Isegoria

David Marchese of the New York Times asks Curtis Yarvin, why is democracy so bad?

Let me answer that in a way that would be relatively accessible to readers of The New York Times. You’ve probably heard of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

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I do a speech sometimes where I’ll just read the last 10 paragraphs of F.D.R.’s first inaugural address, in which he essentially says, Hey, Congress, give me absolute power, or I’ll take it anyway. So did F.D.R. actually take that level of power? Yeah, he did.

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It’s an excerpt from the diary of Harold Ickes, who is F.D.R.’s secretary of the interior, describing a cabinet meeting in 1933. What happens in this cabinet meeting is that Frances Perkins, who’s the secretary of labor, is like, Here, I have a list of the projects that we’re going to do. F.D.R. personally takes this list, looks at the projects in New York and is like, This is crap. Then at the end of the thing, everybody agrees that the bill would be fixed and then passed through Congress. This is F.D.R. acting like a C.E.O. So, was F.D.R. a dictator? I don’t know. What I know is that Americans of all stripes basically revere F.D.R., and F.D.R. ran the New Deal like a start-up.

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You’ll talk to people about the Articles of Confederation, and you’re just like, Name one thing that happened in America under the Articles of Confederation, and they can’t unless they’re a professional historian. Next you have the first constitutional period under George Washington. If you look at the administration of Washington, what is established looks a lot like a start-up. It looks so much like a start-up that this guy Alexander Hamilton, who was recognizably a start-up bro, is running the whole government — he is basically the Larry Page of this republic.

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I’m doing a Putin. I’ll speed this up.

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It’s not even that democracy is bad; it’s just that it’s very weak. And the fact that it’s very weak is easily seen by the fact that very unpopular policies like mass immigration persist despite strong majorities being against them. So the question of “Is democracy good or bad?” is, I think, a secondary question to “Is it what we actually have?” When you say to a New York Times reader, “Democracy is bad,” they’re a little bit shocked. But when you say to them, “Politics is bad” or even “Populism is bad,” they’re like, Of course, these are horrible things. So when you want to say democracy is not a good system of government, just bridge that immediately to saying populism is not a good system of government, and then you’ll be like, Yes, of course, actually policy and laws should be set by wise experts and people in the courts and lawyers and professors. Then you’ll realize that what you’re actually endorsing is aristocracy rather than democracy.

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I’m an outsider, man. I’m an intellectual. The actual ways my ideas get into circulation is mostly through the staffers who swim in this very online soup. What’s happening now in D.C. is there’s definitely an attempt to revive the White House as an executive organization which governs the executive branch. And the difficulty with that is if you say to anyone who’s professionally involved in the business of Washington that Washington would work just fine or even better if there was no White House, they’ll basically be like, Yeah, of course. The executive branch works for Congress. So you have these poor voters out there who elected, as they think, a revolution.

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The thing that I admire about Vance and that’s really remarkable about him as a leader is that he contains within him all kinds of Americans. His ability to connect with flyover Americans in the world that he came from is great, but the other thing that’s neat about him is that he went to Yale Law School, and so he is a fluent speaker of the language of The New York Times, which you cannot say about Donald Trump. And one of the things that I believe really strongly that I haven’t touched on is that it’s utterly essential for anything like an American monarchy to be the president of all Americans. The new administration can do a much better job of reaching out to progressive Americans and not demonizing them and saying: “Hey, you want to make this country a better place? I feel like you’ve been misinformed in some ways. You’re not a bad person.” This is, like, 10 to 20 percent of Americans. This is a lot of people, the NPR class. They are not evil people. They’re human beings. We’re all human beings, and human beings can support bad regimes.

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But when you look at the way to treat those institutions, treat it like a company that goes out of business, but sort of more so, because these people having had power have to actually be treated even more delicately and with even more respect. Winning means these are your people now. When you understand the perspective of the new regime with respect to the American aristocracy, their perspective can’t be this anti-aristocratic thing of, We’re going to bayonet all of the professors and throw them in ditches or whatever. Their perspective has to be that you were a normal person serving a regime that did this really weird and crazy stuff.

