Is Democracy Overrated? The Vacuity of Curtis Yarvin and His ‘Dark Elves’

In his seminal work, the renowned 20th-century economist John Maynard Keynes wrote: ‘Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.’

Donald Trump, the dearly beloved leader of the Republican Party who took power in January as the 47th president of the United States, has made no secret of his autocratic proclivities. During the campaign, he cheekily asserted that he intended to be a dictator on ‘day one’. During recent deliberations with House Republicans, he hinted—facetiously, we can only hope—at the possibility of a third term: ‘I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say, “He’s so good we’ve got to figure something else out”’. In 2016, Trump stated with characteristic bravado, ‘I alone can fix it’. And, of course, there was the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election which culminated in the events of January 6, 2021. Now, in his first month as a second-term president, in which he has referred to himself as a ‘king’ and has gone so far as to say that ‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’, Trump has only amplified these concerns.

Amid all the fanfare about the threat that Trump’s political comeback poses to American democracy, however, more attention needs to be paid to the emergence of a relatively obscure, neo-reactionary (NRx) scribbler whose explicitly anti-democratic musings gave rise to an anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian Dark Enlightenment movement which has gained serious credence with rich and powerful backers of the Trump 2.0 regime—people like Peter Thiel, Nazi-saluting Elon Musk, and Vice President J.D. Vance. The name of this (not really academic) scribbler is Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, a veteran Silicon Valley software engineer whose influential pseudonymous and post-pseudonymous writings were the motivation for a recent high-profile interview with the New York Times entitled: ‘Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.’

The Birth of Mencius Moldbug, aka Curtis Yarvin

A few years back—2007 or thereabouts—Yarvin began writing a blog, entitled Unqualified Reservations and under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, ‘dedicated to providing secure, responsible, and effective government.’ In A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations, Yarvin introduced his notion of an NRx ‘red pill’ designed to ‘cure your brain’ of any illusion that ‘all the competing 20th-century systems of government, including the Western democracies which came out on top and which rule us to this day’ have been anything but ‘Orwellian’. He has written that he stopped believing in democracy because what ‘we haven’t learned is who was right and who was wrong’ in a half-century war between so-called Georgetownists and Arlingtonists—which, as far as I can tell, means that the State Department and Defense Department have been duking it out to determine American foreign policy ever since the end of the Second World War, and neither side has won. Nor did either side convince us that they got things right. Just as ‘[a]lmost no one believes in God today’, almost no one believes in the efficacy of our government. ‘[W]hen you really believe in God’, Yarvin claims, ‘the belief that God is good and makes good things happen is completely woven into your cerebral cortex.’ But God is dead, and so is our feckless democratic government.

Hardly a hot take, but the basic idea, as he says in his interview with the NYT, is that democracy is ‘very weak’. It fails to ‘get shit done’, unlike, say, a modern Silicon Valley CEO, e.g. Elon Musk.

Yarvin’s aversion to democracy has long and deep roots. Besides his low opinion of the current government, Yarvin’s contempt for democracy also stems from his view, common in the right-wing universe, that the mainstream media and America’s universities—‘journalism plus academia’ as he says—is an ideologically-homogeneous ‘cathedral’ of ‘intellectual institutions at the center of modern society’, an oligarchy that ‘inherently converges on [left-wing] ideas that justify the use of power.’ If you have the patience to wade through his writings, as well as countless hours of his seemingly endless appearances on the podcast circuit, you will learn that his parents, and stepfather, all joined the civil service. As the son of former federal bureaucrats, he believes he has a unique, and sufficient, understanding of how sclerotic yet inexorable the federal bureaucracy—he often seems to be talking exclusively about the State Department (his father was a Foreign Service officer)—has been in its lurch to the left, and in its reflexive, but ineffective, promotion of democratic values.

Philosophically, Yarvin started out in his youth with a robust affinity for uber-libertarian thinkers like Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. It was from Hoppe—who wrote a book published in 2001 entitled Democracy, The God That Failed which argued that ‘the transition from monarchy to democracy’ has been a source of ‘civilizational decline’ —that Yarvin took the idea that ‘all organizations, big or small, public or private, military or civilian, are managed best when managed by a single executive.’

