By opening The Hour of the Predator with this analogy, Giuliano da Empoli illuminates the forces that he believes are shaping our current moment. On the one hand, there are the figures of the vanishing status quo: the technocrats, and the institutions they created in the aftermath of the Second World War that, for all their flaws, brought eight decades of unparalleled prosperity and peace (in the West at least). Aztecs like Empoli himself, once a senior adviser to the former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi.

Facing them are the conquistadors, or as Empoli calls them, the “predators”: a new class of political leaders and tech oligarchs who thrive on instability, reject institutional constraints, and operate with the ruthlessness of renaissance usurpers. Men like Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, a company that builds data-analysis platforms and supplies the US defense and security establishment. 

Like Empoli, Karp is also an author and in his most recent work, The Technological Republic, published earlier this year, he argues that, we are living in an age where technological power is becoming synonymous with geopolitical power, and that nations which master the latest tech will dominate over those that don’t. Accordingly, Silicon Valley, he believes, has a duty to abandon its obsessive focus on consumer products and to collaborate more closely with government. Yet for Karp — and here’s the crux — the goal is a broader national renewal: this project should focus as much on culture as it does on technology. 

In Empoli and Karp, then, you respectively get the Aztec scribe and the conquistador: Empoli trying to record the end of a world as it slips beneath the waves; Karp sketching out the one destined to replace it.

For Empoli, the obsolescent old order is literalized in the desiccated figure of Joe Biden warbling away at that great post-war institution, the UN. Like the geriatric leaders at the end of the USSR, Biden seems to physically embody the establishment’s exhaustion as the “tired old grandfather” who has survived the Cold War only to see his foreign policy become “a pile of rubble”.

Here Empoli implicitly concedes that the status quo — or, as Dominic Cummings would have it, the “rotting ancien régime” — has been found wanting. The institutions and leaders that defined the post-1945 world were, in the end, unable to save us from a return of history.

What we are living through, Empoli argues, is not an aberration but a return to the historical mean. The temporary guardrails of the late 20th century — the independence of institutions, concern for minorities, fear of international repercussions — are being swept away. The evidence Empoli piles up is not new: we already know that the post-war taboo against using force to change borders was broken in 2014 when Vladimir Putin seized Crimea, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 further drove this point home. War is back in fashion. Global military spending has jumped; nuclear arsenals that had been shrinking since the mid-Eighties are growing again. 

To make sense of this, Empoli reaches back to Machiavelli — to his idea of princely virtù (as opposed to “virtue”) as set down in The Prince and embodied by Cesare Borgia. For Machiavelli, Borgia was the usurper who showed how power could be seized and retained amid chaos. Today’s predators, Empoli’s “Borgians”, are those political and corporate actors who operate as if there were no limits at all. Faced with an obstacle, they merely reach for what Kremlin insiders now call the ruchnoe upravlenie: the “manual override”.

Procedures and hierarchies, law and bureaucracy: if they don’t yield the desired result, the Borgian leader simply bypasses them all. These acts constitute secular miracles, in the literal sense, as direct suspensions of the rules by a higher power. 

El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele is a case in point of Borgian action without restraint. The self-styled “coolest dictator in the world” was elected at 37 to lead what was then the most violent country on Earth. His response was to effectively replace the penal code with a tattoo manual and order the army to arrest anyone marked with gang symbols. Some 80,000 people were swept into the new Tecoluca mega-prison — mostly gang members, but also the odd unfortunate rock fan with ill-chosen ink. Bukele, a former publicist, turned their humiliation viral: staging photoshoots of prisoners lined up on their knees, heads shaved, naked apart from boxer shorts — a Hunger Games spectacle for a TikTok generation. Human rights groups were appalled, but the homicide rate has now fallen tenfold. El Milagro Bukele (“The Bukele Miracle”) is celebrated across Latin America as a feat of Borgian action — of audacious ideas executed with remorseless speed.

The “predators”, according to Empoli, cannot tolerate any limits to their will to power, and so “lawyers” become their “natural enemies” – “the prey that must be devoured to allow this new world to flourish”. Everyone knew who was causing the crime in El Salvador; by bypassing due process Bukele cleaned his country up. If you already suspect that human rights lawyers, judges and “experts” exist to block the popular will, the Borgian who promises to override them starts to look attractive. Rules are no longer a guarantee of freedom but an elite conspiracy to keep you down. And if the law is one battleground for the Bukeles, Mileis and Trumps of the world, culture is another. Empoli argues that “wokeism” has been a “godsend” for them: it intensifies conflict, forces people to choose sides and punishes the undecided — exactly what Borgians want. Like the Ancient Greeks in the civil war, who stripped political rights from those who refused to fight, or Dante, who exiled the fence-sitters to the vestibule of hell, Borgians are the most afraid of the unaligned. Anything that deepens polarization is fuel for their chaos machine.

