True and False Utopias
Curtis Yarvin is a man of too many words. Direct questions receive vague and winding answers, obscured by a fog of esoteric historical references, any clarity lost to the incoherence and sheer volume. So has been the case in every recent profile and each meandering blog post for two decades. So was the case over four days in the Bavarian Alps in February.
Yarvin, who wrote under the name Mencius Moldbug for many years, emerged in the last decade from pseudonymity and the dark recesses of the internet, bringing to the American new right a revival of an old theory of power, hierarchy, and government. A leading figure in the Dark Enlightenment—a loose coalition of anti-democratic thinkers who believe that reason, correctly applied, leads not towards liberalism but away from it—Yarvin has sought to reconstruct a theory of politics that elevates order as the sole goal of government, and concluded that the centralization of power in a singular executive figure is the only sure way to achieve that. And where he peddles in banalities (his condemnation of hegemonic liberalism in media, higher education, and the federal bureaucracy is hardly original) he seeks to compensate with provocation: tired excursions into race and IQ science as well as revisionist musings on fascists and authoritarians of the past.
Yet for all his newfound visibility, Yarvin's readership until recently remained confined to a narrow Silicon Valley set. Associated with Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and J.D. Vance, Yarvin has cultivated an image, and thus a series of luxury invitations and cushy profiles, as the philosopher of the tech-aligned post-liberal right. It was Andreessen who called him a friend; it was Vance who approvingly cited Yarvin’s idea to fire every government employee and replace them with “our people,” the courts be damned, and it was Thiel who funded his startup and, according to one biography, hosted Yarvin as the “house political philosopher” of his network. Yarvin, in private, has been more boastful, claiming to be “coaching Thiel.” It is on the basis of this role, if opaque, within a crucial and powerful network that he found himself at Schloss Elmau, in the Bavarian Alps in late February.
Ivan Krastev, the Bulgarian political scientist and interpreter of Europe’s nightmares, had gathered twenty intellectuals, journalists, and policymakers, including Yarvin, to discuss the theme ‘The World in Pieces.’ Over the course of two dinners, a panel, and a drink that stretched until the mid-morning, Yarvin breathlessly promoted his usual themes: the illegitimacy of democratic rule, the corruption of liberal institutions, and the inadequacy of the current political class—Trump included—to do anything about either. He only briefly mentioned—and quickly moved on from—the fact that he had come to Elmau by way of Vienna, where he was the guest of Martin Sellner, the leader of the Austrian far-right Identitarian movement.
While Yarvin and his politics are becoming increasingly well known in the United States (thanks to outraged yet superficial profiles in national outlets), most consider him to reflect a fringe movement with some powerful friends, but no general uptake. At Schloss Elmau, however, among the European guests and journalists, Yarvin would not be dismissed as a mere curiosity. To Americans he might be an outgrowth of a culture that indulges extremists and provocateurs; but to the Europeans in this schloss, one built by a Nazi-sympathizer, he was not amusing. In their eyes, his politics have a European history and, if he has his way, a European future.
For the two years between October 8th, 2023 and the return of the final Israeli hostage, an Israeli flag had hung at the front gate of Schloss Elmau, reflecting the commitment of its owner and manager, Dietmar, to account for his family’s history. The hotel was built during the First World War by the protestant theologian and philosopher Johannes Müller. A staunch collectivist and nationalist, and a theologian of self-abnegation, he was drawn to the Nazi Party in the early 1930s. At the same time, however, his public condemnation of the Party’s anti-semitism prevented him and his children from ever becoming members. Over a convulsing two decades, Müller was banned from commenting on national events, banned the Hitler salute at Elmau, leased the property to the Wehrmacht in 1942, and was almost sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for subversive activity. Yet, after the war, he was convicted for glorifying Hitler and, in 1947, lost control of Elmau, whereafter it became a sanatorium for displaced persons and survivors of the Holocaust. It has since been the site of a G7 and a G20 conference, and Dietmar has sought to develop a relationship with Jewish scholarship and culture in Germany and Israel, hosting academics, conferences, and concerts.
