Curtis Yarvin: the Dark Lord of Neo-Reaction
A critical analysis of a seminal figure in the so-called "Dark Enlightenment"
The political scientist Louis Hartz argued in his 1955 classic The Liberal Tradition in America that the dominant ideology in American politics was “liberalism,” which he defined, not in its modern sense, but in a broader, more classical and “Lockean” sense. Liberalism, for Hartz, meant an emphasis on individualism and property rights. Liberalism so defined was a centrist doctrine that eschewed extremes. Its dominance in American politics and culture meant that radical ideologies, whether of the right or the left, were consigned to the fringes of public influence and discourse.
In the last ten years there is evidence that the ascendancy of centrist liberalism is waning. Thanks to the radical left’s near dominance within our nation’s institutions of education, we are beginning to see extreme ideologies such as Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality enter the mainstream. The internet, through blogs and YouTube videos, has spawned an entirely new and vibrant brand of reactionary thought, bristling with heresies and épater le bourgeois nastiness. Unceremoniously tossing such imperatives of Lockean Liberalism aside as democracy, equality before the law, and even progress aside, this new brand of far right speculation finds inspiration in such disparate thinkers as Thomas Carlyle, Fredrich Nietzsche, Julius Evola, Vilfredo Pareto, and Hans Herman Hoppe.
The most important voice to emerge from the enveloping mists of this reactionary “Dark Enlightenment” (as some call it) is that of Curtis Yarvin, perhaps better known under his nom de plume, Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin makes for a rather strange, or at least ironic, mouthpiece for reactionary thought. He does not have the usual trappings of a “far-right” thinker. He was raised as a progressive. His father’s parents were communists who worshipped Stalin. His social views tend to be moderate, if not downright center-left in flavor. “I have no particular problem with abortion, rampant homosexuality, ear grommets, ‘rock music,’ etc.” Yarvin once admitted. He’s irreligious, ironic, foul-mouthed, and snarky. He seems oddly detached from or indifferent to traditional values. In interviews posted on YouTube, he will frequently burst into laughter at his own remarks. He makes for a rather odd reactionary.
Yarvin might be more accurately described as a disappointed libertarian. His political journey began when he discovered the radical libertarian tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. In his very first blog post, Yarvin confessed
I love libertarians to death. My CPU practically has a permanent open socket to the Mises Institute. In my opinion, anyone who has intentionally chosen to remain ignorant of libertarian (and, in particular, Misesian–Rothbardian) thought, in an era when a couple of mouse clicks will feed you enough high-test libertarianism to drown a moose, is not an intellectually serious person.
So where was the problem? How did Yarvin go from the radical libertarianism of von Mises to becoming the Sith Lord of the Dark Enlightenment? If the ideology of Mises and Rothbard was so wonderful, why would he years later describe himself as a “recovering” libertarian? What soured him on the ideology of liberty? Two things, mainly. Yarvin came to realize that libertarianism is “an essentially impractical ideology” that has “never been successfully implemented.” And then Yarvin discovered Thomas Carlyle.
Prima facie, we might have assumed that libertarianism would serve as an inoculation against Carlyle. But it did not prove so in Yarvin’s case. While still in his libertarian phase, he stumbled upon Hans Herman Hoppe’s incendiary book Democracy: The God That Failed, which made such an impression on him that he immediately began scouring libraries and books stores “for other works against democracy—libertarian or not.” This led to his discovery of Thomas Carlyle.
Yarvin’s first post on Carlyle in his “Unqualified Reservations” blog suggests that it took him a while to completely fall under Carlyle’s spell. His initial reaction to the sage of Chelsea is one of caution and qualified reservations:
It is fascinating and frustrating to read Carlyle, because his diagnoses are often startlingly prescient and his remedies are almost invariably dangerous and ineffective. (This is a very familiar conservative syndrome.) Carlyle is often described as a predecessor of fascism, and I see no reason at all to discount the charge, although I should note that I also see no reason to treat fascism and communism differently.
Two and a half years later his attitude toward Carlyle had undergone a significant shift—so much so that he confidently asserts, in glowing terms:
I am a Carlylean. I’m a Carlylean more or less the way a Marxist is a Marxist. My worship of Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian Jesus, is no adolescent passion—but the conscious choice of a mature adult. I will always be a Carlylean, just the way a Marxist will always be a Marxist. And it is not too late for you to join us yourself! It’s a big tent, this cult of Carlyle.
