Curtis Yarvin's Monarchal Antifascism

POLITICAL GORGON 2

Welcome back, our more normal reader

According to a recent New York Times poll, only 13 percent of the American electorate believes that the country is “on the right track.” Because 13 percent is decidedly not the healthy middle, we can assume that you also share a feeling of national derailment; our collective train has left the rails and seems to be hurtling down towards an unknown destination. Reading our Internet content will not stop the catastrophe, but will alert you to the hidden mystery behind the catastrophe. If that last sentence made you cringe slightly, we will be more straightforward: this is a chapter in DEEP SOCKS, a political self help book guaranteed to deepen your political vision.

The whole book will take us a year to write, and like the year, it is organized into seasons. We are now in a part of the “Winter” season called “Embers of Fascism” Fascism was once a fire that threatened to burn down the world and build a new world, headquartered in the “World Capital City Germania.” Berlin never became Germania. Fascism as an actual fire, an actual political movement was largely eradicated in 1945. But (as our name suggests) the embers of fascism still burn. If this still sounds too purple, take a look at this algorithmically generated diagram showing usages of Fascism.

POLITICAL GORGON

After the death of actually existing, globally threatening Fascism in 1945, the use of the term declines sharply, year after year, until 1960. And then, with some interesting peaks and troughs, the word gets used more and more every year since. Why are we talking about fascism? What does it mean to us today?

This is the topic of the current week. Taken as a whole, we’ll call it POLITICAL GORGON. Yesterday’s entry looked at Jason Stanley’s strange book “How Fascism Works.”

Stanley treats fascism as a political spectrum concept. This is to say that fascism is a quantity that can be graphed onto a continuous and discrete line: certain kinds of politics are more fascisty than others. The converse also holds true, certain kinds of politics are merely less fascist than others. The entire political right is defined by its relationship to fascism, a terminal point of moral failing and low political cunning. Trump might not be a fascist, exactly, but he has a high fascism score, and he’s aiming higher and higher. This is a category error: fascism is a historical political movement, and historical political movements can’t be quantified or put on a spectrum. The subject of today’s entry, Curtis Yarvin, is also often put on the fascist spectrum.

Five Words to sabotage your thoughts

Here’s a moment from an interview between Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson and Elizabeth Sandifer, an author who has written a book about something called “neoreaction.”

ROBINSON

Elizabeth Sandifer, I need you to help us understand this neoreactionary tendency. Can you discuss what it is?

SANDIFER

Neoreaction is one attempt of modern far right philosophy—we can just go ahead and call it fascism—to create an intellectual basis. It was formulated by Curtis Yarvin, who writes under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, or formerly wrote.

Pay special attention to that “we can just go ahead.” Instead of explaining to us how “modern far right philosophy” is fascism, the move is made with five strong-arm words. The force comes through the first person plural: “We” are made to agree to something that we might not actually agree to.

The Current Affairs review was filed in May of 2022. Five months earlier, Yarvin published an essay called “Monarchism and Fascism Today.” Either Sandifer has not read this essay, or she has read it, and ignored it because it doesn’t conform to her mental schema, because this essay makes it is very clear that Yarvin is not a fascist. He is, in fact, an anti-fascist. Just not the sort they like at Current Affairs.

King ≠ Führer

According to his own self-branding, Yarvin is “America’s leading absolute monarchist blogger.” His core argument for monarchy, repeated endlessly, goes like this: we think we live in a democracy but we live in an oligarchy. Everything that works in society (iPhones, Teslas) get produced by monarchies: corporations where CEOs act as monarchs. Monarchies work, that’s why most humans have lived in monarchies for most of history. Even the allegedly democratic United States has been a monarchy for at least three happy times: under George Washington, when Alexander Hamilton ran the show like a startup, under Lincoln, when his private secretaries Hay and Nicolay ran the show like a startup, and under (Franklin Delano) Roosevelt, where his brain trust and office of budget management ran the show like a startup. There’s a big problem with the core analogy in the argument, which you can read about here, but now you understand why Yarvin wants monarchy.

