Curtis Yarvin, pseudo-intellectualism and the use of history in politics

Having stumbled across this right-wing blogger and thinker, an ally of Steve Bannon, I was unconvinced by his image and whole method of argumentation

The “Dark Enlightenment”, apparently

I may be well behind the curve here and lacking in expertise on the alt-right, but I have only just encountered Curtis Yarvin, a “neoreactionary” or “Dark Enlightenment” blogger. I decided to watch the first five minutes of his interview on the Triggernometry podcast because it carried the eyecatching headline “Is it time to abandon democracy?” I was in equal parts killing time and mildly intrigued, but, oh my, what a world of wonder unfolded.

I won’t—can’t—expound at great length on his political or philosophical views, not least because, despite the interview lasting 75 minutes, he expressed very few except a slightly performative dissatisfaction with and contempt for the contemporary world, but he has a Substack, Gray Mirror, if you want to dive into it. He bills it as “a portal to the next regime”, declares that American democracy has failed and advocates a monarchical system of government (though not, I think, necessarily one run by a conventional king or emperor). He has long-standing connections with soon-to-be-jailbird Steve Bannon.

Most of his monologue—neither Konstantin Kisin nor Francis Foster gets much of a word in—is portentous, earnest, pretentious and boring. He is very keen to show off his learning, often asking if the hosts have “heard of” this or that author, and draws on historical events to demonstrate a deep and informed view of the world. He explains his intellectual breakthrough as being his “flipping” of perspective when he went from the idea of what modern society thought of rulers and governments to what they would think of us. He mentions especially Elizabeth I (the interview was filmed close to Westminster Abbey) and indicates the contrast between her world, and that of Shakespeare, to whom he returns, and its social and cultural norms and ours.

To be brutally honest, this doesn’t seem a particularly startling revelation or revolutionary viewpoint to me. Yes, the humans of five centuries ago were very different from us; yes, it is simplistic and misleading to view human history as a seamless upward curve of progress; yes, 16th-century Englishmen (say) would not look at 21st-century society and think it was an improvement in every way on their own. That’s a grasp of the texture of history I would expect the second-year undergraduates I once taught to have mastered without too much difficulty. Yet for Yarvin it seems to represent a brave, radical, iconoclastic break with the current intellectual milieu which makes him both innovative and wise.

Yarvin fancies himself a man of ideas. Oh my, he does. Discussing Shakespeare, he remarks that “Like many intellectuals, I’m an Oxfordian”. I generally take it as a rule of thumb that Oxfordians—that is, those who believes that the plays and poems we conventionally attribute to William Shakespeare were in fact written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford—are self-absorbed bores who want to regarded as edgy. Here is not the place to dissect the arguments in detail, but the Oxfordian hypothesis relies heavily on the idea that Shakespeare’s plays are largely autobiographical, from which they construct a theoretical persona which, they claim, fits not the Bard of Avon but Lord Oxford. There is also an underlying sense that Shakespeare, a middle-class provincial who never attended university or even left England, simply could not have written the foundational texts of the Western canon and that, therefore, the “real” author must have been a sophisticated aristocrat.

That is not to say the theory is dismissed. There are many high-profile Oxfordians, like Jeremy Irons, Sir Derek Jacobi, David McCullough, Sir Mark Rylance and, er, Keanu Reeves. It seems undaunted as a theory by the fact that Oxford died in 1604, after which date around a dozen Shakespeare plays are conventionally believed to have been written. Oxfordians simply answer that the conventional chronology was imposed later on and designed to fit the life of Shakespeare rather than the true author. This is an important point: essentially, Oxfordianism is a conspiracy theory. I have examined this phenomenon before (here and here) but the key is the lure of arcana, of hidden knowledge. Believing in conspiracy theories is a double-hit, allowing adherents not only to think that they see the world more clearly than the ordinary person, but also to comfort themselves by perceiving a universe which is full of connections and therefore logical, even if not desirable. It lacks the frightening randomness of chaos.

