According to Joseph Addington writing for The American Conservative, Yarvin has become an “intellectual touchstone” for Vice-President JD Vance - Yarvin: I am not a conservative. I am a radical—a radical monarchist. I believe there are no rails—and never were any. America has no manifest destiny. Her constitution was not divinely inspired. No special providence was involved in her founding, nor has she discovered any unique principle of human governance. Nor can any theory of historical determinism, whether liberal, Marxist or libertarian, explain, predict or guarantee her future—which, like all future history, is a contingent and unwritten blank page in the hands of men only...
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/view/assessing-curtis-yarvin/
Assessing Curtis Yarvin
I am not a conservative. I am a radical—a radical monarchist. I believe there are no rails—and never were any. America has no manifest destiny. Her constitution was not divinely inspired. No special providence was involved in her founding, nor has she discovered any unique principle of human governance. Nor can any theory of historical determinism, whether liberal, Marxist or libertarian, explain, predict or guarantee her future—which, like all future history, is a contingent and unwritten blank page in the hands of men only.
Thus begin the self-revelations of Curtis Yarvin, radical monarchist and scorner of the American founding, in a heated exchange with Manhattan Institute Fellow Christopher Rufo during an event hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). During this exchange, we learn that Rufo’s interlocutor despises the United States, even in its original constitutional-republican form. This troublesome land was “never on the right track” and seems to have always a takeoff point for its present woke incarnation. Yarvin also vents contempt on Martin Luther King Jr., a current establishment conservative icon, and he calls for transforming this country, if possible, into some kind of feudal monarchy, with a CEO-like king.
Some of Yarvin’s observations published online starting in the mid-2000s under the title Unqualified Reservations (and republished in book form in 2023 by Passage Press) are certainly provocative, particularly his dissecting of the cult of democracy and his assault on the rhetorical excesses of Boomer conservatism. But much of what Yarvin states that is true, particularly about the cult of democracy, has been said before, indeed by many others, and a predictable reaction to such views by the conservative establishment has been, until recently, disfavor. No longer! Reactionary statements, it seems, are now becoming part of the conservative conversation, thanks to Yarvin’s celebrity, and this aged enfant terrible is receiving considerable attention from those who have scorned more qualified formulations of his “neo-reactionary” positions. According to Joseph Addington writing for The American Conservative, Yarvin has become an “intellectual touchstone” for Vice-President JD Vance.
Let me be entirely open about why this ideological change within the conservative establishment arouses my interest. About 10 years ago, ISI, one of the premier organs of establishment conservatism, broke all relations with me and others who were not on the same wavelength with its staff (or, perhaps, its donors). The unmistakable impression I was given at the time was that I and my fellow exiles had positioned ourselves too far on the right, perhaps in our critique of the neoconservatives, or in our criticism of the American anti-discrimination regime.
Since that time, the same organization has promoted the ideas of Yarvin as well as those of Christopher Caldwell, who wrote a book on the fatal flaw in the civil rights legislation of the 1960s (The Age of Entitlement) that makes some of the same critiques I and others had made, alas, unfashionably early.Although ISI never invited me or my paleoconservative friends back into the fold, this establishment conservative institute has clearly been pushed to move in a rightward direction. The recent hosting of Yarvin as a speaker witnesses to this shift. The fame that has devolved on Yarvin is by no means limited to recognition by a few old-time conservative fixtures like ISI and its magazine, Modern Age. From profiles in the New Yorker and The New York Times to The Tucker Carlson Show, this political thinker has become the right-winger of the hour.
Yarvin’s rise to general prominence is a welcome sign that the conservative establishment has moved its window of acceptable discourse to the right and is no longer canceling its dissidents with the same fervor of prior decades. Still, as a historian trained to notice changing political and cultural contexts, some of what Yarvin says unsettles me.