At some point, Yarvin also came across 19th-century writer Thomas Carlyle, a writer for whom ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men’ and whose crypto-racist writings (which include the claim, paraphrased here, that ‘black people had no right to own land and should be forced  “with beneficent whip” to work for white people, who were “born wiser”’) he puts on the level of Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson. Maybe Yarvin truly loves the literary quality of Carlyle’s prose, but Yarvin also has a reputation for harbouring racist views, and is not afraid to say that ‘[n]ot all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery’ while ‘[f]or others, it is more suited to slavery.’ (Or perhaps he is afraid to say so, given that the current, live version of that article slyly distances itself from these sentiments by, among other things, attributing them to Carlyle rather than stating them outright.)

Then there is James Burnham, whom he invokes in many of his podcast interviews, and whose 1943 book The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom argues, in Jacob Siegel’s words, ‘that all complex societies are in effect oligarchies ruled by a small number of elites.’ When all is said and done, Yarvin eventually came to believe that only capable autocrats can ‘get shit done’ and that the modern ideal of a capable autocrat is a Silicon Valley corporate chief executive officer like Elon Musk. He has never looked back.

We are not talking autocrat lite. In 2023, a schism arose between Yarvin and right-wing activist Christopher Rufo after Yarvin criticised the efforts of Rufo and Florida governor Ron DeSantis to take over the New College of Florida as part of their campaign to root out Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives and advance a conservative agenda in the education system. For Rufo, it has been a smashing success, and Rufo gloats that ‘the higher education establishment has expressed fear that a conservative counter-revolution has begun.’

For Yarvin, the takeover is a half-measure at best. It may, for a while, ‘give young Florida men and women the virtuous and humanistic education they deserve, not the candy-flavored intellectual dung they are currently getting’, but it also provides yet another golden opportunity for the New York Times and the New Yorker to rile up their liberal subscribers and get them sufficiently incensed by the affront to progressive values to donate money and recruit more subscribers. The liberal Establishment is the true inheritor of Schmittian politics (something of an irony because, as Yarvin likely knows, Carl Schmitt hated liberalism). They need an enemy to keep their friends in line. ‘They need a basically harmless fake enemy to posture at them’, Yarvin claims, ‘maybe even roughhouse a little, so that little old ladies who wouldn’t hurt a fly keep taking fright and sending them checks.’

Rufo and DeSantis, in short, are swimming against the current of a Whiggish progressive Establishment which has been in power longer than we can remember and controls all the levers of institutional and cultural power. ‘To really plant acorns’, Yarvin wrote, ‘you have to get as far upstream of power as you can.’ In other words, it is a question of means, not ends, and the means is for a capable autocrat to seize control of everything, and not only squash his enemies, but then magnanimously take them under his wing and let them see that they were ‘serving a regime that did this really weird and crazy stuff’ and that taking a knee will make their own lives, and everyone else’s lives, better. Anything short of this is ‘LARPing’.

As he explains in his interview with right-wing mainstay Auron MacIntyre (who has argued that ‘the media coordinated the failed assassination of Donald Trump’), Yarvin agrees with Rufo ‘on the fundamental, existential importance of owning the libs’, but disagrees ‘completely on the way to do it’. For Yarvin, ‘politics is like sex’. That is, ‘you’re…aiming to build this…relationship of…ownership which is almost a sexual relationship.’ If this sounds a bit creepy, there’s more. According to Yarvin, ‘there’s sort of two ways to kind of create the ownership of that kind of bond, which you might call seduction and rape.’

There’s even more. ‘Both seduction and rape’, Yarvin says, ‘have created…many wonderful human beings.’ After all, ‘many of our ancestors were the products of rape.’ Yarvin is then quick to clarify: ‘I’m not saying rape can’t make babies… Rape can make babies. However, I am on the side of seduction.’ Whew, at least we know he prefers seduction when it comes to owning the libs, or, ahem, owning your partner in a sexual relationship. But if you think Yarvin is trying to take the ‘high road’, think again. ‘The reason I’m on the side of seduction, especially in this case, is I don’t think Chris Rufo and Ron DeSantis have it in them to be rapists. I think what they’re doing instead is that they’re being a little bit rapey. And I can tell you that being a little bit rapey never once conceived a child.’

