I find it weird that Yarvin hasn’t re-evaluated his views given the total decline of Russia and China. Putin and Xi are arguably the closest things to monarchs we have today, and Russia and China are doing poorly precisely because they have dictators/monarchs. A liberal democratic Russia would never have engaged in a ridiculous, pyrrhic war in Ukraine if not for Putin’s megalomania. Similarly, China wouldn’t have needed to tank its economy and terrorize its own populace if Xi wasn’t so paranoid about losing control.
It’s not admirable to refuse to update your views in light of new evidence.
From many Russian accounts, despite his projections of authority Putin seems closer to a medieval monarch than a pre-modern Luis XIV type, barely holding together various oligarchical power structures in a pseudo-feudal arrangement. If Prighozin had launched his rebellion against a real absolutist, say, Stalin, would he still be a free man?
Definitely agree. Naive monarchists seem to forget that absolute monarchy is a somewhat new form of monarchy, and that for long periods a king was more of a “first among equals” situation.
The Prighozin fiasco definitely frames Putin as the latter kind of monarch
I don’t think there are many monarchists over the age of 20. I can think of stronger arguments for monarchy than many present, but it’s telling that non-monarchists can frequently argue the case better than monarchists
"Naive monarchists seem to forget that absolute monarchy is a somewhat new form of monarchy, and that for long periods a king was more of a “first among equals” situation."
Not really. Augustus, and most of the emperors who were considered among the greatest, were effectively absolute monarchs. They made pretensions to respecting the Senate, but that was solely for appearances. There are many examples of absolute monarchies throughout history.
Yarvin’s view is that the Ukraine war wouldn’t have happened if the US and liberal Western NGOs hadn’t spent billions to turn Ukraine into a shambolic, corrupt Bizarro-Russia directly on Russia’s borders rather than respect its historical sphere of influence.
Akin to China funding some Canadian Communist Party and putting a pro-China figurehead in Trudeau’s place after a “people’s revolution,” then expecting America not to consider them a threat.
I do think the American foreign policy establishment made some big mistakes. The fault lies primarily with Putin, but I think the neocon “we will forcibly make you a liberal democracy” policies have been disastrous.
I don’t think engaging with a nation that wants to engage with the west is bad, however. The bigger mistakes IMO were Iraq and Libya. This showed that the west would use force to destroy regimes it didn’t like, making the threat of a puppet state more severe. If the US hadn’t done so many stupid invasions, Ukraine engaging more with the west doesn’t look so sinister.
Total decline of Russia and China? In what way? Russia has improved in almost every way since Putin took over, and China has had the greatest economic miracle in world history since the 1970's. Time will tell whether the war in Ukraine or China's Covid response will have long term negative effects on either country, but in both cases the US and Western "liberal democracies" have made very similar decisions as those.
I agree regarding China but while Russia has seen a relatively similar GDP/capita improvement since Putin's ascension, it's more a matter of correlation than causation. Just take a quick gander:
"Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country" is just about the only time John McCain was ever right about anything. Their growth has been overwhelmingly from oil sales, obviously buttressed by high global consumption and lower production in the West, and moreover, they sell the oil primarily to China, a country that actually uses it to make real improvements to their nation (and other nations around the world). Russia's land and natural resources are among the best in the world; the fact that they fall behind on so many metrics is proof of Putin's failures, and the worse failures of his predecessors aren't a justification either.
You always have to compare it to what's realistic. You can't expect Putin, who followed 70 years of communism and another decade of failed de-communization, to have Russia performing at the same level as western Europe. There are limitations as to what a country can do. Putin inherited a bunch of gangster oligarchs, a sclerotic military industrial complex that still held power, as well as an economy that still had a bunch of defaults of the previous misrule. I'm not arguing that Putin is Augustus or even Catherine the Great, but he has dramatically outperformed the 90's that was considered to be "democratic."
Soviet Russia was terrible by Western standards, but the legacies of Khrushchev and Brezhnev were obviously nowhere near Stalin or Mao. Post-Stalin USSR saw modest improvements in their economy and standard of living, enjoying a handful of technological achievements and relative stability. To the extent that Russia needed a strongman to tame the chaos of the liberalization process and centralize power, sure, Putin was more capable than Yeltsin and arguably a necessity, but he embraced oligarchs all the same and it's hard to see how Russia isn't a fundamentally corrupt nation. I'm not defending democracy, and it's fair to note that Russia's relatively flatten economy from 2008 on tracks with most of the non-American West. I'm defending the Chinese system which overcame far greater tragedies with weaker geopolitical strength, yet managed to produce many consecutive successes in leadership who oversaw the most miraculous rise to world power since America (or maybe briefly Argentina) in the late 1800s.
Putin could have left Ukraine as a Western-run Russia parody. The evidence prior to 2021 suggests this would have looked more and more favourable to Russia as time went on. However, the fact is that the United States wanted this war so it could end Europe's reliance on Russian energy. If Putin hadn't taken the bait, the U.S. would have just upped the ante further. In any case, by far the biggest losers from this war are Ukraine and western Europe, so it hardly looks like a slam-dunk against monarchy being the superior system.
"Putin could have left Ukraine as a Western-run Russia parody." The problem from Russia's perspective is that NATO has proven to be a maximalist alliance, and we know their end goal was to deploy advanced missile systems in Eastern Ukraine just like they have in Poland.
Yarvin has addressed this argument in interviews, but not in his blog. The gist of it is that USA is a global hegemon that wields soft power and is effectively in a state of cold war with any non-democratic power. Due to the massive imbalance of resources, this conflict tends to hit the non-democratic powers hard. This is also why Yarvin wants USA specifically to become a monarchy, rather than some random nation he could move to.
He also makes the argument that both Russia and China pretend to be democracies in some sense and build their whole political formulas on this pretence, which means they must curate public opinion just like USA does.
A dictatorship is not the same as a monarchy (dictatorships are far more paranoid and unstable) and Putin/Xi has nowhere near as much power as Stalin/Mao did. If Putin or Xi did anything too far outside of the consensus of their respective oligarchies, they'd simply be retired. Russia's failwar is not the result of one man but had broad approval among its elite, same with China's "zero covid" idiocy (China can at least afford such mistakes, Russia not so much).
How do you grok your endorsement of liberalism’s “policy” and “social science” with Yarvin’s point that the only way Bukele was able to put a dent in his country’s state of anarchy was by sidestepping the rules-based order? Ordering mass arrests, sidestepping courts, kicking out NGOs, and silencing journalists aren’t generally things neoliberal wonks consider part of the playbook, yet it was the only solution that could have worked.
There’s a discussion to be had about how some third world countries can’t expect to have first world standards of criminal law. If Bukele declares himself dictator for life though that would be bad for the country in the long run. Ideally you would use his accomplishments to solidify popular support for tough on crime policies. The US in the 1950s didn’t have contemporary ideas of criminal rights while still being a liberal democracy. You don’t have to accept liberal framing that that’s contrary to liberalism.