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Fully enlightened for me means fully disenchanted. When a person who lives within the progressive bubble of the current year looks at the right or even the new right, what’s hardest to see is that what’s really shared is not a positive belief but an absence of belief. We don’t worship these same gods. We do not see The New York Times and Harvard as divinely inspired in any sense, or we do not see their procedures as ones that always lead to truth and wisdom. We do not think the U.S. government works well.

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I think that having an effective government and an efficient government is better for people’s lives. 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.

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Whereas if your MacBook Pro was made by the California Department of Computing, you can only imagine it. I’m sorry, I’m here in this building, and I keep forgetting to make my best argument for monarchy, which is that people trust The New York Times more than any other source in the world, and how is The New York Times managed? It is a fifth-generation hereditary absolute monarchy. And this was very much the vision of the early progressives, by the way.

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.

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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.

Our problem, Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) explains, is that the world is run by a regime with a long-run structurally leftist bias:

It evolves leftisms. On Mars, the same regime structure would evolve the same ideas. Oligarchy is inherently leftist, just as monarchy is inherently rightist.

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The engineering problem is that when a marketplace of ideas makes final decisions, the marketplace is polluted with power. When the marketplace is polluted with power, its ideas compete not just on their wisdom, but on their ability to generate power—for example, their power to attract (or reject) funding.

This is why leftism always wins: leftism is what generates more power. Leftism always has more energy and more excitement. This is because its ideas generate power—leftist ideas always involve impact on the world. If science is put in charge of science, science will favor ideas which make science more powerful, which will be or become leftist ideas. Leftism at bottom is just the natural and inevitable human urge to matter.

Everything is science, or at least works like science. If diplomats and foreign-policy experts are put in charge of foreign policy, they will want to take over the world. If they can. If we can. Why wouldn’t they? How can isolationism compete in the market for foreign-policy ideas? Isolationism is to foreign-policy jobs as rat-poison is to rats.

Andrew Prokop of Vox recently spoke with Curtis Yarvin, the monarchist, anti-democracy blogger that many of us still remember as Mencius Moldbug:

When I first asked to speak with Yarvin, he requested that I prove my “professional seriousness as a current historian” by “reading or at least skimming” three books, and I complied. One of them, Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann — a classic of the journalism school canon — describes how people can respond when their previous beliefs about how the world works are called into question.

“Sometimes, if the incident is striking enough, and if he has felt a general discomfort with his established scheme, he may be shaken to such an extent as to distrust all accepted ways of looking at life, and to expect that normally a thing will not be what it is generally supposed to be,” Lippmann wrote. “In the extreme case, especially if he is literary, he may develop a passion for inverting the moral canon by making Judas, Benedict Arnold, or Caesar Borgia the hero of his tale.”

There, I thought of Yarvin — the self-described dark elf who yearns for a king.

Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) asks ordinary Americans who aren’t power-hungry (“hobbits”) to try thinking of their culture and society as a battered wife:

If your husband hits you, your job is not to hit him back.

Winning a battle in the culture war — as in today’s Current Thing, the repeal of Roe v. Wade — is not like leaving your abusive husband. It is certainly not like finding a new husband. No — it is like hitting your husband back.

0% of domestic-violence educators recommend this strategy — at least not till it is time for Plan E and your actual murder feels imminent. In which case it will probably not work anyway. But why not try.

On the level of physical violence, your husband — a bear of a man — will always prevail. But the cops can easily hogtie him like an animal. If they want, they can make it hurt. If you are thinking like a general, not like a frightened mouse, you reason backward from the assistance of such allies.

Unfortunately, there is only one United Nations, and that one is not much help to such battered ones as we — but this is a type of idea — the strategic idea. In a situation of weakness, the only possible reversal must come from strategy rather than struggle.