We can concede that Yarvin is not literally advocating rape. At least, probably not, since, despite making comments like these, he ironically cautions against trolling —‘the one thing you really don’t want to do is inhabit the stereotypes of your opponents.’ But maybe it is okay if you include a disclaimer. Then again, he is a man who wrote after the 2011 attacks in Oslo and Utøya that ‘If you ask me to condemn Anders Breivik, but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you’d like to fuck.’ Why? Because Mandela allegedly advocated violence, including cutting off the noses of collaborators, and his wife defended necklacing (never mind that Mandela turned to non-violence or that, rather than gunning down children, he was fighting a violently racist tyrannical state; but then, Yarvin probably thinks we’re all living in such states).

This throwaway line about Mandela was cast in the context of his larger point that ‘[t]errorism is the normal mode of warfare in our delightful post-WWII utopia’, so ‘[c]ondemning terrorism, as such, is in every case retarded’ because ‘[y]ou are simply condemning the 20th century.’ Faulty logic, but the more you study Yarvin’s corpus, the more you realize that hard scholarship and rigorous argument are not his game. In the same piece, for example, we get this gem of a syllogism: ‘Since right-wing terrorism does not work, it is illegitimate as a tactic of war. Since left-wing terrorism does work, it is perfectly legitimate. Thus, OBL [Osama Bin Laden] is legitimate and ABB [Anders Behring Breivik] is not.’ (Bin Laden being a leftist because he cynically quoted Noam Chomsky a few times is another example of Yarvin’s exceptional reasoning abilities.)

Yarvin’s concern is with terrorism that works. ‘Right-wing terrorism worked in Weimar Germany, for instance, or prewar Japan, because it aligned with fascist conspiracies in the security forces. Somehow I don’t see a lot of that in 2011 Norway.’ Breivik, after all, ‘didn’t even make triple digits.’ Well, okay, ‘[a]t least he shot communists’.

The upshot is that for Yarvin, DeSantis and Rufo are not willing to do what it takes to genuinely seize power and demolish the system of liberal democracy which has turned into what Yarvin’s interlocutor Auron MacIntyre, in his 2024 book, calls the ‘total state’. This book argues, as political philosophy professor Matt McManus describes it, that we ‘live in the titular “total state” ruled by a managerial elite made up of soy-latte sucking liberals’ and that ‘democracy makes the expansion of state power more inevitable, since it is never securely in the hands of anyone.’ As they say, birds of a feather.

What Yarvin is ultimately saying is that anything short of uprooting the entire system, root and branch, with an American Caesar, is LARPing. It is bound to fail. You cannot reform the system from within. You need to gut it, starting with one of his more radical proposals: Retire All Government Employees (RAGE). What about civil service laws and protections designed to protect an independent and nonpolitical federal workforce? Ignore them. Vice President J.D. Vance, a Yarvin supporter, echoed the commitment to RAGE in 2021 when he stated:

I think what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country and say, “The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

Vance has also stated that he would go where former Vice President Mike Pence refused to go on January 6, 2021, and refuse to certify electoral college votes.

A king, indeed.

Rich and Powerful People Are Listening

For a time, Yarvin existed at the far-right fringe of American political commentary, and even now, he is not as universally revered in the intellectual realm as Trump is in the political world of MAGA. Not all right-wing online accounts are enamoured of him, and prominent right-wing figures like Michael Anton and Christopher Rufo do not agree with him on all accounts, even if they respect him. But as he built a large following over the years, Yarvin gradually gained the attention of the richest and most powerful figures not only in the right-wing universe, but also in the country—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and J.D. Vance.

As noted by Corey Pein at The Baffler (and not denied by Yarvin in his New York Times interview), Yarvin celebrated the 2016 election victory of Donald Trump in the home of Silicon Valley financier Peter Thiel. This information comes from Joseph Bernstein, who recounts, in a long BuzzFeed exposé on the travails of right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, how Yarvin communicated to Yiannopoulos in an email exchange sometime in 2016: ‘I watched the election at [Thiel’s] house, I think my hangover lasted into Tuesday. He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.’ As for Thiel’s ‘enlightenment’, Yarvin explains in his New York Times interview: ‘Fully enlightened for me means fully disenchanted’ with the media, academia, and the federal government. The cathedral, in other words.  

