The Real Mr. Anti-Woke
Would you feel uncomfortable if someone were too tell you they are part of the neo-reactionary movement and “the Dark Enlightenment?” How about if he was the founder whose key argument is that democracy is a failed American experiment and that maybe we should try monarchy— and definitely authoritarianism? You may recognize Curtis Yarvin as who I’m describing from previous times we looked at him and his crackpot ideas last year. His philosophy has some key followers these days: Vice President J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel (and Blake Masters), Steve Bannon, Marc Andreessen… you know, tech bros amenable to being told they’re brilliant and should run the world.
A few weeks after Trump was elected last November, Jason Wilson noted that “The aftermath of Trump’s election victory has seen actions and rhetoric from Trump and his lieutenants that closely resemble Yarvin’s public proposals for taking autocratic power in America… In 2022 Vox called Yarvin the ‘person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the US government could be toppled and replaced.’ Yarvin suggests that a would-be American autocrat should campaign on and win an electoral mandate for an authoritarian program. They should purge the federal bureaucracy in a push Yarvin has anagrammatized as Rage (for ‘retire all government employees’). They should simply ignore any court rulings that seek to constrain them. They should bring Congress to heel, in part by mobilizing their populist base against recalcitrant lawmakers. And liberal or mainstream media organizations and universities should be summarily closed… ‘You’d simply declare a state of emergency in your inaugural address.’ Yarvin continued: ‘You’d actually have a mandate to do this. Where would that mandate come from? It would come from basically running on it, saying, Hey, this is what we’re going to do… you can’t continue to have a Harvard or a New York Times past since perhaps the start of April.’ Later expanding on the idea with ‘the idea that you’re going to be a Caesar and take power and operate with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd.’”
And speaking of the NY Times, last week, David Marchese sat down for a conversation with there 51-year old Yarvin whose ideas he described as “pretty extreme: that institutions at the heart of American intellectual life, like the mainstream media and academia, have been overrun by progressive groupthink and need to be dissolved. He believes that government bureaucracy should be radically gutted, and perhaps most provocative, he argues that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a ‘monarchy’ run by what he has called a ‘C.E.O.’— basically his friendlier term for a dictator. To support his arguments, Yarvin relies on what those sympathetic to his views might see as a helpful serving of historical references— and what others see as a highly distorting mix of gross oversimplification, cherry-picking and personal interpretation presented as fact. But while Yarvin himself may still be obscure, his ideas are not. Vice President-elect JD Vance has alluded to Yarvin’s notions of forcibly ridding American institutions of so-called wokeism. The incoming State Department official Michael Anton has spoken with Yarvin about how an ‘American Caesar’ might be installed into power. And Yarvin also has fans in the powerful, and increasingly political, ranks of Silicon Valley. Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist turned informal adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, has approvingly cited Yarvin’s anti-democratic thinking. And Peter Thiel, a conservative megadonor who invested in a tech start-up of Yarvin’s, has called him a ‘powerful’ historian. Perhaps unsurprising given all this, Yarvin has become a fixture of the right-wing media universe: He has been a guest on the shows of Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, among others.”
The discussion began with Yarvin’s ridiculous misinterpretation of FDR. If he were correct about FDR, we would have this now:
One of your central arguments is that America needs to, as you’ve put it in the past, get over our dictator-phobia— that American democracy is a sham, beyond fixing, and having a monarch-style leader is the way to go. So why is democracy so bad, and why would having a dictator solve the problem? Let me answer that in a way that would be relatively accessible to readers of the New York Times. You’ve probably heard of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Yes. 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. There’s a great piece that I’ve sent to some of the people that I know that are involved in the transition…
Who? Oh, there’s all sorts of people milling around.
