A theorist of American authoritarianism

With the Trump administration’s geopolitical advances now occurring at speed, it has become vital to unpack the conceptual ideology lurking behind its actions. ‘Populism’, descriptive of an anti-establishment appeal to the masses, is becoming an increasingly inapposite term – exacerbated by the US president’s recent decision-making, unpopular even with many loyal MAGA supporters. The American right’s intellectual lodestars are now instead identifying as ‘postliberal’. Although a complex and variegated position, postliberalism draws on classical social theory to argue that the dominant forms of postwar liberalism have coalesced into a totalizing sociopolitical project that threatens to erode its own foundations.

A key advocate of this worldview is software engineer and blogger Curtis Yarvin, whose writing is a novel articulation of non-liberal, non-democratic thought with a computational understanding of society. He describes his vision as: ‘the unity of…the modern engineering mentality, and the great historical legacy of antique, classical and Victorian pre-democratic thought’.1 His linkage of previously uncoupled concepts offers insights into today’s ascendant postliberal thought. And given Yarvin’s influence on figures in the Trump administration, this is by no means an academic question but one with real-world consequences.

Yarvin’s influence

Once an obscure blogger, since US Vice President J.D. Vance noted an interest in his writings, Yarvin’s profile has hit the mainstream.2 He is now read widely, both among young conservatives, who refer, somewhat ironically, to him as ‘Lord Yarvin, our prophet,’ and in Silicon Valley, where he counts Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen as friends. But what drove Yarvin towards postliberal theorization?

The son of a diplomat, Yarvin spent part of his childhood abroad in Cyprus before returning to the US in 1985, where he participated in the Johns Hopkins’ Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. After graduating from Brown University in 1992, he started a Ph.D. in computer science at Berkeley but left without completing the programme. Instead, he found employment as a software engineer in the burgeoning Silicon Valley startup culture of the early 1990s, where he drifted away from the liberalism of his youth, embracing the freewheeling End of History libertarianism that then characterized the West Coast.

However, Yarvin did not simply absorb this libertarian ethos passively. He imbibed a heady brew of twentieth-century thought from Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, both of whom played significant roles in the political and intellectual movement that later informed neoliberalism. While Mises and Rothbard rejected state action, favouring instead a form of extreme right-wing liberalism sometimes dubbed ‘anarcho-capitalism’, Yarvin ultimately broke with such a position, as it failed, in his view, to address the Hobbesian problem of order.3 In this, he was influenced by the nineteenth-century essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle – of whom Yarvin wryly claims to be a ‘late, decadent, second-rate imitation’4 – who advocated for an authoritarian state led by a heroic elite.5 Linking Victorian perspectives with a theory of ideology and political conflict derived from Italian elite theory,6 Yarvin came to view the ideal government as ‘extremely small, extremely efficient, and extremely strong’.7

Under the nom-de-plume Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin started the blog Unqualified Reservations in 2007 with the immodest goal to ‘build a new ideology’.8 Here, he developed many of the themes that continue to occupy him, both in blog posts and several book-length essays. While he ceased updating Unqualified Reservations in 2013 to focus on a startup firm, he returned in 2018 with a new blog, Gray Mirror, which aims ‘to present a detailed ex nihilo vision of governance in the 21st century’.9

Carlylean monarchism

Curtis Yarvin’s political views are outré. He characterizes himself as a ‘radical monarchist’ against all forms of liberalism and progressivism. He also rejects conservatism, which he considers unable to resist liberalism, and democracy, which he argues leads to governmental dysfunction and civilizational decline. As for rights, Yarvin takes umbrage at political and social rights like freedom of speech and the limited welfare state associated with American liberalism. However, property rights remain, for him, extremely important, as he wants a regime of ‘spontaneous order’ so as to foster dynamism and market activity. But unlike some libertarians who believe that such a regime will arise organically from the uncoordinated activity of individuals, Yarvin believes it must be constructed much more proactively. This is the task of the state, which has ‘absolute responsibility for the well-being of the nation it governs, and absolute authority to take any act it considers necessary to optimize that well-being’.10 should be held by a single individual.

