“Curtis Yarvin wants American democracy toppled. He has some prominent Republican fans.” That’s the headline of a recent article by Andrew Prokop for Vox, which I recommend reading in full. The article was a huge eye-opener for me in the context of Trump, Musk, Thiel, and the head-scratching disdain for democracy of some of our most influential tech-bro overlords.
Mr. Yarvin advocates replacing democracy with a semi-elected CEO/King, responsible only to a vaguely defined board of directors, somehow. The breath-taking naivete is something I’d never focused on before. Ignore that courts and bypass the legislature. His views have been cited favorably by Blake Masters and J. D. Vance. Peter Thiel funded Yarvin’s tech start up (because of course).
Here are some excerpts below. The naivete is just astonishing, I can’t get over that. I can’t paraphrase better than Vox wrote it, so please go read the whole thing!
In September 2021, J.D. Vance, a GOP candidate for Senate in Ohio, appeared on a conservative podcast to discuss what is to be done with the United States, and his proposals were dramatic. He urged Donald Trump, should he win another term, to “seize the institutions of the left,” fire “every single midlevel bureaucrat” in the US government, “replace them with our people,” and defy the Supreme Court if it tries to stop him.
To the uninitiated, all that might seem stunning. But Vance acknowledged he had an intellectual inspiration. “So there’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things...”
Nearly a decade earlier, a Stanford law student named Blake Masters, asked by a friend for reading recommendations for a book club, emailed a link to a set of blog posts. These posts made an argument that was quite unusual in the American context, asserting that the democratically elected US government should be abolished and replaced with a monarchy. Its author, then writing pseudonymously, was Yarvin.