You’re not willing to say that there were aspects of political life in the era of kings that were inferior or provided less liberty for people than political life does today? You did a thing that people often do where they confuse freedom with power. Free speech is a freedom. The right to vote is a form of power. So the assumption that you’re making is that through getting the vote in the early 20th century in England and America, women made life better for themselves.
Do you think it’s better that women got the vote? I don’t believe in voting at all.
Do you vote? No. Voting basically enables you to feel like you have a certain status. “What does this power mean to you?” is really the most important question. I think that what it means to most people today is that it makes them feel relevant. It makes them feel like they matter. There’s something deeply illusory about that sense of mattering that goes up against the important question of: We need a government that is actually good and that actually works, and we don’t have one.
The solution that you propose has to do with, as we’ve said multiple times, installing a monarch, a C.E.O. figure. Why do you have such faith in the ability of C.E.O.s?... [H]aving worked inside the salt mines where C.E.O.s do their C.E.O.ing, and having been a C.E.O. myself, I think I have a better sense of it than most people. If you took any of the Fortune 500 C.E.O.s, just pick one at random and put him or her in charge of Washington. I think you’d get something much, much better than what’s there. It doesn’t have to be Elon Musk....
January 19, 2025
I'm reading and listening to "Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening."
This is an interview in the NYT (free access link to the edited transcript/I listened to the full audio in the NYT audio app). Here's an excerpt. The boldface is the interviewer David Marchese:
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Our Republic operates under a Constitution that is not a document of Diversity. Women have always had a right to vote, for one. What has democracy rended in its dictatorial duality. A wicked solution, to be sure.
Most CEOs are douchebags. Get a football coach instead. It doesn’t have to be Andy Reid
But isn’t wasn’t Donald Trump CEO?
We are a Constitutional Republic with Democratic institutions.
Democracy is fine. (whatever that means?)
Actually - we all know what “democracy” means to the left. It means a few things:
"Worship the Democratic Party - or else". & "Only democrats should be allowed power - and if they are not in absolute power, it’s all OVER!” (insert screams and whining)
It means that THE left are ONLY allowed absolute power to censor and rule... with their authoritarian, deceitful, money grubbing & inept iron fist... and their BS media machine.
The Democrats should be done. They destroyed themselves - and they need to be destroyed. Hopefully a new, honest democrat party can take its place.
(lol – right) ... We doubt it.
If you want the vote to matter again, get rid of the civil service system. Make every single executive branch employee reapply for their position when a new President takes office. As things stand today, Democrats largely run the U.S. government because they are permanent employees who make up the vast majority of the payroll.
Yarvin is a interesting figure that you can't get a handle on with one NYT interview. Having listened to him on several podcasts talk about the failure of democracy and the Constitution brings to mind the words of Anton Chigur, If the rule you followed brought you to this place, of what use was the rule?
I would also repeal the 17th amendment- the people who wrote our constitution understood that at least one body of the legislature needed to have an extra layer of insulation from the direct vote of the masses.
It's a paradox. Yes, your individual vote is unlikely to be decisive (or powerful) in an election but as an expression of collective decision (or power) it is vital.
It's one thing to imagine we could select somebody at random to be the head of government, whatever you want to call them. As practical matter the choices seem to be limited to the ballot box or the cartridge box.
Curtis Yarvin is an idiot.
It doesn’t have to be Elon Musk....
So he’s another dingbat who thinks Trump is just a figurehead, a puppet for Elon Musk to manipulate?
quite true.
I tried to read Yarvin’s work before. Incomprehensible trash.
or.. Just pass a law, that states that ANY registered voter; CAN NOT work for the US Government.
Want to be a civil servant? get RID of your ability to vote..
Want to continue voting? No civil servant gravy train for YOU
Yarvin, “ It’s not even that democracy is bad; it’s just that it’s very weak. And the fact that it’s very weak is easily seen by the fact that very unpopular policies like mass immigration persist despite strong majorities being against them.”
What happened with the illegal alien invasion is that dictator Biden refused to e force the democratically-enacted laws. So much for his dictator theory of government.
This guy just sounds smart. He’s like so many computer people: They think they know everything and they don’t.
It's a terrible form of government - aside from all the others.
I was going to comment "I feel seen" or "I think my ideas are having a moment," well, Buwaya's ideas, until I got to the part about CEOs. The reason it's better to have a hereditary ruler is because you at least have a chance of getting a non sociopath. If you pick a CEO, you are most likely not going to get what you wanted. If a king is in charge, fine, ruling is his business, and if you want to take him on so that you can be king? Fine, do so, just don't come whining to us because the king had you killed.