That this hotel would play host to a leading public intellectual of the modern, post-liberal right-wing at a time of his and its ascendancy compounded anxiety with poignancy. It felt almost cosmically excessive that to get to Elmau, one’s train passes through Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the host city for the 1936 Winter Olympics.
When Yarvin took the stage with Krastev, the audience was rapt. Krastev was hoping to extract a clear and specific articulation of Yarvin’s skepticism of democracy and liberalism and faith in autocratic rule. Instead, the audience was regaled with stories about a hurricane that hit Rhode Island the same day the Berlin Wall came down (no matter that the hurricane was in August and the end of history came in November), digs at Elie Wiesel (but praise heaped on Primo Levi), descriptions of the public “as a woman” to whom one should not appear too “rapey,” a fascination with the physical “equality” of identical twins, and adulation for Krastev’s questions. And no answers.
It requires a special talent to talk for so long and say nothing, neither substance nor controversy, not precision or provocation. His most memorable activity was not confrontation but evasion. In his anti-democratic fashion, he appears to have an unflinching conviction in the veracity of his ideas, but little concern for explaining them to others. If his political revolution is realized, he seems to think, it won’t be because he managed to convince people in Elmau. Rather, it will be because he convinced those who waded through thirty seven thousand words of “How Dawkins Got Pwned,” and found in it a compelling vision.
At Elmau as on his blog, Unqualified Reservations, Yarvin seems scantily concerned with clarity and comprehensibility. The ideas are a loose amalgamation, expressed in a unique fashion, but puddle deep. One must then wonder why he was in Elmau. Why does Ivan Krastev, a genuine intellectual, find it vital to hear him out? Why, in explaining his decision, did Krastev identify Yarvin as a driving intellectual force on the modern post-liberal right? And why is he more deserving of an invitation than academic post-liberals, from Patrick Deneen to Adrian Vermeule?
The conventional answer, and thus the source of his invitation, is that he is the philosopher of the new West Coast techno-elite, articulating a political theory that has been denied oxygen in liberal America. It was his derision for democracy, his skepticism for equality, his veneration for rationalism, and his race-science peddling that had a gravitational pull, sucking the newly-powerful out of the orbit of orthodox Liberalism. In this telling, Yarvin—the long-haired, moto-jacket wearing, peptide-taking dispenser of wisdom—developed a political ideology that uniquely meets the challenges of the 21st century. Those important readers in Silicon Valley experienced their own Damascene conversion, first blinded and then enlightened, turning to a politics of unflinching executive power unconstrained by norms, niceties, and nature. In that telling, he is almost oracular.
Consider, however, the possibility that the conventional story is entirely backwards. The prevailing depiction of Yarvin as part court vizier, part oracle is based on a false premise: that the ideas emerged from him and found those figures, as opposed to the other way around. The more plausible reading reveals that figures like Thiel and Andreessen and the broader Silicon Valley new-right already held these ideas; that they were, independent of Yarvin, skeptical of democracy, tired of the influence of liberal hegemony at home and abroad, and critical of projects pursuing racial, economic, and gender equality. These ideas were, put simply, a pre-existing condition. Is that too far a reach? That men raised on the virtues of the market and turned on by the virility of the unchecked CEO would be amenable to a philosophy that preached precisely that?
And so they reached for Yarvin, seeing in him a source not of wisdom but legitimacy, a member of their own California community, a man who spoke in their references and used their coding language. These men could never plausibly be a legitimate source of their own philosophy, as perfectly encapsulated by Marc Andreessen’s recent proud announcement that he does not think. A more honest confession of idiocy would be hard to find. But perhaps Yarvin, with his cult following, fancy footwork, esoteric references to Frederick II and Charles III, narrow erudition, and child-prodigy origin story could serve as precisely the crutch to lean on in times of intellectual insecurity.
