Not since the Apollo program has America been so enthralled by the promise of technology. Elon Musk, President Donald Trump’s closest adviser, founded and runs a company most famous for commercial spaceflight and its mission to establish a colony on Mars. NASA intends to put American boots back on the moon for the first time since 1972. Recent developments in artificial intelligence promise to transform how we work and live. A new generation of innovators—the “tech right”—champion such developments, sketching an almost utopian vision of humanity’s future. For all their rough edges, the rise of Musk, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos, and the like represents something profoundly promising: long-dormant hope bubbling beneath the surface of our postmodern pessimism.
American optimism peaked in the mid-20th century. We stood on top of the world in the wake of World War II. The United States made up over half the planet’s economic output, the public was filled with a deep sense of civilizational confidence, and the scientific community was knee-deep in world-changing discoveries. But then we faltered. Much of what we were promised—zero-cost electricity, flying cars, intergalactic settlement—never came to fruition. Many of our well-intentioned military ventures abroad have concluded in unceremonious, if not outright disastrous, withdrawals (Saigon and Kabul come to mind). Such civilizational let-downs taught us this: History happens to man. The best we can do is manage.
Modern climate alarmism embodies such pessimism, with its boosters contending that the developed world must learn to live with a lack of abundance. A small but vocal minority of those pessimists even eschews child rearing, saying that to bring a child into a burning world would bring only further despair. We’ve gone from boasting American genius to waving the white flag.
The tech right disdains this white flag. “History may happen to man,” its members say, “but so too does man happen to history.” It is no mistake, then, that the prefatory quote to the cofounder of Palantir’s new book, The Technological Republic, is attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Of any faction in our modern political order, the tech right most embodies our Faustian impulse: a willingness to cut moral corners for the sake of progress. If climate alarmism inhabits one end of the spectrum—a complete surrender to nature; a sharp condemnation of man’s drive for progress—the Faustians inhabit the other: progress above all else; total war against nature.
As this movement comes into its own, its leaders are emerging to chart the future of technological development. In turn, they hope to chart America’s future. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal who is considered the prophet of the tech right, articulated the outlines of this in his 2014 manifesto, Zero to One, which is subtitled: “Notes on Start-Ups, or How to Build the Future.” Zero to One is half-jokingly referred to as the “Bible” by many technologists and start-up founders. But Thiel, who also co-founded the software giant Palantir, isn’t the only member of the tech right to try to engrave his vision in writing: in February, his fellow Palantir co-founder Alex Karp published The Technological Republic, a book that could well be equally as influential as Zero to One.
In the book, Karp argues that instruments of hard power—missiles, ships, drones, even nuclear weapons—are necessary for the maintenance of American dominance, and that America’s decades of uncontested hegemony lulled us into complacency. Real power rests in force, or at least in the legitimate threat thereof, he argues. But, he writes, while the center of American technological development today—Silicon Valley—is brimming with highly competent people more than willing to volunteer their services to produce addictive social media algorithms, they’re reluctant to support anything remotely associated with our military due to moral concerns. This is why Karp co-founded Palantir: To be an unapologetically pro-American company that stewards the brainpower of the Valley toward the interests of national security.
This introductory argument sets up Karp’s diagnosis of American malaise: We suffer from a crisis of moral relativism. Relying on political philosopher Allan Bloom’s observations in his popular book The Closing of the American Mind, he harshly condemns the “thinly veiled nihilism” that he says pervades the academy and society broadly. His solution is for modern men and women to commit themselves to believing in something, and they must believe in it very much.
But what exactly ought they believe in? He leaves this question entirely open, except for passing references to American interests. And it’s this moral ambivalence that is symptomatic of the deepest fault in the tech right’s project: its inability to articulate a robust moral and political ethic. Indeed, many on the tech right deeply admire the American project, and for good reason. They gaze at generations of Americans past, and at some Americans present, extolling their work ethic, confidence, and capacity to do great things. One need only gaze at the social media activity of many of these tech titans, replete with memes championing past generations of Americans and their virtues.
Yes, we ought to revive the best of America. But what is the best of America? How do we rekindle our greatness? What sort of politics and culture enables this? How do we rebuild cultural confidence? The tech right remains mostly silent on these most important questions. They lust for a return of the strong gods, but they know not which gods to invoke. And it is these questions—political questions—that must be answered by proponents of an explicitly political project. Gesturing toward an undefined concept of national interest or progress will not suffice.
Karp, to his credit, grasps at this: The construction of a “technological republic,” he writes, “will require an embrace of value, virtue, and culture, the very things that the present generation was taught to abhor.” But how do we get there? If you read The Technological Republic and nothing else, the answer is some combination of people miraculously committing themselves to (still undefined) moral ideals, Congress allocating more dollars to research and development, and bureaucrats tinkering with military equipment procurement policies. Such answers are partial answers at best. The latter two are fairly achievable policy goals, but incommensurate with the great task at hand. The former objective—the public suddenly becoming virtuous, en masse—borders on the stuff of dreams.
Much of the tech right’s inability to respond convincingly to these questions can be explained by the difference between the thinking required to accomplish the sort of (truly awesome) work tech innovators have been engaged in throughout their careers—building companies that have made enormous advances in fields as disparate and important as medical technology, communications, and transportion—and the sort of thinking demanded by ambitious political ventures. It is the difference between ends and means.
