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Odds are, you heard it from me first. Some people here called me crazy. Now others are catching on...
From tech crunch:
And picked up by the American Conservative:
More on the topic at The Week:
It looks like only techies and conservatives have really picked it up in the media so far. But there's something bubbling up. I've been pointing to it here and decrying it as anti-democratic. Now it has a name. Neo-reactionary.
From tech crunch:
Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries
Posted Nov 22, 2013 by Klint Finley(@klintron)
Many of us yearn for a return to one golden age or another. But there’s a community of bloggers taking the idea to an extreme: they want to turn the dial way back to the days before the French Revolution.
Neoreactionaries believe that while technology and capitalism have advanced humanity over the past couple centuries, democracy has actually done more harm than good. They propose a return to old-fashioned gender roles, social order and monarchy.
You may have seen them crop-up on tech hangouts like Hacker News and Less Wrong, having cryptic conversations about “Moldbug” and “the Cathedral.” And though neoreactionaries aren’t exactly rampant in the tech industry, PayPal founder Peter Thiel has voiced similar ideas, and Pax Dickinson, the former CTO of Business Insider, says he’s been influenced by neoreactionary thought. It may be a small, minority world view, but it’s one that I think shines some light on the psyche of contemporary tech culture.
Enough has been written on neoreaction already to fill at least a couple of books, so if you prefer to go straight to the source, just pop a Modafinil and skip to the “Neoreaction Reading List” at the end of this post. For everyone else, I’ll do my best to summarize neoreactionary thought and why it might matter.
Who Are the Neoreactionaries?
“Reactionary” originally meant someone who opposed the French Revolution, and today the term generally refers to those who would like to return to some pre-existing state of affairs. Neoreaction — aka “dark enlightenment — begins with computer scientist and entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin, who blogs under the name Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin — the self-described Sith Lord of the movement — got his start as a commenter on sites like 2blowhards before starting his own blog Unqualified Reservations in 2007. Yarvin originally called his ideology “formalism,” but in 2010 libertarian blogger Arnold Kling referred to him as a “neo-reactionary.” The name stuck as more bloggers — such as Anomaly UK (who helped popularize the term), Nick Land (who coined “dark enlightenment”) and Michael Anissimov — started to self-identify as neoreactionary.
The movement has a few contemporary forerunners, such as Herman Hoppe and Steven Sailer, and of course, neoreaction is heavily influenced by older political thought — Thomas Carlyle and Julius Evola are particularly popular.
Anti-Democracy
Perhaps the one thing uniting all neoreactionaries is a critique of modernity that centers on opposition to democracy in all its forms. Many are former libertarians who decided that freedom and democracy were incompatible.
“Demotist systems, that is, systems ruled by the ‘People,’ such as Democracy and Communism, are predictably less financially stable than aristocratic systems,” Anissimov writes. “On average, they undergo more recessions and hold more debt. They are more susceptible to market crashes. They waste more resources. Each dollar goes further towards improving standard of living for the average person in an aristocratic system than in a Democratic one.”
Exactly what sort of monarchy they’d prefer varies. Some want something closer to theocracy, while Yarvin proposes turning nation states into corporations with the king as chief executive officer and the aristocracy as shareholders.
For Yarvin, stability and order trump all. But critics like Scott Alexander think neoreactionaries overestimate the stability of monarchies — to put it mildly. Alexander recently published an anti-reactionary FAQ, a massive document examining and refuting the claims of neoreactionaries.
“To an observer from the medieval or Renaissance world of monarchies and empires, the stability of democracies would seem utterly supernatural,” he wrote. “Imagine telling Queen Elizabeth I – whom as we saw above suffered six rebellions just in her family’s two generations of rule up to that point – that Britain has been three hundred years without a non-colonial-related civil war. She would think either that you were putting her on, or that God Himself had sent a host of angels to personally maintain order.”
Yarvin proposes that countries should be small — city states, really — and that all they should compete for citizens. “If residents don’t like their government, they can and should move,” he writes. “The design is all ‘exit,’ no ‘voice.’"
That will probably sound familiar if you heard Balaji Srinivasan’s Y Combinator speech. Although several news stories described the talk as a call for Silicon Valley to secede from the union, Srinivasan told Tim Carmody that his speech has been misinterpreted. “I’m not a libertarian, don’t believe in secession, am a registered Democrat, etcetera etcetera,” he wrote. “This is really a talk that is more about emigration and exit.”
