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Yarvin On Trump And His Henchmen

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The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

Yarvin has written several substack posts on Trump and his henchmen since the inauguration. In Barbarians and Mandarins (BM) he reacts to the first six weeks.  In Actually You Shouldn’t Van People (Van) he says it’s a mistake to pick up non-citizens on the street and throw them in vans. He criticizes Trump’s tariff/trade actions here (M1) and here (M2), calling these policies “mercantilism”. He just thinks they’re being done wrong,

There’s a sense of unease in all of them, a sense that things aren’t happening as he expected. That seems to be one aspect of this WaPo piece.

Grading Trump’s administration

BM is about 6K words. My first step was to chop out the repetition, the “jokes”, the snotty remarks about “libs”, and the other irrelevant material. That left me with about 2K words, and I was being generous. He starts by awarding Trump a C-. He says the new administration has two types of people: Barbarians, people who have no experience in DC, and Mandarins who do.

The Bs want to destroy, the Ms want to run things, but neither has the capacity to make the hard decisions about what should be done. Lacking a plan to guide them, they become grifters. Mandarins, he says

… have no strategy: no plan and no endgame. Since action without strategy is ineffective and ineffective action is a grift, the Mandarins are the most convincing grifters of all.

He explains why this is so, perhaps hoping to help them see the Yarvin way.

He approves of Trump’s use of laws and agencies in ways they were not intended

Second, existing infrastructure cannot be relied upon to work or even be controlled. Generally the right first assumption is that it needs to be hacked—made to operate in an unusual way that its designers, its previous operators, or both, did not expect. (The metamorphosis of USDS into DOGE will be the gold standard here for many years.)

I note that this is what Trump and his henchmen have been doing with the tariff law, the Alien Enemy Act, and other laws. Also, courts mostly hold that this is permitted by law and the Constitution.

He uses the assault on government support for science as an example. He says that scientists want power first, and that good science is their secondary goal. The new team, both the Bs and the Ms, are slashing around wildly with no regard to what the new ideology wants.

He says this violates his theory of how kings rule. Slashing funding for scientists makes them angry and makes them hate the new ideology he ascribes to the administration. He says scientists are not happy about the way science funding is managed. The goal should be to make them happy by restructuring that funding. Then they will see that the new king loves and protects them, and they will respond with love. He doesn’t explain how this overcomes their personal demand for power.

Van

In BM, written on March 7, there’s a passing mention of the great work the new administration is doing on the immigration front, but he says it’s not enough, and then inserts his concerns about having state governments, apparently because he doesn’t like federalism. In Van, written April 2, he addresses the reality of ICE tactics:

I refer to the recent news of surprise visa revocations, immigration detention, etc, for a few immigrant grad students, professors, etc, clearly low human capital individuals, who have committed various retarded, if hardly unusual, misdeeds—like writing a pro-Hamas column (probably plagiarized, certainly banal) in the lame student newspaper.

He thinks these tactics are bad. He has no moral or principled objection to any of ICE’s tactics. He just thinks they will backfire on the whole project, create enemies, and destroy support. I stopped reading Van at the point where he explains that Hitler had a theory behind the Holocaust, a theory that is utterly wrong and revolting.

Mercantilism

M1 and M2 are generally supportive of tariffs, but not the way they’re being used. He blames this on the Bs and the Ms. This is from M2:

Trump always has the right reflexes. But a reflex is not a plan. It is not his job, but the job of his administration, to translate reflexes into plans. While executing with great energy and enthusiasm, the administration has had a rocky start in this translation.

These two posts are absurdly long, so I didn’t read them to the end.

Discussion

1. What the hell did Yarvin think would happen when Trump took power? Was he not paying attention during the last Trump presidency? Did he not notice Trump’s insatiable greed, his indifference to policy, his willingness to walk along with anyone who flattered him adequately? Didn’t he notice that Trump doesn’t like competent people,  that he ignores them or fires them? Did he think Trump would suddenly take an interest in policy when every reporter and his own staffers said Trump wasn’t willing to read anything?

Is Yarvin that naive? That credulous? That desperate?

2. Yarvin is supposed to be some kind of computer genius. Has he never watched a large enterprise change its computer system? You don’t rip out the old system and then build a new one. You don’t tear out an old system and put in a new on overnight. You run them side by side long enough to be sure there aren’t any glitches that will poison your employees and customers. Or, you test and retest, and then replace little sections one or two at a time. There’s a plan, there’s testing, and there’s careful attention to outcomes.

Now he’s concerned that people who took his advice to burn everything to the ground are making big mistakes?

3. I think there are problems with our current structure. Yarvin writes about some of them, but never in any sensible context, or with an actual idea about an effective change. For a reasonably sensible discussion see this by Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. There’s a lot to think about in this article, even for lefties. Among other things, Chait complains about delays caused by citizen activists. He does not point out that the rich and their corporations use the same tactics to delay or overturn rules preventing toxic discharges and other horrors. These delay and destroy tactics have hamstrung government action on almost every front.

4. I’m done with Yarvin. Apparently he thought the Trump team had a plan for remaking the United States in ways that would be better as Yarvin understands better. His lack of contact with reality is unbearable.

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Yarvin Explains Why He’s Writing

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The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

Yarvin explains why he’s writing in this post. He opens with a poem by the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, Que Fecit — Il Gran Rifuto, which, roughly translated, is He Who Makes The Great Refusal. Here’s the text:

For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,

he goes forward in honor and self-assurance.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he would still say no. Yet that no—the right no—
undermines him all his life.

Translation by Keeley and Sherrard. Writing in 2007, Yarvin says:

Journalists and professors are all associated with what is essentially one large institution, the press and university system. There are few, if any, ideological quarrels between major universities, or between universities and mainstream journalists.

He says that they all agree on practically everything. The differences between universities are marginal, as are the differences between professors at these institutions, and the differences between journalists. He doesn’t agree with this consensus.

He notes the recent rise of right-wing think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation , the Cato Institute, and the Manhattan Institute, but these are weak, and in no way competitive intellectually with the universities and their acolytes.

He says he’s trying to create an entirely new perspective. He reads Cavafy’s poem first as a paean to the dominant system, and second to the value in dissent. The dominant system rewards joiners, and accomplishes many things. A world of refusers would be a horrible thing. But he wants to be the one who refuses to participate in the Great Consensus, he wants to create an entirely new perspective.

What I’m trying to assemble here at UR is a view of the world we live in that is genuinely alien—at least, as genuinely alien as I can make it. By “alien” I just mean strange, different, or unfamiliar. …

Snip

An alien perspective is useful because it is not, at least not obviously, influenced by the ideas that are loose in the world today.

He says that there are two ways to do this. One is to start from scratch. This approach opens the door to appalling mistakes. One alternative is paleoconservativism. This is perhaps the most alien perspective on our times that he can think of.

Paleoconservatives evaluate the present by the standards of the past. He claims that their views aren’t taught anywhere, there is no education grounded in paleoconservatism. He doesn’t like present-day paleoconservatives, though. He thinks they’re too clubby, too esoteric, and probably too much in love with past regimes. Yarvin isn’t interested in recreating the Holy Roman Empire, or the Byzantine Empire.

He wants to look at 2007 the way people in 2107 do. In the end, he writes because he enjoys doing it and a bunch of people talked him into writing.

Discussion

1. I’m not wiling to read any posts based on Dungeons and Dragons. Or religion. And no more The Matrix, either. Checking ahead, no comparisons between humans and computer hardware.

2. I am sympathetic to the urge to look for different perspectives. I imagine that’s something everyone does when they’re dissatisfied with the status quo; and that academics do it in search of advancement. I’m also sympathetic to the idea of reading older books. Wisdom isn’t the special province of the present.

3. I don’t think it’s possible to start from scratch, as Yarvin claims he wants to do. There is no such place.

I also don’t think that we benefit from considering the present through the lens of the past. The wisdom of the past was directed at the conditions that existed when it was generated, and much of it was dreamed up to support the then status quo. We have to examine each idea in light of our present situation before we try to use it.