Who is curtis yarvin?
a household name?
man or woman??
hm. you all know?
Ack chew ally... You are making his point for him.
answer the question(s)...
this added nothing.
who are you?
so many words.
not telling us anything...
oh, it's not ann fretting
it's meade. he's afraid the elites
will take his vote? curtis must
be a woman...
Calling it a CEO is a distraction. It's dictatorship by another name. If you read the comments at the Times, they're freaking out about the CEO bit. Because, of course, CEOs are bad. But many of them also hold FDR in high esteem. And they loved it when Obama went dictatory to create DACA, even though everyone, including Obama, knew it was unconstitutional. Many Times readers, though they might not admit it, would be happy with a dictator in the U.S, provided it was a left-wing dictator.
This.
We are actually not a democracy. Democracy is just mob rule.
Again - The fact is that WE ARE a Constitutional Republic with Democratic institutions.
Under Biden - we are a mob-ruled farce..
He’s like so many computer people: They think they know everything and they don’t.
You sure he's not a lawyer? That sounds like an awful lot like some lawyers I've met.
Well said. Prince William has spent his whole life in training to be King, as did Charles. They may end up sucking at it, but they at least understand duty. That's what defeated Meghan Markle. She wanted the royal life without meeting the service required.
Yarvin is a brilliant original thinker. Hobbits just want to grill.
Is it really supposed to be some sort of grand insight to say that voting is an illusion or a ruse because you don't always get what you want? I am with Dave Begley
Nothing that a thorough watering of the Tree of Liberty wouldn’t cure.
I made the mistake of clicking on David Brooks and Johnathan Capehart doing their assessment of Biden and predicting what is coming with the 2nd Trump administration. Brooks's level of idiocy is something that requires repeated exposure to ensure that one actually did hear that.
His review of Biden concludes with an encomium to the man and his record as "a mostly wonderful man." Either this speaks to Brooks's absolute lack of judgment or it tells us more than we want to know about the denizens of the senate. If Biden is mostly "wonderful" it has to be in comparison with his cohort, and if Biden is the among the best of that bunch then I all I have to say is "Well, My God!"
And then they turn to authoritarianism and assign it to Trump. Were they paying attention to the executive orders under Obama and Biden? Did they notice that Biden (through his handlers) declared the ERA ratified by fiat?
I fervently hope that Trump has the balls to finally pull the plug on NPR. Like the Long Parliament that Cromwell famously (infamously) castigated and dismissed it is time for them to go. If we close down NPR and The New York Times craters as it ought, then maybe Brooks would have to seem other employment.
For too long this man has embodied Napoleon's (at his most cynical) description of wisdom as "Shouting with the majority." NPR is a smug, conceited, out of touch, overweening and for the most part ignorant echo chamber that exists on the tax dollars of those it denigrates. Cast them into the outer darkness as well.
"It is the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power. For identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel." -- Loki
The irony is that NPR -doesn't- shout with the majority.
I would miss NPR more than I will miss TikTok, but life is change . . .
Derve Swanson asked...
"Who is curtis yarvin?"
A gas giant.
In the original Star Wars movie, the Rebel Alliance was located on Yavin 4, an inhabitable moon of the gas giant. The Empire sent the Death Star to blow up the moon, but the Rebels blew up the Death Star instead.
I refuse to treat people like Yarvin as anything new and interesting, their arguments have all been made in exhausting detail and refuted by results many times before. It makes one wonder, briefly, why he is so focused on touting results in light of that.
My company fired its CEO a couple of years ago for behaving like Bill Clinton in office. IMO, large organizations have flaws especially when it comes to central planning. What I never understood is why some think a government or a board of a large corporation is inherently better than the other one. They often have the same people too.
Dear imbeciles: if you must prop up Moldbug as the "face" of MAGA philosophy, at least use the name that would get people to click on the link. Derve's mental illness admittedly makes it easy to disbelieve in democracy, but the real reason democracy is over is that globalists insist on rigging and annulling elections. If the rules of the game change midway through, people stop playing it.
The idea that our current form of government is an improvement over all those that have preceded it is a symptom of Progressivism. A lot of that going around, it seems.
Someone’s upset because they and/or their friends committed crimes under the last regime and are now quite nervous for a return of rule of law.
Someone’s going to be upset when the new king doesn’t use the chopping block…
Doesn't Trump's election and re-election prove that the power of voting isn't entirely illusory?
