James Kirchick writes in Commentary magazine:
If the alt-right does have an intellectual forbear, it is a 43-year-old computer programmer named Curtis Yarvin. Along with fellow “neo-reactionary” thinker Nick Land (a former lecturer at the University of Warwick), Yarvin is the father of “The Dark Enlightenment.” This is a 21st-century, tech-friendly philosophy that, as its name implies, rejects democracy, egalitarianism, and the Whig interpretation of history. It is delineated in a 30,000-word pamphlet of the same name, written by Land and available for free on the Internet.
Yarvin’s contribution to the Dark Enlightenment oeuvre began in 2008 when, writing under the pen name “Mencius Moldbug,” he produced a series of long blog posts that eventually congealed into two separate treatises: An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives and A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations. Along with “The Dark Enlightenment,” these works can be seen as the foundational texts of neo-reactionary ideology.
The Dark Enlightenment tells a tale of constant societal decline and eventual civilizational collapse. Yarvin traces the inevitable downfall of humanity to the Protestant Reformation and the universalizing, reformist precepts of mainline Protestant Christianity. To Land, evil is synonymous with “universalism.” He sees it as a concept encompassing everything from Marxism to Reform Judaism to Sartrean existentialism and German Idealism. For Yarvin, the bogeyman is concentrated in what he terms “the Cathedral.” It is not so much a single institution as it is the sum of all institutions, from the academy to private foundations to the federal government, the media, and beyond. They are all part of the Cathedral in that they all accept, at least ostensibly, the fundamental precepts of the Enlightenment. Staffed by “Brahmins” who are all members of the “Inner Party” (the exclusive elite that ruled Oceania in 1984), the relentless work of the Cathedral creates a “feedback loop” not unlike the Gleichschaltung—the Nazi term for bringing all institutions under the thumb of the Reich. The ultimate result of the Cathedral’s work will be the destruction of Western civilization.2
What distinguishes neo-reactionaries from traditional conservatives is their complete and utter rejection of reform. Since the Western system of liberal democracy itself is corrupt and hopeless, working within it legitimates liberal democracy’s fundamental illegitimacy. Those who adhere to the model of consensual politics and systematic reform, therefore, are not only to be distrusted; they are the font of evil itself. Around the time Trump’s rise began in 2015, his alt-right fans began slamming right-wingers of more conventional stripes with the term “cuck-servative” —a portmanteau of “cuckold” and “conservative” with racist undertones implying that certain conservative leaders and intellectuals have allowed their cause to be hijacked and violated by black people. Long before this slur was being flung at everyone from Karl Rove to Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee (who has since endorsed Trump), and John McCain, Land theorized that life had simply become one long series of shame rituals for right-wing white men like himself. “The principal role of conservatism in modern politics is to be humiliated,” he wrote. “That is what a perpetual loyal opposition, or court jester, is for.”
In Yarvin’s Hobbesian view, history is an unending game of Risk, and the only way to achieve the ideal political state is to destroy the current one and replace it with another. In his eyes, there is no reason to believe that the life of humans in the West in 2016 is at all superior to the way men used to live in 1788, the fateful year before the French Revolution, when everything started going to hell. “We have no reason to think that the political designs we have inherited from this tradition are useful in any way, shape, or form,” Yarvin writes of the Anglo-American political inheritance. “All we know is that they were more militarily successful than their competitors, which may well have been flawed in arbitrary other ways.” Yarvin is more explicit about the future of the American republic: “This thing is done. It is over. It is not fixable by any form of conventional politics. Either you want to keep it, or you want to throw it out. Any other political opinions you may have are irrelevant next to this choice.”
Largely motivating this civilizational pessimism is an obsession with “human biodiversity,” which is code for racism that finds its basis in pseudoscience. Both Land and Yarvin believe in a hereditary determinism positing that whites are genetically superior to blacks, and that because the races are fundamentally unequal at birth, there is no use or sense in promising them equality in a political contract.
When Yarvin’s counter-history arrives at the Civil War, he laments that the federalist impulse that traditionally characterized Anglospheric political culture (which, followed through to its natural conclusion, would have seen the Union settling its differences by breaking in half) was discarded. “Union victory determined that the emancipatory sense of liberty would prevail, not only in America, but throughout the world, and the eventual reign of the Cathedral was assured,” he writes (neglecting the perspective of the slaves).