I don’t know Srinivasan, but it sounds like he’d find neoreactionary views repulsive. And exit is a concept that appeals to both the right and left. But there are others in the Valley pushing ideas much closer to the neoreaction. Patri Friedman, who co-founded the Seasteading Institute with Peter Thiel, specifically mentioned Yarvin’s blog in a reading list at the end of an essay for Cato Unbound, and Yarvin was scheduled to speak at the Seasteading Institute’s conference in 2009 before his appearance was canceled. Thiel, meanwhile, voiced a related opinion in his own article for Cato Unbound: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Incidentally, Thiel’s Founders Fund is one of the investors in Srinivasan’s company Counsyl. The co-founder of Yarvin’s startup Tlon was one of the first recipients of the Thiel Fellowship. Anissimov was the media director of the Thiel-backed Machine Intelligence Institute (formerly known as the Singularity Institute). It’s enough to make a conspiracy theorist’s head spin, but I’m not actually suggesting that there’s a conspiracy here. I don’t think Peter Thiel is part of some neoreactionary master plot — I don’t even necessarily think he’s a neoreactionary. But you can see that a certain set of ideas are spreading through out the startup scene. Neoreactionary ideas overlap heavily with pickup artistry, seasteading and scientific racism (more on that later), and this larger “caveman cult” has an impact on tech culture, from work environments to the social atmosphere at conferences.
To be clear though, pure neoreaction is an extreme minority position that will probably never catch on beyond a tiny cult following. But there has been an explosion of interest since late 2012, despite the fact that Hoppe, Sailer, Yarvin and others have been writing about this stuff for years (and neoreaction’s European cousin archeofuturism has been around even longer). And this interest just happens to coincide with growing media attention being paid to the problems of the tech industry, from sexism in video games to “bro culture” in the tech industry to gentrification in the Bay Area.
And many professionals, rather than admit to their role in gentrification, wealth disparity and job displacement, are casting themselves as victims. This sense of persecution leads us to our next neoreactionary theme.
The Cathedral
Neoreactionaries believe “The Cathedral,” is a meta-institution that consists largely of Harvard and other Ivy League schools, The New York Times and various civil servants. Anissimov calls it a “self-organizing consensus.” Sometimes the term is used synonymously with political correctness. The fundamental idea is that the Cathedral regulates our discussions enforces a set of norms as to what sorts of ideas are acceptable and how we view history — it controls the Overton window, in other words.
The name comes from Yarvin’s idea that progressivism (and in his view, even today’s far right Republicans are progressive) is a religion, and that the media-academic-civil service complex punishes “heretical” views.
So what exactly is the Cathedral stopping neoreactionaries from talking about? Well, the merits of monarchy for starters. But mostly, as far as I can tell, they want to be able to say stuff like “Asians, Jews and whites are smarter than blacks and Hispanics because genetics” without being called racist. Or at least be able to express such views without the negative consequences of being labeled racist.
Speaking of which, neoreactionaries are obsessed with a concept called “human biodiversity” (HBD) — what used to be called “scientific racism.” Specifically, they believe that IQ is one of — if not the — most important personal traits, and that it’s predominately genetic. Neoreactionaries would replace, or supplement, the “divine right” of kings and the aristocracy with the “genetic right” of elites.
To call these claims “controversial” would be putting it lightly, but they underpin much of anti-egalitarian and pro-traditionalist claims neoreactionaries make. Delving into the scientific debate over race, genetics and IQ is beyond the scope of this article, but I’ve included some links on the topic in the reading list.
It’s not hard to see why this ideology would catch-on with white male geeks. It tells them that they are the natural rulers of the world, but that they are simultaneously being oppressed by a secret religious order. And the more media attention is paid to workplace inequality, gentrification and the wealth gap, the more their bias is confirmed. And the more the neoreactionaries and techbros act out, the more the media heat they bring.
We don’t need more public shamings and firings — what we should want is for neoreactionaries to change their minds, not their jobs. As Jessica Valenti wrote for The Nation about the firing of John Derbyshire — a cause célčbre for — neoreaction: “After all, what’s more impactful—a singular racist like Derbyshire or Arizona’s immigration law? A column or voter suppression?”
I’m not sure what to do about it. It’s not like I think the media should ignore the tech industry’s misdeeds. But maybe recognizing that cycle is the first step towards fixing it.
Neoreaction reading list
Foundations of neoreaction:
Michael Anissimov: Neoreactionary Glossary
Michael Anissimov: Empirical Claims of Neoreaction
Nick Land’s Dark Enlightenment Sequence
Mencius Moldbug: A formalist manifesto
Mencius Moldbug: Against Political Freedom
Mencius Moldbug: An open letter to an open-minded progressive
Heroes of the Dark Enlightenment
Against Neoreaction:
Scott Alexander’s Anti-Reactionary FAQ
Alexander’s Response to the “Empirical Claims of Neoreaction”
Popehat: Free Speech Does Not Include The Right to Be Free of Criticism
Alexander on the historical forces that shaped modernity
Alexander on racism, sexism and social justice
Genetic Similarities Within and Between Human Populations by D.J. Witherspoon et al.
Genetics Made Complicated: Is Race Genetic?
Ron Unz on race, IQ and wealth
Research on the cognitive effects of poverty
Tim Maly on seasteading and other technocratic exit strategies
Correction An earlier version of this story accidentally misidentified Pax Dickinson as Pax Dickerson.
[Photo: Flickr/epSos .de]
Posted Nov 22, 2013 by Klint Finley(@klintron)
Many of us yearn for a return to one golden age or another. But there’s a community of bloggers taking the idea to an extreme: they want to turn the dial way back to the days before the French Revolution.
