Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Is this a sign democracy is weak? Or is it a sign that the political process has to choose between mutually exclusive popular policies?
In my country, the average voter wants their trash hauled away, but don't want any dumps or incinerators built. They want responsive public services, but they don't want tax increases, cuts to other services, or a deficit. They want good care for the elderly, but they don't want to spend more on care workers, or to give the jobs to poorly paid immigrants.
The US political system has a bunch of problems (deadlock and corruption for example) but when voters want to have their cake and eat it too, which is impossible, no political system is going to make it possible.
The voters aren't a homogeneous group. Older voters, i.e. the baby boomers, the biggest voting block, want stability and extensive pension spending. Young people want economic opportunity and to avoid worse quality of life than their parents' generation, as evidenced by recent election results in the US and Europe, where under 30s, especially young men, voted for radical right-wing parties more than any other demographic. Due to the number of working people shrinking relative to the number of retirees, there's a fundamental conflict of interest between the older generation, and the young generation facing greater and greater financial burden to support them. The relatively greater number of voters in the older block is causing society to prioritise their needs over those of the youth, inverting the traditional structure where the old make sacrifices to support the young.
The older generation's burden on the younger generation has always existed. It was paid by labor, usually uncompensated by women of earlier generations. Now, the burden is paid by money from tax revenue and/or personal savings.
We need to expand the financial base for many social services, including elder care. It is long past time that we tax wealth, as the wealthy extract their money from our pockets through various rent-seeking schemes.
It is a sign democracy is fake. Democracy only exists at the grace of someone/something else that decides these very large (in terms of cost) and unpopular policies. And the only thing that really matters is whether people advance economically. This works in democracies because, in a democracy, it's very, very easy to prevent change, so the institutions and policies that existed before democracy was introduced (or before it was real democracy) persist almost everywhere.
Authoritarian changes, and eventually war, is what happens when you have a sustained economic deterioration in a country. The form of governance matters on an individual level, but not on a country level. We're in the first stages of that now, and it's hard to see anything happen but it getting worse from this point forward.
One application of this: if you want to defeat MAGA, you need to pay middle America. MAGA voters vote MAGA because their economic situation has been deteriorating since, well, really since 2008 (with local areas, like Detroit, further back), and accelerated since COVID. A very, very visible part of this deterioration on a household level, sorry, is the increase in household medical spending that is the result of ACA. Yes, it's a very good deal in terms of "how much medical care do I get for $x" (esp. if you're poor), but a pretty bad deal in terms of "if I don't care about medical anything, how much $ can I spend right now?" (especially if you work for those $, and what especially matters if it's more or less than last month/last year/last ... it's less)
More generally, medical and pension costs for the aging population are reducing everyone's standards of living ... and this will keep getting worse for at least 2 decades. We need a solution for this. Republicans' solution is to throw everyone to the curb (less medical care, less pensions, less public transport, even less education, less universities, ...). Can we do better? How?
This is such an incomplete understanding of governance and state it could only appear under already degenerate conditions of poor political education and non-participation.
What even means to improve economically? Buy more stuff? Buy bigger stuff? It's a great mirage to look at, it's absurdly simplistic to equate that being able to purchase more things will translate into a better society... It doesn't really follow, of course people want to buy stuff they think will improve their lives but there's a breaking point to that. If that was the case the USA should be the most fulfilled and happiest population to ever exist, and we know it isn't the case.
> I would argue it has a very great deal of historical support.
Yup, while a society is in the stages of scarcity it does have historical support, after the point of scarcity into abundance... We need new models, it's clear this model doesn't hold after this transition.
No it won't, because people won't pay for it. They can't, so to get ahead of your next argument: it doesn't matter how necessary those services are, they can't pay. If doing without means a city dies economically or even if it means people start actually dying then that's what it will mean, not more GDP.
Read about the century before and after Irish potato famine to see an example of just how bad it can get, while still not resulting in GDP growth.
> What even means to improve economically?