Thus they have built a symbiotic relationship: Silicon Valley needs Yarvin not for ideas but legitimacy, and Yarvin needs the valley for the platform, fame, and influence. The valley has served as the launchpad for a collection of ideas heretofore relegated to small unvisited corners of the internet. He can thank them for his invitation to Elmau.
This story of symbiosis does only half of the explanatory lifting. It stops, however, before it explains why neo-reactionary politics, this blending of what he calls “the modern engineering mentality, and the great historical legacy of antique, classical and Victorian pre-democratic thought,” has such purchase in the first place. That answer lies in an examination of Yarvin’s relationship to the Enlightenment movement he so boldly claims to have forsaken.
That broader Dark Enlightenment movement, of which Yarvin is a leading man, figures itself as the true heirs to the Enlightenment. In their telling, the elevation of reason ought to have led to the expulsion of the liberal values that it ended up, in reality, establishing. Its darkness comes from the inversion of the ends. They may say as much, but that reading reflects the shallowest and least interesting debt Yarvin owes to the Enlightenment.
Yarvin’s true embodiment of that intellectual tradition is found not in his unflinching and emotionless rationalism, but resides in the utopian and maximalist vision that lies at the core of his politics. The faith he places in a solution, and a final one at that, and his deep belief in the capacity to realize revolutionary change through the application of the will, speaks to an Enlightenment ideal far more important, and perhaps far darker, than the trite inversion narrative.
The menacing qualities of Yarvin's politics distract from a harder truth: that the same features which make him dangerous are precisely those which make him magnetic. Utopian thinking and its accompanying visionary politics, despotic at their worst but emancipatory at their best, are energizing rather than enervating. Indeed it is the reintroduction of utopian politics which animates and enables his broader political project. Yarvin’s coterie has returned to political life the idea of the future, long since abandoned by a conservative liberalism focused solely on preservation and by a defanged leftism stripped of its liberating idealism.
It is this conception of the future, of an achievable secular utopia, that makes Yarvin distinct today. He offers a generation raised on bland centrism and incrementalism not just something new but something grand. Its attractive power is, like a black hole, proportional to its scale. Proposing nothing short of an end to the United States as we know it, his politics has the profound capacity to draw attention. And with attention comes power.
Yarvin did not create the hunger that his politics feed. But on to the barren landscape of political theory, scorched by the Second World War, he has emerged as someone willing to revive utopias for the 21st century. That war, existential in its scale and depth of destruction, counted among its dead the possibility of a utopian politics. “The urge,” as Judith Shklar wrote in After Utopia, “to construct grand designs for the political future of mankind is gone.” The radicalness of utopian politics was replaced instead with a crouching and defensive one, concerned with self-preservation, and avoiding at all costs indulging the ambition that fueled totalitarian destruction, Shklar argues. Valid as those fears may have been (and remain) they do nothing to solve the fact that a politics of fear, rather than of utopias, one which has shed its optimism in favor of a superficially mature realism, is one in which “political theory becomes impossible.” We are left to experience only a void, a “cultural fatalism” with no hopes for, nor a conception of, the future.
Yarvin’s influence, his gravitational pull, comes from the aspiration to break out of that cultural fatalism, to articulate a politics that grows out of the long-abandoned soil of the Enlightenment, one rich in optimism and iconoclasm, not wedded to tired shibboleths and wrinkled priests.
Today, one finds in Shklar’s book a framework for understanding Yarvin’s Enlightenment debts and utopian bona fides. There is utopianism in Yarvin’s self confidence; there is utopianism in his faith placed in reason, and there is utopianism in the belief in a singular answer to political questions. These utopian qualities, however, are not reserved simply for the far right. They may not all be desirable—a living pluralism will necessarily resist single answers—but in them one encounters a mode of politics that pulls people in, rather than merely prevents them from leaving.