You have repeatedly cited Bukele as an example of why Hispanic immigration will not necessarily have a negative political impact on the U.S., therefore it is obviously a flaw in your position if you categorically denounce reject implementing the policies that Bukele actually implemented. In general, all of the countries you cite as example of successful multi-ethnic politics with large low IQ populations have policies you not only do not support, but unreservedly condemn the holders of. To take your latest example, 1950s America had extensive segregation by race enforced by both public and private force, but you don't endorse that, so what do you actually endorse?
Moving out to the larger issue. Many of your most important essays essentially reproduce ideas from Unqualified Reservations, but in certain respects improve on them by adding detail and sticking to the point. 'Why is Everything Liberal' is probably the best stat-based introduction to the concept of the Cathedral. 'Woke Institutions is just Civil Rights Law' is a great introduction to the concept that culture is downstream of power. 'Interracial Crime and Perspective' illustrates the point that media manipulates not by fabricating but determining what is part of a narrative, and what is just random stuff that happens. 'Liberals Read Conservatives Watch TV' is a good intro to the caste system of America.
The problem is that if you take these ideas seriously and pursue them, you conclude that meaningful reform in America is simply not possible. Everyone has noticed that you took a hard turn towards pro-establishment liberalism in the last year and half. Your stated reasons for this (e.g. Putin screwed up after 20 years of pretty smart statesmanship on a weak hand; Chinese are germophobes) do not seem convincing. In some cases, such as your advocacy of low IQ immigration, your arguments are palpably weak, in a way that is very obvious to everyone. The simplest explanation is that you realised that honesty meant giving up on your dreams of impact. This is Yarvin's point, and it appears to be correct, despite everything that is obviously wrong with his current output (Yo, Yarvin since I can't comment on your Substack, when am I getting my copy of Gray Mirror?).
"The US in the 1950s didn’t have contemporary ideas of criminal rights while still being a liberal democracy."
Yes, but then it did institute those rights, at that precise moment. The spirit of liberalism is always looking for new universalist frontiers and rights, and something like criminal rights (which are, after all, entirely justifiable up to a point) were inevitable.
That maybe good or bad, but it is very difficult to freeze liberal democracy at an optimal point in time. This is what scares people about the current times as well - not that they are bad, bud that they will lead to something much worse.
More like the spirit of Leftism. If other people are harmed by criminal “rights”, including those blessed “marginalized” so many lachrymose “liberals” weep over, it makes a sham of actual rights/liberty/welfare.
"The US in the 1950s didn’t have contemporary ideas of criminal rights while still being a liberal democracy. You don’t have to accept liberal framing that that’s contrary to liberalism."
But the modern understanding of criminal rights is completely within the bounds of liberalism. And it's not a coincidence that crime spiked as soon as the US adopted that liberal understanding of criminal rights.
Why do you think it was "necessary" to kick out NGO, silence journalists? I think you need to distinguish actions that violate laws governing criminal prosecution and those that seek to consolidate power. I fear that Bukele will give crime control a bad name.
"I see Yarvin thought as presenting “Revolution!” and “Monarchy!” as his trump cards to deal with every issue from affirmative action to entitlement spending to urban crime, which is fun, while I do boring stuff like think about rational policy responses that I think can work."
You mean like importing a billion people who will then vote to dismantle the welfare state? Liberalization of euthanasia to the point where everyone gets a pill?
You are now a libertarian, as you like to point out. Okay. You are then certainly aware that, apart from a handful of important people in SV, nobody is for that. Nobody likes that package and certainly not immigrants (and I am one myself) that you want more of.
From what I can tell, your affirmative action crusade seems more realistic, in line with Rufo etc. But a lot of your ideas are as realistic as Yarvin's idea of monarchy (which, if you read the article, is about monarchy in practice - he uses FDR as an example - not in name).
I don't normally read Yarvin (you are a better writer for sure), but was intrigued by his article. People in Serbia currently have something like what he recommends - a democratically elected president who meddles in literally everything and who is also very smart and capable. A lot of problems with this approach, yet it certainly does work in cutting down the most egregious nonsense.
For suicide? Netherlands was the first country to legalize euthanasia in the early 2000s, and they saw suicides fall until 2007; then the global recession hits and suicides trend up for a bit (not uncommon for the West), then stay flat at new highs. Belgium legalized euthanasia around the same time and saw a similar trend, except their suicide rate actually fell back to early 2000s lows. In America, the rate has been trending forever upwards ever since 2000. For the UK, trending forever downwards.
If there's an analysis out there which finds a significant correlation between national suicide rates with euthanasia after cleaning out some variables, post it. I seriously doubt it exists though, especially for reasons of social sanction. Social sanction works when there is something fundamentally pleasurable; endorse anal sex as not a perversion but instead just something adults do privately, and a lot more of it will happen (to the detriment of national health). Aside from attention-seeking teens and cult members, virtually no one commits suicide for fun/status, they commit suicide to end suffering.
Good response to Yarvin. I enjoy him and find his historical excursions interesting, without seeing him as much of a guide to what should or could actually be done in the real, existing world. Despite the misleading term "monarchy" he often makes the much more viable case that we have on three occasions had a very strong executive in the USA who functioned within the broadly defined scope of Constitutional executive power -- Washington/Hamilton, Lincoln, FDR. That is historically accurate, as I read it. We are overdue for a house-cleaning at that level. A future reform of the USA along the lines that Hanania-Rufo and others of similar views hope for may ultimately require another very strong exercise of central power, for which we have these illuminating precedents. But the political momentum has to built up first. It does not drop out of the sky, as Yarvin would likely admit. Hopefully this hypothetical future reforming administration would respect (verbally anyway) the formal limits of the Constitution, because it is a good Constitution, and we should try to keep it, and when things settle down, it generally works well in ordinary times. In the meantime, incremental and actionable steps are good, and not to be despised because they are not total solutions at a single blow. Bring on the increments! Any movement in the opposite direction of the Revolution is a big win, because it takes away the veneer of inevitability.
Yarvin's monarchist cosplaying is (as usual) the weakest part of his essay. But where he is spot-on is where he does "seriously grapple with policy and social science arguments." to question your libertarian proposals, which seem hopelessly naive in the light of what we know about human biology.
E.g.
"Pinker has simply oversampled WEIRDness. Liberalism “simply works” in Iceland. Anything would work in (21st-century) Iceland. Iceland is roughly as hard to govern as Burning Man. "
"Today, there is no better ongoing natural experiment in the combination of normal, non-WEIRD human populations with a classical liberal, British-derived system of government, than the beautiful “Rainbow Nation” of South Africa. Richard, I encourage you to read the memoir of liberal Afrikaner André de Ruyter, who for three years had the misfortune of being the CEO of Eskom, South Africa’s electricity company. You’ll see why the power is out 8 hours a day."