Having the ability to do more, on a bigger scale. Think of it this way: there isn't a city on the planet that wouldn't benefit from rebuilding itself (in practice increasing the rate at which it rebuilds itself). Lots of houses, businesses, ... are old and have huge problems that need fixing. Most places could use a lot more houses. And then, there's no shortage of ideas for improvements. Wouldn't you agree it would be great if the London metro had the same density all the way to Birmingham as it has in the center of London? If the New York metro extended into the state? If medical care really was universal, cheap, fast and thorough? If there was a vaguely usable train network in Europe (by which I mean that it would be realistic, and cheap, to use European trains to go from, say, London to Rome)? To say nothing of the fact that in 90% of the world, if you brought people's living standards to Eastern European levels, that would be increasing them. That certainly seems worth doing and requires more economy.
These are extreme and perhaps unrealistic examples, but, yes, that would be economic improvement. And yes, these things would improve nearly everyone's lives.
Even waste , inefficiencies ? That is setting yourself up for a big collapse too. One needs to look at it from a more resilient, sustainable perspective, like a biological system.
Many "undemocratic" nations have functioning public services, clean streets, low to virtually no-crime and good universities.
> but they don't want to spend more on care workers, or to give the jobs to poorly paid immigrants.
In a capitalist economy part of a global marketplace, you are not "owed" jobs.
And what consequences can those KPIs have, if considered to be poor? Can we fire the dictator?
If no KPIs allow to maintain the system stable, as a feedback loop, then welcome to USSR where everything is fake, and the « government » governs itself until complete failure.
The Magna Carta had a solution for this:
> Under what historians later labelled "clause 61", or the "security clause", a council of 25 barons would be created to monitor and ensure John's future adherence to the charter.[46] If John did not conform to the charter within 40 days of being notified of a transgression by the council, the 25 barons were empowered by clause 61 to seize John's castles and lands until, in their judgement, amends had been made.[47] Men were to be compelled to swear an oath to assist the council in controlling the King, but once redress had been made for any breaches, the King would continue to rule as before.
Such an arrangement can only work when at least some part of the populace is well armed enough to overthrow the government if things get too bad.
What a naive fantasy.
Organization of people is much more important than guns. You don't even need guns when you organize. You can stop the state just by collective action. See color revolutions.
When it is guns, you need RGP's, detonators and TNT (and drones), a good underground insurgent logistic chains. You also need commit to life in poverty and eventual death.
United States, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, Serbia have plenty of independent weapons, yet there is no fear of effective armed resistance. Everybody is a rebel in the Internet. When things go tough it's "I have to go to work and eat. My family needs me."
The barons it talks about would have been somewhat analogous to US state governors, though even then it's a very loose analogy as the logistics of England in the 1200s was so different to the modern world.
There's lots of things it could be analogised to, including a board of directors empowered to remove an unwanted CEO; or how the English civil war was a fight between Charles I and his parliament (some of the discourse at the time explicitly mentioned Magna Carta*).
Which is to say that while one does indeed need to be able to respond "this one" when asked "you and what army?", that requirement is not itself a show-stopper, people can (and have) been able to give the correct answer.
Bad example, since they are mostly just clandestine interventions of another state to destabilize the one they are happening in.
it seems that democratic regimes don't need any KPIs or any other performance review system, and people all agree with this
how the 'feedback loop' works?
If the leader does too much of a poor job it tends to be voted out. Democracy doesn't work by ensuring great people get power. It just avoids perpetuating leadership that gets too misaligned with a large share of the population.
while president trump is aligned with a large share of the population of the US
have to say I completely agree with this...
but it still confuses me
for instance, how the 'feedback loop' works for elon musk and robert kennedy jr, as they are not in the feedback loop of voting
Judgement is passed by the end of the term. So that's a open question for now.
> how the 'feedback loop' works for elon musk and robert kennedy jr, as they are not in the feedback loop of voting
They were appointed by someone that was elected. So their fuck-ups count against whoever appointed them.
But this is not to say democracy as implemented is always perfect. For it to work properly I think a diverse pool of viable would-be leaders must be present, to maximize the odds of at least one well aligned being present for people to choose. Indirect voting and the bipartisan system screw this, creating moral hazards and poor fit candidates that just take turns between them.
It's like we know evolution works, but if everybody starts marrying their cousin, the gene pool will lose the raw diversity necessary for evolution to work.
Democracy must be fixed, not terminated.
Trump got just over 1/3 of eligible US votes. the Republicans could have run the dead corpse of Nixon and probably gotten at least 1/4 of eligible votes just because he was running on a GOP ticket.
almost 1/3 of the US eligible voters didn't vote at all. the Elector College means that red states have a disproportional sway in elections.