Yarvin sees the state as a corporation that owns a country. As such, it should be divided into shares, which would confer voting rights on their bearers, who would elect a board of directors. Corporation-states, he thinks, should be run along authoritarian lines and form a loosely connected ‘patchwork’. Those unhappy with these arrangements may leave, or, as Yarvin puts it, ‘the design is all exit, no voice’, appropriating A.O. Hirschman’s well-known typology of responses to organizational decline.11 In this view, there is no place for ‘the will of the people’ and no sense of citizenship as civic belonging. For Yarvin, the business of governing is akin to customer service provision – if you are unhappy with your order at McDonald’s, you are free to go to Burger King instead. Exemplars of such government in practice include Singapore and Dubai, which Yarvin praises as ‘.12

The Cathedral

While praising authoritarian regimes, Yarvin excoriates the culture of liberalism as a totalizing, nigh-irresistible force, which he dubs ‘the Cathedral’. In a nominally democratic society, where mass opinion could be said to create power, Yarvin points to ‘information organs’, media and educational institutions, as true sites of power. He considers that the Cathedral functions as a decentralized feedback loop, funneling those who support it into positions of power and influence, fostering a political system that perpetuates it. The Cathedral is said to devise policies and theories that favour its interests, harnessing power and resources to reinforce its position. This supposedly produces effects similar to those of a totalitarian society, albeit without a central coordinating authority.

In light of this, Yarvin advises the prudent reactionary to ‘liquidate’ the Cathedral.13 As for its employees, though they might be considered ‘bloodsucking parasites’, Yarvin counsels benevolence, suggesting that most will go quietly into retirement if offered a full pension conditional on support for the new regime.14 There has been talk of these ideas having been influential on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Elites

It is in the theory of the Cathedral that we see the influence of Italian elite theorists Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels most clearly in Yarvin’s writing. While a full exegesis of elite theory is impossible here, its stance, which can be genealogically traced back to Machiavelli, has been well-described by Donald Levine as one of hierarchic naturalism.15 The elite theorists’ position was anti-individualist, stipulating the presence of a ruling class to maintain social order through material and ideological power. Morality was seen as naturalist, meaning that no judgment should be made on the morality of any particular action. And it posited a common good to which individual wellbeing should be sacrificed for the greater good of the whole.

Like Italian elite theorists, Yarvin views politics as consisting of the struggle for power among elite factions characterized by a particular ideology. He notes the importance of institutions like the Cathedral in fostering this style of thought and in maintaining elite dominance. While elites may struggle for power among themselves, they are deemed united in excluding ordinary citizens from any meaningful access to political leverage.

However, it is worth reiterating that Yarvin is not motivated by a ‘small-d’ democratic sentiment in adopting this perspective. Here, Thomas Carlyle’s influence is apparent. Yarvin shares the thinker’s aristocratic hauteur: because of their natural inferiority, the masses should be ruled by a ‘dictatorial’ government of ‘heroes’, with a ‘natural capacity for leadership’. Democratic institutions, Carlyle wrote, should be maintained only insofar as they register the people’s instincts, for ‘just as a prudent rider consults his horse’s desires as to food, so should the rulers consult the instincts of the people as to government’.16

Yarvin endorses the Carlylean worldview, upholding that democracy is to be vigorously suppressed in favour of authoritarian rule. Thus, the notion of ‘right wing populism’ serves more to obscure than to clarify Yarvin’s thought. He does not advocate a return of political power from the corrupt ‘elite’ to the virtuous ‘people’. His view is precisely the opposite: he is contemptuous of the latter’s cognitive faculties and capacity for political engagement. It is not the existence of elites that disturbs him. Rather, his complaint is that our elites are incompetent and not elite enough. They are too democratic. In Yarvin’s view, democracy only works when it is anti-democratic in practice.

The contemporary American right

Yarvin’s complaint about liberal elites is not novel. Twentieth century American conservatives also lamented academia’s bias and railed against the ‘liberal media’. William F. Buckley, founder of the conservative National Review, is said to have joked, for example, that he would rather the US be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard.

What sets Yarvin apart is his direct relationship with the contemporary American far right, which can be characterized by at least four distinctive features. First, the far right rejects liberal democracy and its endeavour to achieve equality. Second, it upholds white racialism: the assumption that a good polity is one in which the white race is dominant. Third, it takes an anti-American stance based on the assumption that, since the US has replaced de jure white supremacy with racial equality, white citizens should ally themselves against the state. And fourth, it rejects traditional decorum with its vitriolic rhetoric.