More harmful than the Civil War’s result was the way in which it has been used, 150 years hence, to further progressive ends, the righteousness of the cause of racial “equality” having now been bonded inextricably to the growing power of Leviathan. “The moral coherence of the Union cause required that the founders were reconceived as politically illegitimate white patriarchal slave-owners, and American history combusted in progressive education and the culture wars.” As with everything Yarvin says, there is a kernel of truth in this, but it is buried in a cornfield of rage.
One way to understand the neo-reactionaries is to view them as arch-libertarians who have accepted that the liberal democratic state will never wither away—and therefore that more extreme means must be taken against it. “A libertarian democracy is simply an engineering contradiction, like a flying whale or a water-powered car,” Yarvin writes, because the voting masses are too fat and spoiled to ever do something like vote their social-welfare state out of existence. With the option of “exit” foreclosed, the only alternative to living under an oppressive state is to seize control over it.
The softness of the populace can only be reversed through the workings of strongmen who will cut through the sclerotic brush of liberal democracy, clear the path, and set things right. This leads our neo-reactionaries to venerate authoritarian states past and present, like the People’s Republic of China, whose political-economic model Land lauds as “Modernity 2.0.” Achieving this state of affairs, however, “depends upon the West stopping and reversing pretty much everything it has been doing for over a century, excepting only scientific, technological, and business innovation.” It is therefore more likely, in Land’s view, that we will see the onset of “post-modernity,” a democracy-induced “dark age” where “Malthusian limits brutally re-impose themselves.” Should that fate come to pass, Land holds out hope for the prospect of transhumanist accelerationism, a futurist concept in which the select few free themselves from the bonds of the state by evolving into human-computer hybrids, reaching “bionic horizon,” and forming a new cyber-citizen.
Seven years before Donald Trump descended on an escalator in his office building to announce his candidacy, Yarvin declared that his ideal form of regime would be a “sovereign corporation” and that America “needs a CEO.” More practically, he advocates “martial law” in “every major American city,” and, if necessary, that we “hand plenary power to the Joint Chiefs.” (While willing to entertain a system that extends the franchise solely to homeowners, Yarvin argues that “mere freehold suffrage is a poor substitute for military government, and it too is not stable in the long run.”) Oddly for a man who fervently defends Senator Joseph McCarthy and who constantly reminds his readers that Communism exacted a higher death toll than fascism, Yarvin exalts Deng Xiaoping as the greatest figure of the second half of the 20th century.
The unapologetically racist element of neo-reactionary thinking connects intellectuals like Yarvin and Land with the masses they otherwise disdain, evincing the rumblings of a nascent neo-reactionary political coalition. But what really ties together all these seemingly disparate strands—the neo-reactionary intellectuals, the crude Twitter trolls, the highfalutin white supremacists, and the billionaire presidential candidate—is misanthropy. Pollsters may need to develop a new category in the wake of the Trump phenomenon: “resentment voters.” Within the demographic of lower-middle-class white men, Trump is popular in a variety of misanthropic subcultures, many of which did not really exist until the Internet provided them with a way to communicate and organize. Unsurprisingly, he is the subject of a great deal of discussion and admiration in the pickup-artist, or “seduction community,” of men who chat online and gather at conferences to complain about how feminism has destroyed dating culture while simultaneously discussing strategies for bedding as many women as possible. After Trump declared early in the campaign season, apropos of nothing, that supermodel Heidi Klum was “no longer a 10,” a popular blogger from the “men’s rights” movement approvingly wrote, “The alpha does not qualify himself to women, ever. He expects women to qualify themselves to him.”
What also unites the alt-right is a conspiratorial anti-elitism. Policies and principles don’t matter, nor do obsolete ideological divisions like left and right, because the American system itself is a sham. “Why are sh-t-tier whites voting for Trump, a barbarian who can’t even write a grammatical tweet in fourth-grade English?” Yarvin asks. “Because they’re done with being sh-t on by their ‘betters,’ who think invading Iraq and starting civil wars in Syria and Libya is a brilliant use for a third of their income.” In distinction to Bernie Sanders supporters, who at least know what they want to do with the reigns of power, these people loathe our social and political institutions and offer no alternative. Trump and the alt-right want to break everything and watch the world burn, like Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight, and they believe (hope?) that somehow everything will sort itself out. America, using a term that will be familiar to the real-estate tycoon, is a “tear down.”
