What Is This Nation?

“A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West.”

So say Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, top executives at Palantir Technologies—the multibillion-dollar software giant and defense contractor—in the preface to their recent book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. But their reasons aren’t the ones you probably have in mind: the return of Trump, spiraling authoritarianism, the embarrassment of the liberal international order in failing to stop Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza (partly powered, as it happens, by Palantir’s services). No: the crux of the problem is that “Silicon Valley has lost its way.” Again, not for the reasons you might think—grossly concentrated power, violations of privacy, and AI at any cost, including a habitable planet. Instead, the authors say, Big Tech has sold out to consumer capitalism, forsaking the ambition and purpose it had when it got its start in the Cold War. Our “engineering elite,” Karp and Zamiska urge, have “an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation and the articulation of a national project.”

So they set out to articulate just such a project. They call it a “technological republic,” but what exactly this comes to they never quite say. What is clear is that words like “democracy” and “social contract” have little to do with it. Their patriotism flows from a different national tradition: war. Invoking the legacy of the Manhattan Project, they argue that technology companies can find their way back to meaning by embracing military applications of AI and working closely with the Pentagon to ensure continued geopolitical dominance in the “software century.” In other words, by doing exactly what would pad Palantir’s bottom line.

No one could blame you for thinking this should all be dismissed as a glorified marketing campaign. That hasn’t happened—the book has been widely covered in the mainstream press, from the Atlantic to the New Yorker and CNBC—but more to the point, we have something to learn from the way this self-described “political treatise” makes the case for unreconstructed American hegemony. Instead of simply blaming capitalism for operating as capitalism does—workers chasing high salaries and entrepreneurs chasing high profits—the authors lay consumerism at the feet of academic revisionists and deconstructionists, whom they charge with leading the “systematic attack and attempt to dismantle any conception of American or Western identity during the 1960s and 1970s.” Foundering in a sea of relativism, the best entrepreneurial and engineering minds were left without the moral or political compass necessary to resist the blandishments of the globalized marketplace and thus have been eclipsed by a “managerial class whose principal purpose often seems to be little more than ensuring its own survival and re-creation.”

That might sound like more of the anti-woke refrain from Christopher Rufo or the bureaucracy-slashers at DOGE. Yet Karp, at least, cuts quite a different cloth from his Palantir cofounder, fellow Stanford Law grad and stalwart Trumpist Peter Thiel, having supported Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and donated heftily to Joe Biden in 2020. This one-time student of political philosopher Jürgen Habermas reads John Rawls and cites John Dewey in his paeans to “national security.” There is, in short, a kind of respectability politics afoot. In one chapter, Karp and Zamiska complain that “we have withdrawn . . . from making ethical judgments about the good life” and that the “educated class in the United States” has abstained from even posing questions like “What is this nation? What are our values? And for what do we stand?” Those are questions we all have a stake in answering. But the point of this book is to convince you—or more precisely, the establishment—that they can safely be left to the very smart vanguard of our new military-industrial complex. No need to be so nervous: the war profiteers are big thinkers.

Notably, the book devotes an entire chapter to blaming historians for abandoning the Western canon and rejecting political scientist Samuel Huntington’s infamous “clash of civilizations” thesis. While Huntington’s argument was “reductionist,” Karp and Zamiska admit, it nevertheless had a point about the importance of culture in shaping societies. Indeed, they spend several pages criticizing historians for no longer making normative judgments about culture—specifically, for not being willing to seriously entertain whether some cultures really are just better than others. The authors are careful to couch this claim in neutral language. “To point out, as an empirical matter, that a certain subset of nations has come to dominate global affairs,” they write, “is not equivalent to the normative claim that such a result is justified.” That is true, but it’s a very odd and obfuscating thing to say while relentlessly defending American dominance and indicting people, on virtually every other page of the book, for shying away from normative claims.

The mystification appears to be the point. After all, their critique of consumer capitalism and their explicit defense of the West are neither novel nor even particularly edgy. Thiel, for his part, goes all out, warning that “humanitarian” values are a vehicle for the “Antichrist” to impose a totalitarian one-world state—an apocalyptic variation on a theme he has ranted about since the 1990s, when he and Trump’s new AI and crypto czar David Sacks (yet another Stanford grad) published The Diversity Myth. What Karp and Zamiska have done is repackage the same basic idea—that multiculturalism and political correctness are destroying American society—in a politically savvier form, offering a thinly disguised apologia for Western supremacy in language designed to appeal to elites on their side of the aisle. In short, we have here something tailor-made for the “intellectual racketeers” of empire, in Pankaj Mishra’s memorable phrase.