Yarvin fits very much into this mould. At one point in the interview, he touches on, and dismisses, Holocaust denial, pointing out that the Holocaust is one of the most documented and recorded events in human history. However, he goes on to say, while Holocaust denial is a conspiracy theory which is false, he argues for the irony that almost every other conspiracy theory about the Second World War is true. One example he cites is President Franklin Roosevelt having prior knowledge of, or even having provoked or arranged, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which has been in the ether since at least 1944. The closest one can reliably get to that is that Roosevelt was aware that US policy towards Japan might well provoke Tokyo into outright conflict, but that is still some way distant. But it conforms to a frequent conspiracy theory trope, that the supposed “good guys” (almost always the West, especially the United States) were actually by underhand and immoral methods manipulating events to make them seem as if another group was the “bad guys”. Almost irrespective of the truth of Pearl Harbor-related accusations, it can reasonably be argued that if you are trying to rehabilitate or elevate to some virtuous status the Empire of Japan, you may have reached a strange intellectual place.

One of Yarvin’s habits, and it is true of commentators and thinkers across the political spectrum, is to invoke historical examples to bolster their theories. Now, anyone who knows me at all will know that I am fascinated by and devoted to the study of history, and anyone who tries to analyse public policy without solid historical awareness will inevitably fail. Earlier this year, I wrote about the influence of history, arguing that “our history is an important element of who we are and how we conceive of our place in the world”. However, like any principle, this is general rather than universal, and it does not mean that any future event can be judged inevitable by an historical precedent.

The democracy-produced-Hitler fallacy

A frequent, easy hit by those who want to show the flaws of democracy, and one invoked by Yarvin, is the “fact” that Hitler came to power through democratic means, or was “elected”. The message is obvious: look what terrible decisions the demos can make, and what horrific consequences can flow from the exercise of the power of the people. Don’t misunderstand me, democracy is, of course, massively flawed in a number of ways, just as are individual people who collectively operate it. However, I tend to side with Winston Churchill, who said in the House of Commons in 1947 “it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”. But the charge of responsibility for Hitler does not quite land.

The electoral support of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, peaked at the Reichstag elections of July 1932, when it won 37.3 per cent of the vote. That is substantial, and one cannot deny that nearly 14 million Germans looked at Hitler and liked what they saw, or at least thought him the best available option. He had received 30 per cent of the vote in the presidential election that March/April, coming second, albeit by quite some margin, to the incumbent president, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. And the Nazis’ rise was rapid: in 1928, they had only attracted 2.6 per cent of the vote to hold 12 seats in a Reichstag of 491, and two years later they jumped to 18.3 per cent and 107 MPs. But July 1932 was the high water-mark, and when a second election was held in November of that year, they slipped back marginally to 33.1 per cent. They were the largest party but unable to form a coalition.

Yet by the end of January, he was chancellor of a democratic Germany, surely evidence that democracy had erred and allowed in an autocrat and psychopath. Well, not exactly. The Reichstag was divided, with 14 different parties represented. While the Nazis had 196 seats, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, held 121, and the Communist Party had 100. The Zentrum, or Centre Party, a Catholic-dominated moderately right-wing organisation, had 70 seats while the hard-right nationalist Deutschnationale Volkspartei, or German National People’s Party, had 51. Since June, the government had been headed by Franz von Papen, a dim-witted Catholic former general staff officer who had been appointed because of his friendship with President von Hindenburg. The German National People’s Party backed the government, as did some nationalist and conservative independents, but Papen relied on presidential decrees rather than a parliamentary majority to govern. His administration clearly had no long-term sustainable future.

In December 1932, Papen told his cabinet he wanted to consider the option of imposing martial law. But the defence minister, General Kurt von Schleicher, leaked the results of an exercise which purported to show that the army would not be able to implement martial law. Papen was forced to resign, his authority spent, and Schleicher succeeded him as chancellor. His judgement was that the Nazis had peaked, were running out of money and becoming internally divided, and so would be forced to fall in line behind him sooner or later as their only chance of gaining any executive power. For the time being, he retained most of Papen’s ministers, but quietly courted Gregor Strasser, a veteran Nazi who had been tried and imprisoned along with Hitler after the abortive Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. But Strasser had grown distant from Hitler and increasingly isolated within his own party.

