The Nixon Seminar with Peter Thiel
nixonseminar.com
nixonseminar.com
But then there's a turn-on-a-dime: Silicon Valley should be held to account by the US government, and should be made by state authority to advance specific domestic and foreign policies. Thiel and company are explicit about the policies they'd like to see the state advance by strongarming private capital: strategic investment in Taiwanese technological interests, not banning hateful content, &c.
So my question: what gives? The latter is very explicitly a "fusion" (i.e., Chinese) approach to state and capital; isn't that exactly what the Thiel and paleoconservative types are claiming to be against? Is there some inner logic to this that I'm not perceiving, or is this all just Kissinger-style realpolitik?
If you wrap a heavy interventionalist policy in the guise of "we have to defend ourselves against the Chinese doing it!", you might get one group sagely nodding about how it may be a bit sad but is clearly necessary while another group is angrily denouncing the racism or whatever. Turn around and propose the exact same policy (for the sake of argument) in terms of controlling domestic extremism and "nudging" the masses properly, and the people previously angry will be nodding sagely while the other group is now angry.
From my viewpoint, there are very few people left proposing anything like freedom. It's all a fight now over who gets to use the government to impose their views on the US and its individual citizens, not whether views should be imposed by the government. Within my lifetime, this was not the case.
When was this? I can't remember such a time in my own lifetime. (Views on Communism and the Cold War being the dominant initial one that the government was pushing.)
But it was at least a voice at the table, and while it may not have "won", it had influence and was a generally credible position. I don't even hear that voice today, and proposing something like "Hey, what if we just didn't force individual citizens to do X?" is just a recipe for getting cancelled because of how you're for or against X, because of course you must be if you think that we shouldn't be using governmental power to enforce it; that, alone, is sufficient proof. Now the only argument is what X should be.
I don't believe the motives of those people were truly "because liberty" versus much more selfish or malicious ones, but it's been not just a credible position but an effective and advancing one.
And I don't recall much in the way of truly libertarian-leaning mainstream voices calling against all government policing of behavior, vs just people on different sides calling against the ones they opposed.
I think there was a time when there was a constituency that really did want liberty. But now all HN can see if someone says they "want liberty" is that they want liberty to do wrong things that must be stopped, and there is no other conceivable reason that someone may be resisting your efforts to control them.
So... when you accuse me of that, are you denying that there were racially motivated actions being taken that harmed significant populations?
Because that's quite a claim! Most of my history education came from Bob Jones University "For Christian Schools" textbooks that were hardly trying to indoctrinate any sort of "white Americans are evil" mentality, but if you look at what happened, and who did what to what... it's hard to avoid.
It's hard for me to square the claim that people in the past were BETTER about wanting "liberty for everyone" when I look at how they allowed their society to treat people of different races, sexual orientations, people who wanted abortions, etc... I would need more concrete counterexamples, not just generalizations of the past being claimed to be better.
Were they any worse/more hypocritical/differently motivated than today? Probably not! I don't know that people change that much. But it's hard to say they were BETTER based on their actions.
If there was a time when your claim that people in the olden days were better would go unchallenged, it's probably because the people being harmed in those days weren't very visible to the people you were talking to.
You see, we can't even have a meta-conversation about liberty without it immediately going to racism. I had actually considered saying that your prior message contained thinly-veiled threats to fire cancel culture at me, but I thought that went too far.
Yet here you are, doing your level best to fire cancel culture at someone who isn't even advocating for liberty but merely discussing it, as a historical matter, a thing that used to exist in the past.
Yes, people could once say "I'd like to be left alone" and not immediately have their claims translated into "I'd like to be racist". Itself an intrinsically racist belief that only white people want to be left alone and everybody else is happy with your attempt to dictate what they believe.
We live in contentious times, but at least the government isn’t literally jailing people for protected speech and having the Supreme Court affirm their behavior. Or where there’s a standing house committee dedicated to detecting “Unamerican Activities” and creating explicit blacklists for Hollywood actors and writers based on their supposed political beliefs. Or where using the post office to educate people about birth control is a crime.