Hitting your husband back is struggle. Setting a hidden camera before you talk to your husband about his drinking is strategy. Calling the cops is strategy. And in a dangerous situation, strategy is your job.

So if your husband stole something that belonged to you — do you steal it back? What if he literally stole it 50 years ago? Stealing it back is struggle, not strategy.

Since you are in the right, it is the court’s job to be on your side, and it is your job to make the court’s job as easy as possible. Stealing it back is your natural impulse and your moral right — which is exactly why it is such a dangerous trap. It is not your job. And it certainly does not make the court’s job easy.

Of course, the culture war is a sovereign conflict and there is no court to appeal to — only God’s court, in which might makes right — the ultima ratio regum.

Aggressive defense in a culture war is not a bad strategic idea because it displeases some mysterious higher power. In this case, there is no such power. Aggressive defense is a bad strategic idea for other reasons.

It is a bad strategic idea because it makes the problem harder to solve. It is a bad strategy because it is a trap and it always sucks to fall in a trap. Please do not bite at the bait and trip into the wire. Please circle back and try to get behind the trapper.

If you have limited energy and a limited number of possible wins, it is important to focus your limited energy on one kind of win: wins that make future wins easier. By definition, these are the kinds of wins that augment your power. These are real wins.

There is another kind of “win,” wins which expend your power in order to achieve some result you want. These are sometimes called “Pyrrhic victories.” Pyrrhus took the battlefield, but after the battle his chances of winning were reduced. His tactical “victory” was a strategic defeat.

Among those who believe that an unborn baby is a human life, of course, the result of preventing an abortion is saving a life. So the results of this win are lives saved.

This is a weighty argument to set against strategy — but this is war, in which such weights are often balanced, and must be. The battle is important. So is the war.

And how many such lives, really, are saved? Are there really that many American women who want to get an abortion, but can’t afford an $89 ticket to Oakland? We’ll see mobile abortion death vans lined up like taco trucks at the taxi stands outside all major California airports. A girl in trouble won’t even need a reservation… she may not even need to exit the secure area — major airlines now planning to staff their executive lounges with on-demand abortionists, also expert in Swedish massage… abortion tourism as a whole will blossom… specialized abortion spas… abortion bachelorette parties… abortion gender-reveal ceremonies… abortion with dolphins… “our constitution,” per John Adams, “was made only for a moral and religious people.” Does not Pres. Adams’ data point argue strongly for a new constitutional thinking?

Western civilization has been repeating this story over and over for roughly the last half-millennium, Moldbug argues:

The intellectual command economy rules. Public opinion is directed by a dogmatic bureaucracy, rife with pervasive error, systematically incapable of changing its mind.

An unofficial free market for truth evolves. This market cannot be poisoned by power, because it has no power. It develops a higher-quality product than the official narrative.

A new epistemic elite arises. The old intellectual bureaucracy, smart enough to sense its own inferiority, hands power to the new truth market. A new golden age begins.

Dogmatic bureaucracy returns. Slowly and inevitably poisoned by power, the once-vibrant civil society slowly ossifies into a dogmatic bureaucracy, evolving more and more pretty lies until pervasive error is again the norm.

No one sensible could possibly mind a benevolent dictator who was also always right, Moldbug suggests:

Distributed systems are hard. It’s amazing when they work at all. We shouldn’t be surprised to see failure modes. But nor should we have to live with, or be ruled by, pervasive error.

So we should admit that distributed despotism is caused by the way power poisons truth markets. Putting a truth market in power is unsound political engineering. A previously reliable machine will start to evolve pretty lies. This is a slow and degenerative process which cannot be reversed.

Putting a church in charge of the government is not putting God in charge of the government. Putting a truth market in charge of the government is not putting truth in charge of the government.

There’s more than one kind of loyalty:

Intentional loyalty (trying to help the Party), emotional loyalty (believing in the Party), and objective loyalty (being useful to the Party) are three different things. One of Orwell’s grim truths is how easy it is to be objectively useful to a regime by intentionally rebelling against it.