That means we have to identify the problem we want to solve carefully. Yarvin hasn’t precisely stated the problem that drives him to consider paleoconservatism. Based on what I’ve covered so far, I’d suggest some possibilities:

a. The people with power are unable to exercise all their power.
b.. Governmental regulation and public opinion are too cumbersome, and should be removed.
c. Democracy can’t solve irreconcilable differences, so civil war is inevitable.
d. The only serious problem facing our society is violence against person and property. Democracy won’t solve that problem so we need another system.
e. There’s something, as yet undefined, wrong with the way the universities and reporters pursue truth.

As to e., there is a consensus at the root of our education system, one shared with all academics and more widely across society. It’s what Jonathan Rauch calls the epistemic regime, the system we use to construct knowledge. I discuss it here, and in the three posts in that series.

We also use that system to construct and evaluate solutions to problems. Yarvin’s Heritage Foundation and other think tanks aren’t trying to solve problems. They exist to create justifications for undoing solutions currently in place as demanded by their donors. They have no new solutions, and their use of the epistemic regime is intellectually suspect.

Yarvin is toying with the idea of rejecting the epistemic regime but has nothing to suggest as a replacement.

4. As I wrote in the introduction to this series, I’m trying to take this guy seriously. That’s not easy. I have trouble ignoring the possibility that Yarvin is just a contrarian, a jolly gadfly, skittering about puncturing platitudes with outrageous claims like this: “Safeway will sell you a whole, salted rhinoceros head before Harvard will teach you that Lincoln was a tyrant.”

5. Yarvin seems to think that scholars are all liberals. Whatever. I don’t suppose Yarvin has read Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. I wonder if he would say that Foucault was a liberal, or that he was part of the consensus he so dislikes?

6. Finally, a word about the Cavafy poem. Here’s the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on the title of the poem:

The great refusal (Italian: il gran rifiuto) is the error attributed in Dante’s Inferno to one of the souls found trapped aimlessly at the Vestibule of Hell, The phrase is usually believed to refer to Pope Celestine V and his laying down of the papacy on the grounds of age, though it is occasionally taken as referring to Esau, Diocletian, or Pontius Pilate, with some arguing that Dante would not have condemned a canonized saint. Dante may have deliberately conflated some or all of these figures in the unnamed shade.

The canonized saint in ths passage is Celestine V. Here’s the Dante line:

After I had identified a few,
I saw and recognized the shade of him
who made, through cowardice, the great refusal.

Dante says the speaker of the Great Refusal is a coward. Cavafy thinks that the great refusal is right for some people in some cases. The world needs people who refuse to accept the dominant social narative. Yarvin makes a point of saying that he’s made the right decision for himself.

 

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Yarvin on Democracy, Leftism, and Julius Evola

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The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

Blue Pill, Red Pill

In his second blog post, Curtis Yarvin makes what he calls a case against democracy. He begins by pointing out that we are all steeped in democracy and its values from birth, and it’s hard to change. To help see things differently (of course using The Matrix image of the red and blue pills) he offers ten statements about democracy and an alternative view. He doesn’t discuss any, so all discussion is mine. I’ll look at three, the first, and two chosen by the highly Enlightenment method: the 15th decimal digits of pi and e.

First PIll

blue pill:

Democracy is responsible for the present state of peace, prosperity, and freedom in the US, Europe and Japan.

red pill:

The rule of law is responsible for the present state of peace, prosperity and freedom in the US, Europe and Japan.

So close. Yarvin doesn’t ask himself where the rule of law comes from, nor why it’s working. I’d say that in a democratic polity  most people think they have a voice in deciding laws, so they are generally willing to obey the laws. That leads to the good stuff, which encourages further acceptance of laws. Of course, there are other reasons  depending on the nature of the individual and their sense of participation in humanity. Some people obey out of fear, or because that was engrained in them from birth. Others think about the alternatives, and agree to be bound. And there are many other possibilities.

Yarvin doesn’t ask himself who are the people who refuse to obey, like the current administration and its leaders. Are they acting like they live in a democracy? No. They act like they’re rulers. And it’s easy to see that a majority of people don’t like it. Of course the current administration goes much farther than others, but Yarvin might have noticed the abuses and corruption of the Bush administration, or that it pushed us into pointless wars and then failed at them. Maybe he suddenly has.

