By Jack
Butler
Monday,
November 14, 2022
You
need a very high
I.Q. to understand Blake Masters,
in his telling. The Peter Thiel protégé — Masters had long
worked for Thiel and they cowrote 2014’s Zero to One — has
been consistent about this through the years. In a frustrated online exchange
from his college days that emerged during his failed Arizona Senate campaign,
Masters made his high self-regard clear. “I don’t mean any disrespect — but it
takes years to understand where I’m coming from, let alone agree or disagree,”
he wrote. “To expect NOT to receive the
usual (intelligent, perhaps, but still typical) objections and questions in
response to a post such as mine above would be silly. . . . I don’t know what
gave me the urge to try anyways.”
Earlier
this year, before he had successfully managed — with Thiel’s money and Donald
Trump’s endorsement — to win Arizona’s Republican Senate primary, Masters was
similarly dismissive of his competition. “I don’t even feel like I’m competing
with my primary election opponents,” he told Jewish Insider, “because they’re just unable to
talk about some of the thornier issues, and they’re just dealing in bullet
points while I’m actually like, ‘Hey, I’m a real guy with real ideas, and
here’s what I think.’”
His
campaign was replete with lofty self-estimation, almost always at the expense
of his opponents in the Republican primary. In that same Jewish
Insider interview, he also said: “I think I just really stand out”;
“I’m the only one who’s not boring. I’m the only one who really, I think,
understands the stakes”; and, “I think I’m running against some fine guys or
whatever, you know, they’re accomplished in different ways . . . but I think
they are conventional politicians and candidates that you’ve seen before.”
He dismissed Arizona attorney general Mark
Brnovich, one of his opponents in the primary, to National Review‘s John McCormack in this way: “He’s just — not the
worst; he’s just median; he’s just mediocre. . . . Give the talking points,
talk about how you love the Constitution, hope that’s enough, get into office,
do an okay job, not a great job, and lose to the Left.” He told the Spectator that his
message was “conservative, but it’s not just a standard consultant-provided
Republican talking points” of the sort that “you’ll hear a lot of that from”
his primary opponents. Because of his “very different approach,” he was
“bullish” about his “ability to cut through the noise and resonate with
voters.” He complained to the Stanford
Review that “people are sick of hearing the same Baby Boomer
conservatives say the same consultant-provided talking points.” And he described himself to Politico as
“unique and differentiated and interesting.”
What
made him unique? He “knows what time it is.” He understood that the moment was
serious. That “libertarianism
doesn’t work,” but
“totalitarian leftism doesn’t work either,” so . . . fill in the blank, I
suppose. That riding the tiger of the Terminally Online right-wing Twitter zeitgeist
would not only power him to victory in his primary, but enable him to vanquish
incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly in the general election.
The
sources of Masters’s campaign worldview were varied. Trump was an obvious
influence, in his outsider style and his doubts about the 2020 election, some
version of which Masters shared. “I saw so much that was off, that was
irregular, that was either borderline fraud or obviously indicative of some
kind of fraud, I’m just going to call it out and say it: I think it was not a
free and fair election,” he told National Review’s Nate Hochman last year. Earlier this year,
he reassured Trump that he was not “going
soft” on the 2020 stolen-election claims.
His
stark, austere videos were meant to evoke a Terrence Malick
aesthetic, but in practice just seemed off-putting. He was intrigued by the thought of radical
environmentalist terrorist Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who believed that “the
Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human
race” and who conducted a bombing campaign that killed three people and injured
23 others (among them longtime National Review
contributor David Gelernter) to prove it. (Masters has stressed he disapproved
of the bombings.) He recommended works by white-nationalist Sam
Francis, who believed that “what we as whites must do is reassert our identity
and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the
articulation of a racial consciousness as whites” and that “neither ‘slavery’
nor ‘racism’ as an institution is a sin.”
He invoked the thought of his friend
Curtis Yarvin, a computer programmer and neo-reactionary thinker who believes that “Caesarism” — i.e.,
dictatorial government — is the solution to America’s problems. And he cited as
one of his “favorite” historical figures the Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew,
who he said “created a modern, prosperous country and did it in a way that was
more conservative than libertarian” and “did something genuinely new in
politics” — that “something genuinely new” being a relatively free-market
economy enforced by authoritarian rule. (“The exuberance of democracy leads to
undisciplined and disorderly conditions which are inimical to development,” the
late Singaporean leader said.) Masters has said that he doesn’t
“do the guilt by association thing.” But he could have at least picked better
associations.
Regardless:
What was the result of all this bluster, all this posturing, all this affect?
Victory in a Republican primary, sure. But the past week has shown that such
victories are not always followed by wins in the
general. Such was the case in Arizona. Masters apparently had been considering
a Senate run in 2020, but passed. Though “we can’t know the counterfactual” of
whether he would have won if he’d run, he said last year, “I’ve gotten better.
I’ve prepared myself to be able to run well, raise money, and convey the right
message. And so I think now’s the time.” As of this writing, Masters seems to
have performed no better against Kelly than
Martha McSally did in 2020. So much for that
counterfactual.
In
defeat, Masters and others with various self-interested
reasons to explain away his loss have embraced a different counterfactual: Had
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell sunk more into his race at a key
juncture, instead of spending it in, say, Alaska, Masters would have prevailed.
There is
little reason to believe this. Steven Law, the head of a McConnell-aligned
super PAC, told Thiel that Masters had scored the worst focus-group results
of any candidate he had ever seen. Thiel himself, after bankrolling Masters
through the primary, had to be cajoled into spending more on him in the
general, and initially balked when McConnell surrogates suggested he should do
more to help the unappealing candidate he had stuck them with. The Alaska sum
in question amounted to around $6 million, when some $60 million was ultimately
spent on Masters’s behalf in the race ($13 million of which came from a McConnell-affiliated
organization). It beggars belief that this would have been a difference-maker
for a lousy candidate in a race decided by a margin that turned out not to be
close, especially when, interestingly, Thiel himself was hesitant to give more. If this was all that kept
Masters from the Senate, why was a billionaire like Thiel — or Trump, for that
matter, whose Masters fundraising went primarily to himself — so
parsimonious?
The
entire effort stinks of an attempt at scapegoating, a concept with which Thiel
and his acolytes, such as Masters, are familiar. Disciples of Rene Girard, a
Stanford professor of Thiel’s, they pay great attention to his theory about
scapegoating. Briefly: Girard believed that humans are drawn to imitate, that
imitation creates conflict, and that resolution only comes when an agreed-upon
figure to blame emerges. “Perhaps every modern king is just a scapegoat who has
managed to delay his own execution,” Thiel and Masters mused in Zero to
One. If the Trump/Thiel model is to endure despite its failure, then its
practitioners will have to delay their own metaphorical execution. Offering up
McConnell instead works to that end, even — especially? — if it avoids reckoning with what is truly
holding the Republican Party back from power.
For as
much as Masters did wrong, many of the problems he describes are real and will
need some redress. But his failure was, in the end, not one of uniqueness but
of imitation: copying the right-wing Twitter vibes of the moment and
duplicating Trump’s flaccid brand and his stolen-election
nonsense. “Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new,”
to quote Zero to One again. But the voters of Arizona rejected
his imitation. If the necessary predicate for wielding power is first to attain
it, then Masters was, ultimately, unsuited to the moment he assumed he
understood so well. Even when voters there wanted a Republican senator, they
chose a Democrat over Masters.
You
don’t need a very high I.Q. to understand why.
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