I have not studied Yarvin's ideas in depth (I'm not sure he has, either), but his central observations seem to be that a) we are currently in a dire situation, such that change is desperately needed, and b) people tend to take better care of things that they own, so maybe America would be in better shape if someone owned it. But this logic is vulnerable to the strong objection that underlies the theory of democracy; "Better according to whom?"
Mencius Moldbug, aka Curtis Yarvin, has one overall view.
So long as we have created a Medieval world, complete with effete financiers-jesters, king- legislators, and their slavering intellectuals in the media, politics, and academia, it’s just silly to pretend it isn’t happening to us.
Try reading his big.
The Nazis, Fascists and Imperialists of the 1930s were also certain that democracy was a weak form of government, that it couldn’t address the problems of the new century, and that the democratic governments of the west would fold like wet cardboard before the mighty armies of the autocrats. That certainty didn’t work out so well for them.
The idea that bad government is avoided by putting the right people in charge is naive when it is not self-serving or worse. There are no such people because there are no people no matter how wonderful who can be trusted forever. Voting ensures that when the people currently in charge screw up badly enough, they are turned out of office. It doesn't give us heaven on earth but it keeps us out of hell.
Christopher Bc said...
"It's a paradox. Yes, your individual vote is unlikely to be decisive (or powerful) in an election but as an expression of collective decision (or power) it is vital."
I agree with that point. But your individual vote matters more at the state level than it does in the national aggregate.
For example, the NY Yankees outscored the Pittsburgh Pirates 55-27 in the 1960 World Series. But in Game 7, Bill Mazeroski hit a walk-off solo home run in the bottom of the 9th to give the Pirates the victory.
For example, Trump won Ohio 3.1m to 2.5m. Your vote matters more there than the national "popular vote" (where it didn't matter anyway).
Mencius Moldbug = Curtis Yarvin.
Your Philosopher King could just as well end up as Caligula.
This business of finding somebody somewhere who says something outrageous and then playing "gotcha" with it is ridiculous. Nobody in government, nobody with any power, knows about or cares about Curtis Yarvin or Mencius Moldbug. People online may know about and talk about him.
Once we could accept that as consistent with a philosophy of free speech. People read, ponder, criticize in the marketplace of ideas. They try to find what's true and what's false, what's beneficial and what's harmful, about different points of view. Now, ideas one disagrees with are thought of as threats to be defeated and suppressed.
What Yarvin is calling for is a technocracy. Which we have had for over a century now. Its why we are in the straits we are now.
I haven't read Curtis blog but my understanding is that the key insight here is that the people that vote need to be responsible for their vote. That is what animated so many revolutions in the 18th and 19th centuries. It wasn't just about whom could vote is was about making sure the voters were responsible. The general franchise turned this on its head. Now the vote is irrelevant and people voting have no linkage to the consequences (fires in LA) of their vote.
So, the NYT's is now willing for Democracy to die in darkness because Trump got elected? Why this intereview? Curious, no?
Moldbug isn't a conservative, he's a reactionary and a monarchist. He's a silly man who's not actually being listened to. He does one good point, that Althouse highlighted, voting is more about making ourselves feel good then actually accomplishing anything. But then that's because people refuse to organize into groups and vote as a bloc.
And why bring up women voting? That's been the least important development in the last 125 years. The amazing thing about giving women the vote is how little its affected anything. That's probably because most women don't really care, and just go with the flow.
Obviously the way to have a better Democracy would be to give men who are fathers with children under 18 an extra vote. Then you'd have people who are basically carrrying society on their backs having more of a voice. Or you could give people who could pass a test of current events an extra vote. But all this is irrelevant because it will never happen.
Right now, the Democrats and the liberal left are trying to give uneducated 16/17 y/os the vote. They also want illegal aliens and resident foreigners to vote. So we're never going to get more responsible voters, just the power elite making sure the electorate is gullible, ill-informed, and emotional.
The Fishwrap of Record says...
"Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening."
I couldn't read the article. Did they actually name any powerful conservatives in it?
I was just thinking about that the other day, after watching a lot of WWII videos. It's true that the Axis powers were wrong about the strengths and weaknesses of democracy. It's also true that dictatorships made terribly wrongheaded decisions just because the dictators wanted things to be done their way.
But we took WWII as a vindication of democracy and freedom. Could it be that the US, USSR, and the British Empire won because they were bigger and richer and had more resources than Germany, Italy, and Japan? If they'd had our population, area, and resources and we'd had theirs, would we still have won, even taking into account the blunders of their dictators?
I'm thinking of China, which isn't either a democracy or a classic dictatorship and which exceeds us in population and perhaps matches us in some crucial resources. Is our form of government stronger and more likely to succeed than theirs?