Third pill

blue pill:

The disasters of fascism and communism demonstrate the importance of representative democracy.

red pill:

Fascism and communism are best understood as forms of democracy. The difference between single-party and multiparty democracy is like the difference between a malignant tumor and a benign one.

Yarvin calls fascism and communism single-party democracies. But they were not democratic at all. They were all managed by a single person whose decisions were his own and were final. How exactly are they different from the monarchy he wants to install?

Fifth pill

blue pill:

Power in the West is held by the people, who have to guard it closely against corrupt politicians and corporations.

red pill:

Power in the West is held by the civil service, that is, the permanent employees of the state. In any struggle between the civil service and politicians or corporations, the civil service wins.

The premise here is that some person or group in each “Western” nation has ultimate power. It’s just as false that “the people” have ultimate power as it is that the civil service has ultimate power. Anyone who watched the Bush Administration run things would know this. The civil service is and always has been reasonably accountable to the political leadership, more in Republican administrations than in Democratic.

Yarvin doesn’t mention the role of the courts in all this. It’s a telling omission.

Leftism

In this post,  Yarvin tells us that the essential idea of leftism is that intellectuals (he prefers the term “scholars”) should run the world. Scholars are indistinguishable from priests.He asks:

Can anyone find an exception to this rule—i.e., a mass movement that is generally described as “leftist,” but which does not in practice imply the rule of scholars, or at least people who think of themselves as scholars?

I’d guess he means that the ideas that justify and organize a leftist mass movement come from intellectuals. For example, Karl Marx justified and motivated the leaders of the Russian Revolution. John Locke justified  the American Revolution and the form of its new government.

But that’s true of any revolution. There may be grievances, but grievances can be solved by negotiation or tweaks to the order of things. Regime change requires a replacement for the ideology that supports the existing regime. Does Yarvin understand that this applies to himself, to Ayn Rand, to all those right-wing jerks he cites?

1. In comments on my last post, people noted that Yarvin was going to debate Danielle Allen, a Harvard professor with a specialty in democracy. Afterwards, someone posted what looked like a transcript of the debate on Blue Sky. It was taken down and the account closed, but I read it before it disappeared. Yarvin’s arguments felt like a ball falling down a Pachinko board, bounding from pin to pin with no clear connection. Or, as the WaPo described his blog posts,  he was “wildly discursive”.

At one point he said that Harvard doesn’t teach conservative thought. For example, no one teaches the thought of Julius Evola. This is from the Wikipedia page on Evola:

He viewed himself as part of an aristocratic caste that had been dominant in an ancient Golden Age, as opposed to the contemporary Dark Age ,,,.. In his writing, Evola addressed others in that caste whom he called l’uomo differenziato—”the man who has become different”—who through heredity and initiation were able to transcend the ages. Evola considered human history to be, in general, decadent; he viewed modernity as the temporary success of the forces of disorder over tradition. Tradition, in Evola’s definition, was an eternal supernatural knowledge, with absolute values of authority, hierarchy, order, discipline and obedience. Links and fn. omitted.

Evola was a major factor in Italian fascism, with ties to German fascism. After WWII he was closely involved with far right-wing Italian politics. It gets worse: “Evola wrote prodigiously on mysticism, Tantra, Hermeticism, the myth of the Holy Grail and Western esotericism.”

So, Harvard doesn’t teach a marginal weirdo fascist. That’s what Yarvin thinks is a gotcha.

2. I’m on the road, and my main book for this trip is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It’s set in Russia between 1805 and 1812, and give a history of the Napoleonic Wars from the perspetive of Russia and five aristocratic families

Here’s how Tolstoy describes the attitude of one of his characters, Nicholas Rostov, towards Tsar Alexander I:

Rostov, standing in the front lines of Kutuzov’s army which the Tsar approached first, experienced the same feeling as every other man in that army: a feeling of self-forgetfulness, a proud consciousness of might, and a passionate attraction to him who was the cause of this triumph.

He felt that at a single word from that man all this vast mass (and he himself an insignificant atom in it) would go through fire and water, commit crime, die, or perform deeds of highest heroism, and so he could not but tremble and his heart stand still at the imminence of that word. P. 467, Kindle edition.

Does Yarvin feel that looking at Trump or Musk?