Name one. Well, I sent the piece to Marc Andreessen. It’s an excerpt from the diary of Harold Ickes, who is F.D.R.’s secretary of the interior, describing a cabinet meeting in 1933. What happens in this cabinet meeting is that Frances Perkins, who’s the secretary of labor, is like, Here, I have a list of the projects that we’re going to do. F.D.R. personally takes this list, looks at the projects in New York and is like, This is crap. Then at the end of the thing, everybody agrees that the bill would be fixed and then passed through Congress. This is F.D.R. acting like a C.E.O. So, was F.D.R. a dictator? I don’t know. What I know is that Americans of all stripes basically revere F.D.R., and F.D.R. ran the New Deal like a start-up.
The point you’re trying to make is that we have had something like a dictator in the past, and therefore it’s not something to be afraid of now. Is that right? Yeah. To look at the objective reality of power in the U.S. since the Revolution. You’ll talk to people about the Articles of Confederation, and you’re just like, Name one thing that happened in America under the Articles of Confederation, and they can’t unless they’re a professional historian. Next you have the first constitutional period under George Washington. If you look at the administration of Washington, what is established looks a lot like a start-up. It looks so much like a start-up that this guy Alexander Hamilton, who was recognizably a start-up bro, is running the whole government— he is basically the Larry Page of this republic.
…What’s so bad about democracy? To make a long story short, whether you want to call Washington, Lincoln and F.D.R. “dictators,” this opprobrious word, they were basically national C.E.O.s, and they were running the government like a company from the top down.
So why is democracy so bad? It’s not even that democracy is bad; it’s just that it’s very weak. And the fact that it’s very weak is easily seen by the fact that very unpopular policies like mass immigration persist despite strong majorities being against them. So the question of “Is democracy good or bad?” is, I think, a secondary question to “Is it what we actually have?” 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. So when you want to say democracy is not a good system of government, just bridge that immediately to saying populism is not a good system of government, and then you’ll be like, Yes, of course, actually policy and laws should be set by wise experts and people in the courts and lawyers and professors. Then you’ll realize that what you’re actually endorsing is aristocracy rather than democracy.
…[L]et’s say people in positions of power said to you: We’re going to do the Curtis Yarvin thing. What are the steps that they would take to change American democracy into something like a monarchy? My honest answer would have to be: It’s not exactly time for that yet. No one should be reading this panicking, thinking I’m about to be installed as America’s secret dictator. I don’t think I’m even going to the inauguration.
Were you invited? No. I’m an outsider, man. I’m an intellectual. The actual ways my ideas get into circulation is mostly through the staffers who swim in this very online soup. What’s happening now in D.C. is there’s definitely an attempt to revive the White House as an executive organization which governs the executive branch. And the difficulty with that is if you say to anyone who’s professionally involved in the business of Washington that Washington would work just fine or even better if there was no White House, they’ll basically be like, Yeah, of course. The executive branch works for Congress. So you have these poor voters out there who elected, as they think, a revolution. They elected Donald Trump, and maybe the world’s most capable C.E.O. is in there…
Your point is that the way the system’s set up, he can’t actually get that much done. He can block things, he can disrupt it, he can create chaos and turbulence, but he can’t really change what it is.
…In one of your recent newsletters, you refer to JD Vance as a “normie.” What do you mean? [Laughs.] The thing that I admire about Vance and that’s really remarkable about him as a leader is that he contains within him all kinds of Americans. His ability to connect with flyover Americans in the world that he came from is great, but the other thing that’s neat about him is that he went to Yale Law School, and so he is a fluent speaker of the language of the New York Times, which you cannot say about Donald Trump. And one of the things that I believe really strongly that I haven’t touched on is that it’s utterly essential for anything like an American monarchy to be the president of all Americans. The new administration can do a much better job of reaching out to progressive Americans and not demonizing them and saying: “Hey, you want to make this country a better place? I feel like you’ve been misinformed in some ways. You’re not a bad person.” This is, like, 10 to 20 percent of Americans. This is a lot of people, the NPR class. They are not evil people. They’re human beings. We’re all human beings, and human beings can support bad regimes.
