In his Thursday night convention speech, Peter Thiel cribbed his same old thesis but Trump-style.
When Thiel was a child in Cold War Cleveland, “The future felt limitless.” But modern reality is disappointingly limited. “This isn’t the dream we looked forward to.” Thiel helpfully paraphrased “Make America Great Again.” Trump’s not manipulating nostalgia, no. “He’s wanting to lead us back to that bright future.”
Plenty about this election seems absurdly unlikely even in hindsight, but the techno-libertarian Peter Thiel’s coming out for Trump on the crowning night of his convention is a predictable development. Especially if you’re at all familiar with the workings of Silicon Valley’s premier eccentric.
He’s a billionaire venture capitalist, early Facebook funder, co-founder of PayPal, preeminent “public intellectual,” per Fortune, and author of 2014’s Zero To One: Notes On Startups, Or How To Build The Future. In Zero To One, Thiel presented a historiographical diagnosis for the stagnating American dream: The fall from “definite optimism” to “indefinite optimism.” The definite optimist exactly envisions the future he wants and works to realize it against all odds. Definite optimism propelled American innovation until the 1980s, Thiel says, when it gave way to the indefinite variety.
Indefinite optimism is a vague faith in a better future we can’t imagine. It makes us lazy and stunts innovation, whereas definite optimism creates what Thiel calls “vertical progress.” The title Zero to One refers to the challenge of progress from nothing to a meaningful product. “If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress,” he wrote.
Failures of pragmatic progressivism to improve Americans’ quality of life confirm Thiel’s libertarianism: Big government stifles innovation, knocks down vertical progress, snuffs out definite optimism. Thiel’s Trump-love is self-love. Donald Trump embodies a drawn-out, crude expression of Thiel’s own “definite optimism.”