We as a culture have a wildly incorrect view about how free our society was in the past. There have been points in our society where it was literally a crime to be a socialist or birth control advocate; whatever our flaws, we have much more personal liberty in terms of speech and ideas than most seem to realize.
McCarthyism in the past didn't have any impact whatsoever on the average suburban family. Now, though, with social media and with everyone living as the main character of their life, "cancel culture" does. There's a deeply libertarian undertone to rural America and it has never gone away. The loss of freedom for socialists in the 1950s didn't matter. "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" and the subsequent overturn of that case didn't matter. Draft dodging didn't matter.
What's going on today does.
There are also complaints about “kids these days” stretching all the way back to Plato. People can, and do, complain about things in a way that does not conform with any form of objective reality. We need a more rigorous way of discussing these things that goes beyond common complaints and memes.
> McCarthyism in the past didn't have any impact whatsoever on the average suburban family. Now, though, with social media and with everyone living as the main character of their life, "cancel culture" does.
I think you need to read more about the red scare before making such proclamations. 15,000 people lost their federal jobs during the red scare, and hundreds were jailed over their political beliefs. If you don’t think that would have a chilling effect, I’m not sure what to tell you.
The fact that Google and other companies have declined to work with the US government in various capacities proves that there's a distinction to be made here. Do you ever hear about Huawei declining to work with the Chinese government because of its treatment of the Uighurs?
Of course there's no bright line. There is intermingling between US private companies, US defense industry, and US government/military. But that doesn't mean you can't make a distinction between the situation in the US and the situation in China.
> So my question: what gives? The latter is very explicitly a "fusion" (i.e., Chinese) approach to state and capital; isn't that exactly what the Thiel and paleoconservative types are claiming to be against? Is there some inner logic to this that I'm not perceiving, or is this all just Kissinger-style realpolitik?
There's an element of realpolitik, i.e. Thiel doesn't seem to be explicitly against a "fusion." He's arguing that a "fusion" exists in China and not in the US.
The inner logic you appear to be missing is "the United States is an open society" and "China is a closed society". Again, a bright line can't be drawn. But isn't it true that the US is more open than China?
I don't think that Thiel is "in support of US becoming more like China," though I understand where you're coming from. His argument is that China is a closed society where industry and research are subservient to the state. He's saying that Americans should voluntarily pursue their national interest, not that they should be subservient to the state. In Thiel's perspective there is a distinction here: it's the distinction between convincing someone and forcing them.
No, of course not, which is why we can feel somewhat proud of America as comparatively freer than China.
In that case, if the fusion approach is effective in taking on the China (which is pretty clearly the point of strategic investment in Taiwan) why not use it?
Thiel here argues that America, to counter China, needs to become a lot more like China.
The idea that "competition" is bad because it makes you copy your enemy is the most valuable insight in the book Zero to One by Thiel and Masters, yet here he doesn't seem to be using that insight at all.
With China, there's a clear asymmetry, because they're able to be openly opportunistic without consequence. Idealism vs. realpolitik doesn't last long, and it seems people think the US needs more idealism.
Here's an example of the kind of thinking ZTO would advocate, and that I'd expect Thiel to be advocating:
So what if China eclipses the USA in aggregate GDP? It's easy for them to do that: they have 4X as many people so all they need is 1/4 US per-capita GDP to equal ours.
Per-capita matters more in terms of our subjective experience of our success. We should focus on reversing the decline of our own per-capita wealth, such as focusing on fixing the problems destroying our middle class and domestic industry.
Lets settle and establish bases and eventually offshoot civilizations in LEO, on the Moon, and on Mars instead of worrying about China climbing the hill we climbed a century ago.
The only two policies I would really advocate re: China are:
(1) Making sure we stop treating them like a developing nation and establish fair trade with them instead of trade that is favorable to China. This will require fighting with corporations that have been benefiting massively from unfair trade with China due to wage arbitrage.