 

 

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Introduction To Yarvin’s Formalism

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The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

The previous post discussed two aspects of Yarvin’s first blog post, his rejection of current ideologies and his loathing of democracy. This post describes the ideology he created, formalism.

The goal of formalism

Yarvin starts with the proposition that the only truly significant problem facing humans is violence. The goal of formalism is to rid the planet of violence. Only then can we focus on other problems.

Next to organized human-on-human violence, a good formalist believes, all other problems—Poverty, Global Warming, Moral Decay, etc., etc., etc.—are basically insignificant. Perhaps once we get rid of violence we can worry a little about Moral Decay ….

He means exactly this: until violence is ended, we must focus on one thing, getting rid of it. It’s an engineering problem, not a moral problem. He sets up pacifism as an alternative, and of course pacifism doesn’t solve violence.

He also dismisses the idea of social justice as a solution. He describes social justice as the idea that we should all have an equal share of the limited resources available to us. He says we don’t know how to equalize things, it won’t last, and it isn’t practical. We’d have to start by setting up rules about equality in things, and then take from some to give to others.

Solving violence with rules

Violence is the result of conflict and uncertainty. People are in constant conflict about stuff, but if everyone knows the result of the conflict in advance, there’s no reason to engage in violence. He seems to think that’s true of state-level conflict too: if we knew how a war would turn out, why wouldn’t the losing side surrender, he says. So, the first step is creating rules of ownership.

Formalism says: let’s figure out exactly who has what, now, and give them a fancy little certificate. Let’s not get into who should have what.

The starting place is where we are now. We make a list of everything that can be owned, and whoever has it gets to keep it. Then we can define violence:

Violence, then, is anything that breaks the rule, or replaces it with a different rule. If the rule is clear and everyone follows it, there is no violence.

The United States is a corporation

Formalism says that the US government controls what happens inside the boundaries of the US. It has the power to collect taxes and make rules of behavior, and these powers are property, just like any other property right. The government isn’t going to voluntarily surrender them.

Yarvin tells us that the US government is a corporation, meaning “… it is a formal structure by which a group of individuals agree to act collectively to achieve some result.” In this setting citizens are serfs, actually corporate serfs. I think he sees private corporations as no different from the US government. He explains that the purpose of his exemplar, Microsoft, is to make money for shareholders by selling software.

But he doesn’t see the purpose of the US government. He thinks the government isn’t able to control much.

In fact, if anyone can identify one significant event that has occurred in North America because Bush and not Kerry was elected in 2004, I’d be delighted to hear of it. Because my impression is that basically the President has about as much effect on the actions of the US as the Heavenly Sovereign Emperor, the Divine Mikado, has on the actions of Japan. Which is pretty much none.

In his view, the US government is a poorly functioning corporation with no discernible control mechanism, loaded with assets and flailing around trying to do something for opaque reasons.

Yarvin’s solution

To a formalist, the way to fix the US is to dispense with the ancient mystical horseradish, the corporate prayers and war chants, figure out who owns this monstrosity, and let them decide what in the heck they are going to do with it. I don’t think it’s too crazy to say that all options—including restructuring and liquidation—should be on the table.

Snip

To reformalize, therefore, we need to figure out who has actual power in the US, and assign shares in such a way as to reproduce this distribution as closely as possible. Links omitted.

He suggests that the current power structures be evaluated and shares in the reformalized US be distributed on the basis of the power of each recipient. Corporations have power, and would be shareholders. He cites the New York Times as an example. Perhaps some citizens have power, and might get shares, but that’s not clear. In any event, having divided up the power, we let the people with power decide what to do with the assets they control. The rest of us just stay out of the way.

The new power structures may not see the use for nation-states. He suggests that cities, but not states, perhaps should be “spun off”; pointing to Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong as positive examples. He points out that there isn’t any political violence in those city-states because there isn’t any politics.

That seems to be Yarvin’s main point. He thinks politics always leads to violence of some kind, whether it’s the violence of taxation or of limits on personal freedom, or physical violence. Somehow that problem is solved by getting rid of politics and replacing it with system of control by those who hold power now.