Neoreactionaries believe that while technology and capitalism have advanced humanity over the past couple centuries, democracy has actually done more harm than good. They propose a return to old-fashioned gender roles, social order and monarchy.
You may have seen them crop-up on tech hangouts like Hacker News and Less Wrong, having cryptic conversations about “Moldbug” and “the Cathedral.” And though neoreactionaries aren’t exactly rampant in the tech industry, PayPal founder Peter Thiel has voiced similar ideas, and Pax Dickinson, the former CTO of Business Insider, says he’s been influenced by neoreactionary thought. It may be a small, minority world view, but it’s one that I think shines some light on the psyche of contemporary tech culture.
Enough has been written on neoreaction already to fill at least a couple of books, so if you prefer to go straight to the source, just pop a Modafinil and skip to the “Neoreaction Reading List” at the end of this post. For everyone else, I’ll do my best to summarize neoreactionary thought and why it might matter.
Who Are the Neoreactionaries?
“Reactionary” originally meant someone who opposed the French Revolution, and today the term generally refers to those who would like to return to some pre-existing state of affairs. Neoreaction — aka “dark enlightenment — begins with computer scientist and entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin, who blogs under the name Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin — the self-described Sith Lord of the movement — got his start as a commenter on sites like 2blowhards before starting his own blog Unqualified Reservations in 2007. Yarvin originally called his ideology “formalism,” but in 2010 libertarian blogger Arnold Kling referred to him as a “neo-reactionary.” The name stuck as more bloggers — such as Anomaly UK (who helped popularize the term), Nick Land (who coined “dark enlightenment”) and Michael Anissimov — started to self-identify as neoreactionary.
The movement has a few contemporary forerunners, such as Herman Hoppe and Steven Sailer, and of course, neoreaction is heavily influenced by older political thought — Thomas Carlyle and Julius Evola are particularly popular.
Anti-Democracy
Perhaps the one thing uniting all neoreactionaries is a critique of modernity that centers on opposition to democracy in all its forms. Many are former libertarians who decided that freedom and democracy were incompatible.
“Demotist systems, that is, systems ruled by the ‘People,’ such as Democracy and Communism, are predictably less financially stable than aristocratic systems,” Anissimov writes. “On average, they undergo more recessions and hold more debt. They are more susceptible to market crashes. They waste more resources. Each dollar goes further towards improving standard of living for the average person in an aristocratic system than in a Democratic one.”
Exactly what sort of monarchy they’d prefer varies. Some want something closer to theocracy, while Yarvin proposes turning nation states into corporations with the king as chief executive officer and the aristocracy as shareholders.
For Yarvin, stability and order trump all. But critics like Scott Alexander think neoreactionaries overestimate the stability of monarchies — to put it mildly. Alexander recently published an anti-reactionary FAQ, a massive document examining and refuting the claims of neoreactionaries.
“To an observer from the medieval or Renaissance world of monarchies and empires, the stability of democracies would seem utterly supernatural,” he wrote. “Imagine telling Queen Elizabeth I – whom as we saw above suffered six rebellions just in her family’s two generations of rule up to that point – that Britain has been three hundred years without a non-colonial-related civil war. She would think either that you were putting her on, or that God Himself had sent a host of angels to personally maintain order.”
Yarvin proposes that countries should be small — city states, really — and that all they should compete for citizens. “If residents don’t like their government, they can and should move,” he writes. “The design is all ‘exit,’ no ‘voice.’"
That will probably sound familiar if you heard Balaji Srinivasan’s Y Combinator speech. Although several news stories described the talk as a call for Silicon Valley to secede from the union, Srinivasan told Tim Carmody that his speech has been misinterpreted. “I’m not a libertarian, don’t believe in secession, am a registered Democrat, etcetera etcetera,” he wrote. “This is really a talk that is more about emigration and exit.”
I don’t know Srinivasan, but it sounds like he’d find neoreactionary views repulsive. And exit is a concept that appeals to both the right and left. But there are others in the Valley pushing ideas much closer to the neoreaction. Patri Friedman, who co-founded the Seasteading Institute with Peter Thiel, specifically mentioned Yarvin’s blog in a reading list at the end of an essay for Cato Unbound, and Yarvin was scheduled to speak at the Seasteading Institute’s conference in 2009 before his appearance was canceled. Thiel, meanwhile, voiced a related opinion in his own article for Cato Unbound: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Incidentally, Thiel’s Founders Fund is one of the investors in Srinivasan’s company Counsyl. The co-founder of Yarvin’s startup Tlon was one of the first recipients of the Thiel Fellowship. Anissimov was the media director of the Thiel-backed Machine Intelligence Institute (formerly known as the Singularity Institute). It’s enough to make a conspiracy theorist’s head spin, but I’m not actually suggesting that there’s a conspiracy here. I don’t think Peter Thiel is part of some neoreactionary master plot — I don’t even necessarily think he’s a neoreactionary. But you can see that a certain set of ideas are spreading through out the startup scene. Neoreactionary ideas overlap heavily with pickup artistry, seasteading and scientific racism (more on that later), and this larger “caveman cult” has an impact on tech culture, from work environments to the social atmosphere at conferences.