As you know, that’s a pretty different stance than the stance you often take in your writing, where you talk about things like dewokeification; how people who work at places like the New York Times should all lose our jobs; you have an idea for a program called RAGE: Retire All Government Employees; you have ideas that I hope are satirical about how to handle nonproductive members of society that involve basically locking them in a room forever. Has your thinking shifted? No, no, no. My thinking has definitely not shifted. You’re finding different emphases. When I talk about RAGE, for example: Both my parents worked for the federal government. They were career federal employees.
That’s a little on the nose from a Freudian perspective. It is. But when you look at the way to treat those institutions, treat it like a company that goes out of business, but sort of more so, because these people having had power have to actually be treated even more delicately and with even more respect. Winning means these are your people now. When you understand the perspective of the new regime with respect to the American aristocracy, their perspective can’t be this anti-aristocratic thing of, We’re going to bayonet all of the professors and throw them in ditches or whatever. Their perspective has to be that you were a normal person serving a regime that did this really weird and crazy stuff.
How invested do you think JD Vance is in democracy? It depends what you mean by democracy. The problem is when people equate democracy with good government. I would say that what JD Vance believes is that governments should serve the common good. I think that people like JD and people in the broader intellectual scene around him would all agree on that principle. Now, I don’t know what you mean by “democracy” in this context. What I do know is that if democracy is against the common good, it’s bad, and if it’s for the common good, it’s good.
There was reporting in 2017 by BuzzFeed— they published some emails between you and the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, where you talked about watching the 2016 election with Peter Thiel and referred to him as “fully enlightened.” What would “fully enlightened” have meant in that context? Fully enlightened for me means fully disenchanted. When a person who lives within the progressive bubble of the current year looks at the right or even the new right, what’s hardest to see is that what’s really shared is not a positive belief but an absence of belief. We don’t worship these same gods. We do not see the New York Times and Harvard as divinely inspired in any sense, or we do not see their procedures as ones that always lead to truth and wisdom. We do not think the U.S. government works well.
And this absence of belief is what you call enlightened? Yes. It’s a disenchantment from believing in these old systems. And the thing that should replace that disenchantment is not, Oh, we need to do things Curtis’s way. It’s basically just a greater openness of mind and a greater ability to look around and say: We just assume that our political science is superior to Aristotle’s political science because our physics is superior to Aristotle’s physics. What if that isn’t so?
The thing that you have not quite isolated yet is why having a strongman would be better for people’s lives. Can you answer that? Yes. I think that having an effective government and an efficient government is better for people’s lives. 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.
This is an example you use a lot, where you say, If Apple ran California, wouldn’t that be better? Whereas if your MacBook Pro was made by the California Department of Computing, you can only imagine it. I’m sorry, I’m here in this building, and I keep forgetting to make my best argument for monarchy, which is that people trust the New York Times more than any other source in the world, and how is the New York Times managed? It is a fifth-generation hereditary absolute monarchy. And this was very much the vision of the early progressives, by the way. The early progressives, you go back to a book like Drift and Mastery…
…Your ideas are seemingly increasingly popular in Silicon Valley. Don’t you think there’s some level on which that world is responding because you’re just telling them what they want to hear? If more people like me were in charge, things would be better. I think that’s almost the opposite of the truth. There’s this world of real governance that someone like Elon Musk lives in every day at SpaceX, and applying that world, thinking, Oh, this is directly contradictory to the ideals that I was taught in this society, that’s a really difficult cognitive-dissonance problem, even if you’re Elon Musk.
…You often draw on the history of the pre-democratic era, and the status of women in that time period, which you valorize, is not something I’ve seen come up in your writing. Do you feel as if your arguments take enough into account the way that monarchies and dictatorships historically have not been great for swaths of demographics? When I look at the status of women in, say, a Jane Austen novel, which is well before Enfranchisement, it actually seems kind of OK.
Women who are desperate to land a husband because they have no access to income without that? Have you ever seen anything like that in the 21st century? I mean the whole class in Jane Austen’s world is the class of U.B.I.-earning aristocrats, right?
