Is Curtis Yarvin 'influential'?

Moldbug? How many divisions has he got?

Greetings from Read Max HQ! Today’s newsletter is on the right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin, f/k/a Mencius Moldbug, recently interviewed in The New York Times. If it’s not enough Read Max for you this week, keep an eye out tomorrow for a new podcast episode with John Ganz and Quinn Slobodian discussing Elon Musk and the tech right.

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Perhaps the recent event that has most emphatically hammered home for me the fact that Donald Trump is the American president again was the sudden prominent appearance of Curtis Yarvin this past weekend’s New York Times Magazine and Interview podcast, for which he was interviewed by David Marchese. You may remember Yarvin, a software engineer known for elaborating a right-wing political theory called, variously, “neocameralism,” “neoreaction,” or “NRx,” over a series of Blogspot posts in the late 2000s under the pen name “Mencius Moldbug,” from the wave of articles about or explaining him published in the wake of Trump’s first election in 2016, or from the second wave of articles about or explaining him published when he fell in with the Dimes Square crypto crowd after Biden’s election, or even from a third wave of articles published about him last year when Silicon Valley’s right wing took prominence in Trump’s second election bid. But if you missed all of those, don’t worry--there was Yarvin, clad in his trademark leather jacket, shot in a moody black and white, peering out from the pages and website of The New York Times.

I have trouble being clever and subtle about it: I’m sick of this fucking guy. It’s not just the tedious little sophistries, the smug affect, the endless self-regard--it’s also that I increasingly suspect that his importance to the right is often overstated. It would be too glib even for me to claim that he has no influence at all--Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and most prominently our current Vice President have all approvingly cited his work--but it seems to me that at this point the reams of exegesis of his work wildly outstrip his actual mark on right-wing politics or culture. (It’s worth comparing his influence on the Trump campaign to that of, e.g., fellow ‘00s bloggers Steve Sailer or Mickey Kaus.) Trump didn’t really run a “Yarvinite” campaign; nor is his administration prusuing a meaningfully “Yarvinite” program. For all his many powerful fans, Yarvin sometimes feels like a hyped baseball prospect I’ve been reading about for years but who still can’t make the opening-day roster--a man with dozens of magazine profiles but no clear wins.

What is Yarvinism, exactly? Here’s how James Pogue glossed Yarvin’s ideas for a Vanity Fair story on “the New Right” in 2022:

He has consistently argued that conservatives waste their time and political energy on fights over issues like gay marriage or critical race theory, because liberal ideology holds sway in the important institutions of prestige media and academia—an intertwined nexus he calls “the Cathedral.” […] You won’t hear people use the Cathedral term a lot in public, although right-wing Twitter lit up with delight when Yarvin sketched the concept on Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation show last September. People who’ve opened their eyes to this system of control have taken the red pill, a term Yarvin started using back in 2007, long before it got watered down to generally mean supporting Trump. To truly be red-pilled, you have to understand the workings of the Cathedral. And the way conservatives can actually win in America, he has argued, is for a Caesar-like figure to take power back from this devolved oligarchy and replace it with a monarchical regime run like a start-up. As early as 2012, he proposed the acronym RAGE—Retire All Government Employees—as a shorthand for a first step in the overthrow of the American “regime.” What we needed, Yarvin thought, was a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.” Yarvin now shies away from the word dictator and seems to be trying to promote a friendlier face of authoritarianism as the solution to our political warfare: “If you’re going to have a monarchy, it has to be a monarchy of everyone,” he said.

One problem with talking about Yarvin’s “influence” is that for all that he’s developed a reputation as an extreme, fresh right-wing thinker, the core ideas he’s dabbling in are blog-friendly repackagings of obsessions that have gripped mainstream and fringe conservatism alike for 40 years: executive power, the “administrative state,” liberal cultural hegemony, government bureaucracy and waste. This means that there are always vague ways that you could connect Trumpist exercise of power to Yarvin’s various models and concepts--but rarely in a way that seems explicitly Yarvinite. Is the DOGE agency a watered-down version of Yarvin’s “RAGE” idea or is it more properly seen as a continuation of longtime, business-led conservative and libertarian inveigling against government bureaucracy? Is Trump joking about dictatorship because J.D. Vance explained Yarvin’s theories on monarchy to him, or because Trump is a senescent troll?

