The Guardian is writing about the obscure ‘dark enlightenment’ blogger influencing the next US administration:
Curtis Yarvin is hardly a household name in US politics. But the “neoreactionary” thinker and far-right blogger is emerging as a serious intellectual influence on key figures in Donald Trump’s coming administration in particular over potential threats to US democracy.
Yarvin, who considers liberal democracy as a decadent enemy to be dismantled, is intellectually influential on vice president-elect JD Vance and close to several proposed Trump appointees. The aftermath of Trump’s election victory has seen actions and rhetoric from Trump and his lieutenants that closely resemble Yarvin’s public proposals for taking autocratic power in America.
Trump’s legal moves against critics in the media, Elon Musk’s promises to pare government spending to the bone, and the deployment of the Maga base against Republican lawmakers who have criticized controversial nominees like Pete Hegseth are among the measures that resemble elements of Yarvin’s strategy for displacing liberal democracy in the US.
One of the venues in which Yarvin has articulated the strategy include a podcast hosted by Michael Anton, a writer and academic whom Trump last week appointed to work in a senior role under secretary of state nominee Marco Rubio.
[…]
Yarvin is the originator of the neoreactionary or “dark enlightenment” movement, whose early ideas he developed on a blog called Unqualified Reservations in 2007 and 2008 under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. He now writes a Substack newsletter under his own name and the far-right imprint Passage Publishing recently published an anthology of his earlier writing.
The Guardian previously reported that Passage Publishing’s founder is Jonathan Keeperman, a former UC Irvine lecturer who had previously operated under the pseudonym “L0m3z”.
For years, Yarvin has consistently held to a number of explicitly anti-democratic beliefs: republican self-government has already ended; real power is exercised oligarchically in a small number of prestigious academic and media institutions he calls the Cathedral; and a sclerotic democracy should be replaced by a strict hierarchy headed by a single person whose role is that of a monarch or CEO.
He also thinks that current liberal democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Every human organisation contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Some with less barriers to that than others.
Without liberal democracy it is impossible to have individuals. Everyone would need to prove allegiance to the regime.
Trump would not have existed politically if the Democrats had a institutionalised(by law) political oligarchy in USA. Look at Iran Islamic Republic. It is a Islamic oligarchy, you can’t go outside it.
Aww, it’s so nice the Good and Great deigned to notice something that was hot stuff 16 years ago. LMAO. =)
Anyhow, this train have sailed, did it not? Trump is not CEO.
We have a good indicator already. Trump’s idea was to build Space Force, i.e. reboot NASA on a fresh command chain. Now he can only “reform” it, which is very likely to be a waste of time and efforts useless beyond decorative level. Just as Moldbug pointed out, yes.
Thus, most likely hypothesis: Trump was dragged back to prevent the consequences of mismanagement from rolling all the way to various catastrophic results already in sight… but the backseat drivers won’t let him do almost anything useful.
The “liberal democracies” are nothing of the sort. They are extremely illiberal by classical standards, and they are notoriously undemocratic.
2020 – USA stolen election.
2024 – Georgia ignored election.
2024 – Romania annulled election.
2024 – France government failure.
2024 – Germany government failure after partial ban on opposition parties.
2024 – Ukraine cancels elections, bans opposition parties, murders journalists.
Everywhere in “liberal democracy”, the ruling elite are replacing the native people with hostile foreigners.
McChuck says:
Eh, the Team Orange Revolution was always a petty junta. They arrested opposition etc at back in 2021. See for example this bag of dirt on them: https://im1776.com/2022/05/27/servant-of-the-corrupt/
But other than that, yes. As theocratic forces lost their edge and failed at bullshitting more competent people into cooperation, things went to the crapper beyond recovery, all over the Circus World.
Yarvin’s current ideas are a startup CEO President such as Lincoln or FDR. Any person who can read Article 2 of the Constitution could get the strangest idea that the President is in charge of the Executive Branch, instead of the current situation of other way round, with the Executive Branch manipulating a figurehead POTUS, really the situation since Truman, but Harry Truman didn’t shit himself in public.
The Guardian can update from Yarvin’s substack instead of mixing and mashing his ideas from 15 years ago with the present. It can.
But it’s so much fun to cut and paste a boogeyman to “our democracy.”
Yarvin’s current target for some months BTW is Congress, not seizing the throne. That’s perfectly in line with the Constitution.
VXXC says:
What would they do, make an actual effort, and risk catching thoughtcrime cooties?
Most of that crowd are basically C students, cribbing from each other if at all possible. That’s why they are being replaced by LLM parrot-ware.