(2) Make sure we have a credible military deterrent and pursue a sound game theoretic approach to protecting our integrity.
(3) Pursue technologies that reduce our dependency on anything overseas that China can interfere with, such as using EVs instead of being dependent on the global oil market. Develop domestic sources of resources and domestic high-tech expertise.
... then build us some rockets. The final and eternal frontier beckons. Fuck warring over little bits of mud down here.
It's hard to sustain this kind of thinking. Adversity drags us down into the weeds. ZTO (the good parts) is a manifesto against this, urging us to keep our eyes on the prize. Thiel should re-read his book and maybe stop listening to the "intellectual dark web" crap he indirectly supports.
It seems that the conference speakers really wish the U.S. was the very best at everything and believe it deserves to be but the cognitive dissonance is apparent, as you point out in the case of state/capital fusion. Another that stands out is confusion about why the U.S. isn't a leader in semiconductor manufacturing any more, apparently boiling down to the risk of IP theft (which makes no sense from a fabrication perspective). The worry about how many Chinese students are in the U.S. is just sad. The U.S. was only ever exceptional in its efforts to be the melting pot that attracts immigrants, to the limited extent that it did. I'd be quite worried and looking to emigrate if we didn't have a ton of foreign students.
Is it even a reasonable goal in the modern era to achieve or maintain technological superiority in any localized region? That seems to be what the conference is hoping for.
Contrary to what other people are saying, this is actually a perceptive opinion that requires understanding the functional difference between our political systems. One of the main problems with political comparisons that most people make is that they understand the system they live in very well, nothing about any other system, and so they see everything through the frame of their own knowledge. Saying that being responsible to the US govt is the same system as China is just wrong, they are nothing alike, there is no comparison.
Also, you fail to acknowledge that this position isn't actually a standard conservative position (if we are comparing to pure theory). Saying that a company should be responsible to: people other than shareholders, and to the govt is a heterodox opinion (practically, this viewpoint is classic Eisenhower Republican though...appropriate venue).
But the reason this opinion is controversial is: you have people who don't like their own govt for various reasons (and know so little about other countries that they will make comparisons with places like China), and China has almost totally co-opted the globalist wing of world politics (again, this group usually understands very little about politics...the difference here is that China being like us fits with their globalist ideology, and they are usually getting paid somewhere to support this view).
And I don't understand why any of this is controversial. Whether your favoured political tribe is in power or not, you should strengthen your country. And that is self-evidently distinct from doing what China is doing, not understanding this is a grave error.
It is nothing to do with "realpolitik". I am not sure what you think that is but it isn't related to anything related to this topic.
Do more than 36K Americans want to study in China? Are applications restricted?
I didn't get this but I read it a day or two ago so it's not fresh. Can you point where you saw this conclusion? My reading was that the claim is that Chinese companies are not differentiable from the CCP and this feels pretty fair? A great example of this can be seen in this report: https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinese-communist-party-target...
What's more is it's not clear per se that Thiel and co. are explicitly against some role of the Government in influencing the private sector's business relations in foreign lands. In fact, no one really seems to be opposed to that given that we have all sorts of laws around bribes, child labor, etc that expand beyond US borders. The problem in their view is that US companies are explicitly aiding Chinese companies which are in turn in aid of the CCP. The argument is that the US should hold accountable US companies which aid through what is essentially a direct way the CCP. Their problem is not inherently that the CCP directs Chinese enterprises nor more generally that a Nation directs its enterprises in some way.
It's also funny to me that Thiel talks about how big science can't exist, as if CERN, NASA and many universities just disappeared off the face of the earth. It's always interesting how glaring claims like that go unchallenged in conversations like this. Or how he just casually suggests the logical thing to do is bomb North Korea and everyone just sort of sits there doing an uneasy smiling - as if he isn't suggesting millions of deaths on the North Korean side, hundreds of thousands of deaths on the South Korean side, and a humanitarian crisis that would primarily have to be handled by China.
