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For a long time, Curtis Yarvin, a 51-year-old computer engineer, has written online about political theory in relative obscurity. His ideas were pretty extreme: that institutions at the heart of American intellectual life, like the mainstream media and academia, have been overrun by progressive groupthink and need to be dissolved. He believes that government bureaucracy should be radically gutted, and perhaps most provocative, he argues that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a “monarchy” run by what he has called a “C.E.O.” – basically his friendlier term for a dictator.
To support his arguments, Yarvin relies on what those sympathetic to his views might see as a helpful serving of historical references – and what others see as a highly distorting mix of gross oversimplification, cherry-picking, and personal interpretation presented as fact…
… on the shows of Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, among others. I’ve been aware of Yarvin, who mostly makes his living on Substack, for years and was mostly interested in his work as a prime example of growing antidemocratic sentiment in particular corners of the internet. Until recently, those ideas felt fringe. But given that they are now finding an audience with some of the most powerful people in the country, Yarvin can’t be so easily dismissed anymore.
One of your central arguments is that America needs to, as you’ve put it in the past, get over our dictator-phobia – that American democracy is a sham, beyond fixing, and having a monarch-style leader is the way to go. So, why is democracy so bad, and why would having a dictator solve the problem?
You’ve probably heard of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR’s first inaugural address, in which he essentially says, “Hey, Congress, give me absolute power, or I’ll take it anyway.”
… As for the status of women in, say, a Jane Austen novel, which is well before Enfranchisement, it actually seems kind of OK. Women who are desperate to land a husband because they have no access to income without that?
You’re not willing to say that there were aspects of political life in the era of kings that were inferior or provided less liberty for people than political life does today? You did a thing that people often do where they confuse freedom with power. Free speech is a freedom. The right to vote is a form of power. So, the assumption that you’re making is that through getting the vote in the early 20th century in England and America, women made life better for themselves.
… But what is your opinion of the idea that the solution to our problems lies in putting a C.E.O. in charge of the country? Most start-ups fail. We can all point to C.E.O.s who have been ineffective. And putting that aside, a C.E.O., or “dictator,” is more likely to think of citizens as pure economic units, rather than living, breathing human beings who want to flourish in their lives.
Earlier you had said that regardless of what his goals are, Trump isn’t likely to get anything transformative accomplished. But what is your opinion of Trump generally? I talked about FDR earlier, and a lot of people in different directions might not appreciate this comparison, but I think Trump is very reminiscent of FDR. What FDR had was this tremendous charisma and self-confidence combined with a tremendous ability to be the center of the room, be the leader, cut through the BS and make things happen…
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