Utopianism as Action
The first of these utopianisms—that supreme, if blinding, self-confidence—is perhaps Yarvin’s least surprising, given that he calls San Francisco home. In a recent and highly dispiriting portrayal of the new frontier, the British essayist Sam Kriss delivered a stark image of a youth culture rewired by Artificial Intelligence. The creatures of this new lagoon, those young start-up engineers whose vision does not stretch beyond their id, who race sperm and build software for cheating on everything from job interviews to exams to first dates, are predominantly concerned with avoiding the ‘permanent underclass’ at any cost. That fearful vision of an AI future—one in which anyone who did not seize this brief moment to start a podcast or sell slop, or invest in a company selling slop, will be permanently shut out from wealth and prosperity—fuels real anxieties among a generation just now realizing that they are radically ill-prepared for this moment.
Into the breach steps the agentic man, the man who “just does things.” Kriss catalogs the qualities of the agentic individual: “they don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it.”
With roots in the shallow provocation of ‘move fast and break things,’ this culture worships at the feet of the builders and the founders, for they do not merely react to an economy changing around them, but mold it so as to escape the coming underclass. The admiration for action as a means has morphed into veneration for action as an end in itself. It does not really matter what one’s agency is directed towards, one must simply be agentic.
It is this cultural yearning for action that Yarvin’s utopianism taps into. His utopianism is one of high agency, supreme self-confidence bordering on the delusional, and a belief that he will succeed where others have failed and where others think he will fail. When Tocqueville noted in his description of the French Revolution’s Enlightenment leaders that “they were imbued with one admirable faith which we lack: they believed in themselves,” he is revealing a central quality of that era. That boundless confidence in one’s abilities, that one can just do something, that tired dogmas are no longer constraints, is what fueled “a genuinely radical philosophy,” as Shklar writes. Sure of his foundations and committed to an end goal, Yarvin, like the Enlightenment figures before him, believes in himself.
Swollen with confidence, he can quickly appear deluded. Indeed his self-assuredness may very well be hollow. Yet that does nothing to take away from the aesthetic and political power of superficiality and projected conviction. It has a degree of magnetism that says that if you simply take his hand, he will take you on a journey to epistemic and political reality, from which you have been denied access all your life.
The end of utopia and the decline of the Enlightenment also meant the end of radicalism. It is not difficult to think of Yarvin as a radical in our current culture: his provocations on race alone place him outside accepted political discourse. However, it is key to recognize that his deeper radicalism rhymes with that which Shklar identified as a central feature of Enlightenment politics. “The essence of radicalism is the idea that man can do with himself and with his society whatever he wishes… If he is reasonable he will build a rational society; if ignorant, he will live in a state of barbarism,” Shklar writes. This radicalism meant that “to the Enlightenment the political and economic future were open.”
For Yarvin, the future is open and for the taking. What it will take to get there is secondary to it both being there in the first place, and available to whoever seizes upon their own agency. This politics of possibility is, at its core, boundlessly idealistic. Today, in reviving radical political action towards utopian ends, Yarvin has encountered and exploited a central Enlightenment truth: that a future-oriented politics, saturated in idealism and optimism, is magnetic.
While the Silicon Valley culture that Kriss describes and Yarvin inhabits is focused on action as an end in itself, Yarvin draws on that energy and gives it a destination: the engineer’s utopia of order and control, unconcerned with modern inventions like rights and democracy. For a culture increasingly convinced that the only way to avoid perdition is through the aggressive and individualized affirming of one's agency, Yarvin is providing a political superstructure. Rather than defined negatively, his is a positive vision of an idealized, but attainable, political existence.