Yarvin is being only slightly sarcastic. He really is besotted with Carlyle. There is no other thinker who has exercised such a deep impact on his thought. The influence is so intense that Yarvin himself doesn’t know quite what to make of it. “Carlyle is the greatest of all, however, because his vision is the broadest,” he enthuses. “Properly tuned and restored, he is Messiah enough for any grown man.”
Yarvin summarizes the gist of Carlyleanism as follows:
To a Carlylean, the main event is the struggle between left and right. Which is the struggle between good and evil. Which is the struggle between order and chaos. Evil is chaos; good is order. Evil is left; good is right. Evil is fiction; good is truth.
These Carlylean strictures, particularly the identification of the political right with order, truth, and goodness and the political left with their opposites, is fundamental to Yarvin’s political thought. If the right “represents peace, order and security,” then the “left represents war, anarchy and crime.” These are almost axiomatic for Yarvin. They are at the very core of his political thought.
Another important axiom of Yarvin’s political thought is his belief in the inevitable leftward shift:
Whatever you make of the left–right axis, you have to admit that there exists some force which has been pulling the Anglo-American political system leftward for at least the last three centuries.
Since the “left represents war, anarchy and crime,” an inevitable shift to that side of the political spectrum must also entail an inevitable shift toward all those ills of “anarchy and crime” that Carlyle warns about. Yarvin’s prognostications for the future are appropriately grim:
History is not over. Oh, no. We are still living it. Perhaps we are in the positions of the French of 1780 or the Russians of 1914, who had no idea that the worlds they lived in could degenerate so rapidly into misery and terror.
Is the abyss this close? I don’t think so, but surely the materials are present. The spark is a long way from the gasoline—Ayers and his ilk strike most Americans as more clownish than anything, and our modern revolutionaries have never been so out of touch with the urban underclass.... Nonetheless, the first political entrepreneur who finds a way to deploy gangstas as stormtroopers, a trick the SDS often threatened but never quite mastered, will have pure dynamite on his hands.
More probable in my opinion is a slow decline into a Brezhnevian future, in which nothing good or new or exciting or beautiful is legal…. And only after many, many decades—probably not in our lifetimes—does the real dystopian experience start. Or the system could fail catastrophically, and produce ... some kind of awful Stormfront [i.e., neo-Nazi] neofascism.
Is there anything to be done for this? Can Civilization’s inevitable march into leftism and chaos be reversed? Although Yarvin has over the years graced us with various suggestions on how to deal with this inevitable march into the horrors of war, anarchy, and crime, it is generally acknowledged by both admirers and critics of Yarvin’s work alike that the weakest part of his doctrine involves his attempt to offer solutions to the problem of the intensifying leftist hegemony. I’ll have more to say of this later on. Before Yarvin fell under the spell of Carlyle, he had already developed a fairly elaborate diagnosis of the ills of American society. Since it is this portion of Yarvin’s thought that has made the biggest impact on the dissident right, we need to examine it more closely.
Yarvin began his “Unqualified Reservations” blog in April 23, 2007 with following pronouncement:
The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.
Note the jocular tone. In his early days, Yarvin wrote under the name “Mencius Moldbug.” Early Moldbug is rife with self-deprecating humor. Yarvin understands that building a new ideology is “crazy.” “People have been talking about ideology since Jesus was a little boy,” he writes. ”And I’m supposedly going to improve on this? Some random person on the Internet, who flunked out of grad school, who doesn’t know Greek or Latin?”
In all this self-effacement, Yarvin somehow forgets to mention what is most objectionable about ideology. The problem with ideology is that it tends to be far too rationalistic and impractical. When a person “builds” an ideology, more often than not he is doing little more than translating his personal political preferences into abstract form. Ideologies tend to be rationalizations of economic interests and moral sentiments. As such, they are usually more imaginary than real.
Yarvin should have known this. As an admirer of James Burnham’s The Machiavellians, he must surely have been familiar with Burnham’s critique of ideology. In The Machiavellians, Burnham makes a distinction between “formal” and “real” meaning. Guess where ideology falls? Certainly not among the “real,” that’s for sure! Ideology, as I have put it elsewhere, is the window dressing of the soul. It’s far more of a symptom than a cause. So why is Yarvin dabbling in ideology when he should know better?
