Before Alex Karp cofounded Palantir Technologies, the shadowy data analysis firm and defense contractor of which he is now the CEO, he wanted to be an academic social theorist. Upon graduating from Stanford Law School—where he befriended his eventual Palantir cofounder, Peter Thiel—Karp enrolled in a PhD program at Goethe University Frankfurt. There, under the tutelage of a specialist in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, he immersed himself in the thought of the Frankfurt School, the collective of Marxian theorists and cultural critics who inspired student protest movements in the 1960s.
The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska Crown, 320 pp.
It is unclear what led Karp to abandon his high-minded pursuits and build a company whose software has been used by ICE to track down suspected illegal immigrants for deportation, by the U.S. military to target drone strikes, and possibly by the Israel Defense Forces to develop “kill lists,” among other ethically fraught pursuits at the frontier of intelligence and warfare. What is certain is that today, Karp has ascended to a position on the world stage that his former student cohort could never imagine. Since Palantir went public in 2020, the company’s market cap has soared from $16 billion to a recent high of more than $280 billion, briefly surpassing stalwarts like Toyota and making Karp a billionaire many times over (after a nearly 500 percent surge in the company’s stock price last year, The Economist named Karp its top-performing CEO of 2024). And despite Karp’s liberal commitments—he has supported Democrats most of his life, and has referred to himself as a socialist and even a neo-Marxist—Palantir now wields tremendous influence in Trumpworld, largely through Thiel, who has backed Trump since 2016 and is J. D. Vance’s former employer. “Palantirians,” including one of Karp’s closest advisers, are installed in senior roles across the new administration.
At the height of his power, Karp is using his platform to publish a scathing critique of the academic community he once aspired to join. The Technological Republic, cowritten with Karp’s Palantir deputy Nicholas Zamiska, argues that it is academics and other liberal elites, not Karp, who have betrayed their shared values. By abandoning the pursuit of truth in favor of problematizing the pro-West worldview, they have discouraged generations of America’s best and brightest from contributing to the national defense, and diverted precious technical talent to trivial endeavors such as “building algorithms that optimize the placement of ads on social media platforms.” This, in turn, has weakened the liberal world order in the face of rising authoritarian threat, particularly from China.
Why would a man in Karp’s position write an alienating, combative political treatise? On the surface, the book calls on academics to do what Karp believes he has done himself, and embrace a more forceful and pragmatic role in defending democracy—in their case, by strengthening, rather than tearing down, young Americans’ sense of patriotic duty. But the argument Karp delivers is unlikely to convince them. So unlikely, in fact, that it raises the question of who Karp is truly speaking to.
The Technological Republic begins with an assessment of Silicon Valley that channels Karp’s leftist academic roots. The tech industry of the internet era, he says, allocates an incredible amount of financial and human capital to endeavors that contribute little to, and often detract from, the collective welfare.
For Karp, the tech industry’s finest moments came during World War II and the Cold War, when STEM talent partnered with the government—and especially the military—to pursue “grand, collectivist” projects. Government initiatives such as the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program produced world-changing breakthroughs. In the private sector, companies like Fairchild Semiconductor turned government-funded research, and military procurement work, into the bedrock innovations of the modern internet.
Karp views the modern tech industry, and especially Big Tech, as having abandoned this spirit of ambition and public purpose. The platform empires are built not on breakthrough innovations that lifted up the broader economy, but rather on the “aggressive disruption of incumbents and the construction of new monopolies.” They have not sought to solve humanity’s great challenges, but rather to address the “inconveniences of daily life for those with disposable income,” such as getting a taxi or ordering takeout. The Technological Republic drips with disdain for a generation of companies that, while draping themselves in the rhetoric of changing the world, have been content to “sat[e] the often capricious and passing needs of late capitalism’s hordes.” As China channels its resources toward strategic technologies—Karp is particularly concerned about China’s advances toward intelligent drone swarms, which he believes represent the future of warfare—this “complacency” is no longer acceptable.
How did we get here? The contrast Karp draws between the mid-20th-century and the modern-day tech world provides an opportunity to reflect on structural economic changes that might have contributed to the slowdown he sees in innovation and ambition. Has the rise of the venture capital model, or more recently the dominance of a few incumbent players, encouraged founders to think small? Karp suggests that America has “ceded too much control to the whims of the market,” and gestures vaguely at the need for a “Manhattan Project” for battlefield AI, as well as increased allocations to AI in the defense budget (surprise, surprise). But he declines to elaborate on these proposals. The Technological Republic is not fundamentally interested in questions of political economy—it is interested in culture.