And this is why he doesn’t want fascism. Because for Yarvin, fascism is the failure state of Monarchy. Here’s some passages from the aforementioned essay “Monarchy and Fascism Today:”

From an engineering perspective, a fascist regime is a monarchy which is accountable to a democratic political movement. Hitler and Mussolini did not rule by mere force, like William the Conqueror. They took power through political popularity; in power, they stayed obsessed with political popularity; their legitimacy derived from political parties which became ruling parties in their one-party states. Mussolini was actually fired by his own Grand Council of Fascism. Doh! [Laughter.]

And in power, they used the levers of powers to manipulate their own support bases. The classic fascist regimes of the early 20th century were propaganda regimes. They were really accountable to no one, since they could brainwash the party rank and file. Capturing one’s own accountability mechanism is a common failure mode.

Fascism is monarchy which is existentially dependent on a popular support base. It easily tends to mobilize this support base against its subjects outside the base, creating the conditions for civil war and/or human-rights abuses. Generally speaking, this is not a problem we see in stable historical monarchies.

Classic fascist regimes can no longer exist in the Western world, since these regimes require a popular energy that no longer exists. Not only will 21st-century Americans not dress up in costumes and march, 21st-century Germans won’t either. Classical fascism requires levels of democratic passion and martial virtue now far beyond reach. Fascists and liberals alike do not want to hear that we suck too much to be fascists. [Applause, laughter, a couple of boos.]

First, consider the king

Yarvin is certainly trolling here, but a troll is not a fascist, either. Sandifer isn’t the only one who wants to call Yarvin a fascist. Some tentative Internet work will find the modifier “fascist” appearing with high frequency around the substantive “Curtis Yarvin.” It takes very little research to understand that this is factually wrong. The more accurate modifiers for Yarvin would be “anti-fascist” and “monarchist.” But somehow the possibility of right wing antifascism seems impossible to grasp. Why is this?

It is important to consider the triumph of liberalism, then we must consider the mental organization of politics on the part of our stubborn interlocutors who cannot see Yarvin’s antifascism for what it is—a principled exception. Yarvin would likely not object to the fascist revolution all that much, though it may displease him. But while he may not suffer under some future-Führer unduly, he would be in the unique position of wanting him to go a step further. The king is a little contemplated figure today except among historians, the Thai, and drunk European aristocracy. Let us think a moment on monarchical antifascism.

The king, unlike the Führer, exists independently of his popularity and even to a certain extent his strength. Yet an unpopular or weak Führer is a contradiction in terms. An unpopular king is merely that, and he may yet be a great king, or prove worse. A king may die, there needs to be little worry that a successor would appear. The monarchical state will naturally produce a king, and should it not, some man with an army will become king. Even the Byzantines were able to temporarily effect a restoration after the Crusaders looted Constantinople and carried its treasure to Venice, to slowly sink into the lagoons. The difference between the king and the leader of a mass movement is that the king is an embodied institution, whereas the leader is merely a tamer of a force. The force may yet turn on him. The king is the crystallization of that force at his best, and a comparative trifle to exchange should he prove wholly unworthy. The Führer, and fascism, appears to a monarchist as a failed triangulation between things they despise—mass politics and spiritually craven monarchs.

Next, consider the liberal triumph

Power decays the quality of thought over time. Power is seductive, it is a narcotic for the mind. It is an omnitool that solves any problem with judicious and even unjudicious application. It really is a hammer that turns the world into nails. And the moment of triumph in the 1980s when it seemed as if state socialism, fascism, and whatever else that may have existed then died ignobly passed 40 years ago. Since then, liberalism has been huffing its own farts, completely empowered to control the world as it sees fit. All economies are market economies. All human behavior is reducible to the economy. The government is like a firm! Everything can be brought under management.