Yarvin dabbles in it because, despite his obviously sincere admiration for Burnham’s The Machiavellians, Yarvin’s deepest sympathies are not with the Machiavellian tradition. At his core, he still remains a radical libertarian, with the ungainly addition of Carlylean authoritarianism added as a bizarre afterthought. Libertarians are committed ideologists. They have a touching faith in the “power” of ideas to change political and social realities. The fact that libertarian ideas have never gain much traction within the politics of the Western world has done little to shake this faith. Libertarians blithely assume that their ideas would somehow “win” if only enough people were exposed to them. It rarely occurs to any of these zealots for freedom that perhaps most people aren’t interested in their ideas because, deep down, most people favor social arrangements that clash with libertarian ideals.
While Yarvin believes in the power of ideas, he no longer believes in the power of libertarian ideas. Ideas of liberty are doomed to fail because society is rigged against them. To explain this rigging, Yarvin invented the concept of the “Cathedral,” which is perhaps his most famous political construct. The Cathedral consists of “the intellectual institutions at the center of modern society.” These include the universities and the media. The reason why libertarianism can never win is because this Cathedral is controlled, lock, stock, and barrel, by the political left. Yarvin regards the Cathedral as the directing force of the nation’s politics and culture. The ideas that bubble forth from the Cathedral will eventually determine both public opinion and government policy, although it might take a while for the entire process to play out:
On a number of subjects … I note that the public opinion of California in 2008 is quite similar to the public opinion of Stanford in 1963.
In America, the ultimate source of public opinion is ideas, and the source for ideas is the university. “Ideas check out of the university, but they hardly ever check in,” contends Yarvin. From the university, these ideas, bristling with power, flow into the education system as a whole, from whence they enter the bloodstream of the public schools and the mainstream media. “Eventually they become our old friend, ‘public opinion’.”
Yarvin explicates the process as follows:
Thus whatever coordinates the university system coordinates the state, through the transmission device of “public opinion.” Naturally, since this is 100% effective, the state does not have to wait for the transmission to complete. It can act in advance of a complete response ... and synchronize directly with the universities.
This relationship, whose widespread practice in the United States dates to 1933, is known as public policy. Essentially, for everything your government does, there is a university department full of professors who can, and do, tell it what to do. Civil servants and Congressional staffers follow the technical lead of the universities. The residual democratic branch of Washington, the White House, can sometimes push back feebly, but only with great difficulty.
In other words, the Cathedral—that is, “journalism plus academia”—is the locus of sovereignty. Hoary pendants and grubby newshounds run the show:
The professors and journalists have sovereignty because final decisions are entrusted to them and there is no power above them. Only professors can formulate policy—that is, set government strategy; only journalists can hold government accountable—that is, manage government tactics. Strategy plus tactics equals control.
Is Yarvin right about this? Is the country run by academicians in concert with the mainstream media? Is it really true that “only professors can … set government strategy” and “only journalists can … manage government tactics?” If so, somebody needs to inform the nation’s professors and journalists of the fact. Most of them would break into bitter laughter if told that “there is no power above them” and that “final decisions” are entrusted to none other but themselves.
Where does Yarvin come up with such stuff? How could anyone with his extensive reading and high intelligence believe that the nation is governed by an unedifying swarm of donnish pedants and platitudinous editorialists? This, I’ll admit, is a very great mystery, likely to exasperate and befuddle the wisest of men. All I can do to penetrate beneath its recondite layers is offer the following highly speculative conjecture. Yarvin, as I have already noted, has described himself as a “recovering libertarian.” I would modestly suggest that his recovery hasn’t gone far enough—that strains of libertarianism remain embedded in his mind, like barnacles clinging to a rotting ship. In his libertarian period, he gravitated toward the economic theories of Ludwig von Mises. Mises regarded economics as a kind of self-enclosed logical system like geometry or mathematics—a body of thought derived from a single axiom. As Mises protege Murray Rothbard explains:
We turn now to the Fundamental Axiom (the nub of praxeology): the existence of human action. From this absolutely true axiom can be spun almost the whole fabric of economic theory. Some of the immediate logical implications that flow from this premise are: the means-ends relationship, the time-structure of production, time-preference, the law of diminishing marginal utility, the law of optimum returns, etc. It is this crucial axiom that separates praxeology from the other methodological viewpoints--and it is this axiom that supplies the critical “a priori” element in economics.