Discussion

1. I rearranged the order of the arguments hoping to clarify.

2. One obvious thing about this is the reductionism. Violence is a problem, sure, but we can’t wait for that to be solved before dealing with other problems. Those lesser problems, poverty, climate breakdown, moral decay, are at the root of a lot of the violence.

Another is the casual acquaintance with reality. This post was written ten years after Hong Kong was returned to China, and the latter was encroaching on democracy there. Anyone who has seen Crazy Rich Asians will see the outcome of the structure Yarvin imagines: great for the rich sons and daughters of the rich in Singapor.

3. The purpose of the United States government is set out in the Preamble to the Constitution. Yarvin doesn’t address it.

4. Yarvin takes the side of Walter Lippman in his debate with John Dewey over democracy, and goes even farther. Here’s a short paper describing the debate. Very roughly, Lippman thinks that our civilization is too complex for the ordinary citizen, so we should select experts to handle the complexities and advise the government rather than depend on the wisdom of the masses.

Dewey thinks that citizens should be educated in critical thinking, so they could participate in the discussions on issues that affect them. The people most affected by an issue would constitute a “public” in his parlance. This post gives an introduction to his thinking.

But Dewey had a larger reason for supporting democracy. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Dewey views democracy as an ideal of associated life in the sense that as an ideal he thinks that it reconciles the full expression of individual potentialities and the common good. In this sense, democracy sits at the apex of his historicised naturalist account of individuality and community. “From the standpoint of the individual”, as he puts it, democracy “consists in having a responsible share according to capacity in forming and directing the activities of the groups in which one belongs and in participating according to need in the values which the groups sustain”, while “from the standpoint of the groups, it demands liberation of the potentialities of members of a group in harmony with the interests and goods which are common”…. Cites omitted.

Yarvin doesn’t address this debate.  He thinks the problems with democrcy, most of which were laid out by Lippman and Dewey, are so great that the solution is to burn it to the ground. So far he hasn’t identified a view of the individual that would enable him to address Dewey’s view of democracy. instead, he consistently ignores individual citiaens as if we were irrelevant to this discussion.

 

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The Beginnings of Curtis Yarvin

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This introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

Marcy points out that there is no policy in the Trump administration, only destruction, revenge, and palace intrigue. That’s a great start for Curtis Yarvin and the evil shits surrounding Trump, especially the destruction part. This post introduces Curtis Yarvin’s justification for that nihilistic approach.

The first post at The Substack Gray Mirror

Yarvin explains that the Grey Mirror substack is a sandbox for drafting a book. The book is intended to serve as a public policy manual for the leader of a new regime which will replace the current regime in the United States.

Policy is the art of the possible. Today’s possible is relative to an amorphous network of influential stakeholders. Any new idea must first be measured for relevance by its proximity to this meta-institution. The mirror’s abstract prince had no one to please but himself and God. His policy could and must be absolute.

I think the first three sentences are meant as criticism of democracy on the grounds that it spreads power among too many people, making it easy to block or affect policy. The meaning of the last two is clear: the new regime will be a one-man rule, and I do mean man . There will be be a new regime eventually because all regimes fail. And it will be under the control of a single man, because “if you want a completely different government, submitting to one person is the only way to get it.”

His prince has to start from scratch to build his regime. Most of the existing institutions can’t be remodeled to fit with the new regime. That leads to his idiosyncratic use of the term nihilist. His plan is nihilist because “… it’s a plan for building ex nihilo, from nothing.”

The new leader will emerge from the chaos of the deterioration of the existing regime.

From Rome to France to Rwanda, a monarch who emerges unchallenged from one side of a civic conflict does not enforce the civic dominance of his own side, but the civic unity of both sides. If he did otherwise he would be an idiot — which is statistically unlikely. Freezing the civic conflict, cold or hot, tends to be the biggest, quickest win of the whole transition.

There is no explanation for this statement. He goes on to say that the leader is accountable, but he doesn’t tell us how, except that a monarchy is a republic, and has a constitution.

Discussion

1. I’ve rearranged the order in which Yarvin lays out his ideas.

2. I flatly disagree with his statements about Rome, France and Rwanda producing leaders who enforce civil unity of both sides. Rome fell under the sway of emperors and as they degenerated, Rome slowly collapsed. Is he thinking of Napoleon in France? Has he never heard of the restoration of the aristos, or the Commune, or any of the history of the nation in the 19th Century? And Rwanda? Really?