What set apart the technologists of the World War II and Cold War eras, Karp claims, was their mentality. These were not “technical minds chasing trivial consumer products,” but builders who “aspired to see the most powerful technology of the age deployed to address challenges of industrial and national significance.” The core premise of The Technological Republic is that this collectivist ethos was made possible by a strong sense of national identity rooted in “shared culture”—the mythologies, religious beliefs, and common experiences, such as mandatory military service, that forged bonds between citizens and constituted their understanding of what it meant to be part of the American project. But over the latter half of the 20th century, America’s national identity faded. Improbably, Karp blames this entirely on efforts by the academic left to promote tolerance and inclusivity in higher education.
Karp’s narrative of decline begins with efforts to reform Eurocentric university core curricula. Starting in the 1950s and accelerating in the countercultural moment of the late 1960s, rising generations of historians made the obvious point that required general education courses on Western civilization—which for decades had taught students that America was the inheritor of a civilizational legacy linking the ancient Near East, classical Greece and Rome, and early modern Europe, progressing all the while toward liberty and reason—excluded the histories of civilizations elsewhere in the world, and warped students’ understanding of what “civilization” meant. Universities assented, refashioning “Western Civ” into world history courses or, more often, abandoning it altogether. Later, in the 1980s and ’90s (although Karp fuses these distinct episodes into one), the humanities faced a similar reckoning in what became known as the “Canon Wars.” Dead White Men were asked to share space with a more diverse cast of authors.
Meanwhile, a more combative strain of intellectual reform sought to directly “deconstruct” the edifice of Western identity and knowledge. Karp picks on two prominent postcolonial scholars here: Kwame Anthony Appiah, who attacked the coherence of Western civilization as a march from Athenian democracy to the Age of Enlightenment; and Edward Said, whose 1978 tract, Orientalism, produced the revolutionary—and, Karp admits, “brilliant”—insight that productions of history and anthropology reflect power dynamics between speaker and subject. Said’s influence was particularly profound, Karp writes, generating “a new industry in American higher education, built around dismantling colonial understandings of the world,” which “remade” academia as a whole.
To his credit, Karp’s criticism of these academic challenges to the West—the instincts of postwar intellectuals toward diversification and deconstruction—is somewhat more nuanced than the familiar complaints of aggrieved campus conservatives. Unlike his Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel, whose 1996 screed, The Diversity Myth, lambasts multiculturalism as “anti-Western zealotry” in disguise, Karp acknowledges that the intellectual projects of Appiah and Said had merit. “The dismantling of an entire system of privilege was rightly begun,” Karp writes. His gripe is that the generation of academics the reformers, and especially Said, inspired “failed to resurrect anything substantial, a coherent collective identity or set of communal values, in its place.”
In the hands of more radical thinkers, Karp argues, Said’s insight that subjectivity is inherent in the production of knowledge about other cultures was twisted into a belief that accurate descriptive knowledge of other cultures was not possible at all—and therefore that comparative value judgments about different cultures was an inherently problematic, and futile, endeavor. How could Americans claim that their art, ethics, or social organization was superior to the art, ethics, or social organization of another society, from behind their American eyes? Borrowing a term popularized by the traditionalist historians of the Canon Wars era, Karp claims that cultural “relativism” became dogma in academia by the end of the 20th century, and from there permeated political institutions, journalism, Hollywood, and other bastions of the liberal elite. It became, Karp writes, “the dominant form of elite establishment thinking.”
As academia, and the broader liberal establishment, pulled away from comparing cultures, Karp argues, it ceased making normative claims about what America’s shared culture should be. It became uninterested in, or perhaps afraid of, articulating a positive vision of America’s national identity. Certain segments became outright hostile to the idea of having one at all. Karp catches two high-profile academics in the act: the sociologist Richard Sennett, who pondered, in The New York Times, whether there might be “ways of acting together without invoking the evil of a shared national identity,” and the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who castigated Americans’ unique “patriotic pride” as “morally dangerous,” and instead called for “primary allegiance” to “the community of human beings in the entire world.”
The result, according to Karp, was that the generation of Americans raised in this intellectual environment developed no concept of being part of a worthy national endeavor—and retreated into the pursuit of riches instead. Whereas mid-20th-century technologists’ sense of patriotic duty was fortified by their education, the education of Uber and Instagram founders had systematically stamped theirs out. Into the resulting void, Karp writes, “the market rushed in with fervor.” This generation “knew what it opposed—what it stood against and could not condone—but not what it was for.”