To be clear though, pure neoreaction is an extreme minority position that will probably never catch on beyond a tiny cult following. But there has been an explosion of interest since late 2012, despite the fact that Hoppe, Sailer, Yarvin and others have been writing about this stuff for years (and neoreaction’s European cousin archeofuturism has been around even longer). And this interest just happens to coincide with growing media attention being paid to the problems of the tech industry, from sexism in video games to “bro culture” in the tech industry to gentrification in the Bay Area.
And many professionals, rather than admit to their role in gentrification, wealth disparity and job displacement, are casting themselves as victims. This sense of persecution leads us to our next neoreactionary theme.
The Cathedral
Neoreactionaries believe “The Cathedral,” is a meta-institution that consists largely of Harvard and other Ivy League schools, The New York Times and various civil servants. Anissimov calls it a “self-organizing consensus.” Sometimes the term is used synonymously with political correctness. The fundamental idea is that the Cathedral regulates our discussions enforces a set of norms as to what sorts of ideas are acceptable and how we view history — it controls the Overton window, in other words.
The name comes from Yarvin’s idea that progressivism (and in his view, even today’s far right Republicans are progressive) is a religion, and that the media-academic-civil service complex punishes “heretical” views.
So what exactly is the Cathedral stopping neoreactionaries from talking about? Well, the merits of monarchy for starters. But mostly, as far as I can tell, they want to be able to say stuff like “Asians, Jews and whites are smarter than blacks and Hispanics because genetics” without being called racist. Or at least be able to express such views without the negative consequences of being labeled racist.
Speaking of which, neoreactionaries are obsessed with a concept called “human biodiversity” (HBD) — what used to be called “scientific racism.” Specifically, they believe that IQ is one of — if not the — most important personal traits, and that it’s predominately genetic. Neoreactionaries would replace, or supplement, the “divine right” of kings and the aristocracy with the “genetic right” of elites.
To call these claims “controversial” would be putting it lightly, but they underpin much of anti-egalitarian and pro-traditionalist claims neoreactionaries make. Delving into the scientific debate over race, genetics and IQ is beyond the scope of this article, but I’ve included some links on the topic in the reading list.
It’s not hard to see why this ideology would catch-on with white male geeks. It tells them that they are the natural rulers of the world, but that they are simultaneously being oppressed by a secret religious order. And the more media attention is paid to workplace inequality, gentrification and the wealth gap, the more their bias is confirmed. And the more the neoreactionaries and techbros act out, the more the media heat they bring.
We don’t need more public shamings and firings — what we should want is for neoreactionaries to change their minds, not their jobs. As Jessica Valenti wrote for The Nation about the firing of John Derbyshire — a cause célčbre for — neoreaction: “After all, what’s more impactful—a singular racist like Derbyshire or Arizona’s immigration law? A column or voter suppression?”
I’m not sure what to do about it. It’s not like I think the media should ignore the tech industry’s misdeeds. But maybe recognizing that cycle is the first step towards fixing it.
Neoreaction reading list
Foundations of neoreaction:
Michael Anissimov: Neoreactionary Glossary
Michael Anissimov: Empirical Claims of Neoreaction
Nick Land’s Dark Enlightenment Sequence
Mencius Moldbug: A formalist manifesto
Mencius Moldbug: Against Political Freedom
Mencius Moldbug: An open letter to an open-minded progressive
Heroes of the Dark Enlightenment
Against Neoreaction:
Scott Alexander’s Anti-Reactionary FAQ
Alexander’s Response to the “Empirical Claims of Neoreaction”
Popehat: Free Speech Does Not Include The Right to Be Free of Criticism
Alexander on the historical forces that shaped modernity
Alexander on racism, sexism and social justice
Genetic Similarities Within and Between Human Populations by D.J. Witherspoon et al.
Genetics Made Complicated: Is Race Genetic?
Ron Unz on race, IQ and wealth
Research on the cognitive effects of poverty
Tim Maly on seasteading and other technocratic exit strategies
Correction An earlier version of this story accidentally misidentified Pax Dickinson as Pax Dickerson.
[Photo: Flickr/epSos .de]
Among The Neoreactionaries
By ROD DREHER • January 6, 2014, 12:44 PM
Matt K. Lewis takes a look at a very small but noisy group on the American Right: monarchists and neoreactionaries. It’s not just about crusty romantics; techno-libertarians are joining the movement. Klint Finley at TechCrunch wrote about geek neoreactionaries last November.
Excerpt:
Perhaps the one thing uniting all neoreactionaries is a critique of modernity that centers on opposition to democracy in all its forms. Many are former libertarians who decided that freedom and democracy were incompatible.
“Demotist systems, that is, systems ruled by the ‘People,’ such as Democracy and Communism, are predictably less financially stable than aristocratic systems,” Anissimov writes. “On average, they undergo more recessions and hold more debt. They are more susceptible to market crashes. They waste more resources. Each dollar goes further towards improving standard of living for the average person in an aristocratic system than in a Democratic one.”