If this sounds rather rationalistic—which is to say, “armchair” speculation without sufficient immersion in the relevant empirical reality—that’s precisely what it is. Now it could be argued that some parts of economic theory must be rationalistic, because of the impossibility of running scientific experiments on an entire economy. Fair enough. But that doesn't mean there aren’t serious problems with attempting to determine matters of fact with logical constructions based on either axioms or “common sense.” Aristotle tried something along such lines in his physics, and we all know how that ended.
Yarvin, schooled in this manner of thinking, ends up spinning a system of political thought that, in many ways, resembles what Mises and Rothbard were up to in their economic theorizing. I’m not suggesting that Yarvin has slavishly applied this “praxeological” methodology to his reactionary politics. No, he’s a bit more slipshod about it. His rationalism is much less perfect—a limping approximation of the apriorism of Mises and Rothbard rather than the real McCoy. Imperfect or not, the tendency toward a priori reasoning casts a long, dark shadow over Yarvin’s political speculations. His conceptions are often too abstract, too topical, to clean to bear the empirical burden of their real world referents. His concept of the Cathedral is a case in point. Although Yarvin admits that “the Cathedral is many institutions,” he nonetheless insists that it behaves “in many ways as if [it] were a single organizational structure.” There’s a reason for this insistence. Yarvin requires the Cathedral to be an abstract unity because the logic of his ideological system demands it. The implications of Cathedral’s heterogeneity would lead him to a very different analysis, one that is at odds with his conviction that the Cathedral behaves as if it were a singular entity.
We see all this play out when Yarvin gets around to explaining the party system under democracy. There are only ever two real parties, Yarvin asserts: “the Inner Party, and the Outer Party.”
The function of the Inner Party is to delegate all policies and decisions to the Cathedral. The function of the Outer Party is to pretend to oppose the Inner Party, while in fact posing no danger at all to it. Sometimes Outer Party functionaries are even elected, and they may even succeed in pursuing a few of their deviant policies.
For Yarvin, the Inner Party = the Democrat Party, and the Outer Party = the Republican Party. The inner party “delegates” the decisions of the Cathedral; the Outer Party plays the role of loyal opposition. Since the system is rigged in favor of the Inner Party, the two party system is little more than a dog and pony show. As Yarvin explains:
Without the Outer Party, the Cathedral system is instantly recognizable as exactly what it is: a one-party state. You’ll note that when the Soviet Union collapsed, it wasn’t because someone organized an opposition party and started winning in their fake elections. In fact, many of the later Communist states (such as Poland and China) maintained bogus opposition parties, for exactly the same reason we have an Outer Party: to make the “people’s democracy” look like an actual, 19th-century political contest.
From this series of assertions, Yarvin draws the following astonishing conclusion:
If the Republicans could somehow dissolve themselves permanently and irrevocably, it would be the most brutal blow ever struck against the Democrats. It would make Obi-Wan Kenobi look like Chad Vader. As I’ll explain, passive resistance is not your only option, but it is a thousand million times better than Outer Party activism. Do not support the Outer Party.
In practical terms, this means: don’t support Republicans. And make no mistake: Yarvin is quite serious about this. For example, he didn't want Trump to win in 2020. As he wrote after the Presidential election:
Ultimately, I am glad Trump lost, because Trump was more than just a liar—he was a lie. As soon as he accepted the fraud that he was actually in charge of the government, he became complicit in a fraud against his own supporters.
