He’s anti-democracy and pro-Trump: the obscure ‘dark enlightenment’ blogger influencing the next US administration

 

 This article is more than 1 month old

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He’s anti-democracy and pro-Trump: the obscure ‘dark enlightenment’ blogger influencing the next US administration

This article is more than 1 month old

Key figures in the incoming administration follow Curtis Yarvin, who’s pushing for an autocratic takeover of the US

 

Jason Wilson

Sat 21 Dec 2024 12.00 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/21/curtis-yarvin-trump

 

Curtis Yarvin is hardly a household name in US politics. But the “neoreactionary” thinker and far-right blogger is emerging as a serious intellectual influence on key figures in Donald Trump’s coming administration in particular over potential threats to US democracy.

 

Yarvin, who considers liberal democracy as a decadent enemy to be dismantled, is intellectually influential on vice president-elect JD Vance and close to several proposed Trump appointees. 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.

 

Trump’s legal moves against critics in the media, Elon Musk’s promises to pare government spending to the bone, and the deployment of the Maga base against Republican lawmakers who have criticized controversial nominees like Pete Hegseth are among the measures that resemble elements of Yarvin’s strategy for displacing liberal democracy in the US.

 

One of the venues in which Yarvin has articulated the strategy include a podcast hosted by Michael Anton, a writer and academic whom Trump last week appointed to work in a senior role under secretary of state nominee Marco Rubio.

 

Although Yarvin once described Vance as a “random normie politician I’ve barely even met” in a July Substack post, in October the Verge reported that “no one online has shaped Vance’s thinking more”. The growing parallels between the incoming administration’s actions – especially Vance’s views – and Yarvin’s suggestions raise questions about his influence.

 

Robert Evans, an extremism researcher and the host of the podcast Behind the Bastards, recorded a two-part series on Yarvin.

 

“He didn’t fall out of a coconut tree. He emerged into a rightwing media space where they had been talking about the evils of liberal media and corrupt academic institutions for decades,” he said.

 

“He has influenced a lot of people in the incoming administration and a lot of other influential people on the right. But a lot of the stuff he advocates is the same windmills Republicans have been tilting at for a while,” Evans continued.

 

“What’s unique is his way of rebranding or repackaging old reactionary ideas in a way that appealed to libertarian-minded kids in the tech industry, and in eventually getting some of them to embrace a lot of far-right ideas,” he said.

 

“That’s the novelty of Yarvin and that’s his real accomplishment.”

 

‘A form of one-man rule’

Anton and Yarvin’s May 2021 conversation was recorded for the podcast of the American Mind, a publication of the powerful rightwing Claremont Institute, where Anton is a senior fellow, and whose growing influence during the Trump era has seen it described as the “nerve center of the American right”.

 

On 8 December, Trump’s transition team announced that Anton would be appointed director of policy planning at the state department. Anton also served in a communications role in Trump’s first-term national security council from February 2017 until April 2018, resigning the day before neoconservative John Bolton assumed the role of national security adviser.

 

After leaving the first Trump administration, Anton did not abandon Trump, but continued writing about US liberal democracy in bleak terms.

 

In Up from Conservatism, a 2023 anthology of essays edited by the executive director of Claremont’s Center for the American Way of Life, Arthur Milikh, Anton wrote that “the United States peaked around 1965”, and that Americans are ruled by “a network of unelected bureaucrats … corporate-tech-finance senior management, ‘experts’ who set the boundaries of acceptable opinion, and media figures who police those boundaries”.

 

Anton continued the discussion in sections headed “The universities have become evil”, “Our economy is fake”, “The people are corrupt”, “Our civilization has lost the will to live”.

 

His and Yarvin’s conversation was ostensibly about his 2020 book, The Stakes. That book was controversial even on the right for its prolonged consideration of autocratic “Caesarism” as a means of resolving American decadence.

 

In the book, he defined Caesarism as a “form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny”.

 

He adds, though, that “Caesarism is not tyranny, which, strictly understood, is a regime that usurps a legitimate and functioning government”, whereas Caesarism implements “authoritarian one-man rule partially legitimized by necessity” – that is, “the breakdown of republican, constitutional rule”, adding that “a nation no longer capable of ruling itself must yet be ruled”.

 

He writes that a “Red Caesar” could be attractive to “the reds” in the Republican coalition, who he says are “under constant rhetorical, political, and, increasingly, physical attack, especially in blue states”, making them “more likely to turn to a Caesar”.

 

Anton stops short of openly calling for authoritarian rule, but in general, he writes that the advantages of Caesarism include “continuity and stability” and “the prospect of avoiding conflict”, and that it “tends to engender calm”.

