The recent rupture between Donald Trump and Elon Musk occasioned dark chuckling in many corners. Nearly everyone saw this coming. Both men are used to running the show. Neither plays well with others. But the Trump-Musk fracture was more overdetermined than most realize. The personality conflicts mask deeper ideological tensions with implications beyond two oversized egos.
The right now hosts a strange blend of populism, Catholic postliberalism, and techno-optimism. These elements don’t mix well, as recent tensions in the conservative movement show us. No one embodies this unstable synthesis better than our vice president, one of the most philosophically sophisticated figures to hold the office. Vance’s intellectual journey began long before his political career, and each influence entered his thinking at different times. But the same tensions visible in his thought can be seen in the political right more broadly. The instability of those alliances could have significant implications for the right, and the country.
Rome, Silicon Valley, and Populism
Many years before Elon Musk and Donald Trump united in their brief alliance, the right found a techno-optimist spokesman in Peter Thiel. Thiel publicly criticized political correctness in the ’90s and platformed Ann Coulter in 2010. In 2011, Thiel gave a speech at the Yale Political Union on how “Higher Education is a Bubble,” arguing that chasing prestige would not lead to fulfillment. Talented people should throw themselves into valuable projects that improve the world. In attendance was a young J. D. Vance, who would become a protégé of Thiel’s.
Thiel believes that the forces of creative destruction, if appropriately organized, are on balance a good thing for humanity, and that one can generally count on technological advances to be good for humanity. Disruption creates more than it destroys, progress requires radical acceleration, and talent must flow freely across borders. Stagnation is death. Only technology can solve humanity’s greatest problems.
This brand of techno-populism found a more significant foothold on the right after Thiel supported Donald Trump in 2016 and eventually attracted more support from Musk and others. It tends to be harshly critical of the woke left and favorable to a libertarian approach to technology.
Meanwhile, in another corner of the political right, one finds a very different set of thinkers: Catholic postliberals. They represent a strain of thought that is both new and quite old. The Catholic Church has usually had an antagonistic relationship with liberalism, yet most American Catholics have come to believe that their faith can flourish within a liberal democratic order. But with the legalization of same-sex marriage and the rapid progress of LGBT rights, that belief came under pressure. Catholics had come out of the shadows and had fought to be treated as equals in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and before. Then their views on LGBT issues, however, once more made them beyond the pale of American politics.
Catholic intellectuals have always influenced the American Right, going back to Bill Buckley. These Catholics generally sought reconciliation with the American constitutional order. But a newer generation of Catholic intellectuals has argued that there is something fundamentally wrong with the American liberal order and that it has to be replaced. That viewpoint now has a high-profile spokesman in Vance. Following his conversion to Catholicism in 2019, Vance befriended some of those intellectuals, despite being less skeptical of the American project than they were. These figures today include Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, among others.
Often referred to as Catholic postliberals, they oppose state neutrality in moral and religious matters, favor the common good over a stress on individual rights, and emphasize the primacy of the spiritual in political life. We should not leave the spiritual to private affairs, as it is an inherently public concern.
These two groups seem like unlikely allies, given that one is deeply traditionalist, while the other looks optimistically towards a bright (but radically transformed) future. But they have been brought together to a great extent by populist and nationalist sentiments of the Trumpian right. The convergence can be seen in a particularly interesting way in Vance’s 2020 essay, “How I Joined the Resistance,” in The Lamp, where he declared that he had come to understand the Trump phenomenon. He was very critical of Trump early on, describing him as an opioid, someone who cures the pain of the working class but doesn’t solve it. By the time he penned the essay, Vance had completely changed his tune. He began to give talks such as “The Professors of the Enemy,” which are very anti-elite.
The techno-optimists are elitist; Catholic postliberals are elitist; populists are not elitist. But all three are now recognizable influences on the right, to the point where Vance seems eager to reconcile them in a single view.
Central to populism is the idea that the majority of the population is fundamentally good and their interests conflict with those of a corrupt elite. Populists have stressed nationalism, trade protection, immigration restrictions, and a focus on the struggles of the American working class, particularly in the Rust Belt regions.
Economic Tensions
A populist concern for American workers does not mesh easily with the techno-optimist embrace of disruptive technologies, particularly artificial intelligence.
Vance, for instance, endorses populism and nationalism, which led him to support high domestic wages for American workers. This remains a consistent theme throughout his political awakening, even as his views change on Donald Trump. He argues that we must create high domestic wages for families to maintain stable families and communities. The deindustrialization of the Rust Belt has created many social maladies.
