Policy initiatives inspired by the MAGA program, adopted by President Trump, seem more geared toward dismantling existing multilateral institutions and traditional U.S. alliances, rather than creating a new post-Cold War international order. The Trump administration has introduced protectionist tariffs, weakened the UN, questioned NATO, drastically reduced U.S. aid to Ukraine, kidnapped the president of Venezuela, bombed Iran, rebuked the Pope for recalling that the Gospel preaches peace, not war. He is only cautious in his dealings with China, the emerging global power that he respects, because he fears it. These imperialist behaviors have an explanation. The MAGA movement was formed on the basis of an ideological core that is still poorly understood, which could compromise the future of democracy not only in the United States, but in the whole world.
The cultural leader of the ideology of imperial technocracy is Peter Thiel. Its influence is not only cultural. His support seems to have been decisive for the nomination of J. D. Vance as vice-president of the Trump administration. Thiel was born in 1967 in Germany, but later emigrated to South Africa and the United States. He graduated in philosophy and law. He founded PayPal in 1998, with Elon Musk , with the aim of creating an alternative currency to the dollar, to allow secure payments. The goal of replacing the dollar failed, but PayPal was remarkably successful as a secure online payment system. In 2003, Thiel, now very wealthy, founded Palantir, a leading company in data analysis and digital security. This platform allowed him to obtain important orders from the CIA and the Pentagon. After the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, Thiel offered the U.S. government a system for collecting personal data that exploited information obtained from a vast base of data. Thanks to this platform, the Obama administration was able to locate Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan. The same technology was offered by Palantir to the Israeli government, which could thus identify its adversaries individually, in Palestine and in enemy countries, such as Iran. On this basis, Israel carried out deadly personal attacks.
In 2014, Thiel published “From Zero to One”, a summary of some academic lectures in which he denounced the inconsistency of the traditional economic doctrine based on the concept of competition, to defend a new doctrine of monopoly. It is a set of principles on which the fortunes of US start-ups have been created. The new entrepreneur-monopolist must be able to identify an activity in which he can obtain an absolute competitive advantage, thus conquering the global market, as PayPal has done. Thiel later offered a $100,000 scholarship to many young people to create new start-ups. It is a recruitment policy that he calls “desertion”: an invitation to abandon traditional universities where “woke” thinking dominates and adopt the new perspective of revolutionary thinking, based on new information technologies, now at the stage of artificial intelligence.
Once his fame and political influence had been consolidated, also thanks to huge earnings, Thiel developed a second chapter of technocratic and imperialist ideology. According to Thiel, the historical process, from the origins of humanity to the present day, is based on lines of development described by historians Dale Davidson and Rees-Mogg in a 1997 study. In this work, the development and decline of Western civilization are analyzed. Civilization is the control and suppression of violence between individuals and states, but in contemporary politics there are clear signs that violence is resurfacing. This is a revealing index of the crisis of politics. “There is much evidence that adherence to the civic myths of the twentieth-century nation-state is rapidly eroding. The death of Communism is merely the most striking example. As we explore in detail, the collapse of morality and growing corruption among leaders of Western governments are not random developments. They are evidence that the potential of the nation-state is exhausted. Even many of its leaders no longer believe the platitude they mouth. Nor are they believed by others” (Dale Davidson, Rees-Mogg, p. 15). The nation state will be replaced by a global network of individual relationships thanks to new information technologies, created by global centers. National sovereignty will be privatized, and corporations will provide their services, including security, directly to sovereign individuals (p. 259).
In his political writings, Thiel refers to Carl Schmitt’s doctrine on the friend-enemy distinction and René Girard’s doctrine on the role of the “scapegoat” as a mechanism that appeases violence in a community through the sacrifice of a victim. On the basis of these theoretical assumptions, Thiel, in his geopolitical analyses, often relates the optimistic character of American citizens against the pessimistic attitude of European ones. Europe is a decadent cultural space of Western civilization. From an economic point of view, the US-Europe confrontation is inevitable because American IT companies cannot develop in Europe due to European competition regulation based on respect for human rights. Overall, it seems clear that only the USA, where the unqualified use of modern technologies such as AI is possible, can represent the political-economic model for the future of humanity.
The third chapter of Thiel’s technocratic-imperial ideology is dedicated to the relationship between politics, science and religion. The contemporary world is threatened by serious existential crises, which lead to the rejection of scientific progress and fuel violent reactions against institutions. There are dangers denounced by environmentalists, who call for interventions to defend nature. There are risks caused by the danger of a nuclear war between great powers. Artificial intelligence, according to some conservative and reactionary forces, the “Luddites”, will not be the adequate answer to address these risks, indeed it could be used to promote a global catastrophe. These senseless fears will provoke the call for a world government. A world government would be necessary for the protection of life but would lead to an authoritarian world power. This is why “the antichrist like Elizer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom and Greta Thumberg argue for world government to stop science, the antichrirst has somehow become anti-science” (The Guardian, 10 October 2025). Ultimately, the antichrist, according to Thiel, is the world government.
These statements about the antichrist can raise an infinite number of criticisms and counter-criticisms. Theology offers numerous footholds for learned disputes. It is not necessary to go into this quagmire. It is necessary, however, to denounce some errors that lurk in Thiel’s economic-political theses. It is not true that competition leads to a zero rate of profit. In an economy that produces a surplus, over and above wages, there will be a general positive rate of profit, although lower than a monopoly rate of profit. The European Union’s economic policy is correct: competition must be regulated by a public authority. The federalists – who share Thiel’s criticism of the nation state, but for reasons opposite to his own – denounce the thesis concerning the arrival of an antichrist, a fanciful suggestion, perhaps exploited by Trump to criticize the Christianity of Pope Leo XIV. Trump’s government would be made up of apostles. U.S. Christianity could replace Vatican Christianity.
This theological-political interpretation of international relations has no foundation. It is suggested that those who criticize war and ask for peace favor the apocalypse, a world catastrophe. On the contrary, it must be admitted, as the federalists maintain, that the nation state, now in crisis, was a crucial stage in the history of human emancipation and civilization. After the French Revolution and the overcoming of the monarchical principle, it was acknowledged that the various declarations of citizens’ rights and the creation of democratic constitutions allowed for the full pacification of national peoples. Citizens of a nation-state enjoy the right to life and other fundamental rights that are violated only when the nefarious principle of national sovereignty allows governments to go to war against other states. In these situations, the right to life and personal security is forgotten. The nation state asks its citizens to kill the enemy by risking their lives for the defense of the homeland.
Today it is necessary to overcome the division of humanity into sovereign nation states, but not through the creation of an imperial technocracy, at the top of which there will obviously be the US government. Thiel deliberately ignores the fact that the United States of America is a federation, that is, a state of states, therefore a constitutional union of democratic states (today 50) peacefully united by a democratic government: It is a democratic government responsible to the House of Representatives and the House of States. The European Union is not yet a federal government of states, but after the direct election of the European Parliament and the creation of the monetary union it has become an imperfect federation. If it is completed with the establishment of a European defence, it could actively contribute to the creation of a democratic and peaceful world order. The creation of an imperial technocracy, as Thiel would like, can be opposed as long as all democratic parties and forces, in Europe, the USA, India, Brazil, etc., unite in a supranational movement to initiate a democratic reform of the United Nations. The United Nations is now in crisis and rendered powerless by the anti-democratic and imperialist forces that use modern information technologies to dominate the citizens of the world. Democracy in the world can be saved by a well-organized movement of public opinion for a democratic world federation. Democrats from all over the world unite!
