Curtis Yarvin Says

Democracy Is Done. Powerful

Conservatives Are Listening.
The once-fringe writer has long argued for
an American monarchy. His ideas have
found an audience in the incoming
administration and Silicon Valley.
Jan. 18, 2025

“For years, Curtis Yarvin had been writing online about

political theory in relative obscurity. His ideas were pretty
extreme, that institutions at the heart of American
intellectual life, like the mainstream media and academia,
need to be dissolved. He also believes that government
bureaucracy should be radically gutted and that American
democracy should be replaced by what he calls a monarchy
run by a C.E.O.” “Monarch is good. It’s a neutral term.” “But
while Yarvin himself may still be obscure, his ideas are not.
Vice President-elect JD Vance has alluded to his notions of
forcibly ridding American institutions of so-called wokeism.
And Yarvin has also found fans in the most powerful and
increasingly political ranks of Silicon Valley, like Marc
Andreessen, the venture capitalist turned informal advisor to
President-elect Trump.” “We are living under F.D.R.’s
personal monarchy.” “Peter Thiel, a Republican mega-donor,
has called him a powerful historian. On top of it all, Yarvin
has become a fixture of the right-wing podcast universe.
He’s been a guest on the shows of Tucker Carlson and
Charlie Kirk, among others.” “Thank you for that lovely intro,
Tucker.” “I’ve been aware of Yarvin for years, but always
thought of his work as pretty fringe. A lot of what Yarvin has
to say is disturbing. And the historical evidence he justifies it
with is riddled with exaggeration, distortion and sometimes
just plain inaccuracy. But given that his ideas are now finding
an audience with some of the most powerful people in the
country, Yarvin can’t be so easily dismissed anymore.”
“When you say to a New York Times reader, ‘Democracy is
bad,’ they’re a little bit shocked. But when you say to them
politics is bad or even populism is bad, they’re like, of
course, these are horrible things.” “I’m David Marchese, and
here’s my conversation with writer Curtis Yarvin.” [MUSIC
PLAYING] “To my understanding, one of your central
arguments is that America needs to — I think the way you
put it in the past is — get over our dictator phobia, that
American democracy is a sham, beyond fixing, and having a
monarch-style leader, or call it a C.E.O., or call it a dictator,
that’s the way to go. So why is democracy so bad? And why
would having a dictator solve the problem?” “Let me answer
that in, I think, a way that will be relatively accessible to
readers of The New York Times. You’ve probably heard of a
man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” “Yes.” “I do a speech
sometimes where I’ll just read the last 10 paragraphs of
F.D.R.’s first inaugural address, in which F.D.R. essentially
says to the American people, ‘Hey, Congress, give me
absolute power, or I’ll take it anyway.’ So did F.D.R. actually
take that level of power? Yeah, he did. And so there’s a great
piece that I’ve sent to some of the people that I know that
are involved in the transition —” “Who?” “I mean, there’s all
sorts of people milling around in there.” “Name one.” “Name
one. Wow. Name one. Well, I definitely know Marc
Andreessen. And so I sent this piece to Marc Andreessen.
And it’s an excerpt from the diary of Harold Ickes, who was
F.D.R.’s secretary of the interior. And it’s a little diary entry
describing a cabinet meeting in 1933. And what happens in
this cabinet meeting is that Frances Perkins, who’s the
secretary of labor, comes in to this meeting and is, like, here,
I have a list of the projects that we’re going to do. FDR
personally takes this list, looks at the projects in New York.
He’s like, this is crap, this is crap. I don’t know what you’re
doing. Like, humiliates Frances Perkins in the Oval Office, or
wherever they’re having their cabinet meeting. And then at
the end of the thing, it’s like everybody agrees that the bill
will be fixed and then passed through Congress. This is just
a picture of FDR acting like a CEO. And so the question of,
Was FDR a dictator? What does it mean to be a dictator?
What does this pejorative word mean? I don’t know. What I
know is that Americans of all stripes, Democrats,
Republicans and everyone except for a few right-wing
Republicans, basically revere F.D.R. And F.D.R. ran the New
Deal like a start-up.” “So as I understand it, the point you’re
trying to make is that we have had something like a dictator
in the past in American history. And therefore, it’s not
something to be afraid of now. Is that —” “Yeah.” “— right?”
