s single use of the phrase La Verità efettuale (effectual truth) finds an echo in Thiel, who likewise employs it just once in the central chapter of the book. Attempting to do what Bacon once did through Machiavelli. For it was Machiavelli who unleashed the scientific and technological project of modernity in Chapter 25 of The Prince, where for the first time political philosophy diverged from the ancients by declaring that nature can be conquered. But it was John the Apostle in the book of Revelation, before Machiavelli, who announced that nature can be conquered: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea”.

Thiel believed that God works through us to build the kingdom of heaven here on Earth, thereby casting science and technology not as modern idols that would lead to the antichrist but as allied instruments for building the kingdom. But Christianity doesn’t set conquering nature as the highest aim, claim that the modern scientific project could answer our deepest questions, or that the kingdom of heaven could be built without people being centered around Christ.

Thiel sides with modernity rather than the ancients, maintaining that early modernity’s technological and economic “myths” may yet suffice to buy us time against the revealed Christian truth. In the most doubtful time of his project, he retreats from centering the question on technological and scientific progress, and urges the West that it might be that it has been distracted from God and the sacred questions by science and commerce. Yet Thiel, seems that he found a new path for his modern project through the coming Trump administration. He attempts to do what he once attacked Locke for doing. He implies that a new order of the regime could be reinstated by focusing on the technological and administrative questions of our time.

Thiel’s op-ed highlights his belief that the Founders’ American“ancien regime”(a system or mode that no longer prevails) is no longer working. While its failures are multifaceted, Thiel singles out three “deepest questions”: the protracted slowdown in US scientific and technological progress, the ever-swelling real estate bubble, and the mounting national debt. Lowering the aims of the regime, what once Locke has done. He concedes that a deeper historical perspective exists—one stretching back to America’s founding. Yet, just as Locke once counseled avoiding religious or philosophical controversies that might inflame passions, Thiel now treats these broader historical and cultural quandaries as effectively irresolvable, and unimportant for now. This mirrors what Thiel himself criticized Locke in doing: the deliberate sidelining of divisive, foundational questions in favor of a focus on peace and economics. In The Straussian Moment. Yet by lowering our aims himself and championing an unveiling of contemporary secrets while dismissing the significance of older, possibly intractable disputes between the Enlightenment side and the ancient side of the American regime, Thiel essentially replicates Locke’s strategy.

Thiel, in effect, mirrors Locke’s counsel to “not worry too much” about foundational or historical debates—especially those concerning religion and history—and to focus instead on how best to direct our resources in commerce. Thiel once faulted Locke for relentlessly undermining the older tradition, he does so similarly by lowering the regime’s highest aim, but this time for technological progress and administrative questions. We must aside questions concerning older history and justice and instead focus on resolving these technological and administrative questions. As Locke wrote, “we need not reflect on the past and can focus on the future,” Effectively Thiel does the same and lowers the aim of the American regime in the process.

Thiel urges us not to seek scapegoats yet understands that every new order needs a scapegoat. Thus, it is the Founders’ regime itself that becomes the scapegoat, blamed for failing to answer America’s crisis. If the pursuit of justice were truly to go deeper—addressing the rise of the pagan woke religion on the left and ardent young conservatism on the right—far more fundamental problems would emerge. The very fundamental problem is in the meaning of 1619 which Thiel urges us to not discuss. Thiel focuses on demolishing the secrecy of American institutions—unmasking details about the JFK assassination, government surveillance, or corrupt bureaucratic networks. But Thiel knows as he recalled Strauss' reminder for us that all just societies rely on intelligence and espionage. Thiel must know that exposing these secrets risks undermining the order of the regime of the Founders altogether. Conservatives may still believe something remains to conserve, thus unveiling these hidden truths while having the system as the scapegoat will destroy the Founders’ order. From Thiel’s standpoint, “there will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past,” because history, for him, is inherently one-directional—and the old regime of the Founders’ isn’t worth conserving.

Thiel claims the first Trump administration shied away from declassifications because it still believed in a caricatured “right-wing deep state,”. Yet that explanation appears dubious. In reality, many figures from the Bush era populated Trump’s early cabinet, a cohort neither fully aware of the West’s deeper crisis nor believed in the original American order.

Thiel’s push for the unveiling—might even bring about an actual end to politics as we know it. He, before siding with the enlightenment, highlights René Girard’s sense, that the word “apocalypse” points not just to a dramatic event but to the unveiling of a “terrible knowledge” that places humanity on a “catastrophic fault line” If the younger generation discovers the stark truth behind the city of man—its founding violence, its hidden corruption, its boundless capacity for scapegoating—Girard warns us that it may truly mark the “end of the world” Once the victims’ stories are laid bare and longstanding myths collapse, politics may lose the shared illusions that once made it possible, leaving the city of man teetering at the abyss of its own self-disclosure.

There is, however, a different answer for those who hold that the ancient American regime and way of life—as originally conceived—is the highest to ever be reached. Economic growth and technological advances lose much of their worth if the city cannot reclaim its founding religious and philosophical answers. If the West remains unable to reinhabit its older certainties and deeper questions, what truly will be gained from such progress? We should remember Thiel’s earlier admonition—before he leaned into the Enlightenment’s avoidance of ultimate concerns—that “the price of abandoning oneself to such an artificial representation is always too high, because the decisions that are avoided are always too important.” If the important questions are forgotten and aims are lowered, America risks the loss of any hopes of restoration for what America once was.

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