In 2014, as Pein recounts, Thiel ‘was apparently quite sensitive to the suggestion he might be in cahoots with the alt-right underground.’ In Thiel’s words: ‘Actually, I found that vaguely flattering… It was the full-on conspiracy theory. In truth, there’s nobody sitting around plotting the future, though sometimes I think it would be better if people were.’ In other words, Thiel ‘denied nothing’ and, in keeping with someone who ‘plays it very carefully’, suggested rather slyly that ‘sometimes I think it would be better if people were’, in fact, ‘sitting around plotting the future.’ It is no stretch to suggest that the re-election of Donald Trump, for the right-wing universe, is just the future he has been waiting for.

Fast forward to 2025 when, as the Guardian recently noted,

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.

This is no extraneous connection for a man who has the ear of Peter Thiel, who was recently found in the Financial Times calling euphemistically for truth and reconciliation as he peddled conspiracy theories that circulate in the right-wing universe as a matter of routine, and that are presumably designed to amplify a critique of the government that will justify its takeover by men (always white men) like Thiel, Musk, Vance, and, of course, the disruptor-in-chief, Donald Trump. As Pein notes, ‘it’s a matter of record that Thiel is a valued voice in Trumpland—we’re talking about someone who was reportedly offered his choice of cabinet positions, and who the White House called upon to produce names for nominees and appointees to federal agencies.’

So, Yarvin is at the peak of his influence after years of insisting vociferously and voluminously that a monarchy is required to save a country founded on democratic principles. Now here we are, with rich and powerful men who seem to share Yarvin’s vision of an America in which democracy is abolished and a king is installed sitting at the table in the hallowed halls of the most powerful office in America.

But are his ideas any good?

The Nature and ‘Logic’ of Right-Wing Ressentiment

McManus, who is as good as anyone in understanding contemporary right-wing ideology, cautions us when he writes, ‘to focus on the flaws in Yarvin’s thinking is to miss the point. What has made him appealing to so many on the Right isn’t the quality of his reasoning but his undeniable ability to express reactionary ressentiment in a twenty-first-century techno-hipster vocabulary.’ In fact, ‘the whole tone of Yarvin’s rhetoric is one of perpetual adolescence: obsessed with status, blinded by delusions of grandeur, and impatient with the negotiations and compromises of ordinary political life.’ Indeed, some have speculated that Yarvin seems like the nerd who was bullied in school (Yarvin skipped a few grades and was already a sophomore in high school when he was 12 years old) and who always resented that he was not one of the cool kids.

Such speculation aside, the challenge in addressing Yarvin’s corpus is that one runs up against Brandolini’s law, which states: ‘The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.’ We can concede that Yarvin has expended a lot of energy on reading history and philosophy. But quantity is not quality. A lot of Yarvin’s writing mirrors his tedious, meandering, and verbose ‘open letter to open-minded progressives’ in which he traverses through expansive readings of history to show that democracy must be replaced by a technocratic dictatorship. His loquacity also rears its head in most of his online interviews, where he is invariably given ample opportunity to go on at great length without objection. The rare exception is his interview with Michael Anton in which, ironically, he accuses ‘so many historians’ of doing exactly what he does as a matter of course—namely, ‘to take some little piece of propaganda or other from the period, totally out of context, and basically put their own spin on it, and just make up these interpretations that are just totally contrary to reality.’

For example, in his podcast interviews, Yarvin often expresses his admiration for the monarchical reign of Elizabeth I, at least or especially in contrast to the relative weakness of the reign of Elizabeth II. As recounted by Scott Alexander in the most exacting and thorough rebuttal of neo-reactionary thinking that I have encountered, Yarvin has written that

Elizabeth’s legitimacy was a function of her identity—it could be removed only by killing her. Her regime was certainly not the stablest government in history, and nor was it entirely free from propaganda, but she had no need to terrorize her subjects into supporting her.