“What we see in the course of — to look at the objective
reality of power in the U.S. since the revolution — you’ll talk
to people about the Articles of Confederation. And you’re
just like, name one thing that happened in America under the
Articles of Confederation. And they can’t unless they’re a
professional historian. Next, you have the first constitutional
period under George Washington. If you look at the
administration of Washington, what you’ll see is that
basically what is established looks a lot like a start-up. It
looks so much like a start-up that this guy, Alexander
Hamilton, who was recognizably a start-up bro, is running
the whole government. He’s basically the Larry Page of this
republic. He’s nominally the secretary.” “I have to say, I feel
like I’m asking you, What did you have for breakfast? And
you’re saying, well, the dawn of man, when cereals —” “I’m
doing —” “— were first —” “— a Putin.” “— cultivated —” “I’m
doing a Putin. I’ll speed this up.” “And then answer the
question, what’s so bad about democracy?” “All right. To
make a long story short, whether you want to call
Washington, Lincoln and F.D.R. dictators, this opprobrious
word, what they were was basically national C.E.O.s. And
they were running the government like a company from the
top down.” “So why is democracy so bad?” “So it’s not even
that democracy is bad. It’s just that it’s very weak. And the
fact that it’s very weak is basically easily seen by the fact
that very unpopular policies like mass immigration persist
despite strong majorities being against them. So the
question of basically, is democracy good or bad, is, I think, a
secondary question to, Is it what we actually have? When
you say to a New York Times reader, ‘Democracy is bad,’
they’re a little bit shocked. But when you say to them politics
is bad or even populism is bad, they’re like, of course, these
are horrible things. And so the thing is, when you basically
want to be say democracy is not a good system of
government, just bridge that immediately to saying populism
is not a good system of government. And then you’ll be like,
yes, of course. Actually, policy and law should be set by wise
experts and people in the courts and lawyers and professors
and so forth. Then you’ll realize that what you’re actually
endorsing is aristocracy rather than democracy.” “Your ideas
are ones that have been pointed to by people in real
positions of power in the Republican Party. I think it’s
probably overstated the extent to which you and JD Vance
are friends.” “It’s definitely overstated.” “He has mentioned
you by name publicly and referred to de-wokeification ideas
that are very similar to yours. You’ve been on Michael
Anton’s podcast. And Michael Anton has been tapped by
Trump to be high up in the State Department, talking with
him about how to install an American caesar. Peter Thiel, a
major Republican donor, has said you’re an interesting
thinker. And so let’s say people in actual positions of power
said to you, Curtis, we’re going to do the Curtis Yarvin thing.
What are the steps that they would take to change American
democracy into something like a monarchy?” “My honest
answer would have to be, ‘It’s not exactly time for that yet,’
because what I see happening in D.C. right now, nobody
should be watching this panicking thinking I’m about to be
installed as America’s secret dictator. And I don’t think I’m
even going to the inauguration.” “Were you invited?” “No, no,
no. Like, I’m an outsider, man. I’m an intellectual. And the
actual ways in which my ideas get into circulation is actually
mostly through the staffers and the kind of younger people
who basically kind of swim in this very online kind of soup.
And I think that’s fine. I think that what’s happening now in
D.C., to distinguish my much more radical ideas from what’s
happening now — I would say that’s what’s happening now is
there’s definitely an attempt to revive the White House as an
executive organization, which governs the executive branch.
And the difficulty with that is if you go to Washington and
say to anyone who’s professionally involved in the business
of Washington that Washington would work just fine or even
better if there was no White House at all, and they’ll basically
be like, ‘Yeah, of course.’ The executive branch works for
Congress. So you have these poor voters out there who
elected, as they think, a revolution. They elected Donald
Trump and maybe the world’s most capable C.E.O. is in
there.” “And your point is, he can’t — the way the system is
set up, he can’t actually get that much —” “He can’t actually
do that much to it. He can block things. He can disrupt it. He
can create chaos and turbulence, or whatever. But he can’t
really change what it is.” “Do you think you’re maybe
overstating the inefficacy of a president? You could point to
the repeal of Roe as something that’s directly attributable to
Donald Trump being president.” “Yes.” “One could argue that
the Covid response was attributable to Donald Trump, I
think.” “I think the Covid response is a slightly better
example. Certainly many things about Covid were different
because Donald Trump was president. I’ll tell you a funny
story —” “Sure.” “— at the risk of bringing my children into
the media. In 2016, my son —” “Who’s how old?” “He’s now
14. He was 6 then. And my children were going to a chichi,
progressive Mandarin-immersion school in San Francisco.