"By 2050, there will be 2 billion Africans. What percentage of these people would make the rational decision to exercise their human right to move to North America? 25% seems low. What does it actually cost to transport a human being across the Atlantic? What would be the container-ship fare for this new Middle Passage? Breathes there an African so broke that he can’t afford a couple hundred bucks to move to paradise?
Imagine the country you now live in. Add 500 million African immigrants, and you will see why South Africa in the 2020s looks like a piece of the future that fell into the present—your future, Richard, and mine. "
Nobody in the "all humans are interchangeable economic widgets" camp has made a serious effort to explain how open borders doesn't end with the South Africanization of the U.S. Heavily armed gated communities for the elites -- social dysfunction, poverty, corruption and crime for everyone else. But hey, at least no nasty labor unions or welfare state -- oh wait -- reads South African constitution -- never mind!
What clever laws or supreme court rulings would you propose prevent this outcome?
I doubt that Hanania actually proposes "open borders." [I'm not and don't care to be a Hanninanologist, so if he does, his bad.]
Returning to the real world, however I think the US could very productively recruit several million well educated, entrepreneurial people whose participation in the US economy and society that would improve the lives of most actual residents. What their options on Social Security and Medicaid might be I have no idea other than I doubt they'd be very different from most other people. Making us a somewhat richer per capita country might well lead to an expansion of the safety net.
It's an interesting piece since it's out of character for him -- lots of hand-wavy qualitative reasoning, dismissive of quantitative and biological arguments, cherry picking a few real-world examples and ignoring the far greater number that undermine his argument (like, above, SA). Contrary to an enormous body of evidence seems to believe that with a few clever tweaks of the legal system (to be proposed by him, natch) we can completely compensate for any negative externalities. As a policy wonk, every problem looks like a policy nail, sure, but this piece is ridiculously optimistic and reductive.
I don't want to make baseless accusations, but it really feels like his recent conversion to libertarian open borders orthodoxy may have been influenced by the preferences of his Silicon valley donors, who value cheap labor above all. He makes it clear that he also values cheap labor, as long as it's his labor that's not being cheapened, but recently he's completely thrown overboard all the non-economic critiques of loose immigration as well, and in a way that feels sloppy and forced.
It’s hard to take the CATO folks seriously when they say things like immigrants have lower crime rates than “natives”. But when you consider that native crime rates are heavily skewed upwards by non-whites, you recognize the sleight of hand. Unless we have a Singapore-style government, millions of Africans will harm the US. Yes, it will destroy social cohesion--but likely much more. Hanania complains about the tv watching MAGA crowd but he ain’t seen nothing yet. My friend lives in Brazil in a gated community with barbed wire. There have still been home invasions. Is that really better than “socialist” Sweden circa 90s? At least Sweden can reverse its worst economic policies (and has). How do you reverse demographic changes? Hanania will have to fight the socialism of the very people he wants to invite in.
Precisely. There are glaringly obvious contradictions here.
"Open borders!"
"But what about higher crime?"
"Oh, we'll just implement a harsh, intrusive police state and restrict civil liberties like they do in Ecuador. As a side benefit, it will destroy trust and social cohesion, undermining labor unions and the welfare state, thereby boosting GDP by a few percentage points!"
"What if I'm a WEIRD Anglo who has doesn't want to be monitored, surveilled and bullied by cops (AKA live in a liberal democracy), and have a high trust society where I can talk to my neighbors and leave my bike unlocked, and am willing to trade off some economic growth for that? I'd also like a social safety net to avoid seeing people starving in the streets."
A non-woke libertarian friend, well-versed in economics, once pointed out to me that a racially homogeneous homeland is a kind of consumer good, so when you actually count all externalities (as any good economist would), destroying this consumer good is a lowering of GDP in non-monetary terms.
Exactly. While any good economist would recognize this, too many Libertarians have a very simplistic understanding of the field and engage in GDP reductionism. Caplan and Hanson are both libertarians and good economists. I'm not really sure what Hanania is at this point.
Asian crime rates are overwhelmingly lower than White crime rates (*maybe* Cambodians come close), and the Hispanic vs non-Hispanic White gap, especially for violent crime, really isn't that massive when you consider 1) income differences and 2) gang culture made economically viable by narcotic arbitrage. California, Arizona, Texas, etc are full of middle-class/relatively affluent cities with both sizable Hispanic minorities and very low crime rates. El Paso's homicide rate is 33% lower than the national average. Further, the swarthier European immigrants of the previous century if anything were even more disproportionately homicidal than modern Hispanics, meaning within a few generations there's strong potential for improvement.
Willing to bet the people threatening your friend in Brazil are descendants of slavery and not immigrants btw.
Brian Kaplan is his mentor. Brian Kaplan is one of the most vocal proponent for the open borders. This man sees everything through GDP and excel sheets. The US is an office where you do and work.
I think his main point is that you want to be A Respected Public Intellectual instead of a philosopher/truth teller, which he considers a higher ideal. He is correct, you don't acknowledge this at all (no surprise) and this piece ends with you asking the readers to see you intellectualize publicly in Miami (where there is a lot of gay sex, probably no connection though.)
Hanania wants to have an impact on public policy. Yarvin wants to spend all his time playing useless purity politics against others on the right while his small army of dorky malcontents worships him.
We have modern day kings. Bashar Al-Asad, Muammar Qadhaffi, Kim Jong-Un, Vladimir Putin, increasingly Xi Jingping. They do terribly. Yarvin's appeal to Aristotle's monarchy is a fantasy. In the modern world any "monarchy" will end in oligarchy because the modern nation state is too big for one man. Back in the days of the Greeks a 10% income tax would have been seen as tryanny, now 33% in the US is considered low and our GDP is light years ahead of ancient Greece. Monarchy or CEO leadership of a country is a terrible idea.
Bashar Al-Asad would be doing fine if the US wasn't constantly trying to overthrow him, steal his oil, and arm terrorists against him. Qaddafi presided over the top country in Africa on the human development index before he was taken out. China has been a monarchy since Mao, and from his successor (Deng) to today China has had the greatest economic development in world history, and has outpaced other, more democratic, countries in the region. Putin's Russia is orders of magnitude more competent and successful than it's more liberal democratic predecessor in the 90's (which somehow also was worse than the USSR). The only one where you're right is North Korea, which is the worst country on the planet.
You have to compare like to like. You can't take Sweden, a country that has functioned well under multiple types of government and is fully developed, to a country that is further down the line.
Jiang and Hu were hardly monarchs. And the point that dictatorships often do stupid things is not lessened by the fact that a bunch of them did the same Very Stupid Thing- pissing off the worlds greatest superpower.
The idea that Syria was a paradise before the civil war is laughable, if you knew any Syrian people you'd know he was desperately unpopular and the ones who like him today do so only because they dislike the opposition more than him.