The same man, however, was able to give a speech to the EU, attacking them for AI regulation. One would think a MAGA adherent would have worries: this is going to disrupt the whole economy, change everything, automate jobs, and take away employment.
Vance recognized the contradiction when people challenged him and tweeted that he must write up his resolution. He then gave a speech at the American Dynamism Summit, where he attempted to square the circle. He argued that there are ways to organize public policy without regulating AI so that it works to the advantage of American workers. How do we get AI to maintain high domestic wages? It must amplify the productivity of the people using it rather than substituting for them.
It would seem obvious that the tech elite hold views of human nature that fundamentally conflict with Catholic teaching. Given these fundamental differences, one would expect postliberals to be wary of unregulated AI.
Vance also proposes incentivizing tech companies to hire American workers through deregulation and tax breaks. “If you’re trying to employ workers,” he contends, “we’re going to deregulate you, we’re going to cut your taxes. And if you start going overseas, we’re not going to do that.” He favors immigration restrictions so that wages will be bid up instead of letting everyone compete for the same jobs.
This view appeals to many people on the right today. The alliance validates them. Finally, the “smart people” aren’t all on the left. Tech titans join their cause. The right can win via creation and innovation rather than the accumulation of political power. American greatness comes through technological dominance. For those tired of being cast as backward traditionalists, Silicon Valley gives them cultural credibility.
But the tension is plain: techno-optimists embrace creative destruction while populists fear it. The tech right preaches “move fast and break things,” but populists say we must protect what we have. Several concerns emerge. It’s not automatic that more productive firms will pass those gains in productivity to their workers. One factor that passes on those gains arises from competition between firms for labor. However, Nationalist policies might reduce competition for labor by reducing the number of employers. With less competition among employers, wages could lag. This isn’t some trivial possibility given the many foreign multinational companies that come here and compete for American workers.
Moreover, most economists believe that restricting trade and immigration will lower productivity generally. The market dynamics are complicated, and no one knows how they will unfold, but if Vance is correct, it would be a happy coincidence. Concerning AI, the uncertainty increases dramatically. After all, no one knows what this technology can do, how good it will get, or how fast it will improve. It may automate knowledge work, hurting the upper class more than the American poor. But that could easily not occur.
Anthropological Tensions
A second and perhaps more fundamental tension exists at the level of philosophical anthropology—the understanding of human nature itself. Philosophical anthropology is the theory of the human person and the person’s function, the person’s ultimate end.
The philosophical anthropology of Catholicism holds that we are spirit-matter: embodied souls whose aim is to be united with God and other human beings in love forever. We’re incomplete without the spiritual dimension. The assumption is that there is a fixed human nature that tends to manifest itself over time.
People working within the tech sector tend to have wildly different views of humanity, and their techno-optimism is driven by that different philosophical anthropology. A Silicon Valley post-humanist views the person as a digital program. They dream about gaining the ability to upload from one’s body into the cloud.
For any Catholic, the human person is a compound of soul and body, forming a single entity that Aristotle called a hylomorphic unity of soul and body. God created and ordered your spiritual nature, and your biological nature is part of your nature, fixed and immutable. Together, they combine to make a human person.
It would seem obvious that the tech elite hold views of human nature that fundamentally conflict with Catholic teaching. Given these fundamental differences, one would expect postliberals to be wary of unregulated AI. But now, in light of this new landscape, postliberals have grown relatively quiet about the dangers of techno-populism, occasionally even exploring techno-optimist stances themselves.
Deneen, for instance, recently wrote a Substack post where he tried to explore the potential compatibility of MAGA and DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency), indicating that in some cases, postliberalism countenances spending cuts, and not in other cases. The broader commitments of postliberals give them every reason to criticize the tech right that pushes these ideas and supports strong regulation of AI. However, this hasn’t happened to anything like the extent one would expect.
Today, a contingent of the right embraces techno-optimism and opposes AI regulation, one of the most significant policy positions in the history of the human race. Yet many of the same people claim to favor the working class and to support policy and political institutions that focus on creating virtuous people and preserving social cohesion. For Vance specifically, it seems like the techno-optimist is in the driver’s seat, while the postliberal has receded. But as recent events have shown, things can change quickly. These new alliances are unstable, incorporating many deeply conflicting influences. Unsurprisingly, we would see some ruptures when the influences genuinely conflict. It is hard to adopt both postliberalism and techno-optimism simultaneously, especially in a populist moment.
The current conflicts are only the beginning. As AI advances, along with social change, the tensions between these camps will only expand. What will the right do? Will it embrace creative destruction, protectionism, or postliberal “First Things”? The right cannot have it all. The synthesis will not hold.
