“From the 17th century through the 1950s and ’60s,” Peter Thiel wrote in his 2012 book with Blake Masters Zero to One, “definite optimists led the Western world. Scientists, engineers, doctors, and businessmen made the world richer, healthier, and more long-lived than previously imaginable.” From the 1970s on, Thiel and others have observed, that vanguard has not been as prominent, and technological advance has slowed amid institutionalization and bureaucratization. Thiel argued that this stagnation owes, in part, to the loss of optimism’s “definite” character—the idea that only concerted human effort in pursuit of concrete plans can make the future better than the present—and its replacement with an “indefinite” variant, whereby progress, buttressed by institutions and bureaucracies, is inevitable.
A little more than a decade on from Thiel’s book, however, torchbearers for the older form of optimism have reclaimed the center of gravity in America. At President-elect Donald Trump’s left and right hands stand definite optimists in the form of entrepreneur-cum-Trump evangelist Elon Musk and venture capitalist-cum-Vice President J. D. Vance. And they are but two of the most visible figures in a loose Silicon Valley cadre poised to enact the sorts of concrete plans, in the private and public sectors, that Thiel champions. As Samuel Hammond notes, Trump has paved a lane for “highly capable founders and entrepreneurs to bypass the legacy system.”
That tech should be swinging rightward politically has understandably caught many Americans by surprise. Through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, tech luminaries were Baby Boomers in the mold of David Brooks’s “bobos” (bourgeois bohemians). Left-liberalism and left-libertarianism were their reigning political philosophies, as exemplified by the countercultural Steve Jobs. Their nemesis was the establishment: William H. Whyte’s “Organization Man,” who dominated corporate life in the early postwar era. While Jobs himself was undoubtedly a definite optimist of the highest order, the Boomer tech bobos created their own establishment—one so self-satisfied that it couldn’t see the negative effects of its egalitarian creed. In politics, where the Atari Democrats were once insurgents, the Clintons eventually became the avatars of stasis.
Following Jobs’s death in 2011, the bobo era drew to a close. Musk, born 16 years after Jobs and untouched by the America of the 1960s, soon assumed tech alpha status. By then, it was no longer the postwar conformists smothering creativity with their pieties but the bobos themselves: they preached the necessity of community input, the fragility of Mother Earth, the evils of American imperialism, and the perennial guilt of white males.
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