I cannot do better than Alexander’s response:

Let’s review how Elizabeth I came to the throne. Her grandfather, Henry VII, had won the 15th century Wars of the Roses, killing all other contenders and seizing the English throne. He survived several rebellions, including the Cornish Rebellion of 1497, and lived to pass the throne to Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII, who passed the throne to his son Edward VI, who after surviving the Prayer Book Rebellion and Kett’s Rebellion, named Elizabeth’s cousin Lady Jane Grey as heir to the throne. Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary, raised an army, captured Lady Jane, and eventually executed her, seizing the throne for herself. An influential nobleman, Thomas Wyatt, raised another army trying to depose Mary and put Elizabeth on the throne. He was defeated and executed, and Elizabeth was thrown in the Tower of London as a traitor. Eventually Mary changed her mind and restored Elizabeth’s place on the line of succession before dying, but Elizabeth’s somethingth cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, also made a bid for the throne, got the support of the French, but was executed before she could do further damage.

In other words:

Actual monarchies are less like the Reactionaries’ idealized view in which revolt is unthinkable, and more like the Greek story of Damocles—in which a courtier remarks how nice it must be to be the king, and the king forces him to sit on the throne with a sword suspended above his head by a single thread. The king’s lesson—that monarchs are well aware of how tenuous their survival is—is one Reactionaries would do well to learn.

And to polish it off (from a 2007 paper by Moira Goff):

From the early sixteenth century there were regular attempts to control printing. A proclamation issued by King Henry VIII on 16 November 1538 required all books to be examined and licensed by the Privy Council or its deputies and prohibited the unlicensed printing of books. Shortly after her accession, in 1559, Queen Elizabeth I decreed that no book was to be published unless it was properly licensed by Crown-appointed censors.

It is examples like these that explain the frustration of David Marchese when he asks Yarvin in his interview for the New York Times, ‘Are you seriously arguing that the era of slavery was somehow better than’ the era after slavery? I leave the reader to explore Yarvin’s reply. What concerns us is that rich and powerful men, with regular access to the Oval Office, take seriously the kind of autodidact who is so convinced of his own genius that he seems to never bother with consulting anyone before publishing his ideas. He is like a graduate student who writes a dissertation and prepares to defend it in front of his committee without ever having bothered to discuss it beforehand with either his advisors or anyone other than fawning supporters.

This is obviously a problem for someone who rarely, if ever, provides a systematic argument. In fact, Yarvin’s whole style goes something like what one observes in his debate with public intellectual Ben Burgis: after parading a lot of knowledge that often proves to be a distraction rather than a source of enlightenment, he frequently resorts to simply and condescendingly urging Burgis to ‘evaluate your belief in democracy’ or ‘open your mind a little bit’ by reading a bunch of material that Yarvin suggests. To this, Burgis responds with exasperation, ‘Jesus Christ, this is vacuous nonsense.’

An example from that debate is Yarvin’s dispute with Burgis over Haiti, in part a dispute about crime. This is one of Yarvin’s favourite topics when it comes to ‘proving’ the efficacy of monarchy, and it gives rise to another gem of an argument in one of his many writings:

Security and liberty do not conflict. Security always wins. As Robert Peel put it, the absence of crime and disorder is the test of public safety, and in anything like the modern state the risk of private infringement on private liberties far exceeds the official of public infringement. No cop ever stole my bicycle.

(Apparently, Yarvin has never heard of a cop on the take.) In keeping with his tendency to find obscure texts and dump a long passage onto his readers to ‘prove’ his point, Yarvin invokes a British text from the 1870s that says, ‘it may with little fear of contradiction be asserted that there never was, in any nation of which we have a history, a time in which life and property were so secure as they are at present in England.’

Was Victorian England a land of milk and honey that never got stolen? Not quite. You can read Scott Alexander for the full debunking of the typical neo-reactionary belief that ‘past societies were so well-organized that they had completely eliminated crime, whereas our own democratic government turns a blind eye while thousands of people are beaten and mugged and murdered and…’ Suffice to say, as Alexander writes: ‘So, Victorian murder rate of between 1 and 2 per 100,000 people. And the current British murder rate? According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, it stands at 1.2 per 100,000 people, rather lower than the Victorian average.’ This is after citing, among a plethora of other evidence that life has gotten better under democracy, such graphs as this one from Marginal Revolution showing a long and steep downward trend in the American homicide rate from around 1700 to around 2010—i.e., during the history of American democracy!