If Foseti were forced to pick the one key tenet of the neoreaction, he’d pick this understanding of Progressivism, borrowed from Moldbug:

To the reactionary, Progressivism is a nontheistic Christain sect. If you don’t understand Progressivism in this way, you simply don’t understand Progressivism.

From this understanding of Progressivism, all other reactionary ideas flow. For example, here’s reactionary history in one sentence is: “Massachusetts, of course, later went on [i.e. after conquering the US in the Civil War] to conquer first Europe and then the entire planet, the views of whose elites in 2007 bear a surprisingly coincidental resemblance to those held at Harvard in 1945.” Similarly, political correctness and diversity-worship really can’t be understood unless they’re viewed as religious beliefs — at which point their operation becomes startlingly clear.

For certain people that have recently decided to call themselves reactionaries, this understanding of Progressivism is an uncomfortable conclusion. For others (like yours truly) the idea that any Western ideology could be entirely devoid of influence from Christianity is absurd.

Mencius Moldbug explains the real emotion behind the Arab Spring:

Actually, Beavis can tell you better. “Fire is cool,” said Beavis. Fire is indeed cool. Americans were bored and needed some better CNN. They wanted to see shit burn. Shit indeed burned, and is still burning. Which was cool. So they got what they wanted. Not too different from the crowd in the Colosseum, just less honest about how they satisfy their very simple chimp/human needs.

And it’s not just sadism that motivates callous altruism. Another source of venal satisfaction is that when you help people, or appear to help them, you become a patron. You gain ownership over them. When you help overthrow the dictator of Egypt, for example, you become in a sense the new government of Egypt. The old dictator was a strongman — the new dictator is a weakman, because he owes his job to someone else. That someone is you — the collective you, but you nonetheless. If you decide you don’t like your weakman, it’s easy to find another weakman.

The fear that someone, somewhere, is exercising power over someone else, is one of the most basic cues of the callous-altruist mentality. Let me kill the master and free the slave. Out of altruism! Not sadism or ambition, of course. My hands are pure.

But slavery is simply dependence, and the default state of the newly “freed” slave is to be dependent on his new master — you, because you killed the old master. So your sadism itch is scratched, because you get to kill; and your ambition itch is scratched, because you become a slavemaster.

(A slavemaster? You may not tell your dependent what to do all day. But if you pay him to do nothing, he is still your slave — you may not ask him to work today, but you could tomorrow. He would have to obey your commands or starve. In other words, he’s a slave. And of course, there’s one thing you’ve surely bought — his vote.)

When Higginson and friends tried this experiment in the 1860s, roughly a fourth of the slaves died as a consequence of the operation. Not to mention all the other people killed. Naturally, since America is a communist country, this episode — which might under other regimes be viewed as an outbreak of mass criminal insanity — is considered one of the most glorious in our glorious history.

What is communism?

In the terminology of the father of modern political science, Gaetano Mosca, communism is a political formula — a pattern of thinking that helps a subject support the organized minority that governs him. Typically a modern political formula allows the subject to feel a sense of political power that convinces him that he is, in a sense, part of the ruling minority, whether he is or not (usually not). Since humans, and in fact all great apes in the chimp lineage, are political animals evolved to succeed in hierarchically ruled tribes, feeling powerful is deeply satisfying. Communism works because it solves this problem, more effectively than any other political formula in wide distribution today.

When it comes to the formal governance process proper, of course, few are actually in the loop. Just as pornography can stimulate the human sex drive without providing any actual sex, democracy can stimulate the human power drive without providing any actual power. But one of the problems with American democracy today is that it’s far too constant.

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Witch-hunting on a purely informal basis, Popehat’s “social consequences,” scratches the political perfectly, because of course here is actual power — the power to harm other human beings — being exercised by ordinary people who are not mysterious DC bureaucrats. Never, ever understate how fun it is to just chimp out for a minute. If you mock it, it’s because you’ve never had a chance to be part of the mob. You can condemn it as a vile, base passion, which of course it is — and a human passion as well. We really all are Caliban.