Yarvin carries to dizzying heights the practice of making events that occurred centuries ago responsible for recent developments that displease him. He treats “wokeness” as the manipulative tool used by what he calls the “Cathedral”—the informal complex of elite universities and the mainstream media that determine the political culture. This power elite supposedly builds on those teachings about democracy and equality going back to the American Revolution, which set the stage for the radical egalitarian ideology that now pervades the U.S. and much of the rest of the Western world. Yarvin also traces back our present instability to the Protestant Reformation, whose religious positions make him “cringe,” and which he maintains was a development that irreparably disrupted medieval society. Similar arguments can be found in the writings of 19th-century Catholic counterrevolutionaries, though Yarvin’s atheism distinguishes him from these earlier figures.
The problem with attempts to attribute blame for contemporary discontent to villains in the distant past is the difficulty of making convincing connections across the centuries. A multitude of intervening factors played roles in leading from what occurred many years ago to what is happening right now. The assumed causal chain becomes increasingly complicated the further the historian moves from an earlier point in time to a much later one.
It is, furthermore, problematic to claim that we’ve fallen away from some ideal past that existed a thousand years ago. Yarvin introduces in a secularized form the one-time traditional Catholic view of medieval society as a cohesive and hierarchical unity. Although idealized moments do exist for some observers, they function mostly as aesthetic images or as timeless paradigms rather than as historically grounded objects of study.
Medieval Europe was neither politically nor socially static, and religious dissent and sectarian movements were a recurrent feature of that civilization that the authorities worked energetically but often unsuccessfully to suppress. Although the Protestant Reformation did lead into an age of religious wars, it did not abolish hierarchy and degrees or state churches. Traditional political and social authorities were maintained in Protestant as well as Catholic countries; and in the case of Lutheranism, traditional political authorities were kept in place quite strenuously.
Calvinists in early modern times were more open to commercial loans and a capitalist economy than Catholics or Lutherans, excluding the tradesmen and bankers in late medieval Italy. But this hardly made early Protestant tradesmen into predecessors of Elon Musk or the Wolf of Wall Street. Although Calvinists in early modern Europe came to favor republican government, they took that position not as egalitarian democrats but because republican governments in Northern Europe were open to their religious influence and because they had been oppressed under Catholic monarchs. (Significantly, Calvinists did support monarchy in France during the religious wars of the 1570s and 1580s, when they had a Protestant candidate for the throne.)
Both Catholic theologians and Calvinist jurists developed the concept of natural right in the 16th century, for entirely practical reasons. Those who constructed this notion of inborn individual rights were trying to protect their coreligionists, who found themselves threatened as confessional minorities living in countries favoring other established churches. Stating that individuals came into the world with inborn rights gave these religious minorities moral claims against an unfriendly state—though, clearly, states could ignore such claims if they had the power to do so.
Catholic and Protestant countries were both influenced by Enlightenment thought in the 17th and 18th centuries; but it was more generally in Catholic countries that this new rationalism led into revolutionary movements. Enlightenment thinking in Anglican England and Lutheran Prussia produced far less ferment than it did in France, where this scientifically driven approach to government and ethics fueled a political upheaval. Protestants as well as Catholics assailed the French Revolution and its principles, and among representatives of the former group could be found such figures as Edmund Burke, Jacques Mallet du Pan, Karl Ludwig von Haller, Robert Lewis Dabney, John C. Calhoun, Friedrich Stahl, and the founders of the Dutch Anti-Revolutionary Party in 1879.
It is hard for me to grasp how the American Revolution led to the woke insanity that has now gripped the ruling classes throughout the Western world. The fact that America’s Founding Fathers invoked, among other things, natural right does not show they prepared the way for the trans movement or for the media’s denigration of the white race and masculine identity. The American Revolution produced no changes I’m aware of which caused our elites to descend into woke madness.
Not everyone, as leftists have angrily remarked, got to vote in our infant constitutional republic. The franchise back then was generally restricted to white male property holders. Almost all Americans were churched at the end of the 18th century; and even if the Bill of Rights prohibited Congress from establishing a national church, there were established churches in some states, which in Connecticut and Massachusetts remained the case into the 1830s. Religious tests existed in Maryland and the Carolinas up until the Civil War. Slaveholders were among America’s founders, and most of them did not feel egalitarian qualms about pursuing this then not-so-peculiar practice. My point here is not to defend everything that existed in early America, but to underscore its utter unlikeness to what has become the dominant social mindset of the present era.