On the basis of readability, Richard Hanania is streets ahead of Yarvin. With Richard one thought naturally follows the last in a logical progression. With Yarvin there are all kinds of interruptions: admissions, denials, asides about the audience's possible reaction until I can no longer remember where any of this is going.
I also agree with Richard regarding his observation about the sweeping nature of many of Yarvin's claims. They are often so big I find it impossible to tell if they are right or wrong, partially right or partially wrong. Maybe he really is looking at the big picture but the details need filling in for us mere mortals.
My only criticism of Richard is that he speaks too fast for my 64-year-old brain. I feel he is talking to the kind of people who listen to podcasts at 1.5x the normal speed i.e. clever or young people.
Yarvin's entire shtick can be seen as the resolution to a simple dillemma that all of us ex-blue tribers face.
On the one hand the people in his class are regularly doing comicly villanous things, and on the other, they are still at heart, his people. And because they are his people, he cannot bear to imagine them suffering reprisals for what they've done, which is the likely outcome in any semi-democratic counter-revolution. What to do?
Well, what if you suddenly discovered that bad people aren't bad, they are just the product of impersonal forces set into motion back in the 1700s by the dastardly idea of Democracy? What we really need is a Absolute Monarchy!
Good point. His class loyalty impairs his analysis. He almost admits it. He wants an outcome where the "elves" who are his people, are not harmed, and the "hobbits" who "just want to grill" who are the proles he despises, end up somehow kept from seeking revenge, or even putting the elves out of work. His convolutions to reach this (to him) happy outcome are among the least believable parts of his usual spiel. He believes that only smart people, like himself, and the existing elite, the elves, can possibly run things. So they will just change allegiances, and keep their jobs, and the hobbits will be too stupid to notice, when the Monarch shows up. Seems unlikely. In reality, the overthrow of an oligarchic regime, even by entirely lawful means, will impose real costs on the people who managed and benefitted from that deposed, former regime. That would make Yarvin sad, apparently. Many of us proles out here? Will we cry if the elves are no longer running the machine? Not so much.
If you are writing in this comment section, there is a very high probability that you too are an "elf" and part of the group in danger of being put up against the wall by a true "hobbit" revolution. Being an "elf" vs a "hobbit", at least as I understand it, isn't mainly about how much money you currently have or whether you currently work for a living. Yarvin clearly considers himself an "elf" despite having little money compared to the truly rich, and I'm sure he considered himself one even before he became a computer programmer. The revolution does not just come for the rich, it comes also for the kulaks.
A look at your SubStack confirms my hunch. No "hobbit" would post extensively about history online.
Well, to Yarvin's credit, he (perhaps unlike Hanania) doesn't really despise the proles. And he's not entirely wrong about about the general uselessness of the proles, merely wrong in his belief that all the elves are currently blue tribe when many of them can be found making fortunes in flyover country, even as they remain excluded from cultural power.
I respectfully disagree. Yarvin been really does despise the proles or “hobbits” (myself included) and he really does believe that the people who are currently deemed to be well educated and sophisticated, including him, should run the world. I see no other way to read him. Hanania and Yarvin have that in common. They believe that a very large swathe of the country, oddly enough people who would generally be politically aligned with them, are trash. Both of them are valuable thinkers, and Hanania may actually have some positive political impact in the medium term. Nonetheless, if you are the kind of person they despise, you should always keep that in mind when you read them.
"oddly enough people who would generally be politically aligned with them"...
The alignment is only really temporary though, in the face of a superior enemy.
I for example, despise the woke because I despise the elevation of retards and primitive savages as if maximizing their number and status was the only goal of human life on this planet. Christian Republicans meanwhile, run ads on how 'Democrats are genociding black people with abortion, they are the real racists, MLK would be a Republican, isn't this random Down's syndrome person cute!' If they won, they would immediately try to ban all forms of eugenics and genetic engineering. In the midst of a fertility crisis they would ban paid surrogacy.
Yarvin would retort that the masses are incapable of organizing and overthrowing the oligarchy, and the best they can do is nominate a Ceasar to do that for them. You are right that he does see the current ruling class as his people, and that does affect his proposed solutions, as well as producing some blind spots. But I think he is correct that the idea that the federal government can be fixed in with Schoolhouse Rock solutions is a fantasy.
The correct response to Yarvin is "let's have lunch."
Of course, Yarvin can afford to be "controversial" because I suspect he has Eff You money.
BTW. Yarvin introduced me to Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt's notion that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy. Once you have read and understood that you can never go back to Kansas.
What do you say to Yarvin’s argument that race communism’s emergence from civil rights law is proof that legal/legislative victories in the system are pyrrhic?
Those are fair points but I would like to see you struggle a bit more with the criticism (though I'm no fan of Yarvin). The COVID lockdown and mandate regime was worldwide totalitarianism. I think it's tone deaf to write, "but look the conversatives did some things" into that headwind.
I don't think it's hyperbole for conservatives to fear that we are on the precipice of totalitarianism. I think Yarvin's relative success is a reflection of people not knowing where else to look.
NPI's were generally not well crafted as quasi-Pigou taxes on the externalities of virus transmission and they certainly did not spring form am attitude that gave much value to personal liberty. But "bring of totalitarianism?" Come on!
Canada had a mandatory 2 week quarantine for travelers where they were subject to random checks and surveillance. Many countries had strict rules on how far you could travel from your home, even if you stayed outside. People had their careers ruined for taking not taking a vaccine that wasn't even tested for transmission. Australia kidnapped people and sent them to camps.
"Non-essential" workers -- the majority of people -- by arbitrary decree and threat of violence, were imprisoned in their homes for many months or years, children's growth was heavily stunted, and rushed medical products were essentially forcefully injected all for a virus that mostly killed a small proportion of old and already sick people. If you do not see the totalitarian nature of what happened to us, nor the obvious potential of how these powers may be used in the future (as they were in China), then, in my opinion, that's some form of denial; charitably, naïveté.
I find it weird that Yarvin hasn’t re-evaluated his views given the total decline of Russia and China. Putin and Xi are arguably the closest things to monarchs we have today, and Russia and China are doing poorly precisely because they have dictators/monarchs. A liberal democratic Russia would never have engaged in a ridiculous, pyrrhic war in Ukraine if not for Putin’s megalomania. Similarly, China wouldn’t have needed to tank its economy and terrorize its own populace if Xi wasn’t so paranoid about losing control.
It’s not admirable to refuse to update your views in light of new evidence.
From many Russian accounts, despite his projections of authority Putin seems closer to a medieval monarch than a pre-modern Luis XIV type, barely holding together various oligarchical power structures in a pseudo-feudal arrangement. If Prighozin had launched his rebellion against a real absolutist, say, Stalin, would he still be a free man?
Definitely agree. Naive monarchists seem to forget that absolute monarchy is a somewhat new form of monarchy, and that for long periods a king was more of a “first among equals” situation.