Paired with this utopia of action, Yarvin appears distinctly disinterested in explaining himself: Trust the vision, drink the KoolAid: details are for suckers and liberals and losers. The vision is the product, the mechanism is irrelevant. His is a fundamentally aesthetic and idealized product: it turns on an image of the individual who takes action, and offers a dream available only to those who do. The evasion of questions of detail, so thoroughly on display at Elmau and across two decades of blogging, is not incidental but essential: those are the concerns of and for the bureaucrats, the proceduralists, the incrementalists, the mimetic rather than the agentic. Ask Yarvin for a detailed answer on how to get to the CEO model, as I and others did over the course of many days, and you will not get an answer. That's not because he can’t produce one, but because the question misunderstands the focus of his politics. Reactionary utopian politics is emphatic in its disinterest in those questions as a way of reaffirming the generative, fruitful agency that lies at the core of its offering.
Utopianism as Rationalism
Yarvin, to his credit, has managed to hold two opposing ideas in his head at once: while worshipping at the altar of agency, he simultaneously maintains the primacy of reason. Indeed, in the neoreactionary dreamscape, reason paired with agency—the paradigmatic Enlightenment equation—is an unstoppable force.
This rationalism is most evidently on display in the two interlocking epistemic analogies that lie at the heart of his political project: the Red-Pill and The Cathedral. The former, borrowing from the Matrix movie franchise, refers to the pill one takes to see the truth which, in his case, refers to the fundamental corruption of liberalism and democracy. When one accepts the Red-Pill, offered by Yarvin in the form of his blog, one comes face-to-face with The Cathedral, an altogether banal concept that merely reheats complaints over the cultural and political dominance of liberal institutions in media and higher education in particular. Yarvin is far from the first to recognize the degree of power that liberal institutions wield in the United States. However, when paired with his red-pill analogy, one sees that the diagnostic components of his political project are essentially epistemic. The fundamental problem with society is that we live and think in a mindless stupor: his first and necessary job is to wake us from this and bring us face-to-face with reality.
To acknowledge that the Enlightenment was a triumph of reason over dogmatism is no less true for being trite. The same goes for the recognition that Yarvin’s is a rationalist project. However, where the overlap is most profound and distinct is in the limitless power that both ascribe to reason.
It is, unsurprisingly, in Isaiah Berlin’s writing that one finds the clearest and most damning illustration of this child-like wonder with which the French Enlightenment perceived the power of reason. That movement’s program “seemed clear: one must scientifically find out what man consists of, and what he needs for his growth and for his satisfaction. When one had discovered what he is and what he requires, one will then ask where this last can be found; and then, by means of the appropriate inventions and discoveries, supply men’s wants, and in this way achieve, if not total perfection, at any rate a far happier and more rational state of affairs than at present prevails.”
While the program of Voltaire and Montesquieu and Rousseau does not resemble Yarvin’s, one can see the utopianism in the scientism: that with the correct application of reason, a correct solution can be reached. And a correct solution, binary in nature, cannot be improved upon. Where Berlin’s analysis is most pointed, however, is in the mirrored nature of the obstacles facing both programs: “Why does it not exist? Because stupidity, prejudice, superstition, ignorance, the passions which darken reason—greed and fear and lust for domination—and the barbarism, cruelty, intolerance, fanaticism which go with them, have led to the deplorable condition in which men have been forced to live too long. Failure, unavoidable or deliberate, to observe what there is in the world has robbed man of the knowledge needed to improve his life.” The essentially epistemic roadblocks are identical for both projects. And in the simplicity of the solution—merely banish ignorance—one encounters the shared utopianism of both projects.
Yarvin is not so simplistic to think that power derives from reason alone. He is far too Machiavellian to be a pacifist. However, the trust he places in reason to solve the fundamental questions of political life reflects a fantastical foundation. And in so doing, he embodies a basic component of Enlightenment optimism. “The fact is,” Shklar wrote in 1956, “that it is next to impossible to believe strongly that the power of human reason expressing itself in political action is capable of achieving its ends. The various theories of determinism prevalent since the last century have long since undermined this hope, and historical disaster has completed the process. Without a glimmer of such optimism, however, political theory becomes impossible.”
