The Blogger Who Hates America

Curtis Yarvin’s popularity keeps growing. His intellectual rigor, not so much.

(Photo by David Merfield via Wikimedia Commons.)

Three months into Donald Trump’s second presidential term, it has become common for his critics to point out that both he and his entourage act as if he were not the president of a republic but a king whose power is unconstrained by other branches of government: entitled to have his cabinet picks confirmed, to rule by executive order with no intervention from the courts, and even to have his “desires” fulfilled when it comes to the acquisition of a foreign territory. Trump himself has boosted such comparisons with “Long Live the King” and other self-celebrating proclamations.

This comes at a time when the Trump-adjacent intellectual sphere includes an actual, self-identified supporter of absolute monarchy: “neo-reactionary” writer Curtis Yarvin, who is considered a father of the so-called “Dark Enlightenment” movement. Yarvin, a 51-year-old software engineer and former tech entrepreneur who reinvented himself as a public intellectual in a blog he launched in 2007 under the pen name “Mencius Moldbug,” was described by one podcaster last September as “the philosopher behind JD Vance.” While this is likely a dramatic overstatement, and it’s unclear how well the two know each other, Vance has cited Yarvin as an influence.

To call Yarvin a White House guru or ideologue in Trump’s second term would be an exaggeration—just as it’s an exaggeration to call the Russian “Dark Enlightenment” prophet Alexander Dugin, to whom Yarvin has been sometimes compared, “Putin’s brain.” Yarvin is not Vance’s brain. But his proposals for an autocratic American revolution—a drastic expansion of executive power, aggressive moves to crush the universities and the media, a massive purge of civil servants and their replacement with people loyal to the new leader—do bear an uncanny resemblance to the start of Trump’s second term.

All this makes Yarvin worth examining. Obviously, it would be hopeless to tackle the entirety of what one right-wing blogger called “the inexhaustible reams of his musings,” first on the 2007-2014 blog and then in the Substack newsletter Yarvin launched in 2020; but it’s certainly possible to read enough to get a good sense of his views. And while Yarvin is something of a troll, particularly in his “Mencius Moldbug” era—as the deliberately ridiculous pseudonym suggests—there is no reason to think that his posture as an ultra-reactionary political thinker is an act.

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One thing to know about Yarvin: while some have called him a monarchist, he pointedly shuns the label. That’s because, in modern discourse, “monarchist” denotes support for constitutional monarchy, which he despises as a totally discredited idea. No, he’s a “royalist”—a supporter of absolute, “divine-right monarchy.” In case you’re wondering, Yarvin is an atheist—but he’s got an explanation:

To an atheist, the King’s authority must be absolute, not because he is appointed by God, but because he is appointed by no one. If someone appoints him, that man is King. If their roles are divided—the famous “balance of powers” or “checks and balances”—they will struggle, and one or the other prevail. Probably the many over the few. … Thus the modern divine-right monarchist says, not that God has chosen any person or family to rule, but that sovereignty exists and someone must hold it. The more narrowly and stably held the imperium is, the safer it is.

If we believe in democracy, Yarvin writes, it’s simply because we’ve been raised to believe in it, much as 16^th-century Spaniards were raised to believe that Catholicism was the one true faith and other belief systems were false and wicked. Yarvin, the son of liberal civil servants who spent part of his childhood in Portugal due to his father’s Foreign Service posting, was himself for a long time a libertarian and an adherent of a foreign-policy liberalism he labels “Georgetownism”: a belief in America’s global democracy-promoting mission. Then, around 2006, he had his anti-democratic epiphany, probably due at least in part to the fiasco of America’s democracy-building in Iraq.

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What Is National Conservatism?

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In Yarvin’s view, American democracy has run its course—and was, in fact, bad from the beginning. He described “the American Rebellion” as rooted in “thuggery, treason, and—above all—hypocrisy.” He thinks democracy has a natural tendency to deteriorate into totalitarianism: communism and fascism, which claimed to act in the name of the people, were simply monstrous outgrowths of democracy, and while democracy’s progression toward tyranny can be fast or slow, like that of cancer, it is virtually inevitable. Moreover, Yarvin believes that America and other Western democracies in the 21^st century have already reached a state of soft totalitarianism: rule by a hegemonic elite of federal bureaucracy, academia, and liberal media—what he calls “the Cathedral”—either squashes or neutralizes political and cultural challenges.

Yarvin’s proposed alternative is something he calls “neocameralism”—a modern version of “cameralism,” an 18^th-century German political theory that combined “enlightened absolutism” à la Frederick the Great’s Prussia with well-run public administration and centralized state management of the economy. In the modern version, per Yarvin’s vision, the state will be run like a business, with the country’s residents as its “customers” and with a CEO-monarch at its head (perhaps drawn, in America, from the ranks of Big Tech CEOs). A state can be a family business—a traditional hereditary monarchy—or a “joint-stock company” with a board of directors that selects the CEO but does not interfere in governance, and “shareholders” who elect that board. Yarvin never clearly defines who those “shareholders” are, and he is equally fuzzy on whether the board could fire the CEO-monarch; at least, I couldn’t find any direct statement on the subject in several posts in which he explicates his neo-royalist theory. Given Yarvin’s insistence that the monarch’s authority must be absolute, the answer is probably “no.”