Since Yarvin wishes us to believe that the U.S. was set on the path toward radicalization back in the 18th century because of the Enlightenment’s corrupting effect and our republican form of government, how is it, we might ask, that our one-time staunchly monarchist neighbor to the north has become even more woke than the U.S.? Let’s recall that Canada was the place of refuge to which American loyalists fled during the Revolution! Incidentally, I remember as a young man being lectured to by Canadian monarchists about how their country remained loyal to the Crown while American troublemakers rebelled against His Majesty George III. Already in the 1960s, however, as the Canadian social commentator George Grant observed, the acids of modernity were transforming his country into an imitation America—albeit one with a monarchical figurehead.
Although I don’t begrudge any country its fondness for monarchs, their presence has done zilch to protect us against the woke pestilence. Because of internal changes, like steadily widening franchises, mass immigration, and circulating elites, once-traditional European monarchies have become woke administrative states adorned with royal trappings. I have no idea how the establishment of a monarchy in the U.S. will reduce the left’s power or sway. The presence of a monarch has certainly not had that effect in Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, or Spain.
Yes, I know Yarvin has something else in mind when he praises monarchy. Namely, an efficient, authoritarian form of government that once thrived elsewhere, and which he imagines exists in some related form in modern corporations. But even if we concede this strained comparison, Western monarchs, except for brief periods of time in the early modern period, rarely exercised the kind of power that Yarvin attributes to them. In the Middle Ages, they were usually dependent on feudal aristocracy for protection and needed the blessings of the Catholic Church to command the loyalty of their subjects. Just holding together their territories was often more than monarchs could manage. And quite a few ended up getting dethroned and even executed, examples of which we meet in Shakespeare’s historical plays. Charles I was certainly not the first European monarch dispatched by rebellious subjects.
Despite my qualified reservations about Yarvin’s historical views, some of his positions please me immensely. He correctly points out that the belief in democratic equality can be quite toxic, particularly when elevated to a universal good and when linked to an American moral mission to spread that toxin. Yarvin has also recently written an essay on his Substack, Gray Mirror, which perceptively lays out the appallingly weak responses of American “conservatives” to the buildup of leftist insurrectionary forces. Dialogue with the left, together with gatekeeping the right, has not produced a winning strategy. Yarvin reminds us that the counterrevolutionary Joseph de Maistre properly blamed the weaknesses of supposed opponents of the French Revolution, as much as he did the revolutionaries themselves, for the chaos and killing caused by that upheaval.
Yarvin is on the mark in viewing the spread of egalitarian dogma historically. Although he may exaggerate the longevity of what he is condemning, he correctly recognizes how the cult of equality birthed the woke left. Equally to his credit, Yarvin, who stands well to the right of the conservative establishment, has been able to inject himself into public conversation. Arguably, the left and conservative establishment may be showering attention on him because they hope his more fanciful positions may cause his “neo-reactionary” ideas to be dismissed entirely. If this is their design, they may well have miscalculated. Those who call attention to Yarvin may have opened a wider conversation than they one they’d like to have.
And this is all for the best. Dialogues on the right should involve participants other than authorized conservative celebrities talking to each other and then occasionally trying to lure leftists into their rap session.
While Yarvin was still writing online as Mencius Molbug, he produced many memorable observations now included in Unqualified Reservations. I find one of his aperçus particularly memorable because it highlights what went wrong with the American civil rights movement. The more social justice one doles out, explains Yarvin, the higher the crime rate becomes among the “disadvantaged” recipients:
In the UK between 1900 and 1989, as the concept of social justice moved from being the program of a political faction to a universally shared ideal, the crime rate (number of offenses known to the police, per capita) rose by a factor of 46. That is, it’s not that crime, per capita, went up by 46 percent. It’s that it went up by 4600 percent. … I am not a big fan of statistics. History provides no controlled experiments… But I suspect the trend in crime has something to do with the parallel bull-market in planarism. Chaos, after all, is chaos.
This observation about the disastrous consequences of leftist reforms shows Yarvin at his most interesting.
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