The Counter-Elite Won the Meme War
But can they win the peace?
CALIFORNIA CASUAL AFFLUENCE
A friend brings me to an inappropriately young Halloween party in Laurel Canyon. Twenty-three year-old former child actors—the boys in suits I see at Tenants and Silver Lake Lounge—are living a casually affluent lifestyle in the Hills: a West Coast version of the Bruce Weber aesthetic deployed in Abercrombie and Fitch’s iconic campaigns.
It’s not rustic like it’s East Coast cousin. Its cues are suburban rather than rural. And unlike the #oldmoney meme on TikTok, there’s no conspicuously shiny veneer of wealth. No Rolls Royce, no manicured cypress trees, no English riding equipment. Casual affluence is subtle, implicit, and in that way irritating, because it is constructed out of the same things any middle class family may have (only slightly different).
In the house, there are two tells: the un-remodeled interior with its pine cabinet kitchen, wall-to-wall carpeting, wood-paneled basement, and ancient bathroom fixtures. That and the quality of the furniture. The pieces were, as some would say, ‘real furniture’—not mass market, not IKEA, not Raymour and Flanigan—old, but in good condition. Couches, chairs, side tables, and lamps from the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties; eclectic, thrown together, hodgepodge, as if it was inherited piecemeal from a grandmother and a great-aunt, both of whom redecorated frequently.
The patina is different in California. Things fade in the desert. They do not rot or rust. It’s ur text is Joan Didion’s “Notes from a Native Daughter” not Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. The setting is a ranch home and the lazy whoosh of street traffic, not a lake house and the whoop of a loon. Its colors are dusky, the pale pinks and violets of a sunset. There are no navy blues, no hunter greens, no tawny browns.
Interview’s recent Richard Kern photoshoot with Lily-Rose Depp has this feel. Like it could be a set for Valley of the Dolls—or Licorice Pizza. Like it was shot at someone’s family home in Encino. Are they a Sepulveda? Maybe. Although they would never tell you that…
I’m introduced to the host, one of the boys in a suit. He’s excited to tell me he has just returned from Hereticon, the annual Founder’s Fund convention for ‘heterdox thought’ which had hosted an ‘Apocalypse Ball’ in Miami Beach the night before.
Organized by Mike Solana, the venture capital firm’s CMO, as well as editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires, the Substack-powered alternative tech news outlet, the event draws the likes of cyberpunk pop star Grimes, anti-aging activist Bryan Johnson, the Vatican’s Chief Exorcist in Washington DC, the founder of the defense-tech start-up, Anduril, Palmer Luckey, along with tradwives, seasteaders, pro-natalists, and other right-coded dissident Twitterati.
Or is it now Xerati?
The host is implicitly confident Trump will win. He tells me Peter Thiel (partner at Founder’s Fund) will appoint the cabinet. He asks me, do I know how he can get an invite to Peter Thiel’s election watch party? I tell him I do not. Later, rummaging in the kitchen for a clean cup, I come up dry. The cupboards are empty, save a copy of Tom O’Neill’s 2019 book, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, a well-known favorite of Mr. Thiel.
Unlike the Thielbucks scare of Dimes Square circa 2021-2022, in which the downtown scene sought to distance itself from the controversial billionaire, these twenty-somethings were scheming to get into his orbit.
To clarify, unlike Hereticon, this wasn’t a ‘dissident right’ party. When politics came up in conversation, most people I spoke with were incredulous. How could Trump still be a competitive candidate after everything that had happened? Which for me, makes the phenomenon all the more interesting.
The idea that the Thiel was a direct conduit to power has kept coming up over the weeks since the election. Watching the Tyson-Paul fight at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, at a Thai Angel after-hours, at a West Hollywood Christmas party, over dinner, over drinks, people speak of ‘friends at Mar-a-Lago.’ “I hear so-and-so is going to be this.” “I hear so-and-so is going to be that.” So the nonspecific gossip goes. The point being, as a tech bro told me:
“It’s honestly weird how many people I know down there.”
It’s not obvious to me how true any of the speculation is—I remain skeptical. Never put too much faith in anonymous sources or blind items, let alone drunken hyperbole. It’s more an indication of which way the wind is blowing. In 2016, I knew precisely zero Trump voters, let alone people clout-chasing positions in the future Trump White House. Now people brag about connections, out loud, in the presence of Democrats, and no scenes have ensued.
THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE COUNTER-ELITE
What’s especially interesting here is the post-election fixation on Thiel—even though he publicly stated he did not donate to the Trump campaign this cycle. He has become a symbol, a meme, a synecdoche of the counter-elite, much as George Soros has for the traditional elite. (If you forgot your AP English terms, a synecdoche is when a part represents a whole.)