Exactly what sort of monarchy they’d prefer varies. Some want something closer to theocracy, while Yarvin proposes turning nation states into corporations with the king as chief executive officer and the aristocracy as shareholders.
For Yarvin, stability and order trump all.
In the Lewis column, John Zmirak, who knows from neoreactionaries, explains that in an American context, this is fantasy:
“No conservative in Europe (outside Switzerland and maybe Venice) can be whole-heartedly anti-monarchical, just as no conservative in America can realistically be a monarchist,” says John Zmirak, author, most recently, of The Bad Catholic’s Guide to the Catechism. “You conserve what is best in your own tradition; you don’t indulge in utopian fantasies of replacing it with something alien and untried.”
...
By ROD DREHER • January 6, 2014, 12:44 PM
Matt K. Lewis takes a look at a very small but noisy group on the American Right: monarchists and neoreactionaries. It’s not just about crusty romantics; techno-libertarians are joining the movement. Klint Finley at TechCrunch wrote about geek neoreactionaries last November.
Excerpt:
Perhaps the one thing uniting all neoreactionaries is a critique of modernity that centers on opposition to democracy in all its forms. Many are former libertarians who decided that freedom and democracy were incompatible.
“Demotist systems, that is, systems ruled by the ‘People,’ such as Democracy and Communism, are predictably less financially stable than aristocratic systems,” Anissimov writes. “On average, they undergo more recessions and hold more debt. They are more susceptible to market crashes. They waste more resources. Each dollar goes further towards improving standard of living for the average person in an aristocratic system than in a Democratic one.”
Exactly what sort of monarchy they’d prefer varies. Some want something closer to theocracy, while Yarvin proposes turning nation states into corporations with the king as chief executive officer and the aristocracy as shareholders.
For Yarvin, stability and order trump all.
In the Lewis column, John Zmirak, who knows from neoreactionaries, explains that in an American context, this is fantasy:
“No conservative in Europe (outside Switzerland and maybe Venice) can be whole-heartedly anti-monarchical, just as no conservative in America can realistically be a monarchist,” says John Zmirak, author, most recently, of The Bad Catholic’s Guide to the Catechism. “You conserve what is best in your own tradition; you don’t indulge in utopian fantasies of replacing it with something alien and untried.”
...
More on the topic at The Week:
Why are U.S. conservatives so obsessed with monarchies?
And what happened to the right's reverence for the Founding Fathers and America's constitution?
By Matt K. Lewis | January 6, 2014
Something weird is happening on the American Right. Over at Politico Magazine, Michael Auslin, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has penned a column titled "America Needs a King."
Had Auslin's strange desire not come on the heels of Pat Buchanan's paean to Vladimir Putin, or an anti-democracy movement being championed by tech libertarians like Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, one might see this as merely an example of an academic being intellectually provocative. In other words, "trolling" us.
But this isn't mere trolling. It's a trend.
Now, there has always been an element of the Catholic Right with monarchical tendencies. But, for a variety of reasons, this fringe idea seems to be gaining some mainstream traction.
Auslin's fundamental proposal is to create a position above the presidency, to which he assigns the rather Orwellian title "our First Citizen." This would be a symbolic post meant to unite Americans around something they have in common, even as public opinion is split over our more partisan political officials. "Let America's presidents be politicians — slinging mud, cutting deals, and knifing others in the back," he writes. "Just don’t let them pretend they represent all of us."
This, of course, assumes that the modern negative political environment is a new phenomenon — so new and pressing as to warrant departing from the Founders' vision of a chief executive. But American politics has always been nasty and divisive; the notion that today's politics is harsher than ever is revisionist history.
Auslin's other presumption — that the presidency is somehow too big for any one man now — has some history and utility. Last year, I chided Ryan Lizza for arguing the presidency had become powerless, a suggestion I viewed as meant to absolve President Obama of his failures.
It is interesting that this argument is popping up now. It was bandied about a lot during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, but retreated under Ronald Reagan.
Consider this excerpt from Time magazine in 1986: "Americans heard for years that the presidency had grown too complex for one person to manage, that the office had been crippled. Reagan seems to slide through a presidential day with ease."
To be sure, confidence in our leaders and institutions has been eroding since Watergate and Vietnam. And while you're never going to make everyone happy, Reagan proved it is possible to restore faith in government without betraying the Founders' vision.
Could it be that weak presidents naturally lead us to believe it is the modern office — not the man who occupies it — that is to blame? Instead of tweaking our political system, maybe we just need to change presidents?
Conservatives may be especially susceptible to the cult of machismo. And perhaps this has something to do with the admiration held by some on the Right for Vladimir Putin?
Some conservatives see Putin hunting and practicing karate, and juxtapose those images with Obama riding a bicycle, licking an ice cream cone, or appearing on The View. They yearn for the stronger symbolic leader. This impulse may be dangerous, but we cannot deny that it exists. (Note: Obama has the distinction of being accused of both weakness and of tyranny. As Hot Air's Allahpundit sarcastically noted: "Install a king and before you know it he'll be issuing royal edicts changing the law willy nilly to suit his daily whims.")