The Prighozin fiasco definitely frames Putin as the latter kind of monarch
"Naive monarchists" is an interesting phrase; is there any other kind?
I don’t think there are many monarchists over the age of 20. I can think of stronger arguments for monarchy than many present, but it’s telling that non-monarchists can frequently argue the case better than monarchists
Yarvin is a self-described monarchist, and I think he's over 20 ...
"Naive monarchists seem to forget that absolute monarchy is a somewhat new form of monarchy, and that for long periods a king was more of a “first among equals” situation."
Not really. Augustus, and most of the emperors who were considered among the greatest, were effectively absolute monarchs. They made pretensions to respecting the Senate, but that was solely for appearances. There are many examples of absolute monarchies throughout history.
Yarvin’s view is that the Ukraine war wouldn’t have happened if the US and liberal Western NGOs hadn’t spent billions to turn Ukraine into a shambolic, corrupt Bizarro-Russia directly on Russia’s borders rather than respect its historical sphere of influence.
Akin to China funding some Canadian Communist Party and putting a pro-China figurehead in Trudeau’s place after a “people’s revolution,” then expecting America not to consider them a threat.
I do think the American foreign policy establishment made some big mistakes. The fault lies primarily with Putin, but I think the neocon “we will forcibly make you a liberal democracy” policies have been disastrous.
I don’t think engaging with a nation that wants to engage with the west is bad, however. The bigger mistakes IMO were Iraq and Libya. This showed that the west would use force to destroy regimes it didn’t like, making the threat of a puppet state more severe. If the US hadn’t done so many stupid invasions, Ukraine engaging more with the west doesn’t look so sinister.
Total decline of Russia and China? In what way? Russia has improved in almost every way since Putin took over, and China has had the greatest economic miracle in world history since the 1970's. Time will tell whether the war in Ukraine or China's Covid response will have long term negative effects on either country, but in both cases the US and Western "liberal democracies" have made very similar decisions as those.
I agree regarding China but while Russia has seen a relatively similar GDP/capita improvement since Putin's ascension, it's more a matter of correlation than causation. Just take a quick gander:
https://oec.world/en/profile/country/rus
"Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country" is just about the only time John McCain was ever right about anything. Their growth has been overwhelmingly from oil sales, obviously buttressed by high global consumption and lower production in the West, and moreover, they sell the oil primarily to China, a country that actually uses it to make real improvements to their nation (and other nations around the world). Russia's land and natural resources are among the best in the world; the fact that they fall behind on so many metrics is proof of Putin's failures, and the worse failures of his predecessors aren't a justification either.
You always have to compare it to what's realistic. You can't expect Putin, who followed 70 years of communism and another decade of failed de-communization, to have Russia performing at the same level as western Europe. There are limitations as to what a country can do. Putin inherited a bunch of gangster oligarchs, a sclerotic military industrial complex that still held power, as well as an economy that still had a bunch of defaults of the previous misrule. I'm not arguing that Putin is Augustus or even Catherine the Great, but he has dramatically outperformed the 90's that was considered to be "democratic."
Soviet Russia was terrible by Western standards, but the legacies of Khrushchev and Brezhnev were obviously nowhere near Stalin or Mao. Post-Stalin USSR saw modest improvements in their economy and standard of living, enjoying a handful of technological achievements and relative stability. To the extent that Russia needed a strongman to tame the chaos of the liberalization process and centralize power, sure, Putin was more capable than Yeltsin and arguably a necessity, but he embraced oligarchs all the same and it's hard to see how Russia isn't a fundamentally corrupt nation. I'm not defending democracy, and it's fair to note that Russia's relatively flatten economy from 2008 on tracks with most of the non-American West. I'm defending the Chinese system which overcame far greater tragedies with weaker geopolitical strength, yet managed to produce many consecutive successes in leadership who oversaw the most miraculous rise to world power since America (or maybe briefly Argentina) in the late 1800s.
It’s only weird if you think Yarvin has truth-seeking as a primary goal.
Putin could have left Ukraine as a Western-run Russia parody. The evidence prior to 2021 suggests this would have looked more and more favourable to Russia as time went on. However, the fact is that the United States wanted this war so it could end Europe's reliance on Russian energy. If Putin hadn't taken the bait, the U.S. would have just upped the ante further. In any case, by far the biggest losers from this war are Ukraine and western Europe, so it hardly looks like a slam-dunk against monarchy being the superior system.
"Putin could have left Ukraine as a Western-run Russia parody." The problem from Russia's perspective is that NATO has proven to be a maximalist alliance, and we know their end goal was to deploy advanced missile systems in Eastern Ukraine just like they have in Poland.
It’s insightful how you state that Russia wouldn’t be able to defend its core strategic interests or sovereignty if it was a democracy, very telling.
Yarvin has addressed this argument in interviews, but not in his blog. The gist of it is that USA is a global hegemon that wields soft power and is effectively in a state of cold war with any non-democratic power. Due to the massive imbalance of resources, this conflict tends to hit the non-democratic powers hard. This is also why Yarvin wants USA specifically to become a monarchy, rather than some random nation he could move to.
He also makes the argument that both Russia and China pretend to be democracies in some sense and build their whole political formulas on this pretence, which means they must curate public opinion just like USA does.
A dictatorship is not the same as a monarchy (dictatorships are far more paranoid and unstable) and Putin/Xi has nowhere near as much power as Stalin/Mao did. If Putin or Xi did anything too far outside of the consensus of their respective oligarchies, they'd simply be retired. Russia's failwar is not the result of one man but had broad approval among its elite, same with China's "zero covid" idiocy (China can at least afford such mistakes, Russia not so much).
How do you grok your endorsement of liberalism’s “policy” and “social science” with Yarvin’s point that the only way Bukele was able to put a dent in his country’s state of anarchy was by sidestepping the rules-based order? Ordering mass arrests, sidestepping courts, kicking out NGOs, and silencing journalists aren’t generally things neoliberal wonks consider part of the playbook, yet it was the only solution that could have worked.
There’s a discussion to be had about how some third world countries can’t expect to have first world standards of criminal law. If Bukele declares himself dictator for life though that would be bad for the country in the long run. Ideally you would use his accomplishments to solidify popular support for tough on crime policies. The US in the 1950s didn’t have contemporary ideas of criminal rights while still being a liberal democracy. You don’t have to accept liberal framing that that’s contrary to liberalism.
There’s a discussion to be had about how the only difference between third and first world countries is the presence of third or first world people.
It seems that if you were serious about having that discussion, you would be serious about this question…
You have repeatedly cited Bukele as an example of why Hispanic immigration will not necessarily have a negative political impact on the U.S., therefore it is obviously a flaw in your position if you categorically denounce reject implementing the policies that Bukele actually implemented. In general, all of the countries you cite as example of successful multi-ethnic politics with large low IQ populations have policies you not only do not support, but unreservedly condemn the holders of. To take your latest example, 1950s America had extensive segregation by race enforced by both public and private force, but you don't endorse that, so what do you actually endorse?
