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THE DUBIOUS HISTORY OF AMERICA’S MOST FAMOUS MONARCHIST  
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Jamelle Bouie
January 22, 2025
New York Times
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_ 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. _

, Photo illustration by The New York Times; source photograph by
Julia Demaree Nikhinson

 

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
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Vice President JD Vance and as a person who influences many of the
people who influence President Trump.

Posting as Mencius Moldbug, Curtis Yarvin built a small but
influential
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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 C.E.O.-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 Times
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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 underproofed 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
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.

This is flatly untrue. You can read Roosevelt’s first Inaugural
Address to see for yourself
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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 failed to act, Roosevelt did not say that he would do it
himself and seize absolute power. He said that he would ask Congress
to grant him “broad executive power” 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
emphasized, 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 G.D.P.

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
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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
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readers of those who are “merely reflecting the image of other
people’s emotions and manners and feelings,” of those who besiege
“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 President 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 Sánchez, 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.

* tech elite
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* democracy
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* Politics
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* ultra-right
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* Equality
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* capitalists
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* dictatorship
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* monarchy
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