Last month, Thiel appeared on Bari Weiss’ podcast Honestly in an episode titled, “Peter Thiel on Trump, Elon, and the Triumph of the Counter-Elites.” It’s an interesting framing, the term ‘counter-elite.’
Why not the new elites?
It implies an admission that the current elites cannot be displaced or co-opted. Instead it presumes intra-elite competition will be the primary focus of U.S. politics for the foreseeable future. The ambiguity of the situation is why people have become more circumspect about Trump.
The upper middle class is nothing if not conformist. They’re taking a more neutral tack because it’s unclear what the cultural landscape will look like in four years, eight years, twelve years, or more.
In my report Live Players, I addressed the conspicuous lack of a coherent elite in the United States. In my opinion (heavily cribbed from the work of Pierre Bourdieu), a coherent elite has to possess three forms of capital: social capital (trust and relationships), cultural capital (status and institutions), and financial capital (money and assets). Ever since finance lost the mandate of heaven in 2008—nobody trusts banks anymore—no industry has ascended to the vacant throne.
You can only wobble on a two-legged stool for so long.
The obvious successor should have been the tech industry: the centerpiece of the American economy, growth-driver of the last decade. Yet libertarian-minded Silicon Valley was, until recently, wary of taking on the role. Maybe it was the global ambitions tech had for its products. Maybe it was their shape rotator aversion to the wheeling-dealing, wordcel quality of political and cultural life. Maybe it was just the distance between California and Washington, DC.
Over the last decade, Silicon Valley’s ambivalence has worn thin. Over and over, tech has learned you may not care about politics, but politics cares about you. In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg was called before Congress to explain Facebook’s role in the 2016 election. In 2020, social media companies were secretly enlisted to enforce misinformation mandates set by the intelligence agencies. Elon Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter elicited outrage from Democratic Senators.
By 2024, a sea change had taken place. Placid blue Silicon Valley, a place to find new donors and new digital campaign strategies saw it’s leadership tilt red. The obvious examples are Elon’s leadership of the newly formed DOGE—Department of Government Efficiency and Peter Thiel’s mentorship and early support of Vice President-Elect JD Vance. It’s easy to explain away famous tech billionaires donating to political candidates as just another example of oligarchs currying favor with wealth.
But there are other examples that make me think the shift is emblematic of a deeper reappraisal. Gary Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, the prestigious startup incubator, has become a political force within the San Francisco. After successfully spearheading the 2022 recall effort against Chesa Boudin, the city’s progressive, Soros-affiliated district attorney, Tan is now considering a run for mayor.
Setting aside arguments about whether or not Mr. Boudin is responsible for San Francisco’s post-COVID disorder, what’s clear is that the old hands-off attitude of tech towards politics has proven naïve. The Bay Area hosts the world’s pre-eminent tech cluster. Three trillion dollar companies—and their well compensated employees—call the region home. The tremendous heat this industry throws off has filled the tax coffers for a over a decade.
How then, do we square this situation with the crime, disorder and drugs that have tarnished San Francisco’s brand worldwide? No one thinks of Fisherman’s Wharf when the city is mentioned. They think of a homeless encampment. The fact that the term ‘urban doom loop’ is used to characterize the city’s misfortunes underscores this reality. Sorry to be crude, but:
Why is the wealthiest city in the world a shithole?
If nineteenth century France had a laissez-faire attitude about the economy, twenty-first century Silicon Valley has had a laissez-faire attitude about politics. Traditionally, rising industries have intuited the triad of capital laid out by Pierre Bourdieu. They were stewards of politics and patrons of the arts i.e. they participated in the creation and maintenance of social and cultural capital.
That strategy has failed. Tech may have all the money, but it has none of the influence. People rightly question why they should defer to the judgement and preferences of people who can’t even manage to clean up their own backyard. And I mean that literally.
The counter-elite has thus far had an aesthetic problem. The dystopian cyberpunk aesthetics of Blade Runner are great for entertainment products. But nobody wants to live there. Call me when Elon Musk moves to a house in Skid Row. Conversely, the homes of tech billionaires and hundred millionaires I’ve seen (online and otherwise) aren’t much better: generically white and minimal, rectilinear shapes in monochromatic fabrics. You get the sense you are in a third-world luxury hotel that didn’t know you were supposed to hire an interior designer.
On a basic level, both their fantasies and realities fail to inspire. I’m left with the image of the Laurel Canyon house and the comfortable, prosperous, private California of the twentieth century it alludes to. As I said in VIBE SHIFT AMERICA, the counter-elites are being given a chance at bat because a substantial portion of the public no longer trusts incumbent elites to govern well. Whether or not the public trusts the counter-elites to govern long term depends on whether or not they can transform their victory in the 2024 meme war into lasting aesthetic peace.
The counter-elite have been given a probationary period.
After that, all bet’s are off.