According to the “predators” — and they are not entirely wrong — the institutions that once underpinned the liberal order have been hollowed out by identity politics and woke pieties; culture has already been captured. This is where apex predator Alex Karp comes in, for whom cultural failure is a symptom of the rot of the old regime and its vulnerability to attack. 

Karp’s book, like Empoli’s then, is partly an elegy: it is rooted in a sense of civilizational loss.

Yet it is also a manifesto on how to bring about the “reconstitution” of a “technological republic”. This, Karp argues, requires a broader “reassertion of national culture and values”, and a revival of shared identity and purpose. Silicon Valley’s engineering elite, he argues, has an “affirmative obligation” to defend the nation and to ensure it does not fall behind in the new arms race. After all, our adversaries “will proceed with the development of artificial intelligence for the battlefield whether or not we do”. But they must also take on a new duty: to articulate “a renewed sense of collective purpose — what the country is, what its values are, and what it will stand for”. Without this, the gains of the “software century” will end up serving a narrow, insulated elite. Reconstitution. Reassertion. Make It Great Again.

Unlike most tech bros, Karp has the intellectual chops to back his argument up: a BA in philosophy, a PhD on “jargon, aggression, and culture”. He knows the terrain he attacks. For him, nothing better captures the malaise of the humanities than the afterlife of Edward Said’s Orientalism, which metastasized into a worldview that made the West an object of permanent moral suspicion. The culprit is clear: an elite whose “most pernicious weapon” is branding swathes of political opinion it disagrees with as lowbrow and uncouth, and which is responsible for national decline, largely because their ideas dominate the nation’s institutions — it’s Rudi Dutschke’s Long March in practice. But where someone like Steve Bannon dreams of a populist countermarch, Karp imagines the cavalry arriving from Palo Alto.

Yet so far, he argues, the tech class has abdicated its responsibilities. When they are not policing the “wording and tone” of chatbots, they rush to raise capital for video-sharing apps and social platforms that track and monetize our every move. But ask them to work with the US military and they balk. Why? Because they’ve absorbed the values now dominant in elite institutions, namely that “a lack of belief in anything, except oneself perhaps, is the most certain path to reward”.

The obvious rejoinder is that refusing to work for the defense industry can be grounded in strong ethical beliefs, especially in a post-Iraq and Afghanistan world, regardless of your patriotism. At the same time, Silicon Valley has built medical technologies and other tools that plainly improve lives. It can also, if it chooses, put its weight behind efforts to protect citizens from the state. After all, mistrust of government is about as American as it gets; it is why, we are endlessly told, they need all those guns.

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For Karp, though, the stakes are too high to indulge such scruples in the unforgiving world now facing the US and its allies. (Incidentally, that formulation “and its allies” always reads like a piece of stray code from a previous program, language from a more politic era now passing into history.) Before arguing about the justice or injustice of a policy, one must understand leverage — or lack of it — at the table. As Donald Trump famously told his Ukrainian counterpart: “You don’t have the cards”. This is Empoli’s Borgian world, the one where, as Hobbes put it, “covenants, without the sword, are but words.”

Both Karp and Empoli believe we are sliding into a dangerous new era of conflict; both think the victors of the last round have grown complacent just as the terrain tilts beneath them. Empoli calls politics a “forever war” in which intellectuals are mostly useless; Karp quotes Sallust on Roman youth “consumed by luxury and greed”, unwilling to serve the state — the “Hard Times Create Strong Men” meme for the Georgetown set.

For Karp, the “strong men” are not Romans but founders in Patagonia fleeces. The West’s adversaries, he says, are ruled by people “closer to founders” than politicians — leaders whose “fates and personal fortunes” are so intertwined with the nations they rule that they “behave as owners”, free to act quickly without checks and balances. Karp, a founder himself, notes that founder-led companies outperform consensus-driven ones. “Nothing much of substance, and certainly nothing lasting, will be created by committee,” he says. But what is democratic government if not a committee of elected officials? This is Empoli’s Borgian in full roar: the dominant urge is always to hit “manual override”.

For Empoli, AI  is the culmination of the Borgian age: a power no one fully understands but that everyone must live under. The tech overlords, uninterested in history or philosophy, fail to see they are resurrecting a pre-Enlightenment world of magic and mystery. We will pray to AI, Empoli says, as our ancestors prayed to the old gods. The French theologian François Fénelon once warned that humans cannot expect a superior power to remain moderate — a lesson, Empoli fears, that has been forgotten just as such a power has finally appeared on the horizon. Like the Borgians, AI ignores process; all that matters is success achieved by any means.

