"Curtis Yarvin wants American Democracy toppled, has prominent Republican fans" (Vox)
October 2022 seems so long ago — the Select January 6 Committee was still on TV.
Christina Animashaun/Vox; image of Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug from “How to Reboot the US government.” YouTube, 2012
I can still remember being rudely awakened more than twenty years ago to the existence of "neoconservatives" as a force; yes, Cheney/Bush had been fully established before I caught on. Those of us mired in daily news now need to face up to something called the "New Right" peopled by "neoreactionaries."
In light of current political events, this article seems essential reading.
Curtis Yarvin wants American democracy toppled. He has some prominent Republican fans.
Among the "fans" mentioned in the article are JD Vance, Blake Masters (failed as Senate candidate in Arizona), Peter Thiel (bankrolled Vance for Senate; funded Yarvin's startup), and Tucker Carlson (rings a faint bell). Quick thoughts from Thiel:
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009, and earlier this year [2022], he declared that Republican members of Congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment after the January 6 attacks were “traitorous.”
By “freedom,” we readily grasp that he means unfettered capitalism. You'll see several instances of terminology Vance is already using on his much-expanded platform, such as "the Cathedral."
There are some truly scary threads to pull here — for instance, at "Yarvin has written a playbook for the power grab he hopes will then unfold." There is no shortage of ideas for toppling a government, and a "butterfly revolution" featuring an "alternative regime in internal exile" seems to have caught on in the US&A among aspiring leaders.
The article lays out a series of "thought experiments" Yarvin has been developing and urging on his followers who are in a position to implement them. They start at "Campaign on it, and win" if you want to skip to the nitty-gritty, and the next several paragraphs are some of the scariest, with "Ignore the courts" and "Co-opt Congress" right behind. It seems clear that the Heritage Foundation's "Project 2025" has grown out of an effort to do exactly that.
In fact, skimming through those "thought experiment" increments and then reading the last five paragraphs (beginning "But in a practical sense, Yarvin’s long-term ambitions for the new regime matter less than his ideas about how the old one could fall") gives a good idea of the ideology being laid out here. Reading the whole article then slots it all together.
In sum: There is a wealthy stratum of American society that wants, using democratic means if possible, to empower an oligarchy politically (which is the definition of fascism as Mussolini famously put it: “corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”). And we should be under no illusions that the super-wealthy mean to accomplish it by any means necessary. Supreme Court decisions from Citizens United (2010 and campaign cash as “speech”) to Trump v. USA (2024 and presidential immunity) are making it easier for them. We citizens must know what is afoot if we are to resist it successfully.