Curtis Yarvin is hardly a household name in US politics. But the “neoreactionary” thinker and far-right blogger is emerging as a serious intellectual influence on key figures in Donald Trump’s coming administration in particular over potential threats to US democracy.
Yarvin, who considers liberal democracy as a decadent enemy to be dismantled, is intellectually influential on vice president-elect JD Vance and close to several proposed Trump appointees. The aftermath of Trump’s election victory has seen actions and rhetoric from Trump and his lieutenants that closely resemble Yarvin’s public proposals for taking autocratic power in America.
Trump’s legal moves against critics in the media, Elon Musk’s promises to pare government spending to the bone, and the deployment of the Maga base against Republican lawmakers who have criticized controversial nominees like Pete Hegseth are among the measures that resemble elements of Yarvin’s strategy for displacing liberal democracy in the US.
One of the venues in which Yarvin has articulated the strategy include a podcast hosted by Michael Anton, a writer and academic whom Trump last week appointed to work in a senior role under secretary of state nominee Marco Rubio.
Although Yarvin once described Vance as a “random normie politician I’ve barely even met” in a July Substack post, in October the Verge reported that “no one online has shaped Vance’s thinking more”. The growing parallels between the incoming administration’s actions – especially Vance’s views – and Yarvin’s suggestions raise questions about his influence.
Robert Evans, an extremism researcher and the host of the podcast Behind the Bastards, recorded a two-part series on Yarvin.
“He didn’t fall out of a coconut tree. He emerged into a rightwing media space where they had been talking about the evils of liberal media and corrupt academic institutions for decades,” he said.
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Anton and Yarvin’s May 2021 conversation was recorded for the podcast of the American Mind, a publication of the powerful rightwing Claremont Institute, where Anton is a senior fellow, and whose growing influence during the Trump era has seen it described as the “nerve center of the American right”.
On 8 December, Trump’s transition team announced that Anton would be appointed director of policy planning at the state department. Anton also served in a communications role in Trump’s first-term national security council from February 2017 until April 2018, resigning the day before neoconservative John Bolton assumed the role of national security adviser.
After leaving the first Trump administration, Anton did not abandon Trump, but continued writing about US liberal democracy in bleak terms.
In Up from Conservatism, a 2023 anthology of essays edited by the executive director of Claremont’s Center for the American Way of Life, Arthur Milikh, Anton wrote that “the United States peaked around 1965”, and that Americans are ruled by “a network of unelected bureaucrats … corporate-tech-finance senior management, ‘experts’ who set the boundaries of acceptable opinion, and media figures who police those boundaries”.
Anton continued the discussion in sections headed “The universities have become evil”, “Our economy is fake”, “The people are corrupt”, “Our civilization has lost the will to live”.
His and Yarvin’s conversation was ostensibly about his 2020 book, The Stakes. That book was controversial even on the right for its prolonged consideration of autocratic “Caesarism” as a means of resolving American decadence.
In the book, he defined Caesarism as a “form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny”.
He adds, though, that “Caesarism is not tyranny, which, strictly understood, is a regime that usurps a legitimate and functioning government”, whereas Caesarism implements “authoritarian one-man rule partially legitimized by necessity” – that is, “the breakdown of republican, constitutional rule”, adding that “a nation no longer capable of ruling itself must yet be ruled”.
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In 2022 Vox called Yarvin the “person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the US government could be toppled and replaced”.
Yarvin suggests that a would-be American autocrat should campaign on and win an electoral mandate for an authoritarian program. They should purge the federal bureaucracy in a push Yarvin has anagrammatized as Rage (for “retire all government employees”).
They should simply ignore any court rulings that seek to constrain them. They should bring Congress to heel, in part by mobilizing their populist base against recalcitrant lawmakers. And liberal or mainstream media organizations and universities should be summarily closed.
Given the post-election period and Trump’s preparation for a return to the White House, Yarvin’s program seems less fanciful then it did in 2021, when he laid it out for Anton.
In the recording of that podcast, Yarvin offers a condensed presentation of his program which he has laid out on Substack and in other venues.
Midway through their conversation, Anton says to Yarvin, “You’re essentially advocating for someone to – age-old move – gain power lawfully through an election, and then exercise it unlawfully”, adding: “What do you think the actual chances of that happening are?”
Yarvin responded: “It wouldn’t be unlawful,” adding: “You’d simply declare a state of emergency in your inaugural address.”
Yarvin continued: “You’d actually have a mandate to do this. Where would that mandate come from? It would come from basically running on it, saying, ‘Hey, this is what we’re going to do.’”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... rvin-trump
