What Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and Others Are Learning From Curtis Yarvin and the New Right - VF [View all]

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Last edited Wed Apr 20, 2022, 09:53 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets

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Vance believes that a well-educated and culturally liberal American elite has greatly benefited from globalization, the financialization of our economy, and the growing power of big tech. This has led an Ivy League intellectual and management class—a quasi-aristocracy he calls “the regime”—to adopt a set of economic and cultural interests that directly oppose those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up. In the Vancian view, this class has no stake in what people on the New Right often call the “real economy”—the farm and factory jobs that once sustained middle-class life in Middle America. This is a fundamental difference between New Right figures like Vance and the Reaganite right-wingers of their parents’ generation. To Vance—and he’s said this—culture war is class warfare.

Vance recently told an interviewer, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine,” a flick at the fact that he thinks the American-led global order is as much about enriching defense contractors and think-tank types as it is about defending America’s interests. “I do care about the fact that in my community right now the leading cause of death among 18- to 45-year-olds is Mexican fentanyl.” His criticisms of big tech as “enemies of Western civilization” often get lost in the run of Republican outrage over Trump being kicked off Twitter and Facebook, though they go much deeper than this. Vance believes that the regime has sold an illusive story that consumer gadgets and social media are constantly making our lives better, even as wages stagnate and technology feeds an epidemic of depression.

I wrote a piece that came across as critical of him. It expressed my deep hopelessness about the future of America. I figured he’d want nothing more to do with me. But the morning it was published he sent me a short, heartfelt email. He said that he’d been a bit “pained” to read in the piece that my parents disliked him but said he’d like to talk more. “I don’t see you as a member of the elite because I see you as independent of their ideological strictures and incentives,” he wrote. “But maybe I’m just saying that because I like you.”

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“Despair,” he signed off, “serves the regime.”

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