I'm not sure we read the same transcript? Part of the second quarter of the seminar is spent talking about how China is so obsessed with their surveillance state because they, perhaps, perceive their situation as weak or fragile. This makes a lot of sense to me, and checks out with how other authoritarian states have behaved in the past. It's not even that profound of an observation if you couch it in the context of the larger history of 20th century totalitarian regimes. There's a burgeoning nervousness that exists on both sides, the West (broadly defined) and China, about the access to high tech semiconductors. All of that represents a discussion of weakness or single points of failure for both parties here.
Since Thiel and Pompeo are such polarizing characters, to say the least, perhaps it's helpful to read things like this and imagine different names there in the transcript. A lot of this is just old fashioned Realpolitik, which I get it it's kind of frowned upon today for reasons that don't really make much sense to me, but it's just another IR lens to use to look at what is a return to Great Power Conflict.
No snarky replies please. I am genuinely curious.
I have watched quite a few videos with Thiel. He has degrees in law and philosophy and is quite financially successful. Thomas Jefferson he is not, but I don’t think he is “just not that smart.”
[0]: Strauss was a political philosopher who advocated reading the "esoteric" meaning in works of literature. I.e. he thought that thinkers did not write what the actually thought but wrote in a veiled way so that their true meaning was apparent by those in the know, but not to casual readers.
Perhaps his libertarianism extends only so far as the deep state can't blackmail him into doing their bidding. Or...maybe all he cares about is power and ambition, and he'll do whatever it takes to climb that ladder, integrity be damned. Which does seem "borderline autistic", perhaps unsurprisingly, because Thiel claims he's "on the spectrum." He's seeming more like a queer (in the old sense) J Edgar Hoover-type figure. I feel sorry for him.
If it’s a prisoner’s dilemma, you might believe cooperation is the best way, and yet defect if you’re playing the game.
Thiel’s choice would be between: Living out his libertarian beliefs in practice v. Taking opportunities in a big state world and making money.
On the other end of some spectrum might be a radical minded idealist who wants the system to collapse but in practice still chooses to buy a laptop and goes to college.
I’d venture many people have dreamy beliefs about politics that they nevertheless don’t pursue unilaterally.
On the other hand he does seem very interested in wielding his influence to create the world he wants to live in. See Trump, see Gawker for example. My hunch is that he's taking a wider view on liberty -- he sees it as under threat (by China, but also others -- including internal actors within the US), and doesn't trust that liberty will "sell itself" any more than he believes software will sell itself (see zero to one chapter 11). I don't know if he's wrong either -- if China can get the upper hand and solidify some amount of control over the United States, however soft, that could be a very bad thing indeed for liberty -- why not be a pragmatist and sacrifice a little now for a lot more later? The danger of course is if it's not temporary and becomes the seed of the United States own version of totalitarianism.
Thiel is someone who has shown time and time again that he refuses to simply buy any particular narrative hook, line, and sinker. He's very woke to the danger in that kind of "feeling-thinking" combo -- and that goes for the libertarian narrative as well. He's shown himself to be willing to be pragmatic, even opportunistic in his attempts to stay ahead of things and sacrifice money in exchange for being in a position to shape the world. We, of course, see the times he's been right, but I'm far more curious about his failures -- based on how often he's been right I can only guess there are lots of them.
The problem with that of course is the "strategically". He's made what seem to be deals with the devil on many occasions -- Trump being the obvious example, and having a hand in pardoning Levandowski being the most recent one. I'm not so sure that he's crossed the line into "evil villain" territory as many think, but is he headed that way? Maybe.
Why would anyone want to associate themselves with anything to do with Nixon? It's surprising prominent figures would want any association to Nixon and his disgraced legacy. I think overall its peculiar how much influence and esteem Nixon managed to retain after his resignation.
A few of the potshots that are taken at "the woke crowd" bear commenting on since there is some extreme revisionism going on.