The First Post in Yarvin’s Blog Unqualified Reservations

The first post in Yarvin’s blog is titled A Formalist Manifesto, dated 4/24/2007. It’s long, so I’ll cover it in two posts. In this post, I take up his objections to existing ideologies and his complaints about democracy. In the next I’ll discuss the content of his newly created ideology, formalism.

Current ideologies suck

He doesn’t like progressivism because he thinks its adherents, “,,, the vast majority of writers and thinkers and smart people in general…” are so steeped in it that they can’t see its problems. He doesn’t like conservatism because “… not all conservatives are cretins, but most cretins are conservatives.” The re-inventors of conservatism (the earlier version was destroyed by the “Roosevelt dictatorship”) have to appeal to the cretins, so conservatism is dumb.

He thinks moderates, centrists, independents, and non-political people are responsible for the death and destruction of the 20th Century, and presumably the early 2000s. They act like there’s a fixed “center” but it’s constantly changing. There’s nothing for them to hold onto, no controlling set of beliefs. It doesn’t even count as an ideology.

He thinks highly of libertarianism, but thinks it’s never been successfully implemented, because it’s impractical.

Yarvin’s problem with democracy

Yarvin says that the most serious problem people face is how to interact without violence against persons or property.

One conclusion of formalism is that democracy is—as most writers before the 19th century agreed—an ineffective and destructive system of government. The concept of democracy without politics makes no sense at all, and as we’ve seen, politics and war are a continuum. Democratic politics is best understood as a sort of symbolic violence, like deciding who wins the battle by how many troops they brought.

I think what he’s getting at here is that certain political disagreements can’t be resolved by compromise or live and let live policies. Murder is an example. There can’t be any compromise to the no-murder rule. He seems to think that most issues are like that, as if the regulatory preference for LED lighting over incandescent bulbs leads to violence.

Discussion

1. So far we’ve seen two objections to deomcracy. First, the dispersion of power demanded by democracy leads to unspecified bad things, because it slows or preventss technological improvements. That doesn’t  happen under one-man rule. Second democracy inexorably leads to violence. Yarvin doesn’t offer much support for these claims in the two essays I’ve read. Maybe there’s more ahead.

2. Yarvin’s criticism of progressivism, that its adherents can’t see its problems, seems wrong. I think some of Yarvin’s criticisms of our government have merit, and have been raised by progressives repeatedly.

3. Yarvin ignores our experience with one-man rule, going far back into history. People who have experienced democracy don’t want one-man rule. Like the American Revolutionaries, people want to have a say in their governments.

4. Almost all people want to live in a world free from violence. Violence is fairly low by historical standards in most functioning democracies. Even though we don’t have perfect security, our circumstances allow most of us to seek highe-orderr goals. So far, at least, Yarvin hasn’t engaged any of the complexities of humans of today, just as he hasn’t addressed any of the arguments of the proponents of democracy.

5. Here’s a story. My freshman year at Notre Dame, we were required to take a class in writing. My teacher was Mr. Yeltsin, who seemed to think it beneath him to teach writing to guys studying science and engineering. Mr. Yeltsin always wore a black suit, white shirt, black skinny tie, very much not the fashion in those days.

I was very proud of my first essay, about which I remember nothing except that when it came back, Mr. Yeltsin had written one word diagonally at the top: Jejeune. I had to look it up.

I wish Curtis Yarvin had taken writing from Mr. Yeltsin.

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Introduction To Series On Curtis Yarvin

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Posts in this series

The Beginnings Of Curtis Yarvin
Introduction To Yarvin’s Formalism
Yarvin On Democracy, Leftism, and Julius Evola
Yarvin Explains Why He’s Wrigint
Yarvin On Trump And His Henchmen

Trump acts on his stupid ideas, and on the foolish chatter of whatever loon has his ear. He and his courtiers and henchmen recite crackpot theories to justify working for their own ends, with no pretense of oversight by Trump or Republican legislators.