Moving out to the larger issue. Many of your most important essays essentially reproduce ideas from Unqualified Reservations, but in certain respects improve on them by adding detail and sticking to the point. 'Why is Everything Liberal' is probably the best stat-based introduction to the concept of the Cathedral. 'Woke Institutions is just Civil Rights Law' is a great introduction to the concept that culture is downstream of power. 'Interracial Crime and Perspective' illustrates the point that media manipulates not by fabricating but determining what is part of a narrative, and what is just random stuff that happens. 'Liberals Read Conservatives Watch TV' is a good intro to the caste system of America.
The problem is that if you take these ideas seriously and pursue them, you conclude that meaningful reform in America is simply not possible. Everyone has noticed that you took a hard turn towards pro-establishment liberalism in the last year and half. Your stated reasons for this (e.g. Putin screwed up after 20 years of pretty smart statesmanship on a weak hand; Chinese are germophobes) do not seem convincing. In some cases, such as your advocacy of low IQ immigration, your arguments are palpably weak, in a way that is very obvious to everyone. The simplest explanation is that you realised that honesty meant giving up on your dreams of impact. This is Yarvin's point, and it appears to be correct, despite everything that is obviously wrong with his current output (Yo, Yarvin since I can't comment on your Substack, when am I getting my copy of Gray Mirror?).
"The US in the 1950s didn’t have contemporary ideas of criminal rights while still being a liberal democracy."
Yes, but then it did institute those rights, at that precise moment. The spirit of liberalism is always looking for new universalist frontiers and rights, and something like criminal rights (which are, after all, entirely justifiable up to a point) were inevitable.
That maybe good or bad, but it is very difficult to freeze liberal democracy at an optimal point in time. This is what scares people about the current times as well - not that they are bad, bud that they will lead to something much worse.
More like the spirit of Leftism. If other people are harmed by criminal “rights”, including those blessed “marginalized” so many lachrymose “liberals” weep over, it makes a sham of actual rights/liberty/welfare.
"The US in the 1950s didn’t have contemporary ideas of criminal rights while still being a liberal democracy. You don’t have to accept liberal framing that that’s contrary to liberalism."
But the modern understanding of criminal rights is completely within the bounds of liberalism. And it's not a coincidence that crime spiked as soon as the US adopted that liberal understanding of criminal rights.
Why do you think it was "necessary" to kick out NGO, silence journalists? I think you need to distinguish actions that violate laws governing criminal prosecution and those that seek to consolidate power. I fear that Bukele will give crime control a bad name.
"I see Yarvin thought as presenting “Revolution!” and “Monarchy!” as his trump cards to deal with every issue from affirmative action to entitlement spending to urban crime, which is fun, while I do boring stuff like think about rational policy responses that I think can work."
You mean like importing a billion people who will then vote to dismantle the welfare state? Liberalization of euthanasia to the point where everyone gets a pill?
You are now a libertarian, as you like to point out. Okay. You are then certainly aware that, apart from a handful of important people in SV, nobody is for that. Nobody likes that package and certainly not immigrants (and I am one myself) that you want more of.
From what I can tell, your affirmative action crusade seems more realistic, in line with Rufo etc. But a lot of your ideas are as realistic as Yarvin's idea of monarchy (which, if you read the article, is about monarchy in practice - he uses FDR as an example - not in name).
I don't normally read Yarvin (you are a better writer for sure), but was intrigued by his article. People in Serbia currently have something like what he recommends - a democratically elected president who meddles in literally everything and who is also very smart and capable. A lot of problems with this approach, yet it certainly does work in cutting down the most egregious nonsense.
"Liberalization of euthanasia to the point where everyone gets a pill?"
How would that be different from everyone being able to own a gun?
Social sanction is a big game changer
For suicide? Netherlands was the first country to legalize euthanasia in the early 2000s, and they saw suicides fall until 2007; then the global recession hits and suicides trend up for a bit (not uncommon for the West), then stay flat at new highs. Belgium legalized euthanasia around the same time and saw a similar trend, except their suicide rate actually fell back to early 2000s lows. In America, the rate has been trending forever upwards ever since 2000. For the UK, trending forever downwards.
If there's an analysis out there which finds a significant correlation between national suicide rates with euthanasia after cleaning out some variables, post it. I seriously doubt it exists though, especially for reasons of social sanction. Social sanction works when there is something fundamentally pleasurable; endorse anal sex as not a perversion but instead just something adults do privately, and a lot more of it will happen (to the detriment of national health). Aside from attention-seeking teens and cult members, virtually no one commits suicide for fun/status, they commit suicide to end suffering.
Good response to Yarvin. I enjoy him and find his historical excursions interesting, without seeing him as much of a guide to what should or could actually be done in the real, existing world. Despite the misleading term "monarchy" he often makes the much more viable case that we have on three occasions had a very strong executive in the USA who functioned within the broadly defined scope of Constitutional executive power -- Washington/Hamilton, Lincoln, FDR. That is historically accurate, as I read it. We are overdue for a house-cleaning at that level. A future reform of the USA along the lines that Hanania-Rufo and others of similar views hope for may ultimately require another very strong exercise of central power, for which we have these illuminating precedents. But the political momentum has to built up first. It does not drop out of the sky, as Yarvin would likely admit. Hopefully this hypothetical future reforming administration would respect (verbally anyway) the formal limits of the Constitution, because it is a good Constitution, and we should try to keep it, and when things settle down, it generally works well in ordinary times. In the meantime, incremental and actionable steps are good, and not to be despised because they are not total solutions at a single blow. Bring on the increments! Any movement in the opposite direction of the Revolution is a big win, because it takes away the veneer of inevitability.
You left out Wilson. Not much good beyond the income tax, but certainly an example of the exercise of power.
Not on the same scale. Much of what he did was rolled back. He was a proto-FDR who struck too early. The Big Three changed the country permanently.
Yarvin's monarchist cosplaying is (as usual) the weakest part of his essay. But where he is spot-on is where he does "seriously grapple with policy and social science arguments." to question your libertarian proposals, which seem hopelessly naive in the light of what we know about human biology.
E.g.
"Pinker has simply oversampled WEIRDness. Liberalism “simply works” in Iceland. Anything would work in (21st-century) Iceland. Iceland is roughly as hard to govern as Burning Man. "
"Today, there is no better ongoing natural experiment in the combination of normal, non-WEIRD human populations with a classical liberal, British-derived system of government, than the beautiful “Rainbow Nation” of South Africa. Richard, I encourage you to read the memoir of liberal Afrikaner André de Ruyter, who for three years had the misfortune of being the CEO of Eskom, South Africa’s electricity company. You’ll see why the power is out 8 hours a day."