This is all of a piece with the general logic of the Cathedral. The universities and newsrooms sing as one: and from this song flows power and control. Whoever’s President hardly matters—least of all if he is a member of the pathetic Outer Party, which is fake all the way through. The Trump administration was doomed from the get-go, because it was powerless against the inviolable hegemony of the Cathedral. “[Trump] did nothing to ‘drain the swamp,’” gripes Yarvin. “In fact he filled it. And left it flooded…”
Now when we push away all these lofty abstractions and peer through the mists of Yarvin’s a priori rationalism into the very complex reality swarming underneath, this is not quite what we see. Yarvin’s political theories only capture a skewed portion of the empirical truth. His abstractions are like nets with large holes: they allow far too many facts to slip through. While it is true that the Trump administration failed to “drain the swamp,” this doesn’t mean that nothing at all was accomplished during Trump’s four years. Just compare Trump’s four years in office with the current Biden administration. No sooner does China Joe assume the Presidency than the entire country begins to unravel. Millions of refugees from the Third World start pouring over the border; gas prices skyrocket; Critical Race Theory runs rampant within the military; the Afghanistan withdrawal quickly disintegrates into perhaps the greatest military disaster in U.S. history; and the inflation wolf begins howling at the door, ravenous for the blood of individuals on fixed incomes. Would all this have happened had Trump won in 2020? Probably not. While there exist definite limits to Presidential power in the form of constitution restrictions, bureaucratic inertia, and rival branches of government, the office still constitutes the most powerful position in the United States and perhaps the world. The notion that the President is largely ceremonial and that real power resides among the groves of academe and/or in newsrooms is just not credible. Why are hundreds of millions of dollars spent on Presidential campaigns if the office is so impotent and useless?
As we look closer into Yarvin’s theory of the Cathedral, the absurdities begin to mount. Not only does Yarvin misconstrue the source of the Cathedral’s power, but he also foists upon it a homogeneity that does not exist in reality. No ruling elite is ever perfectly, or even largely, homogeneous. There exist within elites an inner ferment among its members, factions within factions, competing for the top positions within the prevailing power structure. How do you think Governor Cuomo was toppled in New York? The more progressive wing of the Democrat Party wanted to replace Cuomo with their own creature (i.e., Attorney General Leticia James). We find similiar infighting within the Republican Party, as Trump-inspired populists seek to dismantle the old guard. Yarvin doesn’t notice these rivalries within the two main political parties because his overly abstract theories are too pure and lofty to lay bare the messy details of the real world.
If there is a principle that unites our ruling elite, it is globalism (i.e., the breakdown of national borders so that labor and capital can move more freely around the world); but not all the factions in the ruling elite are globalists for the same reason. Republican elites are globalists because they represent business interests eager for cheap labor; Democrat elites are globalists because they want to enlarge their voting base with non-whites from peasant cultures; ideological leftists want globalism because they dream of a world government that can impose socialism across the planet and prevent catastrophic wars between nations. These clashing motives arise because of differences in psychology and economic interests. Civilized society is characterized by intense factionalism between various groups divided by economic interests, psychological proclivities, and traditional allegiances. These factions can be further divided into what the Italian political scientist Geatano Mosca called “social forces,” which multiply in number as civilization grows. [The Ruling Class, 144-5] Yarvin’s Cathedral is hardly the unified force he imagines it to be.
Having completed his analysis of the Cathedral, Yarvin then turns his attention to the question of reversing the inevitable leftward push of society. It is at this point that his thinking becomes cagey and difficult to pin down. Yarvin is attempting something very difficult: he wishes to combine Carlyle with von Mises—something nearly impossible, even at a theoretical level. The authoritarian Carlyle simply doesn’t mesh well with the uncompromising laissez-faire liberalism of von Mises. It’s the proverbial oil and water. Yarvin, however, is determined to cross breed these disparate points of view, come what may; and what emerges from this bizarre copulation can only be described as a kind of authoritarian libertarianism.
In Yarvin’s ideal polity, democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law have been thoroughly abolished. “Absolute power” is then bestowed upon “a mysterious figure known only as the Receiver,” who turns the government “into a heavily armed, ultra-profitable corporation” powerful enough to destroy the Cathedral and reverse the leftification of society. But this is not all. With so much power at its beck and call, Yarvin’s Receiver can now roll up his sleeves and deal with all those “decivilized” people who infest society with their barbarism. All such chandela will be rounded up and sent to “secure relocation facilities” where they will receive “mandatory apprenticeships.”
