I think this is a blind spot from American civics classes. Democracy is assumed to be synonymous with/inextricably connected to liberty, whereas in reality liberty, at most, either requires democracy at some point in history to change the culture; or it's possible that they merely correlate. My impression is that Thiel thinks (as do I - and as did, to a lesser extent possibly due to inability to envision mass media and administrative state, the Federalist Papers) that liberty is far, far more important than democracy; and that the combination of constantly bribing the voters and the ratchet effect of the administrative state makes the increasingly direct democracy in the US a threat to it. He supports enlightenment principles, he just thinks the civic culture has degraded so far that the best bet to get them is to enforce them from above. It's not unprecedented - that is what Supreme Court was doing when it shutting down everything from FDR's price and wage fixing, to segregated schools. Thiel wants to do it more, and I agree - wouldn't it be wonderful if a non-democratic, liberal (in the original sense) court could also throw away e.g. internment camps during WW2, instead of bowing to "democratic" pressure?