Yarvin agrees that liberalism and conservatism are coterminous, and rejects the notion of human equality as an ‘arbitrary’ vestige of Christianity.17 Regarding anti-Americanism, however, his position is more difficult to pinpoint. While he clearly harbours no affection for any of the traditional shibboleths of mainstream American conservatism such as the Founding Fathers and Jeffersonian democracy (he penned one essay that takes the British side in the American Revolution, for example), in other writing he strikes a more moderate tone, distinguishing between America – ‘I love the country although frankly I think it needs a lot of work’ – and its government, to which he feels ‘absolutely no emotional connection…Not only do I not love it, I don’t even hate it.’18

While Yarvin’s reasoning for defending anti-American views doesn’t seem to be rooted in white nationalism, here he is nevertheless cagey. He once stated that he’s ‘not exactly allergic to’19 white nationalist writers and rejects racist policy as misguided for focusing on race rather than intelligence. But Yarvin ultimately takes issue with white nationalism’s affiliations: ‘The worst thing …is just that it’s nationalism. Nationalism is really another word for democracy’.20 In other words, white nationalism is also too democratic.

And there can be no disputing that his rhetoric is suffused with vitriol, referring as he does to public employees as ‘bloodsucking parasites’ and comparing the US government to a Lovecraftian abomination: ‘Cthulhu may swim slowly, but he always swims left’.21

The computational metaphor

Unsurprisingly, given his programming background, Yarvin’s visions are full of computational metaphors. He claims that modern government presupposes a computational understanding of the social: because authority is depersonalized and invested in rules, it ‘weirdly anticipates computer-science concepts from a quarter-millennium later’.22 For Yarvin, a political constitution is a combination of the civic sacred ‘holy document’ and the digitally profane ‘blockchain contract’. He describes regime transition as ‘rebooting your computer when…it gets gunked up’.23 Since American democracy has been ‘hacked’, Yarvin recommends ‘hacking the hack…and booting up a successor state’.24

It is important to emphasize that Yarvin is not the originator of this computational Weltanschauung. The notion that the world could be modelled on an information system emerged as part of the US government’s weaponry research during the Second World War. These ideas came to be associated with cybernetics, the interdisciplinary field that treats ‘the study of messages as a means of controlling machinery and society’.25 In the postwar period, these ideas influenced a wide range of academic disciplines, from computer science and economics to anthropology and biology.

Yarvinite and cybernetic thought converge on two points. The cybernetic perspective sees the world as a series of orderly and interconnected communication-control systems surrounded by chaotic ‘noise’. As biological, mechanical and social systems are all treated as isomorphic in this view, the human being fades into a posthuman jumble of electrical impulses. Yarvin, too, is committed to this computational understanding wherein programmers could construct technical, social and even biological systems because of their common ontology. Social and political problems morph into design problems, implying a privileged role for an elite cadre of social engineers.

Then comes the moral language that both cyberneticians and Yarvin expound. For the noted cybernetician Norbert Weiner, order was clearly a self-evident good, while disorder and randomness were phenomena ‘which without too violent a figure of speech we may consider evil’.26 To which Yarvin adds an ideological twist: ‘Evil is chaos, good is order. Evil is left, good is right’.27 Given his usual self-conscious, non-moralistic intellectual stance, this language from Yarvin is odd and represents a contradiction in his thought. A similar tension exists between Yarvin’s influences: the Realpolitik of the Italian elitists sits uneasily with Thomas Carlyle’s thought, which accepted the irreducibly normative character of sovereign political judgment. As always seems to be the case with ‘scientific’ politics, Yarvin’s attempts to objectively ground his theory have led to normative considerations sneaking back in.

Yarvin, postliberalism and the future of democracy

Given that Yarvin’s political views are likely to be unpalatable or odious to many readers, why is explicating them a necessary, if unpleasant, exercise? As societies shift from democracy towards what political scientist John Keane calls ‘new despotism’,28 digital government is being promoted as the solution to political crises. Tech entrepreneurs are counselling governments on how to adopt Silicon Valley’s engineering mindset29 to win the AI arms race and maintain geopolitical dominance. As computational metaphors spread in social theory,30 and governments – from authoritarian Singapore to illiberal India and ‘democratic’ Europe – model their operations on software ‘stacks’,31 the Yarvinite mode of governance appears to increasingly match the trajectory of twenty-first century societies. Curtis Yarvin, then, may serve as a bellwether not just of where we are but also where we may be heading in the future.