And so —” “Oh, you send your kids to a — sorry I’m laughing.
You send your kids to a chichi progressive school.” “At that
time — Mandarin immersion.” “The rubber hits the road, if
that’s what happens. Yeah.” “Indeed. And you can’t isolate
children from the world, right? And so, at the time, my late
wife and I did not. We just adopted the simple expedient of
not talking about politics in front of the children —” “Smart
move.” “— which I recommend to everyone. But of course,
everyone’s talking about it at school. And my son comes
home, and he has this very concrete question. He’s like, Pop,
when Donald Trump builds a wall around the country, how
are we going to be able to go to the beach? And I’m like,
wow, you really took him literally. Like, everybody else is
taking him literally, but you really took him literally. And I was
like, If you see anything in the real world around you, over the
next four years, that changes as a result of this election, I’ll
be surprised.” “In one of your recent blog posts — I guess it’s
a newsletter, not a blog, at this point — you referred to JD
Vance as, I think, a normie.” - [LAUGHS] “What do you
mean?” “I would say that the thing that I admire about
Vance, and the thing that’s really remarkable about him as a
leader, is that I think that he contains within him all kinds of
Americans. His ability to connect with flyover Americans in
the world that he came from is, of course, very, very great.
But the other thing that’s neat about him is that he went to
Yale — Yale Law School, in fact. And so he can connect at a
— he’s a fluent speaker of the language of The New York
Times, which you cannot say about Donald Trump. And one
of the things that I believe really strongly, that I haven’t
touched on when I talk about monarchy, is I think that it’s
utterly essential for anything like an American monarchy, you
have to be the president of all Americans. And I think this is
something that, basically, the new administration could do a
much better job of reaching out to progressive Americans
and not demonizing them and basically saying: Hey, you
want to make this country a better place. I feel like you’ve
been misinformed in some ways. You’re not a bad person.
This is, like, 10 to 20 percent of Americans. This is a lot of
people are, like, the N.P.R. class. But they are not bad
people, evil people who want to do —” “Yeah.” “But the thing
is, they’re human beings. We’re all human beings. And,
human beings can support bad regimes.” “The question was,
why did you call JD Vance a normie?” “Because he contains
within him normie-ness.” “All right. There you go.” “But he is
also an intellectual, and he contains within him
intellectualness.” “And so what you just said about the
administration could do a better job of reaching out to
progressives, and we’re all human beings, as you well know,
that’s a pretty different stance than the stance you often
take in your writing, where you —” - [LAUGHS] “Right. You’re
laughing because you know it’s true — where you talk about
things like de-wokeification how people who work —” “Those
things are —” “— at places like The New York Times should
all lose our jobs. You have an idea for a program called
RAGE, Retire All Government Employees. You have ideas,
which I hope are satirical, about how to handle
nonproductive members of society, that involve basically
locking them in a room forever. So why is your tone — has
your thinking shifted?” “No, no, no.” “Is your rhetorical tone
different in a setting like this?” “You’re looking for different —
my thinking has definitely not shifted. And you’re finding
different emphases. It’s like when I talk about RAGE, for
example, both my parents worked for the federal
government. They were career federal employees.” “It’s a
little on the nose, from a Freudian perspective.” “It is.” “But
yeah, go on.” “It is. But the thing is, basically, when you look
at the way — when you look at the way to treat those
institutions, I’m just like, treat it like a company that goes out
of business. But sort of more so because these people,
having had power, have to actually be treated even more
delicately and with even more respect. And winning means
these are your people now. And so the thing is, when you
understand the perspective of the new regime with respect
to the American aristocracy, their perspective can’t be the
sort of anti-aristocratic thing of, like, we’re going to bayonet
all the professors and throw them in ditches or whatever.
Their perspective has to be that you were a normal person
serving a regime that did this really weird and crazy stuff.”
