What were Thiel’s grandparents doing during the War?

Peter Thiel did an interview at the Press Club in Washington DC Monday morning. Watch it here.

I am … was? … a fan of Peter Thiel. He dislikes many of the same things I dislike: credential inflation, Valley Wag, and over regulation of land use. Also, as a weird, contrary, difficult person, he is a member of one of the affinity groups I belong to.

I’ve therefore been following his support of Trump closely. It’s personally disappointing to see someone I otherwise admire have bad judgment, and embarrassing, as an eccentric, to see one of my own confirm the stereotypes normal people have about us.

The 2 big takeaways of Thiel’s Press Club interview:

1. Part A: Thiel thinks Trump’s Mexico wall comments & Religious test are figurative.
   Part B: Thiel doesn’t seem to have any notion that those statements, said by a presidential candidate, are like yelling “Fire” in a crowded movie theatre — too dangerous to be allowed.
2. Thiel doesn’t know how important name recognition is in politics.

The 2nd takeaway was a real revelation for me. Thiel’s most convincing justification for supporting Trump is that 40 or 50 percent of the country agrees with him. What an epiphany - of course, if you think that people vote based mostly on what they think of a candidate, Trump’s popularity would imply that people actually like him.

People that work in politics will tell you, name recognition wins elections. It doesn’t even matter very much if the voter has a positive or negative association with the name, as long as it’s familiar. There is nothing worse for getting elected in niche elections (like presidential primaries) than lack of name recognition, and nothing better than already being famous.

Thiel is looking at the fact that many people voted for Trump as evidence that his candidacy is appealing to them in a substantive way. I see it as evidence that Trump has been a public personality for 30 years. The same benefit accrues to Clinton as well. This was a close election for a while because Trump and Clinton are equally famous people.

It’s been clear since Thiel’s RNC speech that he doesn’t consider Trump’s race bating to be a political non-starter. What was new to me in the interview is that he doesn’t distinguish it from ordinary political speech at all. No one knew or cared when Thiel supported Ron Paul or Carly Fiorina. The problem in Silicon Valley isn’t that Thiel is out of lockstep with Silicon Valley big-D Democrats, the problem is that he’s apparently unaware of the western intellectual consensus about the lessons of the second World War.

My grandparents were Holocaust survivors. Most of my great aunts and uncles, weren’t. Like many East Coast American Jews in the 1980s, my childhood Jewish education was, hour for hour, mostly about the Holocaust. The main theme was ‘it could happen to you, it could happen here.’ Like us - Jewish kids in the US who thought we were Americans - German (and Polish) Jewish kids in 1930s thought they were German (or Polish). The Holocaust was perpetrated between people who previously had personal relationships with each other. Your co-worker or classmate became your literal mortal enemy in the space of a few years.

My mother kept our passports current, “just in case.” Children’s passports expire every 5 years. My two brothers and I weren’t all on the same schedule, so I have several childhood memories of my mother schlepping us all to the Philadelphia Passport Agency. I knew, as a kid, that this was weird compared to other Americans.

The mechanisms by which friends were turned against each other are othering and mob mentality. We learned that fringe ideas can become popular very quickly, and normal people can perpetrate extreme violence if the victims are dehumanized and the violence is normalized. We learned to be vigilant against state sponsored racial violence and terrified of certain kinds of speech.

Thiel argues now that he is the victim of the same mob mentality. Of course the comparison is false. Being Jewish (or Muslim or Mexican) isn’t something we can opt out of. That was one of the terrors of the Nazi regime. Completely assimilated Jews discovered their German peers considered them other and subhuman, no matter how disconnected they were from their Jewish roots. Thiel, on the other hand, is being punished by his social circle for words and deeds. He has a clear way out of his situation: stop batting so hard for a politician that’s openly racist. Honestly, Thiel doesn’t even have to do anything dramatic like denounce Trump. Just stop being in the news supporting him.

I realized, watching the Press Club, that if my sensitivity to the ever lurking threat of state sponsored racialized violence has to do with my family history, and its effect on my upbringing, Thiel’s blindness probably has the same source.

I’m no longer surprised when ordinary Americans don’t know very much about World War II. History is long and the world is a big place. People know about the parts of history that affect their family or locality. Europeans, however, do typically know quite a lot about WWII and its lessons for the present. Thiel is no ordinary American or European. His father, Klaus, was born in Germany in 1938, which means Thiel’s grandparents were German adults during World War II.

There are twin lessons of the Holocaust. A corollary to the observation that your neighbor can become your murderer is that you can become your neighbor’s killer. “It could happen to you,” and “it” is ambiguous. The “it” could be your victimization, but it could also be your brutalization, or your passive cowardice. In a way, it’s easy for Jews & other victims of the Holocaust to archive & remember. My parents & grandparents can pass the statuses of witness and victim down to me. These can easily be part of my cultural heritage without threatening my idea of myself as a good person.

What if your family history of the Holocaust was perpetrator or collaborator? What if you’re traumatized not by what was done to you, but by what you did to other people? You can’t pass down to your children and grandchildren the status of perpetrator. It would take an extraordinarily sophisticated morality to maintain a cultural memory of brutality and also a visceral understanding of the horror of the results.

My guess is, at an age when I was learning personal lessons of World War II, and other Americans were dutifully engaging in their history book explanations, Thiel was subject to a total embargo on first hand knowledge of WWII. That blank space in his historical memory translates now into his failure to understand why people are alarmed by his support of Trump.

It’s more polarized than I realized … I didn’t think there would be this visceral reaction … this is the 1st time I’ve done something that’s actually conventional, it didn’t feel contrarian, it’s the first time I’ve done something big in my life that’s just what half the country believed and it’s been the most controversial thing ever, so that, that really surprised me.