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By Flynn Nicholls
US News Reporter
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A clip has resurfaced of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, a major Republican donor, suggesting that a prominent unrepentant Nazi's critique of liberalism applies to modern-day America, where he said, "...democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted."
Thiel, who is the most prominent backer of Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, made the comments in an episode of the podcast Conversations with Tyler on February 21, 2024.
The German-born billionaire was talking to host Tyler Cowen about Carl Schmitt, a political theorist and prominent member of the Nazi party.
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Who was Carl Schmitt?
Thiel said Schmitt was in a class of political thinkers who had "fairly deep critiques" of the direction Germany was heading in after the First World War.
He said Schmitt understood that the country "couldn't go back" to the "throne and altar" days, where Germany was ruled as a Christian Empire and "didn't really want to go forward with liberal democracy," as represented in the 1920s liberal government of the Weimar Republic.
In Schmitt's case, his critique of liberalism turned into support for National Socialism.
He became a strong supporter of Adolf Hitler after 1933, and in his capacity as a legal scholar defended Hitler's extra-judicial killings of political opponents and helped purge German jurisprudence of Jewish influence. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Schmitt remained unrepentant about his involvement in the fascist regime until his death in 1985.
Weimar period and the US in the 2020s
In the podcast, Theil drew a comparison between Germany's Weimar Republic period and modern democracy.
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"I don't think we're ever in a cyclical world but there are certainly certain parallels in the U.S. in the 2020s to Germany in the 1920s," Thiel said. "Liberalism is exhausted, one suspects that democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted, and that we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window."
The Overton window means the range of views or opinions considered politically acceptable at a given time.
Thiel compared the Weimar Period, which was ended when Hitler's Nazi Party seized control in 1933, to "the dwarves in Moria where they dwell to deep and finally awaken the nameless terror," a reference to The Lord of the Rings where a group of mining dwarves are killed after awakening a demon deep in the mountain.
A section of the podcast was reposted on X, formerly Twitter, by user @jimstewartson, a frequent critic of the MAGA movement and the Republican Party, who said that Thiel's comments about liberalism and democracy being exhausted were the same rhetoric Nazis used in Germany.
"This was precisely what the Nazis tried to sell to Germans, that Weimar was 'too liberal' and needed 'strong leadership' to save it from degeneracy," Stewartson wrote. "I cannot emphasize enough that this psychopath will be running the country if we don't protect this election." The reposted clip was viewed over 1.4 million times by Monday morning.
Hitler first tried to overthrow the Weimar republic in 1923 in a failed coup in Munich, for which he served a year in jail.
In 1933, he was appointed chancellor of the German cabinet while his Nazi Party was in minority. They were able to seize power through the passing of the Enabling Act, which massively expanded the power of his cabinet to pass laws without parliamentary approval, even if they were unconstitutional, effectively turning the Germany into a one-party dictatorship.
Newsweek has contacted Thiel via email for comment.
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