“How invested do you think JD Vance is in democracy?” “It
depends what you mean by democracy. I mean, I think that
the problem is, basically, when people equate democracy
with good government. When you use that word, you’re
using a very tricky word. I would say that what someone like
— I’m on very safe ground, despite not knowing him well at
all — that someone like JD Vance believes essentially in the
common good and the idea that government should serve
the common good. And I think that people like JD and
people in the broader intellectual scene around him, which is
a very varied intellectual scene, would all agree on that
principle. Now, if that principle — I don’t know what you
mean by democracy, in this context. What I do know is that if
democracy is against the common good, it’s bad. And if it’s
for the common good, it’s good.” “I think what you just
described might be something that Peter Thiel would agree
with. And there was —” “I think a progressive could agree
with it.” “And there was a reporting that I saw. I think it was
2017, reporting done by BuzzFeed, where they published
some emails, I think, between you and the right-wing
provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, where you talked about
watching the 2016 election with Peter Thiel and referred to
him as fully enlightened. What would ‘fully enlightened’ have
meant in that context?” “’Fully enlightened,’ for me, generally
means fully disenchanted. When I look at, basically, what the
kinds of people that I know, not really that well, in Silicon
Valley think, I’m basically like, Have people like this been
exposed to my ideas? Yes. Do they agree that America
should be a monarchy? I doubt it, but I have no idea. But
what they agree on is not a belief but a disbelief. So I think
that when a person who lives their life within the progressive
bubble, liberal bubble, use whatever term you like, of the
current year, looks at the right, or even the new right, or
whatever you want to call it, I think what’s hardest to see is
that what’s really shared is not a positive belief but an
absence of belief. Basically, we don’t worship these same
gods. We do not see The New York Times and Harvard as
divinely inspired in any sense. Or we do not see their
procedures as ones that always lead to truth and wisdom.
We do not think that the way the U.S. government works,
really works well or seems to be perfect in any respect.” “And
this absence of belief is what you call enlightened.” “Yes.”
“OK.” “Yes. It’s a disenchantment from believing in these old
systems. And the right thing that should replace that
disenchantment is not, ‘Oh, we need to go do things Curtis’s
way,’ and is basically just a greater openness of mind, and a
greater ability to look around and say, you know, like, we just
assume that our political science is superior to Aristotle’s
political science because our physics is superior to
Aristotle’s physics. What if that isn’t so?” “You’re basically
saying there’s a historical and political recency bias that
people are susceptible to.” “Yes, exactly.” “But I think the
thing that you have not quite isolated yet is why having a
strong-man figure would be better for people’s lives. Can
you answer that question?” “Yes. Number one, I think that
having an effective government and an efficient government
is better for people’s lives. And I think that the best answer,
when I ask people to answer that question, I ask them to look
around the room and basically point out everything in the
room that was made by a monarchy. Because these things
that we call companies are actually little monarchies. And
then you’re looking around yourself and you see, for
example, a laptop. And that laptop was made by Apple,
which is a monarchy. And it has a little thing on it that says
designed in California and made in China. It is made —” “This
is an example you use a lot, where you say, and if Apple ran
California, wouldn’t that be much better?” “Whereas if your
MacBook Pro was made by the California Department of
Computing, you can only imagine it. I’m sorry. I’m here in this
building, and I keep forgetting to make my best argument for
monarchy, which is that people trust The New York Times
more than any other source in the world. And how is The
New York Times managed? It is a fifth-generation,
hereditary, absolute monarchy. And so we’ve basically taken,
in some ways — and this was very much the vision of the
early progressives, by the way. The early progressives, even,
like, the pre-World War I progressives, you go back to a book
like ‘Drift and Mastery’ are very —” “I have to say, I find the
depth of background information to be obfuscating rather
than illuminating. But —” “How can I change that? How can I
make that —” “By answering the questions more directly and
succinctly, I think would be the simple reply.” “Fine. I’ll try.”
“But the thing I’d like to say, just to tie this back a little bit to
something we spoke about a minute ago, is there is this idea
that the incoming Trump administration is interested in the
idea of a more powerful executive office. Are there things
that you would like to see or, if you saw them, would be hints
to you that the Trump administration is taking the right steps,
as you might see it, towards actually enacting that reality
and becoming a stronger executive, a more monarchical
executive office.” “I would say that the incoming Trump
administration, with all due respect — and there’s a lot of
great people there and people who are working extremely
hard. Unfortunately, I would say that they’re essentially
finding themselves in a position where they’re trying to
untangle the Gordian knot.” “Meaning what?” “Meaning that
they’re basically trying to — let’s take just NASA, in specific.