 

‘This is what we’re going to do’

Yarvin is the originator of the neoreactionary or “dark enlightenment” movement, whose early ideas he developed on a blog called Unqualified Reservations in 2007 and 2008 under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. He now writes a Substack newsletter under his own name and the far-right imprint Passage Publishing recently published an anthology of his earlier writing.

 

The Guardian previously reported that Passage Publishing’s founder is Jonathan Keeperman, a former UC Irvine lecturer who had previously operated under the pseudonym “L0m3z”.

 

For years, Yarvin has consistently held to a number of explicitly anti-democratic beliefs: republican self-government has already ended; real power is exercised oligarchically in a small number of prestigious academic and media institutions he calls the Cathedral; and a sclerotic democracy should be replaced by a strict hierarchy headed by a single person whose role is that of a monarch or CEO.

 

He also thinks that current liberal democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction.

 

As JD Vance put it in a 2021 podcast interview with far-right influencer Jack Murphy: “There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin who’s written about some of these things. One has to basically accept that the whole thing is going to fall in on itself.”

 

Vance added: “The task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved and then when the inevitable collapse comes you build back the country in a way that’s actually better.”

 

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.

 

Given the post-election period and Trump’s preparation for a return to the White House, Yarvin’s program seems less fanciful then it did in 2021, when he laid it out for Anton.

 

In the recording of that podcast, Yarvin offers a condensed presentation of his program which he has laid out on Substack and in other venues.

 

Midway through their conversation, Anton says to Yarvin, “You’re essentially advocating for someone to – age-old move – gain power lawfully through an election, and then exercise it unlawfully”, adding: “What do you think the actual chances of that happening are?”

 

Yarvin responded: “It wouldn’t be unlawful,” adding: “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.’”

 

Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump promised to carry out a wide array of anti-democratic or authoritarian moves, and effectively ran on these promises. Trump has suggested he might declare a state of emergency in response to America’s immigration crisis.

 

Trump also promised to pursue retribution on individually named antagonists like representative Nancy Pelosi and senator-elect Adam Schiff, and spoke more broadly about dispatching the US military to deal with “the enemy within”.

 

Later in the recording, Yarvin said that after a hypothetical authoritarian president was inaugurated in January, “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.”

 

“Machiavelli could tell you right away that that’s a stupid idea,” Yarvin added.

 

While he has not yet assumed power, Trump has moved against media outlets, commencing lawsuits against some including the Des Moines Register, CBS and ABC, with the latter settling a $15m suit that legal experts believed to be winnable for the broadcaster.

 

Vice-president-elect JD Vance, meanwhile, and others in the broader Maga orbit like Christopher Rufo have identified universities as primary ideological enemies, with Rufo helping to remake New College of Florida in the image of Christian nationalism.

 

In 2022, Vance told Vanity Fair: “I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”

 

The Guardian reported in August that Vance said in a podcast recording: “There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we’re willing to strike at the heart of the beast. That’s the universities.”

 

Elsewhere in the podcast with Anton, Yarvin talked of the need to mobilise the base of the party – its ordinary supporters – in the service of the cause. Yarvin postulated this could be done with an app that supporters would download and take instructions from when opponents were identified.

 

Yarvin said the notional US autocrat would use the app “to re-create the Sons of Liberty style, quote-unquote, protest”, he said.

 

The Sons of Liberty is a name for underground cadres who pushed back on British rule in the lead-up to the American Revolution; one historian wrote that their methods amounted to “mob terror”.

 

Although no Trump app exists that parallels the one Yarvin postulates, the pro-Trump social media apparatus has already directed the Maga base’s ire against Republican lawmaker Joni Ernst, a self-identified sexual assault survivor who expressed scepticism about the nomination of Pete Hegseth, who has been accused of sexual misconduct.

 

In a story on Ernst’s backdown earlier this month, the New York Times reported that “her shift suggested that Mr. Trump’s MAGA base was ready, willing and able to bully Republicans into submitting to his desires”.

 

Yarvin’s recommendations for a president in power were for the sharp and sudden concentration of police powers.

 

“Essentially, you have to be willing to say, OK, when we have this regime change, we have a period of temporary uncertainty which has to be resolved in an extremely peaceful way. What that means is basically a state of emergency in the White House,” he said.

 

“It means the president is basically taking direct control over all law enforcement authorities, a state of emergency in basically every state,” he added.

 

In September, on the campaign trail, Trump said that “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day” of unrestrained policing would end crime “immediately.”

 

“One rough hour – and I mean real rough – the word will get out and it will end immediately, you know? It will end immediately,” Trump added.