The point is - Thiel is crank, and if needs to sugarcoat the true import of what he's really saying: "We'd all be better off if women's suffrage never happened" -- that's just Thiel being Thiel.
Maybe it would be terrible if Napoleon had access to nuclear weapons in the early 1800s. Am I saying we should have let the Rape of Nanking go on indefinitely?
1) We would be more capitalist (whatever that means) if welfare beneficiaries and women were not able to vote.
2) Libertarian initiatives would succeed more often.
Neither of those seem to me to obviously translate to "We'd all be better off if women's suffrage never happened". For one thing, the quote seems to be missing anything that says those groups shouldn't be voting. But again, I'm only looking at the words on the page.
Neither of those seem to me to obviously translate to "We'd all be better off if women's suffrage never happened".
That's because I'm starting with what he said. Whereas it seems you're starting with what you would have preferred he had said.
This is after all the very mark of a skilled rhetorician.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that you and the other poster here already have some preconceptions about what a man like Thiel wants people to think, and aren't exactly looking for the most charitable reads.
I certainly could be wrong, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find too many people that didn't already have strong opinions on the man interpreting his words the way you have.
If you refuse to accept that A is A, there's no end of convincing to move your subjective opinion.
This is where my reading and yours differ. You seem to see capitalist democracy being an oxymoron as a value judgment. I see it as saying that these constituencies have historically voted for more socialist style policies. So in this case more democracy equals less capitalism, therefore capitalist democracy is an oxymoron. Now you may see this as "cognitive gymnastics", but that's kind of how I see your reading, so I think that's just our biases at play.
Not sure if you saw me say this elsewhere in the thread, but I'm curious what you think:
> I can believe that my coworker getting a huge bonus/raise means that I am getting less as a result. It doesn't mean I think it shouldn't have happened, or that I'm going to attempt to sabotage them. I can acknowledge something that isn't beneficial for my cause without immediately desiring to end that thing
Do you think Thiel would be in favor of more socialist-style policies? Even some? Do you think he views the diminishment of capitalist democracy as a negative trend? Well, there you have it.
> I can acknowledge something that isn't beneficial for my cause without immediately desiring to end that thing
Thiel doesn't strike me as someone who's politically "live and let live", so to speak. This is a situation where the man's reputation precedes him. Perhaps he doesn't want to overturn something beneficial to others, but he might be in favor of offsetting that benefit in order to further his cause.
And what you are willing to acknowledge is immaterial, as you are not Peter Thiel.
Does that mean that he will automatically be opposed to anything that could contribute to socialist policies being enacted? I think this is the jump that you're making, and was what I was trying to address with my pay raise analogy. To take it to the extreme, the sun coming up tomorrow makes it possible for socialist policies to be enacted. Do you think if Thiel realizes this, he'll try to blow up the sun?
And I'm not claiming to know anything about whether the guy wishes women couldn't vote, maybe he does. I just don't see that in what is written.
OP edited his post to include a link of Thiel responding himself, but with your opinion of him being what it is, is it safe to assume you don't believe him?
EDIT: someone linked to a comment thread from 6 years ago talking about this. Its interesting to see how similar the discussion is. I think both sides are mostly arguing in good faith, this is just one of those "is the dress blue or is it gold" things.
I'm relying here on a priori context tying Thiel to the internet neoreactionary movement [0], which does consist of figures who are comfortable voicing opinions that are quite appalling and out there- or at least were a decade ago. I don't think Thiel is literally a neoreactionary, but he does seem to be a fellow traveller or comfortable enough in association with them to be willing to entertain unconventional opinions.
This isn't really a value judgment, either. It's just identifying one subset of the company that Thiel has publicly kept before, noting the type of ideas they are open to, and thus concluding that Thiel is possibly within the ballpark of such ideas, if not fully aligned.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/geeks-for-monarchy/
> OP edited his post to include a link of Thiel responding himself, but with your opinion of him being what it is, is it safe to assume you don't believe him?
That link does provide context. And it sort of shows the rather extreme position that neoreaction arrives at: quibbling over suffrage is immaterial, because democracy is inherently flawed. There is no political solution.
I believe Thiel when he says people shouldn't be disenfranchised. But I also believe him when he says he believes that voting will not solve anything.
I think that the link doesn't disprove that if Thiel could have retroactively prevented this state of affairs from arising, he would not have done that. But then we arrive at angels dancing on the head of a pin territory of hypotheticals, so I will concede there.
> To take it to the extreme, the sun coming up tomorrow makes it possible for socialist policies to be enacted. Do you think if Thiel realizes this, he'll try to blow up the sun?
Once Palmer Luckey comes up with a plan, yes.
Edit:
Rereading the context of the original Cato Unbound essay, and the paragraph after, it does sound more innocuous than previously portrayed. But it's still questionable framing. Thiel is placing the blame for the oxymoronizing of "capitalist democracy" on those two constituencies. And that's placing the cart before the horse. It's almost as if he's forgetting there was something that happened at the end of his beloved roaring 1920s to change American politics, and in fact the political structures of nearly almost all western democracies, forever. And that was followed by other sweeping historical events leading to the centralization of government power.
Thiel's framing makes it sound like two groups of voters just decided to vote capitalist democracy away, for no reason stated. It's a twisting of the truth by omission, by oversimplification. Which detractors would get understandably upset by.
Against this backdrop -- it's interesting that you chose to drop the "d" part of the phrase as if Thiel never said it. Let's see how your paraphrase works using the "d" word in place of the "c" word:
1) Given Peter Thiel is for more democracy; 2) Peter Thiel believes that women's enfranchisement prevented more democracy; 3) Peter Thiel believes at the very least that women's enfrachisement has a consequence of preventing more of what he stands for, which is democracy.
That's because at his core, the man is and always has been -- expressly, unapologetically anti-democratic.
I can believe that my coworker getting a huge bonus/raise means that I am getting less as a result. It doesn't mean I think it shouldn't have happened, or that I'm going to attempt to sabotage them. I can acknowledge something that isn't beneficial for my cause without immediately desiring to end that thing.
To expand on this bit though:
> It doesn't mean I think it shouldn't have happened, or that I'm going to attempt to sabotage them.
You can probably see how if you go to your coworker, and tell them "It would have been in my best interest and created a world I more prefer if you had gotten less", they may get upset with you. This is what's happening here.