A second writer, the former industrialist Charles Haywood, has also gained recognition in recent years. If Yarvin is the most influential of the modern online authoritarian theorists, he is no longer the only one whose ideas have found circulation in dissident Right circles. Some versions of his vision of techno-utopian monarchy also require the splintering of political rule into autonomous, monarchical city-states-clearly inspired in part by the success of authoritarian city-states such as Singapore or Hong Kong. This sort of new-model monarchy would be structurally similar to an autocratic CEO model and undergirded by a passive shareholder apparatus relying on blockchain technology, although the details have varied across the two decades of Yarvin’s theoretical writing output. Yarvin’s key claim is that the polity of the future, rather than relying on a failed and self-deluded democratic system, would be better expressed as a form of authoritarian monarchy. He coined the “red pill” to describe the process of becoming aware of this reality, which has now become a standard term online. Yarvin writes at a widely read Substack platform, Gray Mirror, and his cutting sociopolitical critique of the modern West operating as “ the Cathedral”-a distributed liberal oligarchy expressed by a hidden, spontaneous political order generated by mainstream media, academia, and the party system-has become particularly influential. Yarvin’s intellectual lodestars are diverse, from the nineteenth-century British authoritarian theorist Thomas Carlyle to the authoritarian-libertarian thinker Hans Hermann Hoppe, and even the Aristotelian political-regime theory tradition of the classical era. He has placed substantial articles espousing his own tech-inflected theory of monarchical rule in Unherd, Tablet, and Compact, and he has appeared on Tucker Carlson Today along with many podcasts and YouTube channels popular among the discontented right-wing discursive ecosystem. In just the last year, he has been profiled in mainstream magazines such as Vanity Fair and Tablet, as well as in the New York Times. Yarvin’s intellectual project dates from the late 2000s at the height of the heterodox blogging era, and has found renewed interest of late. The most prominent modern authoritarian theorist is the former programmer and internet blogger Curtis Yarvin, previously known by his internet pen name, Mencius Moldbug. Yet a few thinkers on the dissident Right have crossed this ideational Rubicon, and their influence is being felt in unexpected places. The political figures most often associated with this framing, however, do not actually propose authoritarian regimes as a solution to the political problems of the United States. These theorized authoritarian alternatives go far beyond the concerns more commonly expressed by close observers of the American polity today, which rather conceive of authoritarian threats as a function of gradual democratic backsliding. I term these select few “authoritarian theorists.” In order to truly qualify as an authoritarian theorist, he or she must 1) have an explicit ideational agenda against electoral democracy as a regime type and 2) proffer an explicit alternative political regime. These positions, although still marginal, are no longer taboo in online discourse.Īs part of a broader research project on authoritarianism and illiberalism in the modern West, I have developed a working paper that assesses this new generation of political thinkers. This is starting to change, if only on the margins.Īt present, the most prominent rejections come from an amorphous collective of thinkers sometimes termed the “dissident Right.” Moving beyond cultural criticism and disenchantment with the political status quo, a small set of internet-based intellectual entrepreneurs have begun publicly to make the case for the end of democracy and the establishment of an authoritarian regime in the United States. Yet very few of the discontented are willing to ditch democracy itself. Critiques are often far-reaching, castigating political institutions as sclerotic and obstructionist, cultural trends as damaging and extremist, and the rise of zero-sum “us-them” mentalities as clashing with the pluralism and mutual tolerance required by our Republic. Many on the Left and Right are unhappy with the state of democracy in America today.
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