In his revived political theory, Yarvin has situated this epistemic question at its heart. Political questions will be solved by a wiser philosopher king, capable of deploying reason and taking action in accordance with it. The vision of a CEO that is at the heart of his political project represents the perfect synthesis of reason and agency by which this political future becomes possible.
In this, he again finds correspondence with Shklar’s analysis of the Enlightenment: “If reason was the supreme guide to progress, the intellectuals, as the most reasonable of men, were entitled to a position of leadership in society.” One should not let Yarvin’s disdain for our current intellectuals distract. His problem is not with intellectuals leading society—in fact, a true meritocracy of IQ is ideal—but with these intellectuals. His hatred for the New York Times and Harvard are not a structural problem but a selection problem. In fact, one could conclude that he is looking for the establishment of a “natural aristocracy” of IQ (and race), an idea to which some Enlightenment figures were, as Shklar notes, sympathetic.
A utopianism infused with a belief in the limitless capacity for reason also speaks to his profoundly secular outlook, and that of his readers, particularly in Silicon Valley. They are free from the restraints on utopian thinking usually imposed by the notion of something greater than themselves. During periods of religiosity, utopianism could be tempered by the humility of divine dependence. But Yarvin has none of that: theological doubt is replaced by atheistic certainty, leading to perfectionist ambition. A simple equation befitting an engineering mindset. In a California and a country now committed to building omnipotent autonomous systems, to coding divinity, these leaders are placing themselves above their divine creations. With no circuit breakers, there is no reason not to place ultimate faith in reason and its perfectionist capabilities.
Utopianism as Monism
There is one more profound utopianism at work here, however. This is the one that undergirds and enables the omnipotent agentic man of history and his all-conquering reason. It is simultaneously Yarvin’s most contemporary and most exhausted idea, his least imaginative yet most energizing faith: that the questions of political life have an answer, and that politics can be treated not as a realm for moral and ethical deliberation, but instead as an arena for the engineer.
A seminal Yarvinian text—A Formalist Manifesto—“sets the stage” for the rest of his work, according to his own blog. It begins, somewhat infamously by now, with: “The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.” One must be careful to avoid falling into the trap of taking his writing at face value, one which has claimed many a liberal critic. Yarvin’s work resists a textual interpretation, his arguments better grasped in silhouette than in detail. However, like any of us, he cannot resist imputing himself into his writing.
Three words stand out from that sentence: tinkering, garage, and build. All three evoke one image: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, tinkering in Jobs’ adopted parents garage, building the technology that would do nothing short of revolutionizing the human experience. What the sentence and the image evoke is the confluence of politics with engineering, reviving the idea that the complex maze of politics has an end point that is singular and correct and final. It is that monism, the true enemy of the pluralist and the liberal and the democrat and the Isaiah Berlin, that provides the crucial scaffolding for Yarvin’s worldview. Indeed there are few things as utopian as the notion that there exists in the universe a single solution to political problems, the discovery of which harkens the final arrival of the ideal order for human life.
His formalist ideology is centered around solving the one political problem he believes to be of singular significance: “organized violence,” cured only by the certainty of sovereign power’s source. Perhaps trite in its thinly veiled restatement of Schmitt’s exception thesis, Yarvin’s prioritization of violence (an even less veiled restatement of Shklar’s most famous essay) yields to only an engineer’s solution. “I think the priorities are pretty clear,” he writes. “The key is to look at this not as a moral problem, but as an engineering problem. Any solution that solves the problem [of violence] is acceptable. Any solution that does not solve the problem is not acceptable.”
Both the problem and the solution reveal the Enlightenment utopianism of Yarvin’s politics: that it can be reduced to a single solution to a single problem. Consistent with his allergy for sincerity and lust for irony, his monism, however, must have two steps. First, politics is condensed to One problem. Once condensed, then the engineer’s mind delivers us to one correct and final solution to that problem. In this, Yarvin is simultaneously timely and out of date. He is returning monism to politics, so abjured by Berlin and so central to his conception of the Enlightenment, and, crucially, the core of the Enlightenment’s descent into totalitarianism. The first step is the utopianism of simplification, the notion that the world can be condensed to and rendered intelligible by a single idea; the second is the utopianism of finality, that a single solution completes and perfects a political equation.