But it's not just Putin's style that some prefer to Obama — it's also his politics. While Obama worries about income inequality, Putin has zeroed in on problems plaguing Russia, such as population decline. Desperate conservatives (who see the nation they love slouching toward a secular state they no longer recognize) might well yearn for an American leader willing to champion such an existential cause, and do so as aggressively as Putin has.
As Pat Buchanan recently wrote, "Peoples all over the world, claims Putin, are supporting Russia's 'defense of traditional values' against a 'so-called tolerance' that is 'genderless and infertile.' While his stance as a defender of traditional values has drawn the mockery of Western media and cultural elites, Putin is not wrong in saying that he can speak for much of mankind."
Of course, it's very problematic to overlook Putin's means. And his motives — whether he supports traditional conservative values out of sincere dedication, or out of a Machiavellian manipulation — ought to account for something. But sadly, it's almost as if some conservatives are saying, "Sure, he's a heavy-handed authoritarian — but at least he hates the gays and Pussy Riot!"
Whatever happened to a world where the Right was almost obsessively proud of the Founding Fathers (you know, the revolutionaries who stood up to the British Crown) and hated the Evil Empire so much they could never be seduced by a former KGB agent?
Times change, I guess.
This is complex, and opinions vary, so I'll try my best to summarize those who espouse this view without misrepresenting them. Though sometimes referred to as monarchists, "neoreactionary" seems to be the preferred watchword. That's not to say that some in this camp don't really advocate monarchy, but "monarchy-fetishism" might be more appropriate.
They would argue that democracy is a form of government where citizens employ coercion. As the oft-repeated aphorism goes, they believe that “a democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury." (Interestingly, they lump democracy in with communism, arguing that both are flawed, inasmuch as they "rule in the name of the people.")
There is some logic (if tortured) to this. "Under monarchy," Hans-Hermann Hoppe, author of Democracy: The God That Failed," explained, "the distinction between rulers and ruled is clear. I know, for instance, that I will never become king, and because of that I will tend to resist the king's attempts to raise taxes. Under democracy, the distinction between rulers and ruled becomes blurred. The illusion can arise 'that we all rule ourselves,' and the resistance against increased taxation is accordingly diminished. I might end up on the receiving end: as a tax recipient rather than a taxpayer, and thus view taxation more favorably."
Consider this from the neoreactionary glossary: "Monarchies are relatively libertarian by current standards, in the sense that the government generally consumes 2 to 5 percent of GDP, unlike modern social democracies which consume 40 to 80 percent of GDP. Legally speaking, monarchies tend to have fewer laws, but enforce them more strictly, following Tacitus's dictum: 'The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.'"
There may be an issue of semantics here. It's not as if these people want to be serfs answering to an authoritarian (though that might be an unintended consequence in the unlikely event they have their way). Many of these techno-libertarians call it monarchy, but what they are really envisioning is something dubbed a "neocameralist state" — essentially, a system where states consist of voting markets and a sort of shareholder republic model where monarchs might compete for citizens (who are free to come and go as they please.) "These libertarians — or perhaps post-libertarians — are simply introducing the ideas of entrepreneurialism and competition to government," says Jordan Bloom, a colleague who has closely followed the movement.
Consider this from a prominent neoreactionary blogger who writes under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug:
In my ideal neocameralist state, there is no political freedom because there is no politics. Perhaps the government has a comment box where you can express your opinion. Perhaps it does customer surveys and even polls. But there is no organization and no reason to organize, because no combination of residents can influence government policy by coercion.
And precisely because of this stability, you can think, say, or write whatever you want. Because the state has no reason to care. Your freedom of thought, speech, and expression is no longer a political freedom. It is only a personal freedom. [Mencius Moldbug]
So why has this idea gained some cachet amongst tech libertarians? "If I could take a stab at a theory, it would be this," explains Bloom: "For the last 500 years or so, history has mostly been a matter of polities consolidating. Fewer, bigger countries and empires. We're on the cusp of things starting to move in the opposite direction, to the point that it's reasonable to predict that secession will be the most important political idea of the 21st century."
Still, they all have some things in common. First, they are boldly venturing outside the bounds of what would have been considered acceptable shared political opinion just a few years ago. This is, perhaps, indicative of the low level of confidence we have in our system and our leaders, of the atomization and feeling of alienation that is plaguing our nation, and also of the way technology can empower people whose opinions are outside the mainstream to spread what unconventional ideas.
But the other things these movements have in common is that they occur during a time when America looks weak.
Additionally, these movements tacitly accept that conservatism as a political force is utterly incapable of slowing the leftward march of liberalism. By definition, conservatives, who want to conserve the good things about the past, are always playing defense. When you consider that many of my conservative views aren't terribly different from John F. Kennedy's views in 1960, this becomes self-evident.
