'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
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From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. For a long time, Curtis Yarvin, a 51-year-old computer engineer, had been writing online about political theory in relative obscurity. His ideas were pretty extreme, that institutions 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 that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a monarchy run by what he's called a CEO, which is basically his friendlier term for a dictator. To support his arguments, Yarvin relies on what sympathetic ears might hear as a helpful serving of historical references, but which others hear as a distorting mix of gross oversimplification, cherry-picking, personal interpretation presented as fact, and just plain inaccuracy. But while Yarvin himself may still be obscure, his ideas are not. Vice President-elect J.D.
Vance has alluded to his notions of forcibly ridding American institutions of so-called wokeism.
You know, there's this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who's written about some of these things.
Incoming State Department official Michael Anton has spoken with Yarvin about how an American Caesar might be installed into power.
I mean, you're essentially advocating for someone to, you know, age-old move, right, which is gain power lawfully through an election, through legal means, and then exercise it unlawfully.
And Yarvin has also found fans in the powerful and increasingly political ranks of Silicon Valley, like Marc Andreessen.
The other lens on this that I think about a lot is Curtis Yarvin, who's also a good friend of mine. And the way he describes the American system, we are living under FDR's personal monarchy.
I've been aware of Yarvin's work for years and was mostly interested in it as a prime example of growing anti-democratic sentiment in particular corners of the internet. Until recently, those ideas felt too fringed to really take seriously. 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. Here's my conversation with Curtis Yarvin. To my understanding, one of your central arguments is that America needs to I think the way you've put it in the past is sort of get over our dictator phobia that American democracy is a sham beyond fixing and having sort of a monarch style leader or call it a CEO or call it a dictator. That's the way to go.
So why is democracy so bad and why would having a dictator solve the problem?
Let me answer that in, I think, a way that will be relatively accessible to readers of The New York Times. You've probably heard of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And I do a speech sometimes where I'll just read the last 10 paragraphs of FDR's first inaugural address, in which FDR essentially says to the American people, hey, Congress, give me absolute power or I'll take it anyway. So did FDR actually take that level of power? Yeah, he did. And so there's a great piece that I've sent to some of the people that I know that are involved in the transition. Who? I mean, there's all sorts of people milling around. Name one. Name one. Wow. Name one. Well, I definitely know Mark Andreessen, and so I sent this piece to Mark Andreessen.
And it's an excerpt from the diary of Harold Ickes, who's FDR's Secretary of the Interior. And it's a little diary entry describing a cabinet meeting in 1933. And what happens in this cabinet meeting is that Francis Perkins, who's the Secretary of Labor, comes in to this meeting and is like, here, I have a list of the projects that we're going to do. FDR personally takes this list and looks at the projects in New York and is like, this is crap, this is crap, I don't know what you're doing. Like, humiliates Francis Perkins in the Oval Office or wherever they're having their cabinet meeting. And then at the end of the thing, it's like everybody agrees that the bill would be fixed and then passed through Congress. This is just a picture of FDR acting like a CEO.
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