Few terms in contemporary political vocabulary carry the rhetorical force of “fascism.” Precisely because of that force, its application demands precision. The recent labeling of Alex Karp, Peter Thiel, and the broader intellectual milieu around Palantir as “techno-fascist” — most prominently by Mark Coeckelbergh and, in cognate form, by Rainer Mühlhoff — has become a test case for whether contemporary technology criticism can sustain conceptual discipline under polemical pressure. It does not, at least not in its current form.
Karp’s argument in The Technological Republic, co-authored with Nicholas Zamiska, rests on a recognizably republican premise: that liberal democracies require a substantive shared purpose, civic virtue, and the willingness to sustain hard power in defense of their constitutional order. This is not an exotic position. It runs from the civic humanism of the Florentine republic through the Federalist Papers to twentieth-century Cold War liberals such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and finds contemporary expression in Michael Sandel and Philip Pettit.
Karp’s diagnosis of Western technological complacency is empirical, not ideological: the most talented engineering cohorts of the post-Cold War period turned overwhelmingly toward consumer software rather than toward problems of state capacity. His prescription — that liberal democracies must develop indigenous technological capacity in defense, intelligence, and critical infrastructure — follows from the standard logic of strategic autonomy, a concept developed extensively in European policy discourse and not associated with fascist thought. His philosophical formation under Jürgen Habermas in Frankfurt is not incidental: it marks a thinker who has internalized the procedural-discursive tradition of postwar German liberalism.
The Historiographical Burden
The serious literature on fascism — Roger Griffin, Robert Paxton, Emilio Gentile, Stanley Payne, Zeev Sternhell — has produced a relatively stable set of criteria: palingenetic ultranationalism, mass mobilization through paramilitary organization, the explicit rejection of liberal constitutionalism, the cult of a charismatic leader, the targeting of internal enemies for elimination from the political community.
Measured against these criteria, the fascism charge becomes difficult to sustain. Karp does not call for the overthrow of constitutional government; he argues for its strengthening. He does not propose paramilitary mobilization; he proposes the rebuilding of state technical capacity. He does not name internal enemies for elimination; he names institutional weaknesses for reform. The aesthetic register of certain Palantir communications may resemble interwar authoritarian rhetoric, but rhetorical resemblance is not ideological identity. Theodore Roosevelt’s strenuous life and the Kennedy administration’s New Frontier employed similar registers without anyone calling them fascist.
Reading Thiel Seriously
Any honest treatment of the milieu must engage Peter Thiel’s 2007 essay The Straussian Moment. The text is consistently misrepresented as a political program when it is in fact a work of political theology operating at considerable depth. Its question is genuinely difficult: how should a liberal political order respond to forms of violence that exceed the categories its founding theorists developed to contain them?
To pose this question is not to abandon liberalism. It is to ask whether liberalism possesses the resources to think through its own limit conditions — a question Schmitt asked of Weimar, Niebuhr of postwar America, and Strauss across his entire career. Thiel’s most important move is the turn to René Girard’s mimetic theory as a hermeneutic for political violence. The argument is genuinely original and has been taken seriously by political theologians across denominational and ideological lines. To engage Karp without engaging Thiel, and Thiel without engaging Girard, Schmitt, and Strauss, is to engage a caricature.
The Conflation Problem
Mühlhoff’s work on predictive privacy is technically more disciplined than Coeckelbergh’s polemical interventions, but when his framework is extended to actors such as Palantir, an analytic flattening occurs. Commercial surveillance for advertising, governmental administrative use of data, and military targeting applications come to be treated as variants of a single phenomenon, distinguished by degree rather than by kind. This conflation matters because the normative and legal frameworks appropriate to each domain differ substantially. Treating them as a single problem forecloses the possibility of differentiated institutional responses — and makes any actor operating in more than one domain appear to embody all of its pathologies simultaneously.
The Better Critique That Is Not Being Made
The strongest objection to Palantir’s position is not that it is fascist but that it raises classical questions of democratic legitimacy in particularly acute form. Who controls critical national infrastructure, on what terms, and what institutional remedies exist when the private operator and the public interest diverge? These are questions internal to liberal democratic theory, not external critiques of it — posed by Theodore Lowi about the administrative state, by Sheldon Wolin about “managed democracy,” and by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman about “weaponized interdependence” in digital infrastructure.
Posed in this register, the critique becomes more powerful, not less. It does not depend on contested historical analogies. It does not require assuming authoritarian intent. It rests on the structural observation that a private corporation operating critical security infrastructure creates accountability deficits regardless of intentions. This is a critique Karp himself, given his Habermasian formation, would have to take seriously, because it operates within rather than against the framework of communicative reason.
The Catholic principle of subsidiarity offers a complementary vocabulary. The privatization of national security capacity, examined through this lens, raises substantive concerns that have nothing to do with fascism and everything to do with the proper ordering of public and private responsibility — a critique legible across the political spectrum, where the fascism charge is legible only to those already disposed to accept it.
The Habermasian Standard
The pattern in the techno-fascism debates is this: a normative conclusion is reached prior to and independently of the analytic work; the analytic work is then organized to produce the conclusion; the conclusion is presented in vocabulary calibrated for moral disqualification rather than clarification.
When critique adopts this form, it ceases to be critique in any sense Habermas, Adorno, or Horkheimer would recognize. The Frankfurt School tradition, properly understood, demanded the opposite: a willingness to engage the strongest version of the opposing position, to identify the rational kernel even in ideological formations one finds objectionable, and to prefer the labor of differentiation over the satisfactions of denunciation.
Measured against this standard, Coeckelbergh and Mühlhoff have not produced critique; they have produced its negation. They engage straw versions of Karp and Thiel while ignoring the actual texts. They invoke historical categories without serious engagement with the historiography that gives them meaning. They conflate distinct domains because the conflation serves the rhetorical conclusion. And they substitute the performative gesture of moral seriousness — the public naming of an enemy — for the substantive work of political analysis.
The deeper irony is that this mode of critique, by pretending to defend liberal democracy, undermines one of its constitutive practices. Liberal democracies are not held together by the moral correctness of their dominant intellectual class but by the willingness of citizens with substantive disagreements to remain in argument with one another. When academic discourse models the opposite — when it treats disagreement as evidence of moral defect and reaches for the heaviest available historical analogies to disqualify rather than engage — it teaches the broader public that political conflict is to be resolved by exclusion rather than by deliberation.
The questions Karp poses about Western technological capacity, strategic autonomy, and civic purpose are questions liberal democracies will have to answer one way or another. The questions Thiel poses about the theological substrate of political order are equally serious and equally unavoidable. A democratic public sphere worth having must be capable of engaging both on their merits. Recovering the conditions of serious deliberation will require, among other things, the willingness to insist that the standards of the tradition both critics invoke be applied to their own practice as rigorously as they apply them to others.
This book review was originally published by the Katechon Institute.