“One belief, more than any other,” Berlin wrote, “is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals—justice or progress or the happiness of future generations, or the sacred mission or emancipation of a nation or race or class, or even liberty itself, which demands the sacrifice of individuals for the freedom of society. This is the belief that somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heart of an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution.”
Berlin’s warning—reflecting his concern about the blend of scientism and perfectionism that fueled totalitarian movements of the 20th century and drew from the Enlightenment—puts Yarvin’s monist utopianism in its proper context. Part of an Enlightenment tradition, but also pulling on its most dangerous impulses. In this respect alone, Berlin would find in Yarvin not a Dark Enlightenment figure but a prototypical Enlightenment figure, precisely because he is so overwhelmingly and dogmatically committed to the principles and values of the movement.
Yarvin’s is a dream universe: one where the answers are always singular, where they can be arrived at by the pure application of reason, and where nothing stands in the way of our future except our own complacency. It is a vision untempered by experience or history, blind in its idealism, solipsistic in its agenda, too expansive to be nuanced and too grand to be grounded. In its unification and simplification of the human experience, it is somewhat soothing for a world overcome with complexity and the experience of irrationalism all around us. Indeed, what to Berlin, among others, are the greatest dangers of this system are in fact its most hypnotic and attractive features.
Utopianism may be banal and, in its simplicity, ill-suited for reality. But housed inside a utopian politics is a vision of the future itself. And the future is not banal nor simple. It ought to be, to borrow from Trilling, marked by variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty. But most importantly, it ought to exist. A politics that has lost the future has lost its purpose and, only once it is too late, will realize it lost the present too. It will have lost the present to those like Yarvin who rediscovered the future as an artefact of political life. Yarvin’s thoroughgoing utopianism—alive in his rationalism, agentic energy, and monism—represents a political energy not consigned to the far right, but available to a liberalism lacking in energy and a vision of the future to animate itself and its people.
When President Trump seized Nicolás Maduro from his home in Caracas, the Democratic Party found itself unsure of how to best respond. They settled on a tried, true, and mostly failed strategy. ‘Leading’ Democrats bemoaned that Congress was not consulted, lawyers were not notified, that the UN was not briefed, and on and on. That was all the party seemed able to muster. Losers, as one friend noted, argue over process, while winners debate substance. Valid as they may be, those are the complaints of a loser, one who bickers over the rules—was he offside, did both feet stay in-bound—rather than find a way to win. In too many ways the response reflected an all too common pathology among liberals to fixate on means rather than ends. Having imbibed a vision of liberalism as entirely neutral, providing merely a scaffolding for the free and equal contestation of normative views, these liberals have gotten drunk. The neutrality and veneration of process has left that same system sclerotic and unattractive to a new generation. Failing to offer a vision of the future, that liberalism is now threatened by a lattice of new theories, Yarvin chief among them, high on their own utopianism, providing a quenching respite.
No recent book of political prognostication and prescription has generated as much widespread attention (capturing almost entirely one of America’s two political parties) as Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance. To those curious as to how a seemingly mundane, process-oriented book on deregulation was so powerful, the answer does not lie in the charts or the appendix or the details. Rather, it is the opening page. It is on that page that the authors paint a picture of 2050: Wind turbines and small nuclear power plants light up the country essentially for free; fresh, clean, desalinated ocean water flows from every faucet; vertical farming and cellular meat has reinvented agriculture as we know it; autonomous drones deliver life-saving drugs at fractions of the prices we know today; electric cars, trucks, and bikes flow through our cities, many of them moving autonomously; AI and economic reforms have rewired the American and global economy, raising living standards and reducing the burdens of back-breaking work.