Yarvin’s most earnest critics make the mistake of taking these political musings seriously—as if Yarvin has the agency to inflict his eccentric theories upon a hapless world. There is clearly a great deal more bark than bite in Yarvin’s authoritarianism. For better or for worse, Yarvin lacks the temperament of the “authoritarian personality.” Despite his claims of being a “recovering” libertarian, he still shares the libertarian’s horror of violence. Hence when he begins talking about how he wishes to bring about his ideal political system, he sedulously shrinks from harsher methods. Coups and revolutions, he insists, will never work. Violence is counter-productive. His system can only be established through what he calls “passivism.” What is “passivism”? Yarvin describes it as a “steel rule” necessitating the “absolute renunciation of official power”:
As a matter of both principle and tactics, the passivist rejects involvement in any activity the goal of which is to influence, coerce, or resist the government, either directly or indirectly.... In case this isn’t crystal-clear, the steel rule precludes, in no particular order: demonstrations, press releases, suicide bombs, lawsuits, dirty bombs, Facebook campaigns, clean bombs, mimeographed leaflets, robbing banks, interning at nonprofits, assassination, “tea parties,” journalism, bribery, grantwriting, graffiti, crypto-anarchism, balaclavas, lynching, campaign contributions, revolutionary cells, new political parties, old political parties, flash mobs, botnets, sit-ins, direct mail, monkeywrenching, and any other activist technique, violent or harmless, legal or illegal, fashionable or despicable.
How then is this “passivism'' supposed to defeat the left? This is something Yarvin never gets around to explaining. He leaves us merely with the puzzling suggestion that somehow, in a vague zen kind of way, those who renounce power will one day be fit to wield it. Thus does this elaborately rationalistic and verbal political philosophy discover it’s ultimate terminus in a shabby cliche.
I don’t mean to be overly harsh. For all his faults, Yarvin must be reckoned a political theorist of some standing. He does, after all, enjoy a small but very devoted following. In an age of deteriorating intellectual standards, his political musings can pass for something important and perhaps even interesting. Yes, they are full of exaggerations and implausible leaps and somersaults. But isn’t that par for the course? Haven’t we already determined that political theory (i.e., “ideology”) is a mere rationalization of personal preference?
Sometimes, however, what begins as political ideology becomes, under the pressure of events, something far more momentous. Yarvin’s attempt to meld Mises with Carlyle, although theoretically absurd and practically impossible, if interpreted more freely, could prove revelatory of the type of political systems that will come to dominate in the future. The crisis of the West under which we all groan is in many respects the handiwork of the political left and its allies among the nation’s neo-liberal plutocracy. Now if the left should nearly succeed in destroying America, there is a real possibility that those most responsible for saving the country will, during an ensuing era of repair and reconciliation, come to look upon the left as a pack of pestiferous nuisances that can no longer be safely tolerated. If so, future governments may decide the best way to secure civilization going forward is to simply render leftism illegal and beyond the pale.
By suggesting that in centuries to come, authoritarian forces will emerge to keep down the left, I’m not engaging in normative analysis. I’m not saying the left “ought” to be repressed, but rather that the left might be repressed under any civil order that emerges after a severe crisis caused by this very left. If social force X nearly takes out a society, those who survive the crisis may not wish to tolerate X going forward. Normal people want their nations to survive over time; they want a legacy they can leave to their children and grandchildren. If in the mad pursuit of such Orwellian figments as “social justice,” “anti-racism,” and “equity” the political left winds up placing the Civilization of the West in serious peril, don’t be surprised if at some point forces will emerge from the right that will attempt, “by any means necessary,” to keep the left at bay for as long as possible. Some people just want to be left alone, free of the agitations of the chronically discontented. In a sterner, less sentimental age, it may be thought the best way to achieve this end is to render leftism verboten.
In a free democratic political order, where advancement into the higher reaches of power (including the ruling elite) is determined by cleverness, skill at chicanery, and the willingness to break rules, the left will always have the upper hand, because leftists are hard-wired to thrive within such environments. Leftists tend to be high in openness and low in conscientiousness. These are characteristics that, in a corrupt society, tend to be selected for in society's competition for preeminence. Democratic polities inevitably prefer men of chicanery and loose morals over those of courage and high principles. Hence over time the ruling class under democracy inevitably falls into the hands of clever, but not particularly courageous or principled, characters. When theorists such as Yarvin arrive later on the scene and try to make sense of this process, they only notice the general connection between democracy on the one side and what appears as an inevitable leftward shift in institutional dominance on the other. Failing to detect the underlying mechanism which favors certain psychological types over others, they end up assuming that “democracy,” in the abstract sense of the term, is what caused the leftward shift, not the underlying mechanism of societal selection operating beneath the surface.
