How an obscure scholar is shaping the most powerful country on Earth

George A. Dunn is a scholar of philosophy and religion at Zhejiang City University in China and Indiana University Indianapolis in the United States.

In 2015, a reality-TV star and real-estate mogul descended a golden escalator to announce a presidential bid that would upend American politics. That same year, a quieter exit took place on the other side of the country: René Girard, the French-American scholar of literature and religion, died in Stanford, Calif., where he had taught for three decades. As Donald Trump vaulted into public infamy, Dr. Girard passed in relative obscurity – at least outside the academy. Yet fate would come to link their names in ways Dr. Girard himself might have found troubling.

René Girard built his reputation on a sweeping theory of human behaviour that traced the roots of desire, violence, and religion to a single source: imitation. We don’t desire objects because of their intrinsic value, he argued – we want them because others want them. Desire is mimetic: we imitate what others find desirable, especially those we admire. Advertisers know this instinctively, which is why they enlist celebrities like George Clooney or Michael Jordan to sell everything from espresso to sneakers.

But what happens when the person we imitate is close enough to us to become a rival? When two people covet the same scarce good – status, love, land, attention – they turn on each other. Dr. Girard called this mimetic rivalry. Its most famous expression is the love triangle, but it also plays out in office politics, athletic competition, Wall Street hysteria, and the endless quest to keep up with the Joneses.

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This insight leads to a darker one: human beings don’t fight because they’re different, but because they’re alike, locked in rivalry over the same thing. Ancient societies, Dr. Girard believed, were haunted by this tendency. To stave off chaos, they developed the scapegoat mechanism: projecting blame onto a single individual or group, then purging them through expulsion or sacrifice. It’s a primal pattern that persists in pogroms, witch trials, and, more recently, cancel culture and internet mobs.

Dr. Girard’s other great insight concerns religion. Far from being the cause of violence, religion, he argued, originated as a means of containing it. Sacrificial rituals diffused mimetic tensions. These systems held – until biblical religion began unravelling them from within. Scripture, Dr. Girard noted, repeatedly sides with the victim: Joseph betrayed by his brothers, the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, and most of all, the crucified Christ. As Christianity spread, it undermined the scapegoat mechanism and implanted a new moral reflex: concern for victims.

But this moral breakthrough came with a paradox. Once victimhood conferred moral authority, people began to compete for it. Mimetic desire now played out as a race to be more oppressed, more offended, more righteous in defence of others. A new rivalry was born – this time, over who suffers most. Dr. Girard, on the other hand, urged us to renounce rivalry and practise forgiveness.

Enter Peter Thiel. The billionaire investor and PayPal co-founder was once a philosophy student at Stanford and a follower of Dr. Girard. He later called himself a “hardcore, unreconstructed Girardian.” It was Dr. Girard’s insights that alerted Mr. Thiel to the power of platforms like Facebook – driven not by information-sharing but by mimetic desire. Mr. Thiel became the first outside investor in Facebook. His early bet on the platform yielded a massive payoff.

Mr. Thiel’s politics defy easy labels. Once a staunch libertarian championing free speech and free markets, he’s since drifted toward national conservatism – a movement fixated on civilizational decline, national identity, and the revival of religion in public life. The shift aligns neatly with Dr. Girard’s warnings about social fragility. Like Dr. Girard, Mr. Thiel criticizes political correctness and the moral theatrics of woke culture.

Mr. Thiel’s 2014 bestseller Zero to One, co-written with Blake Masters, distills Dr. Girard’s message for entrepreneurs: don’t copy – create. Mimetic rivalry leads to stagnation, not innovation. “Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities,” Mr. Thiel wrote, “and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.” That book, coupled with Mr. Thiel’s tireless proselytizing, ignited a surge of interest in Dr. Girard in Silicon Valley. Mr. Thiel also founded Imitatio, a non-profit dedicated to promoting Dr. Girard’s work, and donated millions to support books, research, and conferences.

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More controversially, Mr. Thiel has opened his wallet to politicians. In 2016, he shocked the political world by backing Donald Trump, becoming one of the candidate’s highest-profile donors. His speech that year at the Republican National Convention praised Mr. Trump as a disrupter who would upend a failed establishment and end “stupid wars.” After the election, Mr. Thiel joined Mr. Trump’s transition team and set up shop at Trump Tower, advising on tech policy and vetting appointees.