Yarvin’s Legerdemain

Yarvin’s work is, in fact, so light on hard scholarship and rigorous argument that you can read the New York Times interview and get a reasonably comprehensive snapshot of the basic outlines, and holes, in Yarvin’s whole corpus. David Marchese does an adequate job of boiling it all down with a few challenging questions that bring to light the shallowness and contradictions that plague Yarvin’s work. For example, Marchese asks point-blank: why is democracy bad? Yarvin launches into one of his usual talking points: the notion that ‘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.’

His point, upon which he is allowed to expand in an interview with right-wing interlocutor Benjamin Boyce, is that

if you think about the two words, “democracy” and “politics”, you’ll notice that democracy has very, very positive connotations and politics has very, very negative connotations. But they’re actually synonyms. And how do you have politics without democracy, or democracy without politics?

This is blatant legerdemain given that the father of modern political philosophy, Niccolò Machiavelli, became famous for a work on politics in which he explained the political means by which princes—i.e., monarchs—can acquire and remain in power. And this is to say nothing of the seemingly obvious reality that democracy and politics—two concepts of enormous complexity—can hardly be reduced to being synonyms. The great 20th-century philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, for whom the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements collapses under the weight of the inadequacy of any working notion of synonymy, must be rolling in his grave.

Circular Reasoning and the ‘Accountable Monarch’

Perhaps the most basic flaw in Yarvin’s worldview is the very notion of an ‘accountable monarch’. That is, we should not have a king for king’s sake. The king is supposed to be better at governing than a democratic government, and part of the recipe is that he must be accountable. So, where to turn for Superman? Silicon Valley, of course. Preferably, as he says in his conversation with Michael Anton, to the ‘amazing’ Elon Musk, who has built successful companies that ‘clearly wouldn’t exist without him’ (never mind the Department of Energy loan that saved Tesla), though Yarvin admits elsewhere that his only knock on Musk is that Musk is ineligible as an (formerly undocumented) immigrant.

Musk, however, is also the person who ran X into the ground, its value now being 80% less than when he bought it, and opened the floodgates of verified pro-Nazi accounts formerly banned on Twitter. Yarvin essentially overlooks the problem of survivorship bias (he calls it a ‘banal’ problem in his interview with Boyce). It is well known that most Silicon Valley startups fail. Historically, and more generally, almost half of startup businesses in America fail within five years, and almost two-thirds fail within ten years. The fact that many firms who produce the goods and services that we consume are run by CEOs does not mean there are not many more firms run by CEOs that have tried to produce goods and services for us that have failed. It also does not prove that, say, worker cooperatives, which give everyone a voice like in viable democracies, cannot prove viable as well. Just ask Mondragon.

Yarvin says his plan calls for an accountable CEO, so if a CEO fails, he can be replaced. But this is nothing more than an admission that things can go as easily wrong in matters of state as in matters of business. The trouble is, as we learned quite vividly in the months after the 2020 election leading up to January 6, leaders with the heart of an autocrat do not always go quietly into the night after, say, losing an election because their constituents deemed their rule to be not worthy. Moreover, in the world of business, the ramifications of failure are typically confined to the firm’s stakeholders. In the world of government, the ramifications of failure are felt by everyone in society. Democracy, at least, gives those in society a voice to express whom they would like to see things turn around. In the case of autocracies, not so much.

Even Yarvin gets the point. In an Unqualified Reservations post called ‘The Dire Problem And The Virtual Option’, he writes:

As the King begins the transition from democracy, however, he sees at once that many Californians—certainly millions—are financial liabilities. These are unproductive citizens. Their place on the balance sheet is on the right. To put it crudely, a ten-cent bullet in the nape of each neck would send California’s market capitalization soaring—often by a cool million per neck.

And we are just getting started. The ex-subject can then be dissected for his organs. Do you know what organs are worth? This is profit!

Scott Alexander brings the point home, directing us to Yarvin’s ‘bizarre and in many cases incomprehensible solutions’, such as this one:

The simplest, broadest, and most essential prevention against this degenerate result is the observation that the royal government is a government of law, and a government of law does not commit mass murder. For instance, no such government could take office without promising to preserve and defend its new subjects, certainly precluding any such genocide.