For a book that is supposedly about the need for heavy government investment in AI as part of a forward-looking industrial policy, it says surprisingly little about AI itself. Instead, the authors spend most of their time pursuing a litany of culture war grievances, flitting from resentment to resentment without much narrative cohesion. Anecdotes and figures emerge in chapter introductions to make tendentious points that are almost immediately contradicted.

In one case, Karp and Zamiska cite the ACLU’s 1976 defense of Frank Collin, an “ambitious leader” (their words) in the American Nazi Party in Skokie, Illinois, as a model for taking a principled stand for free speech. Two pages later they condemn the “unrelenting scrutiny to which contemporary public figures are now subjected” on the grounds that it precludes open discussion and debate. Is scrutiny not speech? Their choice example of going too far is the press’s reporting on Richard Nixon’s finances in the 1952 presidential campaign. “The stifling regime of disclosure and punishment for authentic intellectual risk-taking that we impose on would-be leaders,” they conclude, “leaves little room for capable and original thinkers whose principal motivation is something other than self-promotion.” Apparently we are supposed to take the motives of “ambitious leaders” (to say nothing of their capability and originality) at their word. It’s best for the free press to get out of the way, lest “an entire generation of executives and entrepreneurs” be “essentially robbed of an opportunity to form actual views about the world.”

The idea that democratic freedoms “rob” the clever of their rightful influence is more the territory of polemic than treatise. But at least it gives some substance to what Karp and Zamiska mean by the “technological republic.” Certainly, their vision is not full of vibrant and vital democratic institutions that safeguard the public good and check the powerful. One gets the impression that their ideal is that of Plato’s Republic, with wise philosopher-kings insulated from the judgment of the rabble. (One chapter is devoted to rebutting the “wisdom of the crowd” argument, which the authors appear to believe is the same thing as democracy as a political concept.) But in practice the notion that the wealthy power elite should be immune to scrutiny looks far grubbier than Plato. The whole premise of summit meetings like the World Economic Forum in Davos or, for that matter, the summer camp hijinks at Bohemian Grove in California are predicated on the same profoundly anti-democratic vision: that elites should be insulated from any level of public scrutiny, let alone accountability.

In an otherwise unilluminating review in the Wall Street Journal, historian John Bew situates the book in the tradition of James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941), which rebukes managerial elites for using their social, political, and cultural power to block either the prerogatives of the people or—more commonly—corporate leadership. Indeed, The Technological Republic may as well have been called Ending the Managerial Revolution. The authors complain constantly that Silicon Valley engineers and midlevel managers have too much power, preventing Big Tech from developing a closer relationship with the national security and carceral states.

But is it really the case that web developers and project managers are squaring up successfully against the most powerful corporations in human history? If so, there exists precious little evidence. The authors cite only a handful of anecdotes to back up the claim, most notably Google employees pressuring the company not to renew a contract for the Department of Defense’s Project Maven, which included developing a tool for targeted assassinations, in 2018. What the authors fail to mention is that Project Maven was put into production after all and became operational in 2021. At least half a dozen companies—ranging from Microsoft, IBM, and Palantir itself to smaller startups like Clarifai and CrowdAI—were active contributors. Today, the notion that managerial elites have been doing anything close to exercising veto power over defense contracts looks even more laughable. Last April, Google fired some fifty employees in its California and New York offices for participating in a sit-in demanding an end to the company’s $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government.

Any glimmers of worker autonomy in Silicon Valley were surely the result of the hot labor market that programmers, coders, and engineers enjoyed in the 2010s, which granted them a modicum of power even in the absence of formal labor organization. Years later, the end of cheap venture capital—and, crucially, the effects of generative AI on demand for entry-level programmers—has meant that tech workers are no longer able to command massive premiums nor exercise decision-making clout. Yet, discontent over the imagined relative autonomy of tech workers—and the opportunity to crush what threatened to develop into a serious check on the untrammeled power of the C-suite—is a key factor behind Big Tech’s lurch to the political right.