But we have an angelic nature too, and our angelic forebrains need a cover story while the chimp hindbrain is busy biting off toes and testicles. Pure sadism is enough for the id. It’s not enough for the ego. This is why we need communism.

And what is communism? As a political formula? Perhaps we can define it, with a nice 20th-century social-science jargon edge, as nonempathic altruism. Or for a sharper pejorative edge, callous altruism.

What is callous altruism? Altruism itself is a piece of 20th-century jargon. We could contrast it with the original word for the same thing, obviously too Christian to prosper in our age: charity. When we say charity, of course, we think of empathic altruism.

When we think of charity, we think not just of helping others — but of helping others whom we know and love, for whom we feel a genuine, unforged emotional connection. For whom we feel, in a word, empathy. Understandably, these people tend to be those who are socially close to us. If not people we already know, they are people we would easily befriend if we met them.

Dickens, no stranger to genuine empathy, had a term for nonempathic altruism. He called it telescopic philanthropy. Who is Peter Singer? Mrs. Jellyby, with tenure.

So, for example, in classic Bolshevik communism, who is the revolution for? The workers and peasants. But, in classic Bolshevik communism, who actually makes the revolution? Nobles (Lenin) and Jews (Trotsky), basically. To wit, the groups in Russian society who are in fact most distant — emotionally, culturally, socially — from actual workers and peasants.

Similarly, the most passionate anti-racists in America are all to be found, in early September, at Burning Man. Everyone at Burning Man, with hardly an exception, is highly altruistic toward African-Americans. But, to within an epsilon, there are no African-Americans at Burning Man.

But wait, why is this wrong? What’s wrong with nonempathic altruism? Why does it matter to the people being helped if the brains of their helpers genuinely light up in the love lobe, or not? Loved or not, they’re still helped — right?

Or are they? How’d that whole Soviet thing work out for the workers and peasants?

Heck, for the last 50 years, one of the central purposes of American political life has been advancing the African-American community. And over the last four decades, what has happened to the African-American community? I’ll tell you one thing — in every major city in America, there’s a burnt-out feral ghetto which, 50-years ago, was a thriving black business district. On the other hand, there’s a street in that ghetto named for Dr. King. So, there’s that.

If you look for Americans in 1913 who have the same basic worldview of an ordinary American college student in 2013, you can find them, Mencius Moldbug notes — but you can’t find a lot of them:

The cultural mainstream of 2013 is not descended from the cultural mainstream of 1913, most of whose traditions are entirely extinct.  Rather, it is descended from a very small cultural aristocracy in 1913, whose bizarre, shocking and decadent tropes and behaviors are confined almost entirely to exclusive upper-crust circles found only in places such as Harvard and Greenwich Village.

What were these people called?  By themselves and others?  Communists, generally.  Though when they wanted to confuse outsiders, they’d say “progressive” — and still do.  But poking at this paper-thin euphemism, or any of its friends — “radical,” “activist,” and a thousand like it — is “Red-baiting” and just not done.  You’ve got to respect the kayfabe.

The logic of the witch hunter is simple, Mencius Moldbug explains:

It has hardly changed since Matthew Hopkins’ day.  The first requirement is to invert the reality of power.  Power at its most basic level is the power to harm or destroy other human beings.  The obvious reality is that witch hunters gang up and destroy witches. Whereas witches are never, ever seen to gang up and destroy witch hunters.  By this test alone, we can see that the conspiracy is imaginary (Brown Scare) rather than real (Red Scare).

Think about it.  Obviously, if the witches had any power whatsoever, they wouldn’t waste their time gallivanting around on broomsticks, fellating Satan and cursing cows with sour milk.  They’re getting burned right and left, for Christ’s sake!  Priorities!  No, they’d turn the tables and lay some serious voodoo on the witch-hunters.  In a country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found dangling by his heels from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the size of a baseball, we won’t see a lot of witch-hunting and we know there’s a serious witch problem.  In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn.