Decades of research in political science have shown that most voters have only a vague idea of what terms like liberal, conservative and progressive mean. Those of us who think about this stuff a lot? We’re the weird ones.
Hakeem Jefferson@hakeemjefferson.bsky.social · yesterdayI have little to add to the chat, but I will say this: Those of us who spend a lot of time talking about politics overestimate how much other people care about, or are even familiar with, the labels we use to describe, denigrate, or celebrate candidates. Sometimes we’re high on our own supply.
![Thiel: Well, there are these different gradations of this we can describe. But is what I’ve just told you so preposterous, as a broad account of the stagnation, that the entire world has submitted for 50 years to peace and safetyism? This is I Thessalonians 5:3 — the slogan of the Antichrist is “peace and safety.”
And we’ve submitted to the F.D.A. — it regulates not just drugs in the U.S. but de facto in the whole world, because the rest of the world defers to the F.D.A. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission effectively regulates nuclear power plants all over the world. You can’t design a modular nuclear reactor and just build it in Argentina. They won’t trust the Argentinian regulators. They’re going to defer to the U.S.
And so it is at least a question about why we’ve had 50 years of stagnation. And one answer is we ran out of ideas. The other answer is that something happened culturally where it wasn’t allowed. And the cultural answer can be sort of a bottom-up answer, that it was just some transformation of humanity into this more docile kind of a species. Or it can be at least partially top-down, that there is this machinery of government that got changed into this stagnationist thing.
Nuclear power was supposed to be the power of the 21st century. And it somehow has gotten off-ramped all over the world, on a worldwide basis.
Douthat: So in a sense, we’re already living under a moderate rule of the Antichrist, in that telling. Do you think God is in control of history?
Thiel: [pause] Man, this is again — I think there’s always room for human freedom and human choice. These things are not absolutely predetermined one way or another.
Douthat: But God wouldn’t leave us forever under the rule of a mild, moderate, stagnationist Antichrist, right? That can’t be how the story ends, right?](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:hbpefio3f5csc44msmbgioxz/bafkreifhqxgfxcen2mmyba4fd7kvfw4p3zcnfj4joaxhkb3kuhhhwuxyty)