Whatever one might think of the future they describe, of the viability of the reforms, of the reality of the outcomes, or of the sacrifices necessary to reach them, it is clear what they have done: they have projected a utopia. They have described a future worth sacrificing for, a politics worth committing oneself to, and a seemingly too-good-to-be-true outcome that is nevertheless within our reach. That’s the triumph. Another book on deregulation, on climate reforms, on labor laws, on vertical farming, or, god-forbid, AI, would simply be that: yet another book. That this one so successfully captured the national liberal imagination suggests that something else is at play. If the opening paragraphs are too long, then the title might suffice: to experience anything in abundance is a fundamentally utopian vision.
Almost everyone who has read it (and even more of those who just claimed to read it) lacks the specialized knowledge of housing ordinances and zoning regulation for the book to be of any direct utility. Instead, it derives its popularity and political influence for its ability to craft a utopian image of a politics that is both possible and worthy of sacrifice. Klein and Thompson understood what Yarvin understands: that to energize a population towards a political future, they need to first comprehend it.
If Yarvin is instructive it is that he reveals an underlying and unabating longing in the contemporary politics of liberal democracies: a longing for something beyond the merely procedural, beyond the morally neutral, beyond the aesthetically beige and normatively vacuous. That longing is a call to reclaim the values of the Enlightenment from its thieves. While remaining cognizant of the excesses as Berlin urges, it would be a mistake to forget that boldness begets boldness, that a utopian energy begets utopian action, and that a vision of the future begets a future of our vision. Moreover, the inverse is also true, timidity begets incrementalism, cowardice invites defeat, and caution curdles into paralysis.
The Harvard historian Jill Lepore, in a brief monograph on the construction of national histories, noted that those histories will always be attractive and if they are not written by historians committed to academic rigor and the truth, they will be written by liars. People can get their national histories from “scholars or they can get it from demagogues, but get it they will,” she writes. Today, people will either get their bold visions of the future from liberals or post-liberals, but get it they will. Yarvin has an offer. It is up to liberals, descendants of both Shklar and Berlin, of both the Enlightenment and the tragic tradition that tempered it, to decide if it will make an offer of its own.
There is an obvious question that arises when one spends enough time in the bowels of Unqualified Reservations, following Yarvin on Twitter, or sharing three negronis and a bottle of wine with him in a hotel in the German mountains: does any of this actually matter? Am I, are we (noting his profiles in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and his invitation to Elmau), taking far too seriously an online blogger who made it big through some combination of his profound good luck and our distinct misfortune? In a world of posters, is he not just another poster?
In the contest for the preservation and renovation of pluralistic, open, and forward looking liberalism, we ought to count ourselves fortunate that his impenetrable writing, meandering answers, and incomprehensible historical analysis keep him contained in a cage of his own construction. For as long as that is the case, there will be a limit to the reach and breadth of the animating core of his political worldview. However, where our misfortune reemerges is in the ability of those unburdened by his challenges to translate him into a political language that might find a warmer reception.
Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen have been chiefly accused of trafficking in Yarvin’s thought. So far, the limit of their influence and power has been exposed. DOGE—the clearest attempt to govern like a CEO—was a spectacle much like the Challenger explosion: destructive, tragic, a failure of technology, and painful to a nation which saw something worthy in the rubble. Yet there will come a day, perhaps as soon as 2028, when the political agenda of Yarvin—of ever concentrated and expansive executive authority to the point where a resemblance to three co-equal branches is illusory, of unwound racial and social progress, of utter chaos (beyond our current chaos) let loose upon the world—will be realized by another creature of the far right. He will have spent the 2000s swimming in the swamp Yarvin nurtured and he will have found that swamp and those decades profoundly radicalising. That man will have found the esoteric references neat and useful for chat-room dunking but will have been pulled in not by the small details but the grand vision, the utopian revolution he promises, and the bridge to the 16th century he swears is under construction.