This is the condition where illiberal politics of a particular stripe, that is, a potentially threatening or revolutionary stripe, are used as a metonym. A catchword that catches what is unacceptable or unprofitable to contemplate, and attaches it all the negative qualities possible. Power when it captures thought can only lead to thought serving power, telling it what it likes to hear. This is a fable that Yarvin likes to tell, about the marketplace of ideas for a liberal state and a repressive tsardom. The marketplace of ideas in the tsardom will produce increasingly self-serving justifications for the tsar, and increasingly powerful ones for liberalism. The ideas that survive repression are necessarily the most vital, effective, and reproducible. To those who serve power, ideologies of the present and past are reducible to the status of facts and objects, so long as they are not part of the canonical tradition—that is the tradition which serves state power.

Last, consider the spectrum analogy

Because they are conditioned in a liberal triumph, thinkers of centrist liberal and the left socialist types see right wing antifascism as esoteric and meaningless. An empty protest from a guilty conscience, perhaps. If you could conceivably tolerate what is seemingly worst in human nature, you are part of that evil. In order to understand how difficult it is to think about right wing antifacism, we return now to the idea of “spectrum” politics. If you think about politics as a spectrum, situated on a grid, you’re thinking about it as a two dimensional plane; a flatland. Every point has an x-y coordinate. But political reality is (at minimum) five dimensional. Beside the ideological aspects mapped by the “spectrum” concept, there’s also the dimension of time. Fascism existed, as a real live political movement, at a specific time. This moment is a part of its character, inescapably so, just like Carlism, just like the Antifreemason party. To be antimasonic is now an anachronism. And still there’s the dimension of space. Fascism happened in specific places: on the periphery of what gets called, in World Systems theory, “the core” - in Germany, Japan, Italy, Portugal, Taiwan, Spain.

When we situate fascism more properly in a multidimensional space, accounting for its historical and revolutionary character, we see that the politics referred to uncritically by Sandifer and Robinson as ‘fascism’ are as locally similar as their politics are to Stalinism. It is a gross slander to call a dandy like Robinson a Stalinist, after all surely Stalin would have had him killed were he to establish the New Orleans Soviet. Indeed, the modern right, outside of an easily-led faction that spends most of its time shouting slurs into the collapsing void of imageboards and getting banned on Twitter, understands quite well that fascism, like the New Deal and Stalinism, are anachronistic and ill-fitting concepts to will into being on this earth today. They fail the relevancy test. They fail the sniff test for viability. They fail the “are you seriously telling me RACE WAR NOW” test, perhaps the easiest test of all for a serious thinker to pass.

The next FDR

When we move outside of flatland, it becomes easier to understand Yarvin’s antifascist monarchism. In his recent appearance on the Red Scare podcast, Yarvin cites FDR as a model for a new American monarch. This is, of course, also trolling, but there’s something interesting in the example. Again and again, Yarvin speaks of the “cold civil war” in the United States - that is, the fight between the red and the blue states. The US before FDR was also heading towards civil war — a class war between haves and have-nots. In a recent post, Yarvin borrows from Tolkien to describe the “haves” as elves, and the have-nots as hobbits. FDR was an elf, that is, from the ruling class of the United States. But he was what Yarvin called a “dark elf,” an elf who made an alliance with the hobbits. In FDR’s case, there were two groups of hobbits that benefitted from the New Deal: proletarian hobbits, and nerd hobbits. FDR created a new kind of government (the administrative/regulatory New Deal state) and put the nerd hobbits in charge. Through a miracle of Eru, their successors and issue were, in time, elves. Flashforward and it’s 80ish years later. Once again the risk of civil war hangs in the air.

