[gizmo]

> do you think Peter Thiel would assert that life would improve if large swathes of the populace were disenfranchised

Yes! He literally says so:

Thiel: I no longer believe that freedom [meaning capitalism] and democracy are compatible.

Thiel wants to save capitalism, and therefore rejects democracy because in his view you can't have both. That means he wants to disenfranchise everybody except the monied.

[stcredzero]

Thiel wants to save capitalism, and therefore rejects democracy because in his view you can't have both. That means he wants to disenfranchise everybody except the monied

I think his view is a bit more nuanced than that. I think that he'd say that the monied are the only ones really enfranchised now, and that public opinion is currently manipulated by those actors through their influence over the media. In such conditions, we'd expect any democracy to be dysfunctional.