- The progressive left opposed China's admission to the WTO citing human rights (Tibet in particular) and the effect on US workers
- The progressive left yelled and screamed about human rights for Uiygurs and supply chains in general for years. The Trump administration ignored it for most of his term, not mentioning it until the pandemic and scapegoating China for "Kung Flu".
- The progressive left would embrace a carbon border price in a heartbeat. Pompeo's former boss of course said the opposite, calling climate change a Chinese hoax. Biden would do well to propose a border tax.
The plight of the Uiygurs is definitely a progressive talking point, but for better or for worse, it has very much taken a back seat to issues of racism here at home. I can't recall the last time I saw it mentioned in the nytimes for example -- whereas you will see something about some woke cause (racism, sexism, trans rights, homophobia, etc.) every single day.
I think I'm in agreement on your third point though.
Why would you think that? To use one example, Bernie Sanders opposed it then and he would still oppose it today for basically the same reasons. Human Rights Watch et al wrote reports and did investigations about Tibet then and they do reports and investigations about Uighurs now.
> In my experience woke folks are very pessimistic about any narrative of progress that would make the US seem better than other countries -- they would quite literally want to defend the idea that the US is no better than China on the whole
This is a Fox News caricature of wokeness. To be sure, such people exist and Fox et al seeks them out and amplifies them but mainstream progressives have no problem recognizing that there are important differences.
> I can't recall the last time I saw it mentioned in the nytimes for example
What are you talking about, there are dozens of stories covering it over the last year
I guess my point there is that we should draw a distinction between the woke, the center left in general, the socialist left, etc.
Not sure if it's really a caricature of wokeness. My girlfriend and her friends are always talking about how "America is a dumpster fire of a country".
I found the Hidden Tribes report (https://hiddentribes.us/) eye opening in this regard. Here's a quote from a respondent belonging to the farthest left tribe they name "Progressive Activists" (makes up 8% of total respondents):
"The deck is stacked against people of color, against women, against people who don’t have the advantages that others have. It’s not an egalitarian society by any means."
Progressive Activists are three times more likely than the average respondent to say they are "ashamed to be an American". (69% V. 24%) The focus by people in the woke camp is constantly on the negative -- you basically can't mention the fact that we've made progress without risking a lecture from them about each and every exception to that fact.
re: Uighurs -- my point is not that it doesn't get a lot of coverage, but much of that coverage is not "front page" (as much as anything can be front page in the age of internet journalism). E.g. I went to the nytimes right now -- there is 1 opinion piece there talking about the Uighur situation, but depending on the time of day, I could easily miss it. I actually had to hunt for it to find it, was almost ready to say there wasn't one.
You can see that clearly in software engineering. There’s tons of people who consider themselves super smart and experts on world problems, just because someone is paying them $200k per year to move around buttons in css.
But as anyone who’s worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance.
People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence."
-- idlewords, emphasis mine
understanding thiel requires understanding that he decidedly comes at issues with self-interest and ego first (and a bit paranoia) rather than priciples, despite the contrary image he tries to project.
I watched the entire thing (I think close to 3 hours), and about halfway through I came to the realization that both Peter and Eric were using a lot of words... to say basically nothing.
The entire thing was full of truisms and platitudes and overall grievances about the state of science and technology and the slowing down of innovation, with some politics and economics thrown in. Neither of them knew the underlying subjects well, if at all, but had read or heard other people's various takes on them, packaged it up using lots of jargon, and were now spouting it as "wisdom."
It left a very sour taste in my mouth, because I also read Zero to One, and Peter (probably thanks to a very good editor) came across as much more cogent there.
You may not owe "textbook pseudo-intellectuals" better, but you owe this community much better if you're posting here. Similarly for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26740473 - there's no content there, just a celebrity boo.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26740119.
"The Nixon Seminar on Conservative Realism and National Security is monthly gathering of senior statesmen and rising specialists in various aspects of great power competition and American national security, to discuss issues of current and continuing importance to the nation’s interests abroad co-chaired by former Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo and former National Security Advisor Ambassador Robert C. O’Brien. Dr. Henry Kissinger serves as Honorary Chair."