But who will be the new FDR? One name that Yarvin continues to mention (albeit half-seriously) is Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West. One of the Red Scare hosts insisted that Ye, as a “man with bipolar disorder” wasn’t capable of the sustained attention required to be president-king. This may be the case, but it may also be the case that Ye will stop using medicalized language, and come to believe that the infinite healing powers of Jesus (and some enforced separation from the schizoid nightmare world of the Kardashians) have restored balance and focus to his mind, and that he does, indeed, have the attention needed to bring America together again. One of the authors of this piece has the questionable “honor” of being the first to seriously suggest West for public office. Instead of running for Mayor of Chicago on a municipal libertarian communist platform, West married into America’s ruling reality television family. The wisdom of this strategy will only be revealed in the fullness of time. If anyone associated with West is reading this and wants a very detailed strategy analysis of how he can become president, they can email pityless at tutanota dot com.

Give me transcendence, or give me the goat

A monarch of the US may well be desirable. What the antifascist right desires more than anything is transcendence of political struggle, because it is clear to them now that the Imperial Republic of the United States wastes tremendous energy sustaining a shallow, ineffectual, and corrupt political class. Its empire needs to stand in the sun, or fall away from it, and it is unlikely some enlightened ruler will adopt a do-with-less, save-the-republic attitude. Should the Imperial Republic’s holdings and position to deteriorate, it would be by catastrophe and crass stupidity, as was seen in Afghanistan and Iraq. Fascism is no answer to this shit-or-get-off-the-pot moment of history for the American government. Fascism requires enemies within to blame on the failures within, and victories without to displace the violence of its revolutionary becoming. Fascism is aggressive, warlike, revolutionary, and built on a quasi-civil war mentality.

The “cold civil war” of the USA is then the most fascistic element about its current political situation, but it is undirected, and there is no mass movement seeking revolution behind either part. Biden and Trump simply lack the vision, character, or intellectual capacity to be a leader, and it is likely that no one who has yet entered politics on the national level has this quality. It would be like expecting the Cultural Revolution out of Andropov or Chernenko. What exists on both sides are not leaders, but scapegoats. The unlearned lesson of politics in the 20th century is, perhaps, the deep lesson of the scapegoat. You cannot scapegoat a herd. You must find the guilty.

It’s unwise because it reveals the basic injustice of the project. You can reify the herd into an animal, see a class or ethnic group as the enemy, and live accordingly. You can place your sins in them, quite effectively. It is cathartic to do so. Yet when the time comes to kill, the shame and sin rebound upon you, innocent blood is spilled invariably. You’ve not just killed a kulak, you’ve killed the only milliner you’ve ever seen, and flour comes from them as much as you. You’ve not just shot the race traitor, you’ve killed your nation’s soul. The scapegoat must be singular, and must be guilty. Centerless power systems, the modern political centrist liberal configuration, cannot address its scapegoat. It finds instead classes, political parties, agglomerations of human life so large that you can only forget their collective humanity by assigning them, collectively, superhuman guilt, for crimes of the father, for crimes of the neighbor, for crimes in thought as well as deed.

Paranoia in the twilight

We stand now at a point where paranoia characterizes the left and the right. Fear that cannot be resolved by an experience of the other plagues politics. It cannot be resolved, because the other cannot be experienced any longer in shallow politics. It exists as a scapegoat, but this is not a stable or effective formation, there will never be catharsis against a class or group that does not stain and destroy those seeking catharsis. Now, what the left calls fascist, the right is all to happy to blame on the glowies (a neologism for the FBI and CIA ironically invented by a pitiable paranoid schizophrenic named Terry Davis). The first questions on the polarized people’s minds when some wretch finds it in him to shoot up a school or attempt some political violence now:

• Is this the brownshirts?

• Is this the secret police?

Wherever one looks, the secret world of malevolent intention lies writhing in shadows and dark corners, disappearing as you shine light on it. So, our last two entries have been about fascist paranoia: that is, the paranoid belief that nonfascist right wing political agents are fascist, and therefore in a murderous death cult conspiring to kill all the meek and downtrodden of this Earth. Tomorrow, in the last of these reflections on reflections of fascism (remember, don’t look at the Gorgon directly!) we will make use of our time machine and visit to the 1930s and learn, from Salvador Dali, about how to use our paranoia about fascism in a creative, if critical way.