That anything Trump (or Elon Musk, or Peter Thiel) does could be equally explained by venality, expediency, and any number of ideologies, from populism to paleoconservatism to “neocameralism” suggests to me that journalists should be cautious about how we trace intellectual effect in the Trump Era. Over the last eight years I’ve grown pretty exhausted by reporting on the intellectual and social scene variously called “the Dark Enlightenment,” “the alt-right,” and “the New Right” that focuses on outré personalities and extreme ideas but often fails to answer the question “how does this actually matter?” When Pogue’s Vanity Fair piece was first published I posed four questions that I thought would be useful in grounding some of this coverage. Two years later I’m not sure I have particularly satisfying answers to any of the questions.

This isn’t to say that Yarvin isn’t “influential” in some sense, or too unimportant for any coverage at all. But a lot of writing about Yarvin gets the direction of influence backwards: I suspect it’s not so much that Curtis Yarvin “influences” Peter Thiel to act in a certain way, it’s that Thiel has a will to power for which Yarvin provides some level of intellectual cover and apologia. For this reason my guess is that his relationships with Thiel, Vance, and Andreessen aren’t the most important vector through which that influence operates--even if those relationships make for the best copy in an article.

In fact, one reason to appreciate the Times interview over much of the previous coverage of Yarvin is that Marchese is quite good at drawing out the reality of his influence:

There’s a great piece that I’ve sent to some of the people that I know that are involved in the transition —

Who? Oh, there’s all sorts of people milling around.

Name one. Well, I sent the piece to Marc Andreessen. It’s an excerpt from the diary of Harold Ickes, who is F.D.R.’s secretary of the interior, describing a cabinet meeting in 1933. What happens in this cabinet meeting is that Frances Perkins, who’s the secretary of labor, is like, Here, I have a list of the projects that we’re going to do. F.D.R. personally takes this list, looks at the projects in New York and is like, This is crap. Then at the end of the thing, everybody agrees that the bill would be fixed and then passed through Congress. This is F.D.R. acting like a C.E.O. So, was F.D.R. a dictator? I don’t know. What I know is that Americans of all stripes basically revere F.D.R., and F.D.R. ran the New Deal like a start-up.

Like: This is your intellectual godfather? Forwarding articles about F.D.R. to Marc Andreessen? A few questions later, Yarvin disclaims his own influence:

It’s probably overstated, the extent to which you and JD Vance are friends. It’s definitely overstated.

But he has mentioned you by name publicly and referred to “dewokeification” ideas that are very similar to yours. You’ve been on Michael Anton’s podcast, talking with him about how to install an American Caesar. Peter Thiel has said you’re an interesting thinker. So let’s say people in positions of power said to you: We’re going to do the Curtis Yarvin thing. What are the steps that they would take to change American democracy into something like a monarchy? My honest answer would have to be: It’s not exactly time for that yet. No one should be reading this panicking, thinking I’m about to be installed as America’s secret dictator. I don’t think I’m even going to the inauguration.

Were you invited? No. I’m an outsider, man. I’m an intellectual. The actual ways my ideas get into circulation is mostly through the staffers who swim in this very online soup.

Yarvin’s not a trustworthy interlocutor, and it’s possible he’s distancing himself from Vance to conceal his secret management of the presidential transition. (Certainly, I think he’s trying to do Vance and Trump a favor by minimizing his importance.) But I suspect he’s being fairly honest here: If Yarvin has influence, it lies not in his relationships with the powerful people his work flatters but in the legend burnished among the staffers and administrators and low-level hangers-on--the groyperized aides and attachés who do the busy work of the Trump administration--who treat his words as serious political philosophy instead of as post-facto justification.