Some on the Right have given up the belief that they can fix our country by working within the current paradigm. And for a country that got its start by breaking the yoke of monarchy, what these conservatives are proposing is really quite radical.
"No conservative in Europe (outside Switzerland and maybe Venice) can be whole-heartedly anti-monarchical, just as no conservative in America can realistically be a monarchist," says John Zmirak, author, most recently, of The Bad Catholic's Guide to the Catechism. "You conserve what is best in your own tradition; you don't indulge in utopian fantasies of replacing it with something alien and untried."
I guess that means Lorde is right. We'll never be royals.
Matt K. Lewis writes for The Daily Caller and co-hosts The DMZ on Bloggingheads.tv. In 2012, the American Conservative Union honored Matt as CPAC "Blogger of the Year." Matt lives in Alexandria, Va.
And what happened to the right's reverence for the Founding Fathers and America's constitution?
By Matt K. Lewis | January 6, 2014
Something weird is happening on the American Right. Over at Politico Magazine, Michael Auslin, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has penned a column titled "America Needs a King."
Had Auslin's strange desire not come on the heels of Pat Buchanan's paean to Vladimir Putin, or an anti-democracy movement being championed by tech libertarians like Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, one might see this as merely an example of an academic being intellectually provocative. In other words, "trolling" us.
But this isn't mere trolling. It's a trend.
Now, there has always been an element of the Catholic Right with monarchical tendencies. But, for a variety of reasons, this fringe idea seems to be gaining some mainstream traction.
Auslin's fundamental proposal is to create a position above the presidency, to which he assigns the rather Orwellian title "our First Citizen." This would be a symbolic post meant to unite Americans around something they have in common, even as public opinion is split over our more partisan political officials. "Let America's presidents be politicians — slinging mud, cutting deals, and knifing others in the back," he writes. "Just don’t let them pretend they represent all of us."
This, of course, assumes that the modern negative political environment is a new phenomenon — so new and pressing as to warrant departing from the Founders' vision of a chief executive. But American politics has always been nasty and divisive; the notion that today's politics is harsher than ever is revisionist history.
Auslin's other presumption — that the presidency is somehow too big for any one man now — has some history and utility. Last year, I chided Ryan Lizza for arguing the presidency had become powerless, a suggestion I viewed as meant to absolve President Obama of his failures.
It is interesting that this argument is popping up now. It was bandied about a lot during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, but retreated under Ronald Reagan.
Consider this excerpt from Time magazine in 1986: "Americans heard for years that the presidency had grown too complex for one person to manage, that the office had been crippled. Reagan seems to slide through a presidential day with ease."
To be sure, confidence in our leaders and institutions has been eroding since Watergate and Vietnam. And while you're never going to make everyone happy, Reagan proved it is possible to restore faith in government without betraying the Founders' vision.
Could it be that weak presidents naturally lead us to believe it is the modern office — not the man who occupies it — that is to blame? Instead of tweaking our political system, maybe we just need to change presidents?
* * *
This monarchical urge can also at least partially be attributed to human nature. Anyone who has seriously contemplated the possibility of a (Jeb) Bush versus (Hillary) Clinton 2016 presidential election is aware of our dynastic tendencies. What is more, during times of gridlock or crisis, there seems to be an even greater desire for a familiar strongman (or strongwoman) who can get things done.Conservatives may be especially susceptible to the cult of machismo. And perhaps this has something to do with the admiration held by some on the Right for Vladimir Putin?
Some conservatives see Putin hunting and practicing karate, and juxtapose those images with Obama riding a bicycle, licking an ice cream cone, or appearing on The View. They yearn for the stronger symbolic leader. This impulse may be dangerous, but we cannot deny that it exists. (Note: Obama has the distinction of being accused of both weakness and of tyranny. As Hot Air's Allahpundit sarcastically noted: "Install a king and before you know it he'll be issuing royal edicts changing the law willy nilly to suit his daily whims.")
But it's not just Putin's style that some prefer to Obama — it's also his politics. While Obama worries about income inequality, Putin has zeroed in on problems plaguing Russia, such as population decline. Desperate conservatives (who see the nation they love slouching toward a secular state they no longer recognize) might well yearn for an American leader willing to champion such an existential cause, and do so as aggressively as Putin has.
As Pat Buchanan recently wrote, "Peoples all over the world, claims Putin, are supporting Russia's 'defense of traditional values' against a 'so-called tolerance' that is 'genderless and infertile.' While his stance as a defender of traditional values has drawn the mockery of Western media and cultural elites, Putin is not wrong in saying that he can speak for much of mankind."
Of course, it's very problematic to overlook Putin's means. And his motives — whether he supports traditional conservative values out of sincere dedication, or out of a Machiavellian manipulation — ought to account for something. But sadly, it's almost as if some conservatives are saying, "Sure, he's a heavy-handed authoritarian — but at least he hates the gays and Pussy Riot!"
Whatever happened to a world where the Right was almost obsessively proud of the Founding Fathers (you know, the revolutionaries who stood up to the British Crown) and hated the Evil Empire so much they could never be seduced by a former KGB agent?