Some of these weirdo theories, like the tariff gibberish and Christian Nationalism, are well-known. They’ve been discussed in progressive circles for some time, and are occasionally acknowledged in the billionaire media. What I did not know, and what was rarely reported in the media I read, was the influence of a group of anti-democracy advocates.

Recently I began to read about Curtis Yarvin. Heather Cox Richardson mentioned him in one of her Letters To An American, and commenter TruthBtold linked to this substack reporting on Yarvin.  Here’s an article in Commonweal, Yarvin’s Case Against Democracy.

In 2012 Yarvin gave a speech titled How To Reboot The US Government. He gave more speeches and interviews on the subject and drew the attention of rich techbros and right-wing politicians like J.D. Vance. It looks like Elon Musk used Yarvin’s ideas first to remake Twitter as a hang-out for creeps, and then as a template for destroying our govenrment from the inside.

Yarvin claims that democracy has failed and that the only way forward is to get rid of it and replace it with a dictatorship, or a monarchy. It’s a view shared by a lot of people on the far right, and for different reasons by the same filthy rich thugs who’ve been wrecking our country out of hatred for the New Deal and all things that make life better for working people. I’ll be looking into Yarvin’s writings in my next series.

Background

This stuff is wild. To orient myself, I read a chapter written by Joshua Tait in a book, Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy. The book is supposedly available through your library. Tait focuses on a blog Yarvin wrote under the name Mencius Moldbug, Unqualified Reservations.  He gives an introduction to Yarvin’s theory of neoreaction, and his rejection of democracy.

Neoreaction’s basic assumption is that humans desire power. Interpreting democracy through this framework, Moldbug claims that democracy’s appeal is that it disperses power widely, indulging the mass desire for useless fragments of power. Since power-seeking is pervasive, society trends toward greater division of power and a concomitant erosion of order. Democracy is a “dangerous, malignant form of government which tends to degenerate, sometimes slowly and sometimes with shocking, gut-wrenching speed, into tyranny and chaos.”

Trump and his henchmen don’t acknowledge the anti-democratic aspect of Yarvin’s thought, at least not so far, unless you consider Trump’s third-term garbage. They just follow his plan for destroying the institutions that diffuse power; and work at concentrating power into the hands of Musk and Trump. Yarvin’s views  can be seen as justifying the unitary executive theory, and for presidential kingship, as contemplated by John Roberts and his anti-democratic colleagues in Trump v. US.

In his blog Yarvin traces out the development of his theories of history, economics and other matters. The blog ran from 2007 to 2014. He has a substack, Gray Mirror, which began in May 2020 (after Tait’s article) where he posted drafts of his book Gray Mirror: Fascicle I: Disturbance, published January 2025. The title is Yarvin trolling: fascicle is close to fascist, but means something else. I’m reluctant to buy the book so I plan to read from the two online sources first. He shows up on other social media sites, but I’m not going there.

I plan to focus on the anti-democracy material and his views of human nature. We’ll see how that holds up.

Defending Democracy

I won’t defend democracy here. I follow Americans like John Dewey and Richard Rorty. See, e.g. Rorty’s Achieving Our Country. My rationale for defending democracy is my understanding of human nature, which I discussed in my series on individuality.

But I also think that we as a nation have for a long time regarded democracy as background for our lives. We see it as a game we watch on TV. We yell at politicians as we would yell at referees. We don’t think of democracy as making any demands on us, much less as something that requires our constant maintenance and improvement.

Caveat

It’s very difficult to write about material with which you fundamentally disagree. There’s a strong tendency to minimize any good points, and to mock rather than try to understand.

I plan to be very careful about separating Yarvin’s words from my thoughts on how to understand what he’s saying, and to try to indicate where I’m having trouble following an argument, so that readers can check my thinking. That should help with the bias problem.

It’s important to note that Yarvin isn’t some Qanon weirdo cranking out conspiracies. I assume that he’s read the material he cites, and that he has tried to be intellectually honest. That distinguishes him from craven ideologues like the SCOTUS right-wingers and from lazy hacks like David Brooks.

Final thought

Yarvin and the filthy rich idiots he influences are dangerously wrong, wrong in a deeply fundamental way. They think they know what’s best. Not what’s best for you and your family and community. They think they know what’s best for the future of the human race.

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