I think we can all agree everything’s gonna be better once our people seize
control.
#Not all insurrectionists.
Sure royal dictators have such a stellar record throughout history. Good grief. Even in the time frame of the history of thr U.S. can be seen the damage done by hereditary dynasties. Not the least of which is our war for independence. The Franco-Prussion war which was the harbinger of WW1. Royalty is not a solution to anything.
I'd bet many more CEOs have been brought down by their shareholders than Kings by their subjects. Corporate charters allow for that, while Kingships do not. . What's more, it's really tough for a CEO to retaliate against those who tried unsuccessfully to remove him.
(and btw: contrary to n.n.'s claim, women have NOT "always had the right to vote." Wyoming was first to grant their women that right in 1869, and by 1914 only 5 other states, all Western, had done the same. The 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920.))
Excellent link at ¡No Pasarán!
“It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.
~ Henry L. Mencken, 1926."
Yarvin is same age as Dave Chappelle
It would be interesting to see Chappelle come with joke for every political philosophical point Yarvin make!
Curtis Guy Yarvin (born 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American blogger. He is known, along with philosopher Nick Land, for founding the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary movement (NRx)
I enjoy all Mencius Moldbug writings but there is no ways his neoreaction political philosophy will go main stream
@Rocketeer ... like I said above, the choice of boxes seems to be ballot or cartridge.
Of course it's early to begin the enumeration of nesting fowl but the ballot box seems to have worked this time.
Good point, though I would make it even more general. Focusing on voting is the wrong place to look. It's the means, not the end. The end is periodically replacing the folks in charge, peacefully, so you don't wind up with extended fights or ossification in office.
The US is no longer a democracy but an Administrative State where unelected lifetime bureaucrats write all the rules. Rules which have the power of law.
I think that's a hard question to answer because there were other strategic advantages and disadvantages on each side beyond governance and resources. The Axis nations were, generally, working on interior lines. The US especially had to transport men and equipment thousands of miles just to get to the battle. It's also a bit of a misnomer to think the Allies didn't do some bone-headed stuff (like build an entire tank plant in Rock Island IL that produced a grand total of 12 tanks, per The Chieftan Nicholas Moran) or have drastic personality conflicts that affected plans and strategy (Trent Telko has gone deep into the McArthur-USN battles in the Pacific theater) or that all the bad decisions can be laid at the feet of Tojo or especially Hitler. With a few exceptions including the chief of logistics who was pretty much on the money with his prediction of where the Germans would outrun their supply lines, the German General Staff was all-in with Hitler's view they could easily conquer the Soviet Union. I think, however, that over all the democracies corrected their mistakes faster, and absolutely cooperated more closely, especially the US and UK, and that was likely due to our more open societies and history of political compromise.
We have the same advantage over China, especially the direction that Xi is heading.
To paraphrase:
Democracy is like a train. When you get to your station, you get off.
It doesn't matter who votes. What matters is who counts the ballots. (Ballots are not the same as votes).
could be Speaker Johnson who kept mum about FJB not knowing where marbles are !!
Last I checked, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Trump, Robert Rubin, Hank Paulsen, and Rex Tillerson (just off the top of my head) had been CEOs. I hadn't noticed that they significantly outperformed other officeholders.
Also:
Once the number of voters who receive government largesse exceeds the number of voters paying for the government largesse, you've lost your freedom and your country.
the German General Staff was all-in with Hitler's view they could easily conquer the Soviet Union
===========
does this view pre-date lend-lease or adjust to it?
"If they'd had our population, area, and resources and we'd had theirs, would we still have won, even taking into account the blunders of their dictators?"
Turn it around. If they had more individual freedom, political competition and peaceful transfers of power, would they have had more population, area and resources?
Look at the USSR. A dictatorship with massive resources that allowed them to win WW2. Then they squandered those resources and the dictatorship fell. Now unfortunately the Russians have empowered a new dictatorship, and those massive resources are being squandered anew, and this latest dictatorship will also fall.
"Turn it around. If they had more individual freedom, political competition and peaceful transfers of power, would they have had more population, area and resources?"
That goes back a century in the case of the US and further with Britain and Russia. Britain wasn't a democracy when it began to expand, and Russia wasn't one while it was expanding. Divided Germany and Italy and isolated Japan weren't in the position to acquire vast territories when that was still possible in the period before the mid-19th century. So, the allies' advantages were already "baked in" when the war began.