In an attempt to debunk purported pro-democracy myths, Yarvin asserts that “rule of law,” not democracy, is responsible for peace, prosperity and freedom. Yet he has also stressed that the sovereign himself cannot be subject to the law since any such constraints would nullify absolutism. Yarvin is apparently unaware of the contradiction—and when he tries to explain why his unconstrained autocrat would not become an oppressive tyrant, his answers fall apart under the slightest scrutiny.

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For instance: the monarch would respect human dignity, equality, and the law because to do otherwise would harm the state’s reputation. But it’s not clear how this reputational damage would occur, given that Yarvin also endorses harsh restrictions on any speech that could mobilize public opinion against the monarch’s conduct: “a government is not a government unless it takes all necessary steps to preserve itself.” Or: trampling human rights would be bad for business, since it would drive away foreign investment and even tourism. But Western dealings with China suggest otherwise. Or: the sovereign would see himself as “God’s proxy on earth” and would feel compelled to act in godly ways. But does that mean Yarvin’s ideal absolute monarchy must, after all, be built on religious foundations? And didn’t numerous actual monarchs act in ungodly ways even in highly religious societies?

In the end, as George Mason University economist Robin Hanson pointed out in a scathing 2010 critique, Yarvin simply asks us to accept his philosophical deductions that “iron fists would rule best,” and that such power would not be prone to abuse or corruption.

Yarvin’s arguments haven’t gotten better in the last fifteen years. In a recent New York Times interview, he cited the Times itself as a successful organization run like a monarchy. But that’s a nonsensical argument when projected onto the state, since the Times exists within the constraints of law, justice, and policies that protect employees: Yarvin seems to forget the fact that New York Times company chairman A.G. Sulzberger couldn’t, for instance, have a disobedient staff member whipped or pilloried in the lobby of the Times building even if he wanted to.

As Hanson asked in the conclusion of his Moldbug rebuttal, “What more can one say to such a person?”

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As the above suggests, Yarvin’s political theories are not exactly coherent or well-thought-out; New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie aptly calls them “underproofed and overbaked.” Poking holes in his arguments is like shooting fish a barrel: for instance, his claim that citizens of modern democracies blindly accept their culture’s dominant faith (much as subjects of 16^th-century Catholic monarchies did) ignores the fact that modern liberal societies offer easy access to alternative ideas, including critiques of the dominant creed. Yarvin’s own ideas were recently featured in the pages of The New York Times.

Yarvin’s reflections on history are equally inept. Even fellow far-rightist Charles Haywood has scathingly criticized him for a woefully superficial knowledge—and, in many cases, utter ignorance—of both history and religion, as well as his habit of using cherry-picked nuggets from biased sources (as in his tirades against the American Revolution). Bouie points out that, in his Times interview, Yarvin completely mischaracterizes Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address as a demand for dictatorial power. And his claim in the same interview that the U.S. Civil War left formerly enslaved blacks worse off than they were before relies on such arguments as “just Google slave narratives” and “there was a recent historian who published a thing.”

Or take a more distant example: To illustrate the supposed superiority of traditional monarchies, Yarvin asserts that while Hitler and Stalin had to resort to extraordinary levels of violence and propaganda to control the populace, Elizabeth I had no need to do that since “her legitimacy was a function of her identity.” In fact, as blogger Scott Alexander points out in his rebuttal to neo-reactionaries, Elizabeth’s reign was preceded by an extremely bloody history in which the legitimacy of monarchs was repeatedly contested: for example, the 15^th-century War of the Roses, several rebellions, and succession disputes that included the execution of Lady Jane Grey.

Elizabeth herself, prior to her ascension to the throne, was at one point literally declared illegitimate after Henry VIII invalidated his marriage to her mother, Anne Boleyn—and nearly lost her own life to dynastic power struggles when her predecessor Mary briefly imprisoned her in the Tower on suspicion of colluding with rebels.

By way of contrast with the “demotic” dictatorships of the 20^th century, Yarvin passingly remarks that “a Tudor Holocaust” would be “inconceivable.” But in reality, the reign of Henry VIII featured levels of violence comparable to 20^th-century totalitarian regimes. There were as many as 57,000 executions during Henry’s 38-year reign; since England’s population at the time was only about 2.5 million, that’s roughly 2.3% of the population. Stalin’s body count, by Timothy Snyder’s estimate, was six to nine million out of a population of 170 million, or 3.5 to 5.3%.

