Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew.
Why did Donald Trump place these tech CEOs--some of the richest human beings in the world--in the front row immediately behind him at his inauguration, while the most prominent elected Republican leaders were forced to sit in the back row, hidden from view?
One possible answer is that this shows the influence of the MAGA intellectual Curtis Yarvin, who argues that the only escape from the obvious failures of liberal democracy is to establish an American feudal autocracy ruled by tech CEOs. A few days ago, the New York Times published an interview of Yarvin where he briefly stated some of his ideas. What he says here is vague and incoherent, but he is clear about his hope that tech CEOs will take over monarchic control of America under Trump's Caesaristic leadership.
A better exposition of Yarvin's thinking comes in his extensive internet writing over the past twenty years, which I have analyzed in a series of posts a few years ago. Here I will briefly summarize some of my main points.
I had never heard of Curtis Yarvin until I saw that the Claremont Institute was publishing some of his writing. Once I began looking at his work, I knew that something strange was happening at the Claremont Institute.
Yarvin ridicules the Declaration of Independence, scorns the American Revolution as "thuggery, treason, and hypocrisy," and takes the side of the Loyalists in their defense of King George III's monarchic rule over America. He also praises the Confederacy for fighting a war of secession to defend slavery, which he regards as "a natural human relationship." The only mistake the Confederates made, Yarvin believes, is that they did not see themselves as reactionary Cavaliers trying to restore the Stuart monarchy. Yarvin says that he likes to "flirt" with "Confederate racist fascism."
I think I know what Harry Jaffa would have said about this. Is this what the Claremont Institute now stands for?
I have said that Yarvin is intellectually stimulating because he is one of the few--maybe the only one--of the Anglo-American Far Right thinkers today willing to be truly reactionary by rooting far-right thinking in the Tory ideology of divine-right monarchy and Robert Filmer's Patriarcha in opposition to the Whig Lockean ideology of natural rights to equal liberty and government by the consent of the governed.
But still there are two big problems in his remarkably weak arguments. First, his favorite form of argumentation is begging the question: he finds a writer who agrees with him, he paraphrases or quotes from that writer, and he then he concludes: ah, you see, I must be right because this writer agrees with me! I have seen the same kind of sophistical rhetoric in the work of other critics of liberalism, such as Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher.
The second problem with Yarvin's rhetorical style of arguing is that he does not survey the relevant empirical evidence for deciding the historical disputes that he enters. So if he wants to prove that modern liberal democracy inevitably leads to disorder, while archaic autocratic authoritarianism leads to order, he needs to present the empirical evidence for that, which he rarely does.
An example of the first problem is Yarvin's attack on the Declaration of Independence. He calls as his "first witness"--Thomas Hutchinson, a leading Loyalist. He allows Hutchinson to speak through his 1776 pamphlet Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia--a Loyalist attack on the Declaration of Independence. He calls other witnesses, but they are all Loyalists. He does this even though he says that "there is no such thing as a neutral primary source," which leads us to expect that he will introduce primary sources on both sides of the debate, but he never does.
Even in his exposition of Hutchinson's Strictures, Yarvin does not tell his readers that a dozen or more scholars studying the Declaration of Independence have critically responded to Hutchinson's pamphlet. For example, Hans Eicholz has done this in his book Harmonizing Sentiments: The Declaration of Independence and the Jeffersonian Idea of Self-Government (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), which includes a reprint of Hutchinson's whole pamphlet.
An example of the second problem with Yarvin's rhetoric--failing to survey the relevant empirical evidence--is his prediction that feudal illiberal societies will have low rates of violent crime, while modern liberal societies will have high rates. In making this argument, he is silent about the quantitative historical evidence that from high rates of violence and homicide in the Middle Ages, there has been a long decline in modern liberal societies, which shows that liberalism promotes moral self-command, and that peop0le in pre-modern illiberal societies suffered from a lack of self-control.
Another example is his claim that "slavery is a natural human relationship." He says that most slave masters have been benevolent in their treatment of their slaves. He dismisses the depiction of the brutality of slavery in Harriot Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as "propaganda." But he is silent about the factual evidence for the brutality of slavery that Stowe presented to show that her novel was not just "propaganda." She published a book--A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin: Original Facts and Documents--in which she provided extensive documentation to confirm her claim that the fictional story of her novel was an accurate depiction of what American slavery was like. Now, maybe Yarvin would want to say that her evidence is not persuasive, but he would have to argue for that, which he has not done, because he never wants the burden of responding to possible criticisms of what he says.
I draw two conclusions from all of this. Yarvin is not a serious thinker. And if Trump and his people decide to embrace his "Confederate racist fascism" ruled by tech CEO billionaires, they will destroy the liberal pluralist coalition that voted for Trump in November.
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