This revival of anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian sentiment on the dissident right should surprise no one. The correlation between democracy and the dominance of the left in our nation’s most important institutions is too obvious not to be noticed. Even after acknowledging that correlation doesn’t necessitate causation, it is nonetheless a striking connection, impossible to ignore. It will of course cause some to look askance at democratic institutions and begin pining for a Carlylean hero who can sweep clean the Augean stables. This disillusionment with democracy only intensifies as the left completes its Gramician march through the nation’s institutions.
As a society becomes wealthier and more decadent, the left becomes crazier and more reckless. The typical leftist is inflicted with a personality type that craves novelty and anything regarded as “cutting edge” are part of “the future.” There is no resting point for the leftist. He and his comrades must always push forward, regardless of how stupid or insane the ultimate goal becomes over time. In the last decade, the left has at last achieved their much treasured goal of “marriage equality” for homosexuals. Did this satisfy their eternal yearning for change? Only for a very brief moment. Soon they were on to the next big thing—namely, “equality” for those who had “transitioned” to another gender (it hardly mattered which one). As the left pursued this odd agenda, their estrangement from reality and good sense took on epic dimensions. Soon they were insisting that children should be allowed to tamper with their sexual biology unimpeded by adult supervision. This included taking hormone blockers during puberty and having invasive surgeries that mutilated their sexual organs. As this movement has gathered steam, it has become sicker and more grotesque. The logic of radical leftist neophilia has no stopping point: it must embrace ever more bizarre and preposterous aspiration, until at last it drowns in a pool of its own vicious nonsense. Imagine where they will proceed once they have succeeded in their current project of mainstreaming transgenderism and the right for children to mutilate themselves into ever new and more exciting franken-genders. Will the next big thing for the left be marriage equality for siblings and multiple species? Or will they seek to normalize pedophillia and cannabilism? Only time well tell, but it is sure to be something ever more preposterous.
There’s no getting around it: the left, particularly the far left, is a destructive force and if given a long enough leash, it will bankrupt our society, sabotage our economy, and render the nation defenseless against its enemies. America is $29 trillion in debt (with over $100 trillion in total liabilities); the nation’s infrastructure is falling apart (which the elite acknowledges but then uses it as an excuse to enrich themselves with “pork”); critical race theory, an invention of the radical left designed to stir up race hatred against white people, is being inflicted upon the military and the nation’s children; the dollar is being debauched to support chronic budget deficits nearing a trillion dollars a year; ideologues have seized control of the justice department, which they have weaponized for political purposes; the southern border is a sieve through which low skilled workers along with criminals and terrorists pour into the country; draconian lockdowns are being used to wipe out thousand of small businesses and enrich monopolistic retailers such as Walmart and Amazon.com; and the free movement of capital is allowing business to sell out American workers to China and the Third World. The governing elite of the United States is not fit to rule; yet there seems no democratic means for getting rid of them. This, more than anything else, is what makes people on the dissident right lose faith in democracy. When democratic institutions render the political system unworkable, it’s only a matter of time before the theorists will begin inveighing against them.
Greg Nyquist is author of The Psychopathology of the Radical Left and The Faux-Rationality of Ayn Rand.
Greg, I'm indebted to you for the idea that culture (and therefore politics) is downstream from psychology. And recent research identifying openness, conscientiousness, etc. as key dimensions points the way toward reality-based political analysis. I see this idea bearing much fruit in your columns.
I believe that a Jeffersonian aristocracy of virtue (having at least the four cardinal ones) and talent (honed to mastery) is most at home in a free republic that recognizes inalienable rights and has safeguards against tyranny of the few or of the many. But that's a bit like saying our traffic laws are crafted to give you the best chance of making it from Point A to point B safely--if they're followed.
A natural aristocracy may well attract the most bitter envy because they really are the best, and it's therefore harder to deceive oneself that the natural aristocrats came by their position dishonestly. Enter the dark aristocracy--unfortunately as natural as the Jeffersonian one--an aristocracy of cunning psycopathy and talent. One of their tricks is to redefine virtue in a way that makes virtues useless for a healthy society, but useful for making the envious feel superior.
Looking forward to a future column (or referring me to a past one) concerning whether a natural aristocracy tends to have a short shelf life. (E.g., envy aside, the "regression toward the mean" makes it likely that the children aren't as talented as their aristoi parents (although likely above average); thus, natural aristocrats must be prepared to see most of their sons and daughters in a lower-status position than they themselves occupy. That's asking a lot of a parent.)
Thank you. Followed the link from JRN's blog.