Schleicher was a bad politician. Secretive and authoritarian, he never gained the trust of colleagues and had few natural allies. Worse, however, Papen, formerly a friend, was embittered by his ousting but retained the ear of the ageing President von Hindenburg. It was court politics, not democracy, which would open the door of the chancellery for Hitler.

Hindenburg was now 85 years old. He was so old that he had already retired from the army before the First World War, when he was hastily recalled and formed his brilliant partnership with Erich Ludendorff. By late 1932, he was not completely senile, but was certainly suffering from lapses in cognition, at one point failing to recognise Heinrich Brüning, then chancellor, when they met. He had been reluctant to stand for re-election as president, making just one radio broadcast during the whole campaign. He was tired, reluctant to face major decisions and easily impressed by people’s military credentials, having expressed delight that eight members of Papen’s cabinet had served as officers during the war. Still driven by a profound sense of duty and service, however, he was ripe for manipulation and prey to a supposedly easy solution to the country’s problem.

Franz von Papen wanted revenge on Schleicher, wanted to regain power and was confident he could use Adolf Hitler as a platform to do so. Over the weeks of January 1933, he proposed a new government to Hindenburg: Hitler would become chancellor, and he, Papen, would be vice-chancellor and Reichskommissar of Prussia (effectively prime minister of Germany’s largest state, with 61 per cent of the whole national population). Papen’s roles would, he assured the president, keep Hitler “boxed in”. On 28 January, Schleicher requested that Hindenburg declare a state of emergency, and the president refused. The chancellor has no option but to resign, and Hindenburg commissioned Papen to form a new government.

On 30 January, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor, with Papen as his deputy. In a cabinet of 13, there were only two other Nazi ministers, interior minister Wilhelm Frick and Hermann Göring, the president of the Reichstag, as Reichskommissar for air traffic. It seemed as if the Nazis’ support had been bought cheaply. But the whole scheme depended on the determination and wiliness of Papen, and the weakness and biddability of Hitler. Both were tragic miscalculations. Initially, like its predecessors, the government exercised authority through presidential decrees, but within two month Hitler had the Reichstag pass the Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich, or Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich, otherwise known as the Enabling Act. This allowed the cabinet to rule by fiat. German democracy was dead.

I recount this at some length because the response to the charge that “Hitler was democratically elected”, and that this a proof of democracy’s inadequacy, is “it’s more complicated than that”. Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, after which he was able to make himself a dictator, was certainly made possible by the Nazi Party’s rise to the largest bloc in the Reichstag. But they were never close to a majority, and by the end of 1932 many thought they were at the beginning of a process of decline. The circumstances which saw Hitler come to power were specific and several: the party’s electoral and parliamentary strength, yes, but also the ambition and manipulation of Papen, the weakness of Hindenburg and a belief that the alternative to bringing the Nazis into government in some form was military dictatorship. The hubris is illustrated by Papen’s reaction to his friends’ alarm at giving the Nazi leader power.

What do you want? I have the confidence of Hindenburg! In two months, we’ll have pushed Hitler so far into the corner that he’ll squeal.

That proved inaccurate.

This shows the danger of history as a guide. Yes, Adolf Hitler rose to power in a democratic system of government, albeit a fragile and failing one. But he was certainly not elected—the closest he came in a personal capacity in 1932’s presidential election, when he received 30 per cent of the vote in the first round and just shy of 37 per cent in the second—nor, in any meaningful sense, was it the democratic nature of the Weimar Republic which was responsible for his appointment. Quite the opposite, it was the disintegration of the democratic system which made Hitler seem like the best available option to a group of right-wing, nationalist, conservative politicians who wanted him as a pathway to their own autocracy. And yet, if you assert with enough confidence and authority that democracy led to Nazi rule, you will often be believed.

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see us

One argument Yarvin came back to was the idea of Elizabeth I and how she would have regarded the modern world, especially how she would have regarded her namesake and successor, Elizabeth II. I feel like I have at least some standing to take this one on, having studied Tudor history and having actual degrees in it. The argument at which Yarvin hints, though he may have said it more explicitly elsewhere, is that the 16th century monarch would have disapproved of modern society as fractious, divided, dysfunctional, lacking in morality and fundamentally degenerate, and that she would not have seen our totems of democracy and tolerance as virtues in the way that we do.