"By 2050, there will be 2 billion Africans. What percentage of these people would make the rational decision to exercise their human right to move to North America? 25% seems low. What does it actually cost to transport a human being across the Atlantic? What would be the container-ship fare for this new Middle Passage? Breathes there an African so broke that he can’t afford a couple hundred bucks to move to paradise?
Imagine the country you now live in. Add 500 million African immigrants, and you will see why South Africa in the 2020s looks like a piece of the future that fell into the present—your future, Richard, and mine. "
Nobody in the "all humans are interchangeable economic widgets" camp has made a serious effort to explain how open borders doesn't end with the South Africanization of the U.S. Heavily armed gated communities for the elites -- social dysfunction, poverty, corruption and crime for everyone else. But hey, at least no nasty labor unions or welfare state -- oh wait -- reads South African constitution -- never mind!
What clever laws or supreme court rulings would you propose prevent this outcome?
I doubt that Hanania actually proposes "open borders." [I'm not and don't care to be a Hanninanologist, so if he does, his bad.]
Returning to the real world, however I think the US could very productively recruit several million well educated, entrepreneurial people whose participation in the US economy and society that would improve the lives of most actual residents. What their options on Social Security and Medicaid might be I have no idea other than I doubt they'd be very different from most other people. Making us a somewhat richer per capita country might well lead to an expansion of the safety net.
This was his big coming out party: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/diversity-really-is-our-strength?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fimmigration&utm_medium=reader2
It's an interesting piece since it's out of character for him -- lots of hand-wavy qualitative reasoning, dismissive of quantitative and biological arguments, cherry picking a few real-world examples and ignoring the far greater number that undermine his argument (like, above, SA). Contrary to an enormous body of evidence seems to believe that with a few clever tweaks of the legal system (to be proposed by him, natch) we can completely compensate for any negative externalities. As a policy wonk, every problem looks like a policy nail, sure, but this piece is ridiculously optimistic and reductive.
I don't want to make baseless accusations, but it really feels like his recent conversion to libertarian open borders orthodoxy may have been influenced by the preferences of his Silicon valley donors, who value cheap labor above all. He makes it clear that he also values cheap labor, as long as it's his labor that's not being cheapened, but recently he's completely thrown overboard all the non-economic critiques of loose immigration as well, and in a way that feels sloppy and forced.
It’s hard to take the CATO folks seriously when they say things like immigrants have lower crime rates than “natives”. But when you consider that native crime rates are heavily skewed upwards by non-whites, you recognize the sleight of hand. Unless we have a Singapore-style government, millions of Africans will harm the US. Yes, it will destroy social cohesion--but likely much more. Hanania complains about the tv watching MAGA crowd but he ain’t seen nothing yet. My friend lives in Brazil in a gated community with barbed wire. There have still been home invasions. Is that really better than “socialist” Sweden circa 90s? At least Sweden can reverse its worst economic policies (and has). How do you reverse demographic changes? Hanania will have to fight the socialism of the very people he wants to invite in.
Precisely. There are glaringly obvious contradictions here.
"Open borders!"
"But what about higher crime?"
"Oh, we'll just implement a harsh, intrusive police state and restrict civil liberties like they do in Ecuador. As a side benefit, it will destroy trust and social cohesion, undermining labor unions and the welfare state, thereby boosting GDP by a few percentage points!"
"What if I'm a WEIRD Anglo who has doesn't want to be monitored, surveilled and bullied by cops (AKA live in a liberal democracy), and have a high trust society where I can talk to my neighbors and leave my bike unlocked, and am willing to trade off some economic growth for that? I'd also like a social safety net to avoid seeing people starving in the streets."
"Racist bigot!"
A non-woke libertarian friend, well-versed in economics, once pointed out to me that a racially homogeneous homeland is a kind of consumer good, so when you actually count all externalities (as any good economist would), destroying this consumer good is a lowering of GDP in non-monetary terms.
Exactly. While any good economist would recognize this, too many Libertarians have a very simplistic understanding of the field and engage in GDP reductionism. Caplan and Hanson are both libertarians and good economists. I'm not really sure what Hanania is at this point.
BTW Ed West has a great substack post using the Glastonbury music festival as an example of high-trust-society-as-luxury-good: https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/what-if-britain-was-run-like-glastonbury
Asian crime rates are overwhelmingly lower than White crime rates (*maybe* Cambodians come close), and the Hispanic vs non-Hispanic White gap, especially for violent crime, really isn't that massive when you consider 1) income differences and 2) gang culture made economically viable by narcotic arbitrage. California, Arizona, Texas, etc are full of middle-class/relatively affluent cities with both sizable Hispanic minorities and very low crime rates. El Paso's homicide rate is 33% lower than the national average. Further, the swarthier European immigrants of the previous century if anything were even more disproportionately homicidal than modern Hispanics, meaning within a few generations there's strong potential for improvement.
Willing to bet the people threatening your friend in Brazil are descendants of slavery and not immigrants btw.
Brian Kaplan is his mentor. Brian Kaplan is one of the most vocal proponent for the open borders. This man sees everything through GDP and excel sheets. The US is an office where you do and work.
And when those "several million" want to bring in millions more of their countrymen?
I think his main point is that you want to be A Respected Public Intellectual instead of a philosopher/truth teller, which he considers a higher ideal. He is correct, you don't acknowledge this at all (no surprise) and this piece ends with you asking the readers to see you intellectualize publicly in Miami (where there is a lot of gay sex, probably no connection though.)
Hanania wants to have an impact on public policy. Yarvin wants to spend all his time playing useless purity politics against others on the right while his small army of dorky malcontents worships him.
We have modern day kings. Bashar Al-Asad, Muammar Qadhaffi, Kim Jong-Un, Vladimir Putin, increasingly Xi Jingping. They do terribly. Yarvin's appeal to Aristotle's monarchy is a fantasy. In the modern world any "monarchy" will end in oligarchy because the modern nation state is too big for one man. Back in the days of the Greeks a 10% income tax would have been seen as tryanny, now 33% in the US is considered low and our GDP is light years ahead of ancient Greece. Monarchy or CEO leadership of a country is a terrible idea.
Bashar Al-Asad would be doing fine if the US wasn't constantly trying to overthrow him, steal his oil, and arm terrorists against him. Qaddafi presided over the top country in Africa on the human development index before he was taken out. China has been a monarchy since Mao, and from his successor (Deng) to today China has had the greatest economic development in world history, and has outpaced other, more democratic, countries in the region. Putin's Russia is orders of magnitude more competent and successful than it's more liberal democratic predecessor in the 90's (which somehow also was worse than the USSR). The only one where you're right is North Korea, which is the worst country on the planet.
You have to compare like to like. You can't take Sweden, a country that has functioned well under multiple types of government and is fully developed, to a country that is further down the line.
