Over recent decades, a computer programmer and prolific internet commenter has risen from the obscurity of forums and pseudonymous blogs to the pages of this newspaper, as a friend to Vice President JD Vance and as a person who influences many of the people who influence President Donald Trump.
Posting as Mencius Moldbug, Curtis Yarvin built a small but influential following among the more reactionary segments of the tech elite, providing them with an elaborate and conspiratorial vision of a nation under the heel of a tyrannical and suffocating liberalism, a broad group of individuals and institutions he calls “the Cathedral.” The path to national renewal, Yarvin argues, is to unravel American democracy in favor of rule by a benevolent CEO-monarch drawn from a cadre of venture capitalists and corporate oligarchs.
With views like these, it is not difficult to understand how Yarvin won the admiration of powerful patrons. He does little more than tell them what they want to hear. If he had been born a minor noble scrounging for influence in the court of Louis XIV, he would have been among the first to exclaim the absolute authority of the king, to tell anyone who would listen that yes, the state, it’s him.
We do not have kings in the American republic, but we do have capitalists. And in particular, we have a set of capitalists who appear to be as skeptical of liberal democracy as any monarch. They want to hear that they are the indispensable men. They want to hear that their parochial business concerns are as vital and important as the national interest. Aggrieved by the give and take of democratic life, they want to hear that they are under siege by the nefarious and illegitimate forces of a vast conspiracy. And hungry for the kind of status that money can’t buy, they want to hear that they deserve to rule. Yarvin affirms their fears, flatters their fantasies and gives them a language with which to express their great ambitions.
Never mind that the actual substance of his ideas leaves much to be desired. Take his illuminating interview with The New York Times, in which he gives readers a crash course in his overall political vision. He makes a studied effort to appear as learned and erudite as possible. But linger just a little on his answers and you’ll see the extent to which they’re under-proofed and overbaked.
Consider his claim that “effective government” requires a strongman. He uses consumer goods as evidence:
“When I ask people to answer that question, I ask them to look around the room and point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy, because these things that we call companies are actually little monarchies. You’re looking around, and you see, for example, a laptop, and that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy.”
If Yarvin believes that Apple is a monarchy, he may not actually understand what a monarchy is. Tim Cook is not the sovereign of the Apple computing company; he serves at the pleasure of its board. Moreover, to say the laptop was “made by Apple” is to elide the extent to which product development, like any other form of high-level industrial production, is a collective and collaborative process. Your MacBook is not forged by a singular will. The idea that you can “thank monarchy” for an iPhone is ridiculous, and the idea that this could be a political prognosis is absurd.
More egregious in the interview are the moments when Yarvin gets basic history wrong in an attempt to demonstrate the sophistication of his views. He answers the first question of the exchange — “Why is democracy so bad?” — with what he thinks is a pointed rejoinder:
“You’ve probably heard of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I do a speech sometimes where I’ll just read the last 10 paragraphs of FDR’s first inaugural address, in which he essentially says, Hey, Congress, give me absolute power, or I’ll take it anyway. So did FDR actually take that level of power? Yeah, he did.”
This is flatly untrue. You can read Roosevelt’s first Inaugural Address to see for yourself. There is no threat to seize power. “I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require,” Roosevelt said. “These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.”
If Congress fails to act, Roosevelt does not say that he will do it himself and seize absolute power. He says that he will ask Congress to grant him “broad executive power” to “to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” But even this, Roosevelt emphasizes, would be done within the bounds of the Constitution and in fidelity to the principles of American democracy.
One of Roosevelt’s most essential qualities, in fact, was his belief in the superiority of representative government. It was part of the engine of his ambition and motivated him to try everything under the sun to arrest the crisis of the Depression and restore the public’s faith in a system that was teetering on the edge of collapse and facing pressure from authoritarians at home and abroad. To read Roosevelt as anything other than a small-D democrat is to demonstrate a fundamental ignorance of his life and career.
More laughable than Yarvin’s claims about Roosevelt are his claims about the well-being of Black Americans after slavery. “If you look at the living conditions for an African American in the South, they are absolutely at their nadir between 1865 and 1875,” he says. “They are very bad because basically this economic system has been disrupted.”
All of this comes after his interviewer, my Times colleague David Marchese, pushes Yarvin on his selective use of historical events. It’s supposed to be a comeback to Marchese, but it fails completely. The only way it is possible to say that living conditions for Black Americans were worse after emancipation is to ignore the actual conditions of slavery and to treat the human experience as reducible to an estimate of per capita gross domestic product.
The fact of the matter is that the material deprivation of freedom in the postwar South was a small burden compared to the tyranny of bondage. In freedom, Black Americans owned their bodies. They could have families as they chose to see fit. They could keep their children. Another way to think of this is just to ask a series of simple questions: Were Black Americans better off in a world in which they were owned as property to be sold to the highest bidder, and where their sons and daughters were bound and trafficked for profit? Do I even need to answer that?
These are some of the daring and unconventional views of a bold iconoclast. And they are nonsense.
The truth is that Yarvin is a stock character. Theophrastus identified his type as “the flatterer,” the person “who will say as he walks with another, ‘Do you observe how people are looking at you? This happens to no man in Athens but you.’” Plutarch warned his readers of those who are “merely reflecting the image of other people’s emotions and manners and feelings,” of those who “besieges with praise the ears of those who are fond of praise.” From Shakespeare, we have Regan; from J.R.R. Tolkien, Gríma.
There’s no there there — only an obsequious commitment to the interests of the powerful. Yarvin serves exactly one purpose, and that is to spread the idea that this country would be better served by a dictatorship of capital, spearheaded by tech elites and their allies in government.
Vance is a protégé of Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and occasional ally of Trump. Sitting close to the action at Trump’s inauguration on Monday were the members of his Cabinet. Just in front of them, in full view of the cameras, were Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk, the richest man in the world.
Yarvin is a charlatan, but he has done his job. His patrons are in power.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