His enthusiasm didn’t last. Mr. Thiel soon quietly distanced himself from the administration and told The Atlantic in 2023 that voting for Mr. Trump was “like a not very articulate scream for help.” Yet his influence in Mr. Trump’s world lives on – most prominently in Vice-President JD Vance.

Their relationship began in 2011, when Mr. Thiel spoke at Yale Law School, where Mr. Vance was then a student. Mr. Thiel’s speech, laced with Girardian themes, critiqued elite institutions for breeding status-chasing rather than creativity. The two men connected immediately. When Mr. Vance published Hillbilly Elegy in 2016, Mr. Thiel wrote a glowing blurb. A year later, Mr. Thiel brought him into his venture capital firm Mithril. In 2019, Mr. Vance co-founded Narya Capital in Ohio with Mr. Thiel’s backing.

Mr. Thiel’s influence on Mr. Vance was not just professional. In a 2020 article, Mr. Vance credited Mr. Thiel with introducing him to Dr. Girard, whose insights played a major role in Mr. Vance’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. Dr. Girard helped him distinguish two competing inner voices: one urged him to climb the ladder of worldly success, while the other put a premium on moral integrity. Dr. Girard also showed him that scapegoating was a way to dodge self-reckoning. “In Christ,” he wrote, “we see our efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim for what they are: a moral failing.”

Around this time, Mr. Vance also underwent a political conversion – from a vocal Trump critic, who once likened Donald Trump to Hitler, to a populist true-believer persuaded that Mr. Trump was the only one capable of effectively challenging the political establishment. Backed by Mr. Trump’s endorsement and Mr. Thiel’s $15-million donation, the largest ever to a Senate campaign, Mr. Vance won a Senate seat in Ohio in 2022. Only a couple of years later, Mr. Trump tapped him as his running mate. On trade, immigration, and foreign policy, Mr. Vance had become a Trump loyalist in both message and tone.

Mr. Vance’s open admiration for Dr. Girard and his closeness to Mr. Thiel, arguably the world’s most prominent Girardian, has raised provocative questions about how Dr. Girard’s ideas could be shaping the most powerful country on Earth.

Many have called out Mr. Trump’s rhetoric as exemplifying everything Dr. Girard was against. It comes across as textbook scapegoating, casting elites, immigrants, and media enemies as the source of all social ills. Mr. Vance himself seems to have echoed this playbook when he repeated unverified claims during the campaign that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating pets. Critics say he was scapegoating for political gain. Others more charitably suggest that he may have been merely voicing local concerns he believed to be genuine.

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More broadly, Dr. Girard’s critique of political correctness and victimhood culture resonates deeply with conservatives. His warnings about rivalry and mob violence dovetail with concerns about ideological conformity and institutional fragility, while his emphasis on religion as a restraint on human conflict makes him especially appealing to religious traditionalists.

Yet Dr. Girard is no man of the right – or the left. He called himself a centrist and a “political atheist.” These labels, in his usage, mean something more than moderation and skepticism. A true centrist, Dr. Girard said, is not someone who splits the difference but someone who refuses to be captured by the crowd, whether on the right or the left. “The crowd,” he wrote, “tends to be completely on the ‘right’ or on the ‘left.’ An intellectual has the obligation to avoid such dichotomies.” To succumb to political groupthink spells the death of independent thought.

Politics, for Dr. Girard, becomes dangerous when it becomes sacred, when the party, the movement, or the leader becomes an idol. To be a political atheist is to refuse this worship. And that may be Dr. Girard’s final gift to our moment of frenzied polarization – not a theory that take sides, but a challenge to gain enough distance from the fray to see how mimetic it all is.

As Dr. Girard’s ideas quietly migrate from seminar rooms to Senate offices and Silicon Valley boardrooms, we’re left with a paradox. A thinker who diagnosed the madness of crowds now haunts the imagination of men moving masses. A theorist of humility and sacrifice now animates projects of ambition and power.

But Dr. Girard himself foresaw this risk. His work was never meant to be weaponized or converted into ideology. It was a mirror – dark, exacting, and hard to face. To read Dr. Girard seriously is to confront our own rivalries, our own scapegoats, and the ways we imitate not just those we admire, but those we claim to oppose. As he once responded to a question about how to judge his theories, “You will see the success of my theories when you recognize yourself as a persecutor.”