Introduction To Series On Curtis Yarvin
Trump acts on his stupid ideas, and on the foolish chatter of whatever loon has his ear. He and his courtiers and henchmen recite crackpot theories to justify working for their own ends, with no pretense of oversight by Trump or Republican legislators.
Some of these weirdo theories, like the tariff gibberish and Christian Nationalism, are well-known. They’ve been discussed in progressive circles for some time, and are occasionally acknowledged in the billionaire media. What I did not know, and what was rarely reported in the media I read, was the influence of a group of anti-democracy advocates.
Recently I began to read about Curtis Yarvin. Heather Cox Richardson mentioned him in one of her Letters To An American, and commenter TruthBtold linked to this substack reporting on Yarvin. Here’s an article in Commonweal, Yarvin’s Case Against Democracy.
In 2012 Yarvin gave a speech titled How To Reboot The US Government. He gave more speeches and interviews on the subject and drew the attention of rich techbros and right-wing politicians like J.D. Vance. It looks like Elon Musk used Yarvin’s ideas first to remake Twitter as a hang-out for creeps, and then as a template for destroying our govenrment from the inside.
Yarvin claims that democracy has failed and that the only way forward is to get rid of it and replace it with a dictatorship, or a monarchy. It’s a view shared by a lot of people on the far right, and for different reasons by the same filthy rich thugs who’ve been wrecking our country out of hatred for the New Deal and all things that make life better for working people. I’ll be looking into Yarvin’s writings in my next series.
Background
This stuff is wild. To orient myself, I read a chapter written by Joshua Tait in a book, Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy. The book is supposedly available through your library. Tait focuses on a blog Yarvin wrote under the name Mencius Moldbug, Unqualified Reservations. He gives an introduction to Yarvin’s theory of neoreaction, and his rejection of democracy.
Neoreaction’s basic assumption is that humans desire power. Interpreting democracy through this framework, Moldbug claims that democracy’s appeal is that it disperses power widely, indulging the mass desire for useless fragments of power. Since power-seeking is pervasive, society trends toward greater division of power and a concomitant erosion of order. Democracy is a “dangerous, malignant form of government which tends to degenerate, sometimes slowly and sometimes with shocking, gut-wrenching speed, into tyranny and chaos.”
Trump and his henchmen don’t acknowledge the anti-democratic aspect of Yarvin’s thought, at least not so far, unless you consider Trump’s third-term garbage. They just follow his plan for destroying the institutions that diffuse power; and work at concentrating power into the hands of Musk and Trump. Yarvin’s views can be seen as justifying the unitary executive theory, and for presidential kingship, as contemplated by John Roberts and his anti-democratic colleagues in Trump v. US.
In his blog Yarvin traces out the development of his theories of history, economics and other matters. The blog ran from 2007 to 2014. He has a substack, Gray Mirror, which began in May 2020 (after Tait’s article) where he posted drafts of his book Gray Mirror: Fascicle I: Disturbance, published January 2025. The title is Yarvin trolling: fascicle is close to fascist, but means something else. I’m reluctant to buy the book so I plan to read from the two online sources first. He shows up on other social media sites, but I’m not going there.
I plan to focus on the anti-democracy material and his views of human nature. We’ll see how that holds up.
Defending Democracy
I won’t defend democracy here. I follow Americans like John Dewey and Richard Rorty. See, e.g. Rorty’s Achieving Our Country. My rationale for defending democracy is my understanding of human nature, which I discussed in my series on individuality.
But I also think that we as a nation have for a long time regarded democracy as background for our lives. We see it as a game we watch on TV. We yell at politicians as we would yell at referees. We don’t think of democracy as making any demands on us, much less as something that requires our constant maintenance and improvement.
Caveat
It’s very difficult to write about material with which you fundamentally disagree. There’s a strong tendency to minimize any good points, and to mock rather than try to understand.
I plan to be very careful about separating Yarvin’s words from my thoughts on how to understand what he’s saying, and to try to indicate where I’m having trouble following an argument, so that readers can check my thinking. That should help with the bias problem.
It’s important to note that Yarvin isn’t some Qanon weirdo cranking out conspiracies. I assume that he’s read the material he cites, and that he has tried to be intellectually honest. That distinguishes him from craven ideologues like the SCOTUS right-wingers and from lazy hacks like David Brooks.
Final thought
Yarvin and the filthy rich idiots he influences are dangerously wrong, wrong in a deeply fundamental way. They think they know what’s best. Not what’s best for you and your family and community. They think they know what’s best for the future of the human race.