On that very last point, it is probably correct. Widespread democracy based on universal suffrage was not a concept favoured by many thinkers in 16th century Europe: even some of the states which had some element of popular selection for its rulers like Florence and Venice had very limited franchises and tended towards oligarchy. England had, of course, a House of Commons which was chosen with an element of popular franchise: the right to vote was restricted to men who held property in freehold, or directly from the monarch, of an annual rent of forty shillings. This meant that the electorate was a tiny fraction of the total population, probably less than five per cent. Nor was Parliament a frequent part of the constitutional landscape. There were only 10 parliaments in Elizabeth’s 45-year reign, sitting for a total of something like 19 years.

There is one important difference on which it is interesting to reflect. Modern society sees tolerance and diversity as inherent virtues: Elizabethan society absolutely and explicitly did not. Elizabeth’s priority was order and conformity, and that was reflected most clearly in her approach to religion. Her restoration of a Protestant Church of England of which she was supreme governor was a masterpiece of compromise, allowing the retention of some Catholic totems like the crucifix and traditional clerical vestments. The Book of Common Prayer of 1559 omitted the reference from earlier editions to “the bishop of Rome, and all his detestable enormities” as well as the “Black Rubric” of the 1552 version which had explained that kneeling to receive communion did not mean “that any adoration is done, or ought to be done, either unto the Sacramental bread or wine there bodily received, or unto any real and essential presence there being of Christ’s natural flesh and blood”.

However, the Act of Uniformity 1558 stipulated that everyone was required to attend divine service, in the Anglican tradition, once a week or risk a fine of 12 pence, roughly equal to three days’ wages. The importance was what people did, not what they thought or believed. Famously, according to Sir Francis Bacon, Elizabeth had no desire “to make windows into men’s souls and secret thoughts”. She understood that what mattered to a strong, well-ordered and above all sustainable government was cohesion and compliance, with everyone participating in communal expressions of belief as a fundamental part of that.

Essentially, Tudor “thought leaders” and their modern counterparts would have struggled to have a sensible conversation about politics because they lacked basic shared assumptions. The population of England in 1600 was around 4.1 million, having grown by more than a quarter during Elizabeth’s reign. Easily its largest city was London, with around 200,000 people, followed probably by the Norwich (16,000), centre of the English wool trade, and the port city of Bristol (10,500), but the country was still overwhelmingly agrarian: something like 94 per cent of population lived in the countryside. Much is made of the presence of black and other ethnic minorities at this time, but they probably amounted to 1,000 people, an impossibly tiny fraction of the population overall. The largest visible minority was probably that of Protestant “strangers”, refugees largely from France and the Low Countries, who may have numbered as many as 50,000.

England, therefore, was an overwhelmingly mono-cultural Christian country, with sharp doctrinal divisions but Anglican Protestantism becoming predominant. Perhaps a third of the population lived in poverty, often dependent on alms. The Poor Relief Act 1601 offered shelter and relief for those who were “lame, impotent, old, blind”, made provision for the able-bodied poor to be found work, but included draconian measures against those unwilling to work (“send to the house of correction or common Gaol such as shall not employ themselves to work”) and those who left their own parishes to look for work. The Vagabonds Act 1597 had also dealt with this latter group. (This rough-and-ready welfare system would remain in place until 1834.) Moreover, the economy of England in 1600 was one of expansion and growing commerce but also of an increasingly debased coinage and the new constant of inflation. Tudor governments and legislators had a very rudimentary understanding of the dynamic forces driving economic change, and consequently had few effective measures to control it.

If we try to imagine a dialogue between Sir Robert Cecil, secretary of state and effectively chief minister when Elizabeth I died in 1603, and Rishi Sunak as prime minister, it would be one which struggled for meaning. They would have hardly any powers in common, either personally or as heads of a government: Cecil had influence because he had the confidence of the Queen, and so could direct such levers as the Crown possessed through officers like the lord chancellor, who largely supervised royal administration and the justice system, and the lord treasurer, in charge of expenditure. Moreover, beyond a very generic sense of the country’s ‘security and well-being’, neither would agree on what the purpose of government even was.

