If you’re picking a costume for Halloween this week, socialist NYC mayoral candidate Mamdani isn’t the only scary political figure to consider. His Columbia-professor dad may be too obscure to be easily recognizable as a costume but is frightening in his own right nonetheless—so left-wing that he sees Abraham Lincoln as the real source of Hitler’s racist thinking, herding people into Native-American reservations and thereby proving the U.S. the source of most ethno-colonial evil in the modern world.
It’s enough to make you wonder why the elder Mamdani settled in this horrible, unwelcoming country that’s about to put his son in charge of its largest city. Yet Papa Mamdani shows an almost paleoconservative wisdom in recognizing that some weird, dangerous, seemingly distinctively-German ideas have American, often Progressive roots, or at least influences.
Since big-souled, semi-mystical writer Ralph Waldo Emerson was an influence on Nietzsche, outcast-sterilizing eugenics programs existed in the U.S. before they became the norm in Nazi Germany, and Cold War-spawned military bases continue to be an important factor in German politics, one could easily reverse the U.S.’s usual intellectual humility in the face of European philosophy and write a book on “the American roots of German thought,” if it hasn’t already been done.
The borderland where American and German thought blends produces plenty of horrors that could be turned into this year’s costume. And what could be more cutting-edge than going as a tech bro? A German-born cofounder of PayPal, Facebook, and Palantir, the venture capitalist Peter Thiel has become a great living Venn-diagram-overlap of ostensibly American-conservative ideas (he subsidizes various right-wing projects in this country) and heavy, dark, pessimistic, Germanic philosophical notions.
Since his name is an anagram of THE REPTILE, you might even be able to work that motif into the costume. Then again, real reptiles don’t sweat so much.
Thiel has become a bold advocate of technological surveillance as the answer to all our societal ills, eager from early in his career to make intelligence agencies and other arms of government big users of his tech and to create social order through the public’s panopticon-like awareness that they are watched at all times, their status as good citizens or criminals flagged by A.I. None dare call it a Chinese-style computerized social credit system, since, well, this one will be run by our guys.
But Western tech bros, who in theory should display some version of libertarian thinking—hooray for markets, for choice, for technological progress—have an alarming tendency to sound like homogenizing, collectivist technocrats when push comes to shove. Thiel has called competition stupid and said that the smart developer’s goal should be a highly efficient monopoly.
Bill Gates, who’s been entrusted with running so much educational software over the decades, reflexively laughs in his disturbing, psychopath-rictus way at the idea that there should be choice or competition in education, saying that obviously one should find the one best way of doing things and implement that (in computers, in healthcare practices, in personal identification methods, in all else, one imagines, or at least in all areas where Gates-associated tech or NGOs might be the default choice).
I don’t know whether to be grateful or even more frightened by the fact that A.I. in its current forms is still so stupid. I tried asking a major A.I. recently whether Mark Twain and G.K. Chesterton (both of whom would likely have been very skeptical of letting the machines run everything) ever met, and though it’s likely that they did (Twain having attended a dinner in England in honor of Chesterton), the word-salad-making, slop-serving, b.s.-churning A.I. replied that they very likely hadn’t, “explaining” that they were from two different countries and were of two different generations.
Well, they were one generation apart (just over a century ago) and hailed from two of the chummiest countries in all of history, so if this is how A.I. “reasons,” we probably shouldn’t make too much use of it for a few decades yet, certainly not in any sensitive areas like economics, medicine, weapons-launching, or communications. It doesn’t work yet, or at least it seems as though it probably couldn’t yet handle making intergenerational vacation travel plans.
With or without tech, though, adding a dash of dark authoritarianism to one’s politics is rarely an improvement. Take fat, stupid fascist Steve Bannon, for example, who’s lately been talking up the idea that Trump should run for a third term in 2028, Constitutional rules be damned. It was creepy enough when Bannon was praising figures such as century-ago Italian far-right thinker and occultist Julius Evola and sounding like he wanted to unleash forces from Hell to remake a wimpy world’s effete notions of individual liberty. Now, more concretely, Bannon scoffs at the idea that a mere constitutional amendment should stand in the way of Trump staying in the Oval Office for years to come, since Trump embodies “the will of the American people” and is “an instrument of divine providence” to boot.
People who think like Bannon and people who think like Thiel are well on their way to becoming a huge, globe-straddling “bad cop, worse cop” formula for turning culture authoritarian. The Bannons of the world will tell you we need barbarous but sanctified autocrats like Trump to smash what exists, and Thiel will rationalize tracking your every last movement in the ruins of civilization and in the ruins of the human politics we once knew, assuring you that everything is now under a new and better form of control, a final solution to all the old human failings.
But as any old-fashioned neoconservative knows (like security-firm-founding ex-government officials in the Michael Chertoff or Rudy Giuliani mold), to sell people on a new system, you usually need to convince them there’s a huge problem on the horizon that only your method can solve. Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt and Nazi-fleeing philosopher Leo Strauss alike knew it, and both influenced Thiel. Politics needs villains against whom the pliable public can be rallied.
The public is getting wise to the tactic. Mencken warned them a century ago that government will menace us with imaginary “hobgoblins” to justify its power-grabs, but since then we’ve been cowed into accepting more policing, more military adventures, and more surveillance as antidotes to ever-changing threats, whether real, imagined, or often exaggerated: Nazi saboteurs, communist spies, hippie murder cults, drug gangs, terrorists, hackers, and likely soon space aliens. Thiel may have come up with the villain to end all villains, though, the Final Boss that will make you sure to want to play the game.
As Laura Bullard explained for Wired, and as Thiel himself explained in a series of four off-the-record lectures ending earlier this month, he sees his surveillance tech and its accompanying conservative political mindset as opposing the literal or metaphorical power of the Antichrist, the biggest menace of them all. He warns that the Antichrist would bring One World Government and stifling government regulations. I oppose those things as well. But for people of an authoritarian mindset, the answer to such a threat is never liberty, not fully. The touted cure is just their version of an all-pervading authority instead of the dreaded other guy’s (China’s, the Antichrist’s, the left’s, whoever).
Thiel warns that the Antichrist’s current mission is to oppose tech like his surveillance software. If this pitch were being made by a 1980s televangelist who wanted you to buy his brand of videogame software, nearly the entire population would be laughing at him and making him the villain in a horror movie or a rock video.
People like Thiel switch costumes from liberator to ever-watchful controller so easily and completely that the dizzied public is left thinking some form of omnipresent authority is inevitable, like the universe ultimately serving either God or the Devil, one centralized entity running everything instead of leaving it to diverse, limited little mortals like you. God, in the Christian story, will leave you free to worship him and sing his praises, which doesn’t sound nearly as bad as being roasted in a sulfur pit for eternity, so the binary mind picks him over the guy with the pitchfork.
And Thiel and his ilk will assure you that by siding with them instead of Luddites and anarchists, you’ll get safe streets, protective drones, facial recognition to screen out unwanted outsiders, and endless access to the products and upgrades his cabal thinks you need most—or at least that they themselves most need to sell, or that their government clients would prefer you most readily access. There’s no reason to be scared or to think there’s anything creepy behind virtue’s new mask. Some of the people in charge read about markets in college, in between their theology discussions and computer programming classes, so surely they pose no looming threat to freedom.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey