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Curtis Yarvin wants to replace American democracy with a form of monarchy led by a ‘CEO’

Allan

Allan

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Normally I'd laugh off someone like Curtis Yarvin but his ideas are getting some traction among younger Republicans and he has the ear of some people in the Trump administration.

Meet the man who has been advocating to replace American democracy with an all-powerful monarchy — and who has the ear of some of the most important people in Washington and Silicon Valley.

Curtis Yarvin is a computer engineer and entrepreneur turned political theorist, deemed the father of “dark enlightenment” — a school of thought that the best path forward for the United States is to consolidate as much power as possible in the chief executive and do away with most of the federal government (and most state governments) as we know it.
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Allan said:
Normally I'd laugh off someone like Curtis Yarvin but his ideas are getting some traction among younger Republicans and he has the ear of some people in the Trump administration.



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He is the Western version of Alexandr Dugin aka "Putin's Brain".
And yes, ALL the US "tech bro's" are kissing his feet.
I'll never forget how our former DP member @MasterPO kept laughing as I talked about how Silicon Valley and San Francisco were "anything BUT leftist" and were in reality being controlled by an increasingly extremist faction of ultra libertarian folks who despised democracy in any form.
He was so convinced I was wrong that he carried my statement in his sig line for months.
 
More of his political philosophy...

“I don’t believe in voting at all,” he told the New York Times in January.

According to Yarvin’s worldview, the cadre of elite institutions like academia and media (what he deems “The Cathedral”) should be done away with, while the worthy and smart individuals inside those institutions should be brought into the fold of the new order.

When asked how to prevent any leader from turning into the next Hitler or Stalin, Yarvin argues that most examples of monarchies “don’t generally see a Holocaust” and that today’s general population doesn’t have the same type of “barbarism” of the past.

“You need to concentrate that power in a single individual and then just hope somehow that this is the right individual, or close to the right individual,” Yarvin says.
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None of these tech bro types are willing to have interviews and they pretend they are too busy to have their policies questioned.
In reality they are terrified (and angry) that anyone would even DARE to question their wisdom.
 
When asked how to prevent any leader from turning into the next Hitler or Stalin, Yarvin argues that most examples of monarchies “don’t generally see a Holocaust”
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He is wrong about that. The Thirty Years War was Europe's bloodiest war in history prior to the two world wars, and it was fought almost entirely between monarchs. Going back even farther in time, virtually every genocide described in The Bible was perpetrated by monarchs. To steelman Yarvin's argument: It's probably true that any monarch who wanted to commit a Holocaust nowadays probably would have too unstable a regime to successfully transfer absolute power to his son (although even here North Korea would seem to be an exception). But this gets the cause and effect backwards...monarchy doesn't prevent Holocausts, Holocausts (maybe) end monarchies.

and that today’s general population doesn’t have the same type of “barbarism” of the past.
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Again, he's getting the cause and effect backwards. You can't just upend democracy and assume that everything else about the modern culture will continue as-is. Maybe people don't *need* to be barbarians because they have democracies and can vote bad leaders out of power.

“You need to concentrate that power in a single individual and then just hope somehow that this is the right individual, or close to the right individual,” Yarvin says.
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He hasn't provided any evidence that this is even possible, much less desirable. Why would this even be a good thing? Absolute monarchies of the past were rarely well-run nations.
 
Allan said:
Normally I'd laugh off someone like Curtis Yarvin but his ideas are getting some traction among younger Republicans and he has the ear of some people in the Trump administration.



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I thought the name Curtis Yarvin sounds familiar....

J. D. Vance seems to be - or once was - interested in Curtis Yarvin.

www.wbur.org

JD Vance and the rise of the 'New Right'

In this week’s Jackpod Meghna and Jack spoke about this episode of On Point from August last year about ‘radical monarchist’ Curtis Yarvin and the so-called New Right movement. To make it easy to find we’re dropping it here again.
www.wbur.org www.wbur.org

...CHAKRABARTI: We asked Curtis Yarvin for an interview. He did not respond to our request. His ideas, though, have found willing minds among some younger conservatives, especially those whose own experience winds through Silicon Valley, as JD Vance's does. Here's Vance in 2021 on the podcast Jack Murphy Live.

VANCE: There's this guy, Curtis Yarvin. Who's written about some of these things. A lot of concerns that said we should deconstruct the administrative state. We should basically eliminate the administrative state. And I'm sympathetic to that project. But another option is that we should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes.

I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And then when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say the Chief Justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.

CHAKRABARTI: Again, that was JD Vance in 2021. Now, Vance has never said that he's an unquestioning acolyte of Yarvin's. But Yarvin's ideas do have a stickiness to them. Yarvin also coined the term the cathedral, by which he means elite academic and media institution that he believes set the bounds of acceptable discourse, and by doing so distort reality to amplify their own power. Or in Yarvin's telling:

The cathedral is essentially the reification of the legitimate sources of information. So the cathedral is essentially performing the functions that a ministry of truth would perform in a classic Orwellian environment, and it's performing the functions that a religion would in a classic theocracy.

CHAKRABARTI: And once again, here's JD Vance in 2021.

VANCE: So much of what we want to do in this movement and in this country, I think, are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions, specifically the universities which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provides research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country.

And we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country....
 
Yes, Yarvinism is about ending democracy and install a corporate dictatorship. He has a view that there exists something he calls "the Cathedral", which is his version of the "deep state", but it also encompass the media and higher education. Thus not only the government needs to be torn down but also universities and the free media. The replacement will be a "monarchy" under a CeO who will only answer to a Board of Shareholders (rich people), who are the ones that seat the CeO King and can unseat him. Yarvin comes from a Libertarian background, but like many Libertarians he fell into the "if there was a dictatorship where I was part of the ruling elite I get MORE liberties" pipeline. This however is always self delusion. In a Dictatorship there is exactly one person with Liberties: the Dictator. All the cronies are expendable, and will be tossed aside as soon as the Dictator does not need them anymore.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
He is the Western version of Alexandr Dugin aka "Putin's Brain".
And yes, ALL the US "tech bro's" are kissing his feet.
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While he's kissing their asses? I suppose there are enough people on the planet that some might genuinely believe that they should be servants to an all-powerful dictator, but I imagine a more common route to a philosophy like Yarvin's is recognizing that the best way to secure billionaires' patronage is to preach that billionaires should be god-kings, or something to that effect.
 
aociswundumho said:
Concentrating power down to one individual. I'm not sure how anyone could think this is a good idea.
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Everyone did, since forever. Until now.
Liberalism is the reason you don't have to tip your hat to the man who owns the land you live on.
 
aociswundumho said:
Concentrating power down to one individual. I'm not sure how anyone could think this is a good idea.
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From everything I have seen of him, Mr. Yarvin is not very intelligent. He is not stupid mind you. But I think he thinks of himself as far more intelligent and deeper thinker than he actually is. More of a mid-wit.
 
joluoto said:
Yes, Yarvinism is about ending democracy and install a corporate dictatorship. He has a view that there exists something he calls "the Cathedral", which is his version of the "deep state", but it also encompass the media and higher education. Thus not only the government needs to be torn down but also universities and the free media. The replacement will be a "monarchy" under a CeO who will only answer to a Board of Shareholders (rich people), who are the ones that seat the CeO King and can unseat him. Yarvin comes from a Libertarian background, but like many Libertarians he fell into the "if there was a dictatorship where I was part of the ruling elite I get MORE liberties" pipeline. This however is always self delusion. In a Dictatorship there is exactly one person with Liberties: the Dictator. All the cronies are expendable, and will be tossed aside as soon as the Dictator does not need them anymore.
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This is what you get when you empower ignorant entitled kiddies who skipped History class.
But, you see, History is a product of "the Cathedral" and "our revolution will be bloodless, if the Left allows it to be" (Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation) but for some reason people like Roberts and Yarvin insist that everyone outside their little circle MUST be "the Left" because the Left is automatically evil, thus everyone who disagrees with the CEO-king is evil.
I say let's force the Yarvinites to put their money where their mouth is and make them start their war on "the evil folks who don't bow" and see how long their honeymoon lasts.
 
joluoto said:
Yes, Yarvinism is about ending democracy and install a corporate dictatorship. He has a view that there exists something he calls "the Cathedral", which is his version of the "deep state", but it also encompass the media and higher education. Thus not only the government needs to be torn down but also universities and the free media. The replacement will be a "monarchy" under a CeO who will only answer to a Board of Shareholders (rich people), who are the ones that seat the CeO King and can unseat him. Yarvin comes from a Libertarian background, but like many Libertarians he fell into the "if there was a dictatorship where I was part of the ruling elite I get MORE liberties" pipeline. This however is always self delusion. In a Dictatorship there is exactly one person with Liberties: the Dictator. All the cronies are expendable, and will be tossed aside as soon as the Dictator does not need them anymore.
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American billionaires have already been going for this long before Yarvin came about.
 
Felis Leo said:
The man is not very intelligent.
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I looked into it a little bit, and he wants wealthy people and corporations to pick the first dictator. I found this quote from him:

“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia,” he said in 2012.
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Apparently this guy has a "following" of tech leaders.
 
Of course, if this whole "CEO-king" business actually comes to pass, are we still "The United States of America" at that point?
I'm not asking an emotional or moral question, although that can come later.

I am asking an academic or constitutional question, because it's rather obvious that replacing democracy and a republican form of government with a monarchy is, in effect, a cancellation of The Constitution of the United States of America, and therefore in my humble opinion, that spells the END of the *"republic ma'am, if you can keep it" and therefore The United States of America ceases to exist as said republic, and ma'am is the American people and the American people need to be informed that the republic has failed.
*1748838971877.webp
Furthermore, seeing as how the republic ceases to exist, the various formerly "united" states are no longer under ANY obligation to remain within the republic.
 
Grand Mal said:
Everyone did, since forever. Until now.
Liberalism is the reason you don't have to tip your hat to the man who owns the land you live on.
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I don't know about that everyone part. Even the Tanakh despite functioning largely as propaganda for a monarchic idealism suggests an initial resistance to the idea (1 Samuel 8). I imagine the reason for the historical prevalence of emperors, kings and petty lords has more to do with the difficulties of implementing an alternative once they're established, not least because the people with the best chances of overthrowing a current king (princes, lords or generals) almost invariably did so to take their place. A popular revolution would be very difficult to successfully organize in circumstances with poor transportation, communication and literacy, particularly on larger scales. Rome and Athens did so when they were city-states, or near enough to it (and even then were still more oligarchies than truly democratic).

It's possible that we just happen to have been born in a narrow window of history after the time when communication and organization techniques became sophisticated enough to make popular uprisings more feasible and more commonly successful, at least in part, but before the (rapidly approaching, or current a la China's mass surveillance, social credit system etc.) time when control and coercion mechanisms become sophisticated enough to subvert or pre-empt them entirely.
 
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