As for Elizabeth I and her namesake, Elizabeth II, I think the Virgin Queen would have found much to admire in her successor. She would have admired the way Elizabeth II married, and married for love, yet managed to give away not a jot of her power, and indeed maintained the name of the royal house unchanged. She would have admired the late Queen’s quiet, unshowy piety. Most of all, I think, Elizabeth I would have credited the second Elizabeth was enormous political skill and cunning, albeit exercised in a very different context from her own. Elizabeth II was unimpeachably unpolitical throughout her 70 years on the throne, and seems, insofar as we can judge, to have made the best use of her constitutional powers of, as Bagehot defined them, “the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn”.

What lies underneath Yarvin’s invited comparison, however, is surely a suggestion to wonder whether we have, in fact, made “progress” since 1600. This is a common trope among those far to the right of the spectrum, but I have always found it extraordinarily easy to answer. Whatever faults our modern society may have, however horrific and deep-seated they may be—and many are—if one takes society in the round, we are obvious better off now. We are healthier, we live longer, we are immeasurably more prosperous, we are far better informed and we have a fundamental input into the way we are governed. We live in a democracy, albeit an imperfect one, and a free society, albeit an imperfect one. If you want to suggest the England of 1600 was a better place, you have, it seems to me, a tough argument to construct.

Conclusion

I don’t intend this solely or event principally as a broadside against Curtis Yarvin. The interview I saw may not have shown him at his best, but it certainly gave me no reason to delve further into his philosophy. But my fleeting experience of him did show some examples of qualities in modern public debate which I find damaging: conspiracism and its attendant sense of superiority; instinctive distrust of any conventional thinking; heavily worn intellectualism (especially if not particularly deep); performative iconoclasm and contrarianism; and deeply questionable deployment of history.

There are some genuine and impressive public intellectuals across the political spectrum at the moment, though the United States and, to an extent, continental Europe seems to welcome them more than we do. I would certainly find time to listen to Niall Ferguson, Thomas Sowell, Stephanie Kelton, George Will, Steven Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell, Mariana Mazzucato, Yascha Mounk, David Frum, Naomi Klein, Thomas Piketty, Cornel West, Mary Beard or Anne Applebaum.

(This is not an invitation to debate the merits or otherwise of any of the above.)

At the same time, there is a strong movement of what we might charitably call popular intellectualism, fuelled by a seemingly unceasing appetite for books which seem to contain ideas. Naming authors would be a distraction here, but I’m sure you all have your own candidates. We are attracted, I would suggest, by dramatic, arresting, often counter-intuitive “big theories”, which at least indicates an appetite for conceptual discussion, but we are also easily satisfied with eye-catching headline data, ponderous language and an illusory façade of deep learning and historical awareness. This sometimes leads us to giving more credence and attention than we should to performers who are saying not very much, or making specious, flimsy, tendentious arguments, or combining the two activities.

From my exposure, Yarvin seems to embody this. He points out what is not working well in society and what is different from the past. Great, sure. But what does he actually want, what is his vision of the future, how would he like to change America, let alone the world? Essentially he talks about radical libertarian techno-dictatorships, turning democratic states into joint-stock corporations which elect leaders with absolute power. These monarch-CEOs, unencumbered by democratic checks and balances, would be free to rule wisely, efficiently and effectively.

It’s obviously a fantasy. Even if it were desirable, which I don’t think many people would think it is, how would we start moving towards that? What is the process? Of course that’s not his purpose. He’s a gadfly, a middle-aged man saying provocative things to inspire a reaction (that I am writing this suggests he has some success). But he’s not an important thinker, he is contributing no interesting or valuable ideas. And, regrettably, there are lots of people like him, on the left and the right: attention-seekers and pseudo-intellectuals, stoking the fires of outrage to warm their feet. The only danger they pose is if we start taking them seriously.