Ironically, The Technological Republic falls into this trap itself. Karp concludes the book with what is essentially a call for academics and the liberal elite broadly to reject cancel culture and orthodoxy—one that resembles Thiel-style cultural warfare more than it resembles an original, or constructive, critique. In one eyebrow-raising passage, Karp appears to sympathize with a 1998 speech by a German writer that railed against what Karp describes as “the yoke of an enforced remembrance” of the Holocaust. This speech was also the subject of Karp’s doctoral dissertation, although he did not condone it then.
But Karp, like the academics he criticizes, fails to articulate a positive vision of what a new American identity should be. Nor does he grapple with recent liberal attempts to do so—contrary to Karp’s claim that such projects have been thought-policed out of existence—such as Jill Lepore’s This America, and Colin Woodard’s voluminous work in the Washington Monthly and elsewhere. If there is a path forward suggested by The Technological Republic, it is that by embracing “intellectual confrontation,” the liberal establishment can allow a new national identity to spontaneously emerge through debate.
Considered in isolation, Karp’s key observations are likely to resonate with his supposed target audience of academics and liberal thought leaders. Readers with ties to elite educational institutions would likely agree that their peers are more motivated by money than any sense of duty to the collective, especially when one considers the staggering percentages of graduates who flock to the finance and consulting industries. (Karp himself notes this phenomenon in one passage, though his focus is on the tech world; for a deeper dive, see Zach Marcus, “The Corporate Raid on Campus.”) And it’s difficult to argue with his claims that America’s national identity has been eroded, or that higher education has become more interested in questioning, rather than strengthening, a pro-West perspective.
But The Technological Republic fails to convince that these phenomena are interconnected. Do many of America’s best and brightest today work for Facebook and McKinsey because they lack patriotism? Was one semester of “Western Civ” so pivotal in the career trajectories of the engineers who put a man on the moon? If so, Karp provides no evidence. And he strenuously avoids grappling with other historical events and cultural currents that likely contributed to the elite’s abandonment of public service careers—does it have more to do with their belief that America is bad, or that “greed is good”? As far as there is a disinclination toward military work specifically, the impact on public opinion of America’s disastrous military campaigns in Southeast Asia and the Middle East goes unmentioned.
Perhaps, after two decades at the helm of an infamously cult-like company where he is “accustomed to being received as an oracle,” according to a recent profile, Karp’s powers of persuasion have dulled. Or perhaps he was simply limited by the scope of the book. The main text of The Technological Republic clocks in at 218 breezy pages, 56 of which are dedicated to a non sequitur on Palantir’s corporate culture. But for a man of Karp’s intellectual mettle—which does shine through in the book, in his command of intellectual history—these explanations are doubtful. One can’t help but feel that he has not made an earnest attempt at persuasion.
Which brings us to the question of Karp’s true purpose in writing the book. There are moments when he seems to be making a friendly appeal for liberals to get their act together; the clearest example is his warning, borrowed from the political philosopher Michael Sandel, that “fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread.” But the carelessness with which he argues his central points, and his neglect of a thoughtful solution, do not ultimately leave the impression that The Technological Republic is rooting for the liberal establishment to recover. What we are left with is a vicious critique of that establishment, delivered through gleeful transgressions of its boundaries on acceptable topics of discussion. In short: red meat for the right.
Viewed this way, the book forms a pattern with other publicity stunts Karp has performed in the wake of last November’s vibe-shifting election. After Palantir reported blowout earnings in February, Karp went viral and successfully triggered the libs by proclaiming on the (video-streamed) investor call his commitment to “scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.” Appearing on CNBC’s Squawk Box the morning The Technological Republic hit shelves, Karp called Elon Musk “obviously the most important builder in the world.” He applauded Musk’s controversial DOGE initiative, which he claimed “90 percent of Americans” support, for targeting “the fraud, waste, and abuse we know is there.” Musk tweeted the clip.
The moral case for Palantir that Karp has made throughout his career—that the company is a project to promote democracy, and strengthening Western militaries is its means to this end—has always been somewhat simplistic. But Karp seemed to genuinely believe in this calculation, and his conduct could be seen as consistent with it. He made a point of refusing to work in autocratic countries, and of meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine to offer Palantir’s support in its war against Russia.
But as Karp attempts to curry favor with an administration that is not only disassembling the world order Karp cherishes but actively undermining America’s standing as a beacon of liberal democracy at home, the coherence of Palantir’s political project has begun to unravel. In his TV interview, and in his book, Karp no longer comes across as a man with firm commitments.
“I’ve been a Democrat most of my life,” Karp said on CNBC. “I still—I kind of view myself as outside it.”
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