Karp is inevitably more sanguine, arguing instead that AI is underused in the West owing to institutional timidity and cultural self-loathing. For him, AI is almost Trotskyite in its application: seize the power station, not the town hall. Don’t reform the diseased bureaucracy; build the infrastructure that renders it irrelevant.

Empoli gives you the view from the crumbling palace steps of the old order: the sense of being overrun by powers you neither control nor understand. Karp writes from the engine room, arguing that tech founders have both the ability and, more importantly, an obligation to harness those powers. For Karp, Silicon Valley has a debt it owes society because of the“vast license over broad swaths of the economy” that they were granted. “What should the public ask for in exchange? Free email is not enough,” he says. The grim truth is that free email and cat reels were enough: if you had told me in the late Nineties, when I got my first mobile phone, that one day it would log every place I visited and every step I took, I’d have said that 1984 was upon us. Now I use those functions to track my calorie burn. The story of humanity is never how quickly we forget, but how quickly we acclimatize.

Trump’s second term may well become the story of Silicon Valley’s political ascent. Karp notes approvingly that not all founders are apolitical. Elon Musk entered government, straddling space policy, the green transition and the public square for a time. Since January, we have watched something close to founder-style governance: a president who reviles cultural orthodoxy, loathes bureaucracy and wants to make decisions unencumbered by committees. Musk is not American-born; he can never be president. Still, the precedent is set. If a founder does indeed one day become president, the alliance of the oligarchy and the executive will be complete. The boundary between the state and the forces it exists to check will disappear, and America will find itself governed by a single circuitry of power. It may well be too much for the republic to bear.

Read together, Empoli and Karp’s books form a composite x-ray. Empoli shows you the rotting bones of the liberal order and the silhouettes of the predators that have learned to live through it. Karp gives you the brain chemistry of one of those predators — anxious, self-justifying, sometimes admirably clear-eyed, sometimes half in love with the very forces he says oppose us, our “geopolitical adversaries” with their founder-leaders who act unencumbered by tedious committee and Get Stuff Done.

The conclusion is unmistakable. The conquistadors are already here. Some wear uniforms, some keffiyehs, some Silicon Valley t-shirts. Some write elegant little books urging us to save the republic. All are interested in who controls data, drones, and the new gods of AI. And, as Empoli warns and Karp makes clear, they no longer seek merely to influence the republic; they are preparing to replace it.

The British Prime Minister has clearly grasped the weight of the moment, but that’s not to say he will take advantage of it. If Starmer’s robotic, borecore demeanor is the perfect antidote to Trumpian bombast, then, perhaps, cometh the hour, cometh the man? After all, Churchill said of Clement Attlee that he was “a modest man, with much to be modest about”. But in spite of his understated tone, his temperance and his small-C conservatism, the postwar Labour Prime Minister built a very British social democracy, with nationalized industries, trade union power, and a welfare state existing alongside the monarchy and the House of Lords. It was an egalitarian model that suited the times.

Could Starmer become this generation’s Attlee? I doubt it. Rather than seeking to build a New Jerusalem in an age of geopolitical upheaval, Starmer resembles a rabbit in the headlights. He has never been a visionary, but vague nods toward a new social and economic settlement have been a feature of his leadership. Early on in his tenure as Labour leader, he promised a “1945 moment”. For think tank audiences he has heralded an age of “productivism”, a “different model of growth”, and “a different analysis of the state and its role in the economy”. And yet for all the woolly rhetoric about a paradigm shift, we’re unlikely to see totemic policy initiatives or seismic turns; no new model for a drastically changed world.

So far, Starmer has responded to Trumpian carnage by offering us “turbocharged” planning reforms, and the odd tweak to electric vehicle regulations. The nationalization of Scunthorpe’s steelworks has been tentatively mooted, but not before the blast furnaces at Port Talbot, and the refinery at Grangemouth, and the car plant in Luton, have already been wound down. The front bench’s speeches on “securonomics” portend an era of regional growth and “reindustrialization” backed by a dirigiste state. In practical terms, that seems to mean we’ll get a theme park in Bedford. This is the problem with Starmerism: it is good at diagnosing sickness, but not at curing it.

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If he wished to, Starmer could harness this moment to reshape Britain. Now more than ever is the time for a quietly patriotic revival of the protective nation state: in order to drive industrial renewal through investment-led growth, Britain needs national capital. But Labour’s grey, ineffectual technocracy won’t bend the fiscal rules. Instead it explains that painful cuts have to be made to satisfy a faceless quango called the OBR. The idea of ironclad fiscal limits is a nonsense that even the German Right is waking up to. But in Britain, epochal shifts and new world orders will be met not with the spirit of transformative, active government but with a review into a staggered reform of cross-departmental regulatory frameworks.