Jiang and Hu were hardly monarchs. And the point that dictatorships often do stupid things is not lessened by the fact that a bunch of them did the same Very Stupid Thing- pissing off the worlds greatest superpower.
The idea that Syria was a paradise before the civil war is laughable, if you knew any Syrian people you'd know he was desperately unpopular and the ones who like him today do so only because they dislike the opposition more than him.
Lee Quan Yu
The exception that proves the rule.
I like Yarvin's stuff but I don't get where he gets off accusing someone else of being disingenuous with how much he likes to play Straussian.
What is needed is an old school Buckley // Vidal style series of podcasts hosted by Brian Chau with you and Yarvin.
On the basis of readability, Richard Hanania is streets ahead of Yarvin. With Richard one thought naturally follows the last in a logical progression. With Yarvin there are all kinds of interruptions: admissions, denials, asides about the audience's possible reaction until I can no longer remember where any of this is going.
I also agree with Richard regarding his observation about the sweeping nature of many of Yarvin's claims. They are often so big I find it impossible to tell if they are right or wrong, partially right or partially wrong. Maybe he really is looking at the big picture but the details need filling in for us mere mortals.
My only criticism of Richard is that he speaks too fast for my 64-year-old brain. I feel he is talking to the kind of people who listen to podcasts at 1.5x the normal speed i.e. clever or young people.
Yarvin's entire shtick can be seen as the resolution to a simple dillemma that all of us ex-blue tribers face.
On the one hand the people in his class are regularly doing comicly villanous things, and on the other, they are still at heart, his people. And because they are his people, he cannot bear to imagine them suffering reprisals for what they've done, which is the likely outcome in any semi-democratic counter-revolution. What to do?
Well, what if you suddenly discovered that bad people aren't bad, they are just the product of impersonal forces set into motion back in the 1700s by the dastardly idea of Democracy? What we really need is a Absolute Monarchy!
Good point. His class loyalty impairs his analysis. He almost admits it. He wants an outcome where the "elves" who are his people, are not harmed, and the "hobbits" who "just want to grill" who are the proles he despises, end up somehow kept from seeking revenge, or even putting the elves out of work. His convolutions to reach this (to him) happy outcome are among the least believable parts of his usual spiel. He believes that only smart people, like himself, and the existing elite, the elves, can possibly run things. So they will just change allegiances, and keep their jobs, and the hobbits will be too stupid to notice, when the Monarch shows up. Seems unlikely. In reality, the overthrow of an oligarchic regime, even by entirely lawful means, will impose real costs on the people who managed and benefitted from that deposed, former regime. That would make Yarvin sad, apparently. Many of us proles out here? Will we cry if the elves are no longer running the machine? Not so much.
If you are writing in this comment section, there is a very high probability that you too are an "elf" and part of the group in danger of being put up against the wall by a true "hobbit" revolution. Being an "elf" vs a "hobbit", at least as I understand it, isn't mainly about how much money you currently have or whether you currently work for a living. Yarvin clearly considers himself an "elf" despite having little money compared to the truly rich, and I'm sure he considered himself one even before he became a computer programmer. The revolution does not just come for the rich, it comes also for the kulaks.
A look at your SubStack confirms my hunch. No "hobbit" would post extensively about history online.
Well, to Yarvin's credit, he (perhaps unlike Hanania) doesn't really despise the proles. And he's not entirely wrong about about the general uselessness of the proles, merely wrong in his belief that all the elves are currently blue tribe when many of them can be found making fortunes in flyover country, even as they remain excluded from cultural power.
I respectfully disagree. Yarvin been really does despise the proles or “hobbits” (myself included) and he really does believe that the people who are currently deemed to be well educated and sophisticated, including him, should run the world. I see no other way to read him. Hanania and Yarvin have that in common. They believe that a very large swathe of the country, oddly enough people who would generally be politically aligned with them, are trash. Both of them are valuable thinkers, and Hanania may actually have some positive political impact in the medium term. Nonetheless, if you are the kind of person they despise, you should always keep that in mind when you read them.
"oddly enough people who would generally be politically aligned with them"...
The alignment is only really temporary though, in the face of a superior enemy.
I for example, despise the woke because I despise the elevation of retards and primitive savages as if maximizing their number and status was the only goal of human life on this planet. Christian Republicans meanwhile, run ads on how 'Democrats are genociding black people with abortion, they are the real racists, MLK would be a Republican, isn't this random Down's syndrome person cute!' If they won, they would immediately try to ban all forms of eugenics and genetic engineering. In the midst of a fertility crisis they would ban paid surrogacy.
What unites us exactly?
Yarvin would retort that the masses are incapable of organizing and overthrowing the oligarchy, and the best they can do is nominate a Ceasar to do that for them. You are right that he does see the current ruling class as his people, and that does affect his proposed solutions, as well as producing some blind spots. But I think he is correct that the idea that the federal government can be fixed in with Schoolhouse Rock solutions is a fantasy.
The correct response to Yarvin is "let's have lunch."
Of course, Yarvin can afford to be "controversial" because I suspect he has Eff You money.
BTW. Yarvin introduced me to Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt's notion that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy. Once you have read and understood that you can never go back to Kansas.
Yarvin's arrogance is insufferable. You owe him no explanation.
What do you say to Yarvin’s argument that race communism’s emergence from civil rights law is proof that legal/legislative victories in the system are pyrrhic?
You’re both grifters, and I love you both. Keep doing doing what you do!
Those are fair points but I would like to see you struggle a bit more with the criticism (though I'm no fan of Yarvin). The COVID lockdown and mandate regime was worldwide totalitarianism. I think it's tone deaf to write, "but look the conversatives did some things" into that headwind.
I don't think it's hyperbole for conservatives to fear that we are on the precipice of totalitarianism. I think Yarvin's relative success is a reflection of people not knowing where else to look.
NPI's were generally not well crafted as quasi-Pigou taxes on the externalities of virus transmission and they certainly did not spring form am attitude that gave much value to personal liberty. But "bring of totalitarianism?" Come on!
Canada had a mandatory 2 week quarantine for travelers where they were subject to random checks and surveillance. Many countries had strict rules on how far you could travel from your home, even if you stayed outside. People had their careers ruined for taking not taking a vaccine that wasn't even tested for transmission. Australia kidnapped people and sent them to camps.
"Non-essential" workers -- the majority of people -- by arbitrary decree and threat of violence, were imprisoned in their homes for many months or years, children's growth was heavily stunted, and rushed medical products were essentially forcefully injected all for a virus that mostly killed a small proportion of old and already sick people. If you do not see the totalitarian nature of what happened to us, nor the obvious potential of how these powers may be used in the future (as they were in China), then, in my opinion, that's some form of denial; charitably, naïveté.
The attempt at totalitarianism failed though. It was definitely scary while it was going on, but most of that garbage has gone away now.
What seems more likely now is a slide into third world dysfunction as institutions and social fabric continue to disintegrate.