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.