America should be run like a monarchy with a chief executive in charge and all government employees should be fired.
Sound familiar?
It might seem like the unofficial Maga agenda for the second Trump administration, but the approach actually comes from a fringe philosopher who has been embraced by some of the President’s prominent followers.
Although Curtis Yarvin’s name is not yet well known in the mainstream, the influence of his thinking is increasingly apparent in the actions of the Trump administration, prompting concerns about the extent of his influence.
Yarvin has been hailed as an inspiration by Trump’s Vice President JD Vance and was an “informal guest of honour” at the inauguration in Washington last month.
The far-right blogger sees democracy as a failed experiment where society is ruled by a shadowy group of unaccountable liberals known as “The Cathedral”, his version of what Trump calls the “Deep State”, and which needs to be razed and replaced by what sounds very like a dictatorship.
Seen as a leading voice in the “Dark Enlightenment” or neo-reactionary movement (NRx), an anti-democratic movement which is closely linked to the alt-right, Yarvin believes society needs a “hard reset”, which is the kind of language that could have come from Elon Musk, who is dismantling the US government at Trump’s request. Yarvin has even advocated for something he called “RAGE” or “Retire All Government Employees”, which is only a few letters away from Musk’s Department for Government Efficiency, DOGE.
Musk is not the only Silicon Valley tycoon and Trump supporter who has cited Yarvin. Billionaires including Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist, PayPal co-founder and Trump donor, has called him a “powerful historian”, while the investor Marc Andreessen, who voiced his support for Trump during the election is also a fan, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist and a major figure in the Maga world, has expressed a liking for Yarvin’s philosophy too.
Jaime Caro, a historian who researches the extreme right, summed up Yarvin’s idea of utopia as “a dictatorship in which those who hold power are simply the wealthiest individuals”.
He said: “What makes NRx particularly dangerous is not the ideology itself, [it is] how Silicon Valley billionaires can weaponise it to consolidate even more power while dismantling the state and democracy.
“NRx serves as a theoretical justification for an ultra-elitist project in which corporate oligarchs become de facto sovereigns, using their wealth and technological influence to accelerate the erosion of democratic institutions.”
Figures like Musk seem to want to shrink the state but “only to the extent that it continues to subcontract to their companies”, Caro said.
A striking example would be the $400m (£318m) contract to buy armoured Teslas signed by the US State Department at the same time Musk is cutting tens of thousands of jobs, or the $38bn (£30bn) that the billionaire has reportedly received in government contracts over the past 20 years.
Aged in his early fifties, Yarvin first came to prominence in the late 2000s with his blog Unqualified Reservations in which he outlined his ideas under the pen name Mencius Moldbug.
In the posts, Yarvin shares a deep suspicion of government and a desire to tear it down that is shared by The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think-tank behind the “Project 2025” agenda that is shaping much of the second Trump administration.
But Yarvin’s thinking goes goes further and darker, making claims including that white people are smarter than black people. He has compared Nelson Mandela to Anders Breivik, the neo-Nazi who killed 77 people on a rampage in 2012 at a summer camp in Norway. In an interview with The New York Times last month, Yarvin even questioned whether American slaves wanted to be freed.
John Finn, professor emeritus of government at Wesleyan University and author of Fracturing the Founding: How the Alt-Right Corrupts the Constitution, said that Yarvin was having a moment now because of the cover he gave to his powerful allies.
Yarvin offers “intellectual substance and a veneer of seriousness / respectability to big-money extremist / right-wing donors and their candidate / politician proteges and projects,” Professor Finn said.
“Despite the pretence of intellectual heft, Yarvin is not a serious historian, a serious economist, a serious political theorist or even, at bottom, a very serious thinker.
“But he thinks he is, and his monied admirers are happy if not eager to believe it and claim the mantle of intellectual respectability.”
Professor Finn added that Yavin’s ideas are “fundamentally incompatible with constitutional democracy” and that he was advocating the idea of a strongman akin to an “American Caesar”.
Dr Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, warned that stopping the spread of people like Yarvin was far more difficult now than in the past.
In his book How Far-Right Movements Die: The decline of the John Birch Society, about the extremist conservative Bircher movement, Dallek pointed out that in the 60s there was a shared culture, heterogeneous political parties and an active liberal civil rights coalition that pushed back.
The Bircher movement, which also began to become more radical and attracted more conspiratorial people to its ranks which turned off other supporters.
Dr Dallek told The i Paper that now we have a “totally different country and culture” in which the President just pardoned the 6 January rioters”.
He said: “Legacy media has lost enormous amounts of clout and authority. Social media drives a lot of conspiracy theories.
“The backlash to immigration has been decades in the making … and so Americans are also now decades removed from a time when there was hope that America was coming back and that economic equality would return.
“That hasn’t come to pass. People are feeling more pessimistic about the future in democracy, they have lost faith in government and that’s why Musk enjoys the support he does.”
Yarvin himself painted an equally grim picture in his New York Times interview in which he said that it was not that democracy was bad, it’s just “very weak”.
He suggested liberals were hypocrites because they want policy and laws to be set by “wise experts and people in the courts and lawyers and professors”.
In another echo of Trump’s worldview, Yarvin added: “Then you’ll realise that what you’re actually endorsing is aristocracy rather than democracy.”
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