Again and again, Karp stresses the importance of results. The success of past generations of American innovators, especially those who followed in the wake of World War II, was enabled by a “commitment to advancing outcomes at the expense of theater … [of] setting aside vain theological debates in favor of even marginal and often imperfect progress.” Among Silicon Valley’s most valuable contributions—what Karp calls an “engineering mindset”—has to do with this dogged preference for results over abstract theory. Such talk should receive a warm reception in our present moment, especially as the Trump administration attempts to tackle waste, fraud, and abuse in the belly of the administrative state. Government bureaucracies the world over have become prisoners of process.
But whereas in the start-up world, a founder rarely needs to consider the ends of a project beyond profit, in politics, what the “ends” are remains much more open-ended. The end of political science is eudaimonia, according to Aristotle (in English, roughly translated to “flourishing”)—an end obviously harder to define, much less quantify, than profit or user base goals. (Blaise Pascal put it well when writing of justice and truth: They are “two such subtle points, that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.”)
In simpler terms, the tech right is best at achieving objective goals. But when one enters the political arena, one must also consider subjective goals: not just, say, building a highly capable and effective military, but also—what should our military power be used for? Where should we deploy our forces and why? Simply because contemporary politics has not lent itself to the serious contemplation and debate of what human flourishing actually looks like does not mean that the project can be abandoned altogether.
Faced with this stumbling block, some on the tech right will conflate human flourishing with “progress,” claiming they have stumbled upon solid ground. But progress presumes some goal worth advancing toward. I do not mean to say here that Karp and his ilk don’t understand this problem. They clearly do, insofar as they are advocating for the reassertion of national ambition and a strong sense of national purpose. I mean only to say that they need to spend more time contemplating what future they are truly striving for.
How human flourishing ought to be defined and achieved in our time, with an eye to technological development, is a project far too grand to wedge into this essay. But we should recognize that for the tech right’s nobler political ambitions to come to fruition—the revitalization of a culture that dreams and does great things, a government effective enough to serve its constituents, and a national security apparatus capable of defending our interests and upholding justice—it must ground its mission in something more substantive.
Here are several starting points for how members of the tech right can better define their vision of human flourishing.
First, they should promote the cultural and political ethic that has made America great: republicanism. A republic, as understood by the French political philosopher Montesquieu, is a form of government in which the power rests in the people—not in dictators (despotism), nor in monarchs (monarchy). While honor is the animating principle of monarchy and fear is that of despotism, republics are animated by virtue. “There is no great share of probity necessary to support a monarchical or despotic government: the force of laws, in one, and the prince’s arm, in the other, are sufficient to direct and maintain the whole,” Montesquieu wrote, “but, in a popular state, one spring more is necessary, namely, virtue.” Republicanism, then, champions the ability of people to govern themselves in their personal and political affairs, requiring and nurturing civic virtue among citizens.
Virtue not only manifests itself in political matters like voting and participating in town hall meetings, but also in how one interacts with the world. Instead of waiting for the state to act, republican citizens act on their own. “Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France … in the United States you will be sure to find an association,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in his early-mid 19th century classic, Democracy in America.
Virtue, the bedrock of republicanism, requires a restoration of self government. In our over-managed, excessively bureaucratic society, the question most often asked is not “How do we make that happen?,” but rather, “How do we get management on our side?” This is where the tech right’s anti-managerial instincts are spot on. We need more people in government and industry thinking about making things happen instead of merely navigating ever more complex red tape. People must not only be made to feel that their actions can bear fruit in the world—they must be empowered such that this is the case. They must be enabled to govern their own lives and learn how to govern others. Republicanism is the political theory the tech right should be grasping onto.
Secondly, the tech right should ground its ambitions in a renewed humanism. Many Americans understandably regard technological development with suspicion, fearing that automation will take their jobs; that AI will make us all obsolete. There are particularly thorny ethical questions surrounding increasingly complex forms of genetic engineering and exponentially more advanced varieties of artificial intelligence. Technologists would be misguided to wave away these sincere concerns as nostalgic lamentations. People, especially citizens of a republic, have every right to ask questions like these—indeed, these are the questions that must be asked if we seek to retain any iota of control over our own governance. We must do more than embrace technology: We must submit it to human ends. To do anything less would be to trade helplessness in the face of stagnation for helplessness in the face of growth.
Lastly, the tech right ought to take its argument to the American people. One of the key failures of our outgoing progressive elite, made up of exultant technocrats and central planners, is its pronounced lack of faith in the average citizen. The tech right should not repeat that mistake. Efforts to downsize the federal bureaucracy and reorient our politics towards making things happen must be brought to the American people—and the electorate must be persuaded of their rightness. How can this be done? Karp and Thiel have started off on the right foot, writing their thoughts down in widely available books. Members of the tech right should go further, supporting popular outlets that publish about these issues, frequenting prominent podcasts and news shows to broadcast their views, and ultimately supporting political candidates who are interested in making their argument to the American people. Their theory of American decline is among the most convincing out there. They are grasping at real solutions. They have the money and means to make an enormous impact.
We should salute the tech right for conjuring a renewed hope in humanity’s capabilities, because we in our postmodern malaise are in desperate need of such optimism. But we must ground such hope in new “pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason”: a new humanism, one rooted in the principle of self-government—in short, a new republicanism.