By contrast, across the Atlantic, a top-down revolution has been initiated, inverting half a century of uniparty common sense in a bid to overturn the multilateral world order. While Starmer’s government is cautious and self-limiting, Trump’s approach is the policy battering ram. He has turned Washington into a postmodern theatre of the absurd, in which nothing is true and everything is possible. Starmer, meanwhile, merely confirms that everything is broken and nothing is possible. But it’s only by doing away with the arcane processes and rotten vestiges of a broken system that a radical agenda can be successfully applied.

Starmer, though, doesn’t have a radical agenda. To the extent that he has politics at all, the Prime Minister hails from a center-left tradition that long ago embraced globalization. His tribe acquiesced to the demands of European integration — freedom of movement of goods, services, labor, and capital — after 1988, when Jacques Delors promised them concessions of “a social Europe” that never quite transpired. And after the defeats of the Thatcher period, the more moderate voices of the labor movement abandoned class struggle in favor of internationalized systems of liberal rights. This is Starmer’s intellectual milieu.

Tony Blair said that globalization was a positive inevitability: “you might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer”, he told a skeptical Labour Party at their 2005 conference. But winter is coming, and it’s the populist Right that now makes the weather. In such a climate, the Left might remember it wasn’t always this way.

In fact, Trump has achieved what the radical British Left never could. In the Seventies and Eighties, the Labour Party’s Left flank coalesced around the so-called “Alternative Economic Strategy”. As a young Bennite, Jeremy Corbyn was an early supporter. It was a manifesto for a siege-economy socialism: a flailing British industrial sector would be revived behind high, protective walls made up of prohibitive import controls and tariffs, insulating the working classes from foreign competition. A Trumpian-style dream.

During this period, it was the Right which advocated closer trading relationships with continental and world markets. It promoted a form of globalization that favored highly mobile, borderless capital investing in just-in-time supply chains spanning across oceans. Margaret Thatcher campaigned vociferously in favor of the EEC’s free-trade bloc membership, while the Left, still dominated at the time by a strong trade union movement, was doggedly opposed.

As the old labor movement waned and Soviet socialism collapsed, a more diffuse, counter-cultural Left came to the fore. New radicals in the Nineties and 2000s based their efforts not on workplace organizing or even on the old mission of proletarian liberation, but instead on the construction of more informal, autonomous, horizontally-organized networks. They could be found demonstrating against free trade in the “Battle of Seattle”, or against the G8 in Genoa, or adding a turf mohican to the Churchill statue in Parliament Square. Starmer himself even dabbled in some of the early manifestations of this new eco-Left crowd in the late Eighties.

This Left was more middle class, more socially libertarian, more anarchic. Some of its foot soldiers were influenced by Italian “post-workerism”, an obscure offshoot of Marxism, while others joined in New Age voyages of self-discovery in raves, squats, or direct action protests. They were the era’s primary face of anti-globalization, although they were more concerned by ecology, Third World underdevelopment, corporate malfeasance, consumerist alienation, and cultural homogeneity than the plight of the British working class.

But neither of these distinct Lefts succeeded in overthrowing the system of liberalized trade and open markets that rendered the traditional nation state impotent. Instead, a real-estate billionaire — and a Republican to boot — has upended the Washington consensus. The final humiliation is that Trump not only succeeded where the British Left failed, but that he did so flanked by grinning trade unionists. After hosting grateful miners in the White House, he couched tariff policy in the language of pro-worker social justice. “I’m proud to be the president for the workers, not the outsourcers,” he wrote, “the president who stands up for Main St, not Wall St; who protects the middle class, not the political class.” It’s a screed that could have been delivered by any Berniecrat.

MAGA, in its mad belligerence, has reminded us that states can act; policies can be implemented; you can just do things. The Left used to say that another world is possible. And they were right. Another world is possible. It’s being built right now. Just not in the way that they hoped.

In the last decade it has become de rigueur in certain circles to quote the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: to remind ourselves that we are in “an interregnum”, in which “the old world is dying and the new struggles to be born”. In these periods, we have been assured, “morbid symptoms appear”. But the interregnum is coming to an end. The morbid symptoms are becoming a new normal. Without the vulgarity, the bluster, and the oligarchical nature of MAGA’s second coming, the Left needs to learn how to wield the populist playbook. For this is politics now. It is not an aberration. Labour must become a government of insurgency, or else be confined to the dustbin of history.