In other words, Alexander concludes, Yarvin ‘wants to have his cake and eat it too. His government will be unconstrained and effective because it doesn’t rule by consent of the people. But when we start examining how horrible an “unconstrained effective government” really would be, he promises that the need for the consent of the people would rein it in.’ Is it the case, then, that the ‘accountable monarch’, who has absolute power, is as ‘weak’ as a democratic government because he is accountable to the people?

What It All Means for Working-Class America

In recent years, a narrative has taken root among pundits and commentators that the rise of Donald Trump sparked a realignment in American politics. According to this story: ‘To become the Republican nominee in 2016, then-candidate Trump defeated his right-wing, libertarian rivals and remodelled the GOP as a workers’ party.’ Trump’s subsequent victory in the 2024 presidential election then solidified the Republican Party’s status as the champion of the working class while the Democratic Party represents an out-of-touch, credentialed, oligarchic elite. Trump’s violent and divisive rhetoric, his role in the January 6 insurrection, and all his obvious character flaws are excused, superseded by his middle finger to the elite and his apparently heartfelt commitment to working-class America.

At the same time, critics of Trump lament the rise of Elon Musk as ‘first buddy’ and first (not among equals) in the club of billionaires who have taken a seat at the table in the most powerful office in America. For these critics, the idea that the Republican Party champions the working class is a farce. Trump’s (and Musk’s) opposition to unions, Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent’s opposition to raising the federal minimum wage, and Trump’s proposed corporate tax rate reduction, which will likely result in share buybacks and dividends to the 10% richest Americans who already own more than 90% of the value of stocks in America, are among the reasons that make it hard to envisage how the Trump presidency will elevate the working class.

Nevertheless, Trump gained sufficient support from working-class voters to eke out a small margin of victory in the crucial seven swing states and in the popular vote. Now he is set to chair a committee of billionaires who will not only help him make and shape policy for the next four years, but he also shows signs that he is ready to ignore the checks and balances built into the system of American democracy to constrain the undue exercise of executive power. That does not sound like an accountable monarchy, never mind an accountable democracy. But then again, perhaps it has never really been about that.

After all, J.D. Vance’s run for the Senate seat in Ohio was funded by Peter Thiel, who, as it turns out, owns an 8% share in Palantir (worth $69 billion). As fans of The Lord of the Rings like Peter Thiel will know, palantíri were crystal balls created by the elves to see into the past and present. It is helpful to keep this fact in mind when reading a Substack post by Yarvin about how elves will always rule the hobbits, but only ‘dark elves’ hiding within the elf population will rule over hobbits in a way that benefits the hobbits. In other words, the right must adopt the strategy of dark elves who assume a low profile while plotting to take power. These ‘dark elves are the allies [that] hobbits need to get the quality of government they deserve.’ Yarvin provides additional clarification:

Hobbits will always be governed by elves. But they need to be governed by elves who respect hobbits (as well as elves, dwarves and orcs)… Therefore, the best strategy for hobbits to get good government is to split the elves—to capture absolute power over the state, then give it away, delegating it to a new regime.

I leave it to the reader to work out who the dark elves are. As for the hobbits, I am guessing you get that one right too.

In other words, what all the hoopla around Yarvin and the billionaires who take him seriously really amounts to is the view of the billionaires that they are part of what Yarvin calls a ‘natural aristocracy’. It is their natural place to rule. That may not ultimately sit well with Trump, but for now, commoners—i.e., working-class Americans, and despite Yarvin’s own belief that the accountable monarch would work for everyone, the rest of us—be damned. After all, as McManus accurately writes: ‘For Yarvin, most people are nothing more than a mass of hobbits who “suck” and should be governed by their betters.’

Related reading

How Trump will reshape America’s global role in his image, by Matt Johnson

Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy, by Jonathan Church

Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp

US Election 2024: On ‘Lesser Evilism’, by Ralph Leonard

‘Project 2025 is about accelerating the demise of a functioning democracy’: interview with US Representative Jared Huffman, by Daniel James Sharp

White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

American democracy will soon turn 250. Freethought can reinvigorate it. By Patrick Seamus McGhee