While The Technological Republic is very much a product of this rightward shift, its target audience is not actually MAGAfied tech CEOs: that particular demographic is already well-served by the conspiracy theories and thinly veiled white nationalism of Thiel and Elon Musk. Rather, Karp and Zamiska evidently seek to appeal to those in the tech world who are not yet avowed Trumpists, offering up much of MAGA’s substance—a valorization of the power of capital and the rejection of “wokeism”—stripped of most (but not all) of MAGA’s stylistic excesses.

I struggled until the very end of The Technological Republic to understand Karp and Zamiska’s actual vision for America and “the West.” For all their criticism of intellectuals for no longer asking the hard questions, they never explicitly state what they believe the answers to be. Most of the subtext sounds indistinguishable from bog-standard conservatism, even occasionally shading into its ethnonationalist fringes. At one point, Karp and Zamiska devote several pages to defending novelist Martin Walser’s explosively controversial criticism of Holocaust memory in Germany, soft-pedaling the same talking points popular with the far-right Alternative for Germany party and its American patron, Elon Musk: Germans should not be ashamed of their national identity, and it was a “mistake” to destroy the German national project after 1945.

It is not until the last pages of the book that it finally becomes crystal-clear what the real model is: Singapore. Karp and Zamiska regard Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s paramount leader for most of its existence as an independent state, as something approaching a world-historical genius, a leader who understood the need for the creation of a new national identity in an ethnically and linguistically diverse society—and was not afraid of using state power to enforce the conformity required to do so. Not only does Singapore offer a model of how to build and defend nationhood, they contend. Lee himself vindicates the “Great Man” theory of history, where “lone individuals” of great genius forge and shape their societies.

Of course, Karp and Zamiska elide the sticks—figurative and literal, as corporal punishment is infamously common in the Singaporean justice system—that undergird Singaporean nationhood. Lee himself was widely described even by his supporters as a benevolent dictator; he outlawed free speech, explicitly embraced eugenics as a cornerstone of state policy, and self-consciously created an ethnically homogenous ruling class that fused Chinese and English cultural norms. The “technological republic” for America is Singapore on steroids—a centralized authoritarian state that invests heavily in technological systems of repression and violence on a global scale.

No surprise, then, that the book’s chief bête noire is the Palestinian American academic Edward Said, whose landmark 1978 work, Orientalism, Karp and Zamiska say, undermined our “monolithic and wholly coherent conception of Western civilization.” Their contempt for Said cannot be disentangled from Palantir’s business model. Unlike many Silicon Valley startups, the company does not rely on an endless stream of venture capital to run at a loss, drive competitors out of business, and establish service monopolies. Instead, it draws revenue from a more reliable source: a steady stream of government contracts for its defense and intelligence software. (The startup capital came from Thiel’s venture capital firm and a small amount of seed funding from the CIA.) Over half of Palantir’s sales come from such contracts, not just with the United States and Israel but also the UK, Denmark, Norway, and Ukraine. To put it plainly, the software Karp insists will be the basis of American prosperity in the twenty-first century counts on death to drive its returns.

Admitting that your version of the “good life” is based upon brute domination may be fine for the likes of Thiel, but it is less so for the authors of a book trying to maintain at least a veneer of respectability beyond the outright MAGA set. The comparison to Singapore is the furthest Karp and Zamiska are willing to go. But there’s perhaps another, even bleaker, model that they likely have in mind: apartheid South Africa. Thiel and Musk grew up in South Africa in the 1970s, a time when the prime minister of the white minority-ruled country was onetime Nazi sympathizer John Vorster. The country was frequently invoked as an outpost of Western civilization by its defenders in the United States and Europe, and many of the same charges that Karp and Zamiska (and, for that matter, Thiel and Musk) levy at activists today were pioneered by conservative apologists for apartheid in the 1980s.

For all of them, post-apartheid South Africa does not represent a hard-won story of righteous struggle, justice, and reconciliation. Rather, it stands for a nightmarish vision of the future where the West is undermined by the forces of postcolonialism, losing its cultural superiority and geopolitical primacy. The Technological Republic is merely the latest attempt to sell this vision, carefully shorn of its explicit commitment to racism and inequality, to credulous elites.

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