In many thousand words’ worth of blog posts over the past 15 years, computer programmer and tech startup founder Curtis Yarvin has laid out
a critique of American democracy: arguing that it’s liberals in elite academic institutions, media outlets, and the permanent bureaucracy who hold true power in this declining country, while the US executive branch has become weak, incompetent, and captured.
But he stands out among right-wing commentators for being probably the single person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the US government could be toppled and replaced — “rebooted” or “reset,” as he likes to say — with a monarch, CEO, or dictator at the helm. Yarvin argues that a creative and visionary leader — a “startup guy,” like, he says, Napoleon or Lenin was —
should seize absolute power, dismantle the old regime, and build something new in its place.
To Yarvin, incremental reforms and half-measures are necessarily doomed. The only way to achieve what he wants is to assume “
absolute power,” and the game is all about getting to a place where you can pull that off. Critics have called his ideas “
fascist” — a term
he disputes, arguing that centralizing power under one ruler long predates fascism, and that his ideal monarch should rule for all rather than fomenting a class war as fascists do. “Autocratic” fits as a descriptor,
though his preferred term is “monarchist.” You won’t find many on the right saying they wholly support Yarvin’s program — especially the “
monarchy” thing — but his critique of the status quo and some of his ideas for changing it have influenced several increasingly prominent figures.
Besides Vance and Masters (whose campaigns declined to comment for this story),
Yarvin has had a decade-long association with billionaire Peter Thiel, who is similarly disillusioned with democracy and American government. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009, and earlier this year,
he declared that Republican members of Congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment after the January 6 attacks were “traitorous.”
Fox host Tucker Carlson is another fan,
interviewing Yarvin with some fascination for his streaming program last year. He’s even influenced online discourse — Yarvin
was the first to popularize the analogy from
The Matrix of being “redpilled” or “-pilled,” suddenly losing your illusions and seeing the supposed reality of the world more clearly, as applied to politics.
Overall, Yarvin is arguably the leading intellectual figure on the
New Right — a movement of thinkers and activists critical of the traditional Republican establishment who argue that an elite left “ruling class” has captured and is ruining America, and that drastic measures are necessary to fight back against them. And New Right ideas are getting more influential among Republican staffers and politicians. Trump’s advisers are already brainstorming Yarvinite — or at least Yarvin-lite —
ideas for the second term, such as firing thousands of federal civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists. With hundreds of
“election deniers” on the ballot this year, another disputed presidential election could happen soon — and Yarvin has
written a playbook for the power grab he hopes will then unfold.
So these ideas are no longer entirely just abstract musings — it’s unclear how many powerful people may take Yarvin entirely literally, but many do take him seriously. And after the 2020 election crisis,
the fall of American democracy seems rather more plausible than it used to. To better understand the ideas influencing a growing number of conservative elites now, and the battles that may lie ahead, then, I reviewed much of Yarvin’s sizable body of work, and I interviewed him.
During our lengthy conversation, Yarvin argued that the eventual fall of US democracy could be
“fundamentally joyous and peaceful.” Yet the steps President Trump took in that direction after the 2020 election were not particularly joyous or peaceful, and it was hard for me to see why further movement down that road would be.
[...]
For years, Yarvin was something of an odd internet curiosity, with his ideas far from most political conservatives’ radar.
He gained one prominent reader — Thiel, who had written about his own disillusionment with democracy, became a Yarvin friend, and funded his startup. “He’s fully enlightened,” Yarvin later wrote of Thiel in an email, “just plays it very carefully.” (Thiel did not respond to a request for comment.) Beyond that, ideas bloggers like
Robin Hanson and
Scott Alexander argued with him, and he gradually got more attention for being a leading figure in the
“neoreactionary” movement.
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