Yarvin also invokes the dramatic rise in crime in England over the course of the democratic 20^th century—a 50-fold increase in “indictable offenses” from 1900 to 1992—as evidence that the rise of democracy leads to social decline. Scott Alexander points out that the statistics he references are not entirely reliable: what counted as an “indictable offense” in the 20^th century was likely inflated by more reporting of crime or better policing, or even changes in the definition of crime. (It’s very likely that the surge of arrests in England in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, had to do with marijuana use; meanwhile, homicide rates rose but remained quite low.)

It is undeniable that Victorian and Edwardian England was a fairly low-crime society compared to later decades. But it is also worth noting that this was a dramatic change from earlier periods: numerous scholars have discussed the astonishing drop in both violent and nonviolent crime in British society in the second half of the 19^th century. The reason this is a salient fact is that the Victorian era in England was also a time of remarkable liberal gains, including an expansion of the franchise and other rights and the curtailment of royal powers. Liberal thought was dominant, and Yarvin himself ruefully acknowledges that Queen Victoria, albeit a conservative who opposed the republican revolutions of 1848, was also a staunch opponent of reaction and favored gradual expansion of the “privileges” of the people. In other words: Yarvin’s supposed triumph of stable royalist rule was actually a triumph of ascendant bourgeois liberalism.

And what is there to say of Yarvin’s claim, in a tribute to his arch-reactionary 19^th century idol Thomas Carlyle, that liberal democracy has reduced Britain’s lower classes today to “levels of squalor, ignorance and degradation perhaps unsurpassed in human history”? His source is conservative British pundit Theodore Dalrymple’s 2001 book on the British underclass; but it is doubtful that Dalrymple would endorse such a ludicrous thesis. Even adjusting for hyperbole (all of human history?) and limiting the comparison to Europe, Yarvin could try reading Carlyle’s contemporary Charles Dickens—Oliver Twist, for instance. Or one could read scholarly works about regular famines in 17^th and 18^th-century France, or infant and child mortality in London from the mid-16^th to the mid-19^th century. (At one point, only a third of children survived past their fifth birthday.)

Finally, if Yarvin’s excursions into the past are bizarrely rose-colored, his proposals for the future quickly rip away the benevolent and even socially liberal coating in which he dresses up his reactionary vision. Take, for instance, his post in January 2022 during the buildup to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in which he not only cheered the invasion but suggested that, if Trump wins in 2024, he should withdraw from Europe completely and “give Russia a free hand on the continent.” Russia, Yarvin writes, must be encouraged not only to take Ukraine but to reprise its 19^th-century role of “defeating liberalism in Europe.” (More bad history from Yarvin: in fact, imperial Russia’s stint as the anti-liberal “policeman of Europe” under Nicholas I was almost entirely a failure.)

In Yarvin’s fantasy, a Russia-dominated continental Europe becomes a “laboratory of reaction” in which Putin will lend European nations “a helping bear-paw in restoring [their] traditional culture and form of government—the more autocratic and legitimate, the better.” This also involves Russia itself becoming “more autocratic,” doing away with the pretense of elections, and building “an absolute, Tsarist-style monarchy.” Somehow, Yarvin imagines that all this can be accomplished without much violence, since, according to him, democratic ideas are alien to Europe anyway. He also seems to forget his own argument that traditional monarchies were (supposedly) not very violent because they already had built-in legitimacy—which the new autocratic regimes he envisions would not.

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Yarvin’s influence should not be overstated. Some of his concepts, such as “the Cathedral” as a term for the academic/political/media establishment which sets the boundaries of mainstream political opinion, have gained widespread currency on the right and even some centrists annoyed by “woke” progressivism; as Andrew Prokop has written in Vox, the concept “anticipated the ‘Great Awokening’ and the social justice wars.” However, it also vastly underrates the diversity of opinion that is possible within today’s “establishment,” despite the real groupthink that undoubtedly exists. What’s more, most people who use the term “Cathedral” likely have little use for the rest of Yarvin’s royalist ideology. That goes double for people who use a far more common Yarvin neologism: “redpilled,” a Matrix reference popularly used today to mean “awakened to deliberately concealed truths.”

And yet the fact remains that this trollish, ill-informed pseudo-intellectual who genuinely hates the American idea is treated as a respectable figure on the MAGA right—respectable enough to be cited by the vice president, interviewed by Tucker Carlson, and to have his articles featured on The American Mind, a website of the Claremont Institute, the premier MAGA think tank. Some of the same people who (not without good reason) excoriated the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which portrayed the American Revolution as predominantly pro-slavery, are willing to legitimize a man who has written, only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that to sympathize with the Patriots is akin to a “desire to volunteer for the Waffen SS.”

Curtis Yarvin won’t destroy American democracy. But his continued intellectual ascent is a reminder that the republic is going through a dark moment.

Cathy Young is a writer at The Bulwark, a columnist for Newsday, and a contributing editor to Reason.

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