Times change, I guess.
* * *
Joining the Auslins and Buchanans of the world is a new group of techno-libertarians and monarchists who have been making waves online for a couple of years now. The movement seems to have officially kicked off when, in 2009, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, declared, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."This is complex, and opinions vary, so I'll try my best to summarize those who espouse this view without misrepresenting them. Though sometimes referred to as monarchists, "neoreactionary" seems to be the preferred watchword. That's not to say that some in this camp don't really advocate monarchy, but "monarchy-fetishism" might be more appropriate.
They would argue that democracy is a form of government where citizens employ coercion. As the oft-repeated aphorism goes, they believe that “a democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury." (Interestingly, they lump democracy in with communism, arguing that both are flawed, inasmuch as they "rule in the name of the people.")
There is some logic (if tortured) to this. "Under monarchy," Hans-Hermann Hoppe, author of Democracy: The God That Failed," explained, "the distinction between rulers and ruled is clear. I know, for instance, that I will never become king, and because of that I will tend to resist the king's attempts to raise taxes. Under democracy, the distinction between rulers and ruled becomes blurred. The illusion can arise 'that we all rule ourselves,' and the resistance against increased taxation is accordingly diminished. I might end up on the receiving end: as a tax recipient rather than a taxpayer, and thus view taxation more favorably."
Consider this from the neoreactionary glossary: "Monarchies are relatively libertarian by current standards, in the sense that the government generally consumes 2 to 5 percent of GDP, unlike modern social democracies which consume 40 to 80 percent of GDP. Legally speaking, monarchies tend to have fewer laws, but enforce them more strictly, following Tacitus's dictum: 'The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.'"
There may be an issue of semantics here. It's not as if these people want to be serfs answering to an authoritarian (though that might be an unintended consequence in the unlikely event they have their way). Many of these techno-libertarians call it monarchy, but what they are really envisioning is something dubbed a "neocameralist state" — essentially, a system where states consist of voting markets and a sort of shareholder republic model where monarchs might compete for citizens (who are free to come and go as they please.) "These libertarians — or perhaps post-libertarians — are simply introducing the ideas of entrepreneurialism and competition to government," says Jordan Bloom, a colleague who has closely followed the movement.
Consider this from a prominent neoreactionary blogger who writes under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug:
In my ideal neocameralist state, there is no political freedom because there is no politics. Perhaps the government has a comment box where you can express your opinion. Perhaps it does customer surveys and even polls. But there is no organization and no reason to organize, because no combination of residents can influence government policy by coercion.
And precisely because of this stability, you can think, say, or write whatever you want. Because the state has no reason to care. Your freedom of thought, speech, and expression is no longer a political freedom. It is only a personal freedom. [Mencius Moldbug]
So why has this idea gained some cachet amongst tech libertarians? "If I could take a stab at a theory, it would be this," explains Bloom: "For the last 500 years or so, history has mostly been a matter of polities consolidating. Fewer, bigger countries and empires. We're on the cusp of things starting to move in the opposite direction, to the point that it's reasonable to predict that secession will be the most important political idea of the 21st century."
* * *
Now, these monarch-curious folks are still a tiny minority of the American Right. And as I noted, these movements aren't directly related (tech libertarians, for example, probably hate Putin, who — in any event — isn't a "monarch.")Still, they all have some things in common. First, they are boldly venturing outside the bounds of what would have been considered acceptable shared political opinion just a few years ago. This is, perhaps, indicative of the low level of confidence we have in our system and our leaders, of the atomization and feeling of alienation that is plaguing our nation, and also of the way technology can empower people whose opinions are outside the mainstream to spread what unconventional ideas.
But the other things these movements have in common is that they occur during a time when America looks weak.
Additionally, these movements tacitly accept that conservatism as a political force is utterly incapable of slowing the leftward march of liberalism. By definition, conservatives, who want to conserve the good things about the past, are always playing defense. When you consider that many of my conservative views aren't terribly different from John F. Kennedy's views in 1960, this becomes self-evident.
Some on the Right have given up the belief that they can fix our country by working within the current paradigm. And for a country that got its start by breaking the yoke of monarchy, what these conservatives are proposing is really quite radical.
"No conservative in Europe (outside Switzerland and maybe Venice) can be whole-heartedly anti-monarchical, just as no conservative in America can realistically be a monarchist," says John Zmirak, author, most recently, of The Bad Catholic's Guide to the Catechism. "You conserve what is best in your own tradition; you don't indulge in utopian fantasies of replacing it with something alien and untried."
I guess that means Lorde is right. We'll never be royals.
Matt K. Lewis writes for The Daily Caller and co-hosts The DMZ on Bloggingheads.tv. In 2012, the American Conservative Union honored Matt as CPAC "Blogger of the Year." Matt lives in Alexandria, Va.
It looks like only techies and conservatives have really picked it up in the media so far. But there's something bubbling up. I've been pointing to it here and decrying it as anti-democratic. Now it has a name. Neo-reactionary.
Well I'll go one better, Neo-Libgods!
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