Peter Thiel isn’t diagnosing the “exhaustion” of democracy—he’s, once again, announcing his hostility to it. When he moans that “liberalism is exhausted” and “democracy, whatever that is, is exhausted,” he’s not offering a sincere analysis — he’s doing public relations for fascism and calling it political “pontification.”
The Weimar Playbook Redux
On Tyler Cowen’s Conversations with Tyler podcast, underwhelming, zero-rizz Peter Thiel—the poster child for why billionaires are anathema to freedom and democracy—compared the United States in the 2020s to Weimar Germany in the 1920s, claiming that liberalism and democracy have run their course and that we must start thinking “outside the Overton window.”
That’s not intellectual musing—it’s the authoritarian script democracy-bashers used a century ago to justify dismantling the Weimar Republic for the supposed “strong leadership” of a hate-mongering, genocidal madman.
Thiel even promotes Carl Schmitt, a key intellectual architect of the Nazi regime who argued that true sovereignty lies in a leader’s power to decide who “counts as an enemy.” Thiel loves to cosplay as a deep thinker when he riffs on Schmitt’s “friend and enemy” distinction—the idea that politics is fundamentally about sorting people into those who belong and those who can be treated as threats to be crushed. That these are the “ideas” Thiel pines to revive says just how sick and twisted his worldview is.
When you start talking about “America as Weimar” while rehabilitating Schmitt, you’re not worried about fascism—you’re reviving it—and you’re repugnant.
Thiels Constant War on Democratic Accountability
This isn’t a new mania of Thiel’s. In his 2009 essay The Education of a Libertarian, Thiel declared, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” because “the people” could not be trusted with decisions that might constrain billionaire prerogatives. In other words, accountability is for everyone not born with a trust fund. For more than a decade, he’s built an ideological case that democratic checks on concentrated wealth are an affront to (his) “freedom.”
In a surprise to absolutely nobody paying attention, Thiel wants the benefits of a democratic society without the pesky inconvenience of a democratic public. His definition of “freedom” is the freedom of oligarchs to act with indifference to all and without interference from the majority.
Following the Money to the Filthy Fascists
Thiel’s money has long flowed toward those who share his democracy-loathing worldview. He has bankrolled another tedious, emotionally-stunted faux-intellectual fascist Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug… yawn), who openly advocates a corporate-style dictatorship run by a CEO/king.
JD Vance’s political career is one of Peter Thiel’s key projects. Thiel bankrolled Vance’s life before politics, then poured millions into a super PAC backing his Ohio Senate run, later introducing him to Trump so Vance could become his running mate. Given Thiel’s open disdain for democracy and the Trump maladministration’s ongoing war on democratic norms, we should rethink whether Vance’s “America’s Hitler” remark was ever truly meant as a pejorative.
A billionaire who calls democracy incompatible with freedom, a pet politician he helped build and brand, and a pet court intellectual fantasizing about fascism. This is not dystopian nightmare, it is the active blueprint of the American authoritarian project Peter Thiel is trying as hard as he can to make palatable.
The Corporate Media’s Selective Outrage
Yet corporate media still treats Thiel as some eccentric contrarian rather than a man financing democracy’s demolition. I’m old enough to remember the media’s nonstop reporting of Sarah Palin’s charge that Barack Obama was “palin’ around with terrorists” because he had a loose association with Bill Ayers - a man whose “Weather Underground” connection ended when Barak Obama was a toddler. This is the same corporate media that is perpetually silent about JD Vance’s direct ties to a democracy-loathing billionaire with a habit of repeatedly referencing the musings of outright Nazis.
If the corporate media treated these billionaire assaults on democracy as the crisis it is, Thiel’s claim that “democracy is exhausted” would get some attention and scrutiny, given his associations.
So Much for Gratitude! Democracy Built Everything Thiel Wants to Destroy
Thiel’s argument collapses the moment you look beyond his billionaire echo chamber. The crises of the 1920s and 1930s did not expose liberal democracy’s weakness—they produced the New Deal, labor protections, Social Security, civil rights reforms, and Medicare. Democratic politics created nearly every advance in social welfare and human dignity of the last century. What’s “exhausted” is not democracy—it’s the patience of oligarchs with any system that occasionally restrains them.
Overgrown Manbabies Are Truly “Exhausting”
As for democracy being “exhausted,” Thiel is not weary of democracy because it fails — he’s weary of it because it still works enough to sometimes hold him and his ilk accountable. For these overgrown manbabies, a functioning government that tells them “no” is what needs to be replaced. And their so‑called “post‑liberal” philosophies—the Schmitt revivalism, the talk of “Weimar America,” the constant sneering at “mass democracy”—are sinister efforts to launder authoritarians through pseudo‑intellectual respectability. Giving the underwhelming creature that is Thiel another platform to play "genius” and parade his stale, tried-and-failed, authoritarian ideas in public is what’s exhausting.
Billionaires Are the Problem
Figures like Thiel and his fellow billionaire manbaby Elon Musk aren’t symptoms of too much democracy—they’re products of a political economy that’s allowed wealth to accumulate so grotesquely it can warp public discourse — and the body politic. They built fortunes atop public infrastructure, exploited markets they didn’t invent, and now spend their billions trying to turn the society that made them rich into an unfettered playground for themselves and an unmitigated nightmare for the rest of us.
Money Doesn’t Equal Wisdom
At some point we have to stop mistaking money for wisdom. Thiel’s fortune doesn’t make him a philosopher any more than Musk’s tweets make him a visionary. The arrogance, racism, and contempt for ordinary people displayed by these billionaire “disruptors” are not eccentricities—they’re evidence of profound unfitness for power.
A healthy democracy doesn’t elevate sociopaths who despise its core principles. It reins them in. If American democracy feels weary today, it’s because we’ve spent too long mistaking concentrated wealth for insight and treating oligarchs as prophets instead of as parasites.
Peter Thiel is wrong. Democracy isn’t exhausted—his con is. The real question is whether we’re ready to stop handing megaphones to men who dream of ending self‑government and start rebuilding a culture where the first qualification for power is decency, not the size of someone’s bank account.
Please subscribe to Tara’s substack!
Support the independent media! Every dollar helps to keep the truth out and save the “Grand Experiment” from the right wing forces currently destroying it.
Please become a Tarabuster Patron.Check out Tarabuster Tuesdays on PVN, 2PM ET
