The Death-Cult Logic of the Billionaire Mind
Part II of the billionaire reading list about international relations.
This post is a follow-up to a previous one that you can read here.
We can detect a pattern in the four books comprising the international-relations canon for MAGA billionaires. All four can be read as extremely pessimistic about the prospects for humanity. All four treat the national state as the only actor of relevance in world politics. All four are Euro-centric, ignoring or caricaturing any knowledge that might be plumbed from non-Western historical experiences.
Further, one of the four, Mearsheimer’s Tragedy, is a permission slip for militarism and expansionism. And two of the four—Huntington’s Clash and Buchanan’s A Republic, Not An Empire—are avowedly racist.
These themes—ethnonationalism and militarism, underwritten by pessimism—ought to be very familiar to anyone acquainted with MAGA’s foreign policy preferences.
But why have the oligarchs embraced a set of ideas that betray humanity with a kind of death-drive politics that sacrifices democracy (and lives) even though they lack analytical rigor and largely fails to pass tests of common sense? This is where it’s useful to channel a historical materialist perspective. We ought to care about the ideology of the powerful not for what it prescribes, but rather for the work that it does.
Today’s oligarchs benefit from having a worldview that assumes Western civilization is under threat and that the answer is to meet a dark world of perpetual conflict with darkness in kind. If security is a scarce resource, as JD Vance has said, then the state must go on the offensive to hoard it on behalf of “the nation.” And to hoard something is, by definition, to take it from (or deny it to) others.
And this is the devil’s trick.
A predatory foreign policy of territorial expansion, colonial extraction, and war optimization is only a rational response to the world if you take hierarchy, scarcity, and the possibility of a spatial fix to political problems as a given. And a system of predatory foreign policy requires systems and technologies of oppression, of death-dealing. Silicon Valley and venture capital are the chief beneficiaries of those systems because they are its producers and financiers—they are heavily, heavily invested in American militarism.
It’s good for business to promote all this geopolitical slop. Consequently, billionaires end up exhibiting motivated reasoning, believing the things that it’s valuable for them to believe.
This is all-too evident in Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s entire new book—a fever dream of civilizational conflict and right-wing cultural grievances, hung on the China threat. For Karp, wokeness, cancel culture, and diversity initiatives make us less competitive against China and China is the most dangerous threat to America’s proper role. And that role is not as defender of the world but defender of “the West.” A mashup of ethnonationalism and offensive realism, harnessed to benefit the oligarchs.
We’re closing in on a hundred years since Smedley Butler argued that War is a Racket, and it’s more true now than ever. The permanent war economy becomes your never-ending wealth spigot if you’re positioned to be its supplier, never mind that what is a spigot for you is a siphon for peace, democracy, and equality.
The billionaire IR reading list is reactionary worldmaking and that signals two things. One, unless something changes, they are taking us on a path to the dark ages. Two, the most celebrated ideas in knowledge production about the world are inevitably the ones that most benefit the rich and the powerful.
A Disturbingly Related Personal Story
In before times, when I had just transitioned from the Obama administration into the land of think tanks, I made a trek out to the Bay Area. This was around 2016.