You’re not willing to say that there were aspects of political life in the era of kings that were inferior or provided less liberty for people than political life does today? You did a thing that people often do where they confuse freedom with power. Free speech is a freedom. The right to vote is a form of power. So the assumption that you’re making is that through getting the vote in the early 20th century in England and America, women made life better for themselves.
Do you think it’s better that women got the vote? I don’t believe in voting at all.
Do you vote? No. Voting basically enables you to feel like you have a certain status. “What does this power mean to you?” is really the most important question. I think that what it means to most people today is that it makes them feel relevant. It makes them feel like they matter. There’s something deeply illusory about that sense of mattering that goes up against the important question of: We need a government that is actually good and that actually works, and we don’t have one.
The solution that you propose has to do with, as we’ve said multiple times, installing a monarch, a C.E.O. figure. Why do you have such faith in the ability of C.E.O.s? Most start-ups fail. We can all point to C.E.O.s who have been ineffective. And putting that aside, a C.E.O., or “dictator,” is more likely to think of citizens as pure economic units, rather than living, breathing human beings who want to flourish in their lives. So why are you so confident that a C.E.O. would be the kind of leader who could bring about better lives for people? It seems like such a simplistic way of thinking. It’s not a simplistic way of thinking, and having worked inside the salt mines where C.E.O.s do their CEOing, and having been a C.E.O. myself, I think I have a better sense of it than most people. If you took any of the Fortune 500 C.E.O.s, just pick one at random and put him or her in charge of Washington. I think you’d get something much, much better than what’s there. It doesn’t have to be Elon Musk.
Earlier you had said that regardless of what his goals are, Trump isn’t likely to get anything transformative accomplished. But what is your opinion of Trump generally? I talked about F.D.R. earlier, and a lot of people in different directions might not appreciate this comparison, but I think Trump is very reminiscent of F.D.R. What F.D.R. had was this tremendous charisma and self-confidence combined with a tremendous ability to be the center of the room, be the leader, cut through the BS and make things happen. One of the main differences between Trump and F.D.R. that has held Trump back is that F.D.R. is from one of America’s first families. He’s a hereditary aristocrat. The fact that Trump is not really from America’s social upper class has hurt him a lot in terms of his confidence. That’s limited him as a leader in various ways. One of the encouraging things that I do see is him executing with somewhat more confidence this time around. It’s almost like he actually feels like he knows what he’s doing. That’s very helpful, because insecurity and fragility, it’s his Achilles’ heel.
Yarvin’s ideas aren’t just fringe thought experiments. They represent a dangerous undercurrent in American politics, one that seeks to dismantle democratic norms under the guise of efficiency and enlightened leadership. Think Elon Musk. His romanticization of historical figures as “national CEOs” grossly distorts history, ignoring the democratic processes that tempered even the most powerful American leaders. The suggestion that America needs a monarchy— or, as he euphemistically puts it, a “CEO”— is a blueprint for authoritarianism disguised as intellectual debate. And Yarvin’s rhetoric has already seeped into the mainstream, carried by influential reactionaries like Vance, Thiel and Andreessen. When power brokers in tech and politics flirt with these ideas, they legitimize a worldview that would strip power from the people and consolidate it in the hands of a self-proclaimed elite.
Not all Americans are idiots— not even most. It’s worth noting that despite spending billions of dollars to make himself liked, 52% of the public have an unfavorable opinion of Musk while just 36%— primarily partisan Republicans— have a favorable opinion.
Yarvin’s “dark enlightenment” is a stark reminder that the battle for democracy is being fought in the realm of ideas, beyond election cycles per se, where authoritarianism is being repackaged as “innovation.” History warns us of the perils of such movements. The Enlightenment thinkers who inspired America’s founders didn’t just dream up democracy for idealistic reasons— but as a bulwark against tyranny. Yarvin’s vision is not progress; it’s regression to a time when power was wielded without accountability. The question is not whether America could function under a monarchy but whether it could survive as a free and just society. If Yarvin and his followers have their way, we’re not going to like the answer… well, some of us won’t.
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