Sorry, that's kind of bullshit. Stating things that way is just spin to mischaracterize the actual result.
> almost 1/3 of the US eligible voters didn't vote at all.
Things are weird now. The indications I've been seeing is the less engaged the voter, the more they tended to support Trump. So if those people voted, Trump would have probably have had a bigger win. In prior years, those voters would have tended to support Democrats, but not anymore.
The Democrats got rejected badly. They lost to a dangerous buffoon. Instead of sticking their heads in the sand, they need to own that loss and internalize what that means about them.
Is that actually true? I've been around ~45 years, and the Republicans have been in and out of power repeatedly during that span. But I don't think they've ever owned a loss, and I don't think they've ever internalizing what it means about them. And it hasn't stopped them from coming back into power, once the mess from their last misadventure has been cleaned up.
I'm sure the Democrats at some point will come back into power in a 50%+1 squeaker, but that will be bad for the country and another step in its decline.
If they want to be the people to actually answer this crisis, instead of ratifying it, they damn well better own thier loss and internalize what that means about them. They lost to Trump, twice, FFS. The only Democrat who could beat him was a fossil from another time (and he only won by a hair). The Democrats suck. They need reform into something else for the sake of the God-damned country.
> If they want to be the people to actually answer this crisis, instead of ratifying it
Honestly? I'm not convinced they do—they seem to be content swapping back and forth, saying "well at least we're not evil". Which like sure, they're not trying to burn the country down, and that's a good thing, but they don't seem to be putting any effort in stopping the country from being burned down by the Republicans. And that's not a good thing.
I guess all that's to say, I agree with you.
Two big reasons:
1: It's incredibly difficult to judge the effects of an elected leader's actions. Even assuming an educated/informed/engaged populace, there's nearly always an extremely long delay between an elected leader's actions and the results of those actions.
2: Even when the results of the actions are very tangible, it's still extremely difficult to assign credit or blame for the outcome.
A prime example would be the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). Americans can tangibly experience the outcome of the ACA and form their own opinions. However, the final product is objectively quite different from what Obama and the Democrats initially wanted.
So if you think the ACA turned out pretty well (or poorly), to whom do you ascribe the credit (or blame)? To the Democrats for pushing the idea, or Republicans and the healthcare industry for scaling back its initial ambitions? To make an informed decision here you need to know "how the sausage was made" and you're also comparing the actual outcome versus a number of hypothetical roads not taken.
It just avoids perpetuating leadership that gets too
misaligned with a large share of the population.
It precludes any kind of long-term thinking, or stable relationships with other nations.
Well, we had stable relationships with other nations, until a few months ago. So it's at least possible.
That’s nothing new, either—Reagan had advanced Alzheimer’s, and I’m sure he was far from the first. This is something different.
Classic class warfare at work.
Here you stand, trying to blame 1 of the political parties, when the people responsible for ACA were company boards of health insurance companies and any other front-men of large business interests (doctor cartels, medical supply companies etc.)
In the US, both parties are captive to large business interests, with mostly non-overlapping areas of interest.
In almost all cases, you should be looking very closely at large business interests and elect leaders who have shown strong anti-trust tendencies and understand how the social contract works.
Power = Business.
In the current world gigacorps, moving fast and breaking shit is good business
Democracies are NOT about moving fast and breaking shit.
Its hardly surprising that the gigacorp crowd want to replace Democracy with something they feel is doing so well.
If you look at the administration of Washington, what is established looks a lot like a start-up. It looks so much like a start-up that this guy Alexander Hamilton, who was recognizably a start-up bro, is running the whole government — he is basically the Larry Page of this republic.
[...]
Understanding why Hitler was so bad, why Stalin was so bad, is essential to the riddle of the 20th century. But I think it’s important to note that we don’t see for the rest of European and world history a Holocaust. You can pull the camera way back and basically say, Wow, since the establishment of European civilization, we didn’t have this kind of chaos and violence.
It’s basically just a greater openness of mind and a greater ability to look around and say: We just assume that our political science is superior to Aristotle’s political science because our physics is superior to Aristotle’s physics. What if that isn’t so?
