The crazies rule

"The Blogger Who Hates America" is a fascinating, and important, piece written by Cathy Young, a Bulwark writer and columnist for Newsday. Her subject, a "trollish, ill-informed pseudo-intellectual" who, unshockingly, has become an influential voice in the crackpot asylum of Trumpism. Curtis Yarvin merely happens to be even more crackpotted than your average, ill-informed pseudo-intellectual with White House ties.

And that, as we've learned, is Trumpism's Platonic Ideal. Its leader is the nation's most ill-informed America-hater, something he demonstrates most every day through economy-damaging tariffs whose rates are pulled from something even thinner than air, or by using the National Archives' original U.S. Constitution's margins to scribble grievously unlawful executive orders, some of which send persons on U.S. soil to hellish Latin American prisons without so much as a duly processed farewell.

But back to Yarvin. As Young tells us, he's "an actual, self-identified supporter of absolute monarchy," a “neo-reactionary” writer who's "considered a father of the so-called 'Dark Enlightenment' movement" — an ironically apt moniker for the dim influencers in it. Young concedes that she's wary of further publicizing Yarvin. His philosophy is incoherent and his history is "equally inept," nevertheless he's "treated as a respectable figure on the MAGA right," so we mustn't avert our eyes. (I should not have written nevertheless. It's because Yarvin is incoherent and intellectually incompetent that MAGA respects him.)

To do his ahistorical pigswill the justice it deserves you must read the full Bulwark article. Never have I, for one, encountered a more preposterously vacuous take on the past; the depth of Yarvin's painful tormenting of history nears the designation of awesome. Care to be awed? I certainly was — by this: Via The NYT's James Bouie, Yarvin characterizes "Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address as a demand for dictatorial power."

Yet Mr. Yarvin is at the same time inescapable copy. As a podcaster said of him a few months back, he's "the philosopher behind JD Vance." Young also concedes that that "is likely a dramatic overstatement" — to say he's "a White House guru or ideologue ... would be an exaggeration." Yet "Vance has cited Yarvin as an influence." Although he's "not Vance’s brain..., his proposals for an autocratic American revolution—a drastic expansion of executive power, aggressive moves to crush the universities and the media, a massive purge of civil servants and their replacement with people loyal to the new leader—do bear an uncanny resemblance to the start of Trump’s second term," observes Young.

"If we believe in democracy," writes Yarvin, "it’s simply because we’ve been raised to believe in it." That's partially though not "simply" true. We're all subject to our environment, and politically our environment is democratic. Most of us, however, at some point in our lives were exposed to the writings of the ancient Athenians, John Locke, Montesquieu, James Madison and others who wrote poignantly about the superiority of democracy over other forms of government.

Yarvin believes that democracy's natural course is that of totalitarianism, something which "claim[s] to act in the name of the people." I'd note that that's what we have under Trump. But he'd be rather superfluous for Yarvin, it seems to me, since the latter "believes that America and other Western democracies in the 21st century have already reached a state of soft totalitarianism: rule by a hegemonic elite of federal bureaucracy, academia, and liberal media." (I was in academia once, but not once did I notice that it was bossing America around.)

Young cites one of Yarvin's many, dare I say laughable, contradictions. "In an attempt to debunk purported pro-democracy myths, Yarvin asserts that 'rule of law,' not democracy, is responsible for peace, prosperity and freedom. Yet he has 'also stressed that the sovereign himself cannot be subject to the law since any such constraints would nullify absolutism.' Yarvin is apparently unaware of the contradiction—and when he tries to explain why his unconstrained autocrat would not become an oppressive tyrant, his answers fall apart under the slightest scrutiny." The contradiction seems even simpler to me than Young's exposition. "The sovereign cannot be subject to the law" — which promotes and is responsible for the social blessings of peace, prosperity and freedom?

There's another "and yet" about Yarvin and his lunacy. What seemed lunatic on the right in 1979 was everyday Republicanism by the mid-1980s; what seemed crazy in the mid-80s was common thought by the 1990s; what seemed unthinkable in the 90s was defended indefatigably by Rs throughout W.'s two terms; and now "unitary executive," pro-torture, let's-privatize-Social Security George would be banished from the Republican Party as a soft-hearted leftie.

I often suspect that the Yarvins of the internet don't mean one damn word they write. They write what they write only to be wildly controversial and thereby grab the attention of respectable minds at The NY Times, the New York Magazine, New York Intelligencer, Politico Magazine, The Bulwark and others. Meanwhile, yours truly and many others of rational mind and honest sentiments will write in virtual obscurity. And that strikes me as one of modern democracy's significant failings: It's easily distracted by the irrational, which receives notice, which then, in time, becomes part of mainstream conversation and political thought. Just refer, again, to the above paragraph.