The difference is that Kings don't demand total war, well, unless you are Genghis Kahn. Kings patch things up when the dispute has been settled, and get along later as if nothing had happened. Churchill said that democracy made it difficult to fight less than total war, because the propaganda required to get people to fight makes it impossible to make peace without total victory. We are seeing that dynamic played out right now. It might have saved the world a lot of suffering if we had been able to settle WWI early, which we couldn't because the necessary propaganda got everybody's blood so hot peace was impossible.
Who is Dave Begley? Someone whose comments are not deleted by the blog proprietors as soon as they see them. That's not a high standard, but it's one D---- S------ can't seem to meet. When it comes to quality and longevity, her comments are like a fart in an elevator: everyone else tries to ignore them until they can escape the stench.
You get a gold star, Lance, for regurgitating neocon propaganda. There is nothing but trouble in Europe for Russia, and they learned that lesson the hard way, and we all pretend that they haven't to justify constant troublemaking against them. We told Russia the week before the invasion that we were going to bring Ukraine into NATO and place nukes there, and it was not up for discussion. We thought that if we could get Russia to invade, that we could cause the collapse of the Russian Federation. This was Joe Biden's dream. Remember when he said that by invading "Russia has already lost"? That was the plan.
Yarvin/Moldbug opposed what he called the "Cathedral," the complex of universities and the media that promoted progressive ideas. He apparently didn't understand that in addition to the universities, the media, the various foundations, advocacy groups and NGOs, the politicians and the bureaucracy, the corporations and banks also favored progressive ideas and were fine with them being imposed on the population. The tech moguls who are now interested in Yarvin's thinking were also in favor of the progressive agenda.
Yarvin opposed the "Cathedral" because he thought it was egalitarian. He wanted successful people to come together and back an executive board that would run the country. Was he kidding? The egalitarianism is for show. The "Cathedral," in the expanded sense of academia, the media, foundations, NGOs, activists, think tank, bureaucrats, politicians, CEOs, and tech billionaires, is elitist. What we have now is precisely the kind of oligarchy that Yarvin favors. He just doesn't realize it.
Yarvin's thinking is confused, but it's understandable if you see him as a libertarian who progressed to anarcho-capitalism and then read Thomas Carlyle. He distrusts the state and would like to see the market running things but then recognizes that someone has to be running things, so he falls back on the corporate leaders and business oligarchs. You can also think of him as the son of Ayn Rand. Once the brilliant and talented Randian heroes overthrow the spongers are they going to let the meddlesome masses run things? No, who better than themselves to tell others what to do and what to think.
I do congratulate Yarvin for mastering the Bernard-Henri Levy/Michel Houellebecq style of the scruffy intellectual and the Times for animating the still picture to have Yarvin's fingers tapping in an ominous way. Who says the NYT doesn't like deep fakes?
WWII saw absolutely unprecedented levels of cooperation among the Allied rivals.
In the case of the US and the UK, the sharing of strategic decision-making in the CCS was an extension and deepening of previous experiences as allies who shared a language and political culture.
In the case of the US and the USSR, every secret and process except the Manhattan Project and a couple of others (and some details of strategy) were opened to the Reds, who sent their liaisons and officials almost anywhere they wanted to go. The relationship there was in spite of differences in language, culture, and history.
To address Narayanan's question, the scale and scope of Lend-Lease was probably unimaginable to most of the Kraut leaders, who thought in terms of countries and campaigns, not continents and long wars.
You really have no clue how NPR works. Say your wet-dream comes true and funding for CPB is zeroed out. Who is going to be hurt? The WNYC's and WHYYs will be fine after a little belt-tightening. Who is going to be hurt is listeners in the Red States. NPR affiliates in small markets are going to be hurt bad, ones that may broadcast Morning Edition and All Things Considered (or even just the news at the top of the hour) but spend the rest of the day on local programming or niche music (jazz, classical etc.)
I dont see the point in writing endless streams of words to counter Molberg's endless stream of words. Nothing he says is related to the real world or has the slightest chance of changing anything. That's why the NYT's is giving him a platform. Nice that some liberal/leftists/conservatives enjoy his writings - but its just a dead end. .
Thanks Rocco.
I'm glad ann worries about this stuff for us!
He's just hoping to end up in bed with one of the ladies celebrating the ERA passing into law... Ideas, ideas, how big are my ideas? Come see!
The "Democracies" didn't win WW II. The USSR - the most totalitarian evil regime then existing did. With help from China, half of which was ruled by a strongman and the other half by a communist.
And if "The Democracies" had had 1/3 the steel of the Axis and 1/10 the oil they would've lost. Fortunately for them, it was the other way round.
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