Basically, Yarvin looks and sounds like someone who consumed an excess of mind-altering substances in his formative years and has never fully recovered.
The piece is accurately titled: Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America, although it could easily also be against Western civilisation as a whole and even against the very notion of a democratic society as an entity, and the centuries-long struggle for universal suffrage. I genuinely think Yarvin misunderstands the fundamental principle of democracy.
As long ago as 2008, he was advocating "the liquidation of democracy, the [US] Constitution, and the rule of law", and the transfer of power to a CEO (someone like Steve Jobs of Apple) who would transform the government into "a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation."
This new regime, once democratically elected I presume, would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison "decivilized populations." It would also fire civil servants en masse and cut diplomatic relations with foreign countries, including the ending of "security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration."
Instead of being confined to a secure institution, he was lauded as a genius by people on the right, including Thiel, who invested in Yarvin's tech start-up businesses.
Yarvin, the New Yorker piece explains, "might have remained an obscure and ineffectual internet crank" but instead has "become one of America’s most influential illiberal thinkers, an engineer of the intellectual source code for the second Trump Administration."
A history professor at New York University says: "Yarvin has pushed the Overton window.” Nikhil Pal Singh, said Yarvin's scribblings have revived ideas that once seemed outside the bounds of polite society, and created a road-map for the dismantling of "the administrative state and the global postwar order."
The seeds for Yarvin's outlandish philosophy came originally from a German academic Hans-Hermann Hoppe, sometimes apparently described as 'an intellectual gateway to the far right.' Hoppe is now a retired economics professor, formerly at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and has argued that universal suffrage has supplanted rule by a "natural élite"; advocates for breaking nations into smaller, homogenous communities; and calls for communists, homosexuals, and others who oppose this rigid social order to be "physically removed."
Listen to this:
"Following Hoppe, Yarvin proposes that nations should eventually be broken up into a “patchwork” of statelets, like Singapore or Dubai, each with its own sovereign ruler. The eternal political problems of legitimacy, accountability, and succession would be solved by a secret board with the power to select and recall the otherwise all-powerful C.E.O. of each sovereign corporation, or SovCorp. (How the board itself would be selected is unclear, but Yarvin has suggested that airline pilots— 'a fraternity of intelligent, practical, and careful people who are already trusted on a regular basis with the lives of others. What’s not to like?'—could manage the transition between regimes.)
"To prevent a C.E.O. from staging a military coup, the board members would have access to cryptographic keys that would allow them to disarm all government weapons, from nuclear missiles down to small arms, with the push of a button."
It is a measure of the strange world we are entering that these ideas are not only not being dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic, but have entered mainstream political thinking in the world's most powerful nation.
Hoppe believes a monarch or a CEO has more of a long-term incentive to safeguard his subjects and the state than democratically elected officials because both (subjects and state) belong to him. Looking at how medieval monarchs and modern dictators behave, this sounds incredibly naive to most people, but not Yarvin. Politicians, who can be turfed out every few years unless they produce the goods, don't feel the same incentive, apparently.
Yarvin rejects Churchill's doctrine that democracy is the ‘worst of all systems, except for all the others’ as "highly delusional" simply because it hasn't so far ushered in some Utopian world, so let's go back to square one.
I think he misunderstands the fundamental purpose of democracy, which is not to produce a perfect government but to provide a safety valve to get rid of the bad ones. It allows a peaceful testing of public opinion and an orderly transition of power without the streets running with blood. Nobody reads manifestos nowadays and most voters barely know what they're voting for. They certainly know what they're voting against though, be it individuals or policy.
In 2011 Yarvin met Renaud Camus, the man who first coined the notion of The Great Replacement Theory, at his house in France. Afterward, Camus wrote in his diary: "The visitor spoke without interruption from his arrival to his departure, for five hours, very quickly and very loudly, interrupting himself only for curious fits of tears, when he spoke of his deceased wife, but also, more strangely, certain political situations."
Another documentary maker who was with Yarvin at the time, said he reminded him of the long-winded character in the film Airplane! who talks so incessantly that it drives his seatmates to kill themselves. I can understand it.
Yarvin has clearly never lived under an all-powerful monarchy or a dictator like Putin. He thinks in his imagined benign regime there would still be freedom of speech: "You can think, say, or write whatever you want, because the state has no reason to care." Really?
Under men like Yarvin, Thiel, Vance and Trump we are going back to before Magna Carta, before 1066, and even before King Alfred when Britain and the continent was divided into tiny kingdoms, each ruled over by monarchs of varying quality, and this is supposed to represent progress.
The New Yorker piece is overly long but well worth reading. That Yarvin's utterings are taken seriously is deeply, deeply worrying.