When I look at the status of women in, say, a Jane Austen novel, which is well before Enfranchisement, it actually seems kind of OK.While I strongly disagree with them, I feel an affinity and familiarity with their thinking. I have read the same books, seen the same news, and lived in the same era. I understand how they arrived where they are now.
The Neo-reactionary movement seems exactly like what my generation comes up from the right. Dark Psychology of Dark Enlightenment is a cyberpunk sci-fi world as a fantasy. To live with societal collapse, dystopia and decay with low-life and high-tech. Always framing oneself as an independent outsider and a rebel. Sarcasm as a reflex. These guys see themself living in William Gibson's Neuromancer world.
Me too.
> I have a background in computers and am financially independent.
Me too.
I think having read the same books, seen the same movies and news, played similar games, having lived in the same era is only part of it.
Maybe where you came from, where and under what circumstances you grew up, which opportunities and/or (bad)luck you had, where the winds of chaos have blown you, how you were 'driven' to be 'driven' where you landed makes you more detached, or immune to such overgeneralizations, or maybe call it 'cultural' brainwashing?
IOW: There is too much trash in the minds of too many people. Memory leaks. Buffers overflow. Garbage collection is overdue. Or a reboot.
Edit: That's not to be read as an endorsement of the people you mentioned, and their likes. Or that I'd be a fan. Maybe my 'reboot' is useless, too. Because the filesystem is irrecoverably damaged, the hardware underneath has been replaced, and is working different, so a new install of another 'OS' is needed anyways.
Things change faster than tribalistic peoples grasp. Dunbar's Number etc.
Similar , however I see them more as extreme greed (for power/control) and technological hubris.
Interesting how people interpret things differently based on their life experiences. I feel this is what strong advocates of objective facts and EMH tend to miss. People have the same input data, however the interpretations are different based on the (hidden) internal state.
I keep wondering, what does the richest man in the world want more ? Why this ? I find it a very revolting way to live.
Also, I don't claim to have any answers, but I found some insights about literacy (vs pre-literate orality) in Walter Ong's work "The Written Word". Maybe it'll spark some ideas in your mind as well.
The main tl;dr from Ong's work IMHO is that Literacy is a Technology, and every technology entices us to give up certain strengths and conveniences for other strengths and conveniences. Humanity bought into the power of the written word wholesale, but words can be hijacked to manipulate people (by LLMs, by Yarvin, etc.) at scale.
I'd say one of the major problems is that the voting system is built to de facto ensure a two-party system because it's a system in which individuals are voted for, with each race being a winner-takes-all for a single individual; as opposed to a system of representative voting. And a two-party system simply isn't able to represent the complexities of the world.
(This is of course in addition to other problems of the system which are also real.)
Eg one might like one party's position on the environment, but disagree with regards to their military position - it is not possible to find a party that represents how one feels on a multitude of issues. And even if you did agree with all a party's positions, parties change their positions - saying one thing and doing another.
And it has always been thus. One votes for a representative, who then votes on the specifics.
> And it has always been thus. One votes for a representative
In the US, yes. In many (most?) other countries, many votes are for parties instead. This allows for better representation.
If you think about that, if that's the best our democracy can do, then it sounds like evidence for Yarvin's position... until you think about it. Then you wonder, what happens if the non-democratic ruler was Biden or Trump or equivalent, and you can't get rid of them?
What we actually need is to fix the primary process.
https://newrepublic.com/article/183971/jd-vance-weird-terrif...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/18/jd-vance-w...
They've been talking about ignoring court rulings for years. Now they're in a position to actually do that.
It may well happen soon that they ignore a Supreme Court ruling. It depends how far they think they can push it.
Years before he was the Republican vice presidential nominee, however, Vance openly touted that influence.
“So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin who has written about these things,” Vance said on a right-wing podcast in 2021. Vance didn’t stop at a simple name-drop.
He went on to explain how former President Donald Trump should remake the federal bureaucracy if reelected.
“I think what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
This “piece of advice” is more or less identical to a proposal Yarvin floated around 2012: “Retire All Government Employees,” or RAGE.
~ https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/16/24266512/jd-vance-curtis...
(drawn from the Vanity Fair 2022 piece)
Now I get how people can argue that Ukraine got invaded by the USSR because they wanted to join NATO. You just go back in the causal tree until you hit the thing you don't like and blame it.
Honestly he is a danger, with his pseudo-intellectual mumbojumbo.