So for example, if you compare NASA to SpaceX, that’s a
fine example of, actually, all of the principles that I’ve been
describing because NASA was once as efficient as SpaceX.
So if you basically say, OK, at a very abstract level, forget the
rest of the government. Elon, go and fix NASA. The goal of
NASA is to give us cool space [BLEEP]. We feel like we’re not
getting enough cool space [BLEEP]. You have $25 billion a
year. Go and do cool space [BLEEP]. I think you would get a
lot more cool space [BLEEP]. under that principle. But one of
the basic principles of kind of the California startup way of
thinking is just to realize it’s way easier to create a new NASA
than it is to fix the old NASA. And that principle extends
around the government.” “Your ideas, and I guess it’s been
called a neo-reactionary cast of mind, are seemingly
increasingly popular in the Silicon Valley world. Don’t you
think there’s some level on which that world is responding to
your ideas because you’re just telling them what they want
to hear? If more people like me were in charge, things would
be better. It’s an ideologically useful set of arguments for
them to latch onto.” “The funny thing is, I think that’s almost
the opposite of the truth. It’s like, let me give you a very
simple illustration of this. Someone I have actually never met,
believe it or not, is Elon Musk. Now, Elon tweeted the other
day. He was like, the proper structure of government on
Mars should be not just a democracy but a direct
democracy. Let me examine the thinking behind Musk saying
this, because I find it extremely odd, in a sense. Because one
of the things about monarchy that’s been known for quite
some time — and again, even in very, very anti-monarchical
regimes and periods, an exception is made for this — is that
a ship always has a captain. An airplane always has a
captain. Basically, in any very safety-critical environment —”
“You should have someone in charge.” “You should have
someone in charge. But the thing is, you look at, basically, a
Mars colony, and you’re just like, really? Are the citizens of
the Mars colony going to vote on how to replenish the
oxygen supply or whatever? No, of course not. The Mars
colony that Elon establishes will be a subsidiary of SpaceX,
and it will have someone in charge. And it will have a
command hierarchy, just like SpaceX does. And so I’m like,
Elon, when you say that this should be a democracy, what
are the people voting on. And so there’s this world of actually
real governance that someone like Elon Musk lives in every
day. And actually applying that world, applying that thinking
to being like, Oh, this thinking is directly contradictory, in a
sense, to the ideals that I was taught in this society — that’s
a really difficult cognitive-dissonance problem, even if you’re
Elon Musk.” “When I hear you talk about the need for a
monarch — and we’ll just use that term, encompassing
C.E.O.s or dictators. I’ll just say monarch for now.” “’Monarch’
is good. It’s a neutral term.” “It would be an understatement
to say that humanity’s record with monarchs is mixed at
best. Roman Empire under Marcus Aurelius seems like it
went pretty well. Under Nero, not so much. Spain’s Charles III
is a monarch you point to a lot. He’s sort of your favorite
monarch. Louis XIV, he’s starting wars like they’re going out
of business. And then in — those are all before the age of
democracy. And then if you look in more —” “The monarchs
in the age of democracy are just terrible.” “Terrible. I can’t
believe I’m saying a phrase like this. If you put Hitler aside
and only look at Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Idi Amin,
we’re looking at people responsible for the deaths of
something like 75 to a hundred million people. So given that
historical precedent, do we really want to try dictatorship?”
“Your question is the most important question of all.
Because, basically, understanding why Hitler was so bad,
why Stalin was so bad, is really essential to the riddle of the
20th century. But I think it’s important to note that we don’t
see, for the rest of European and world history — human
history as a whole is a mixed bag. The history of the age of
democracy in the last 250 years is also a mixed bag. And —”
“But we don’t see in human history what? You didn’t finish
the thought.” “A holocaust. You can pull the camera way
back and basically say, wow, in Europe since basically the
establishment of European civilization from 1000 A.D. to
1750 A.D., we didn’t have this kind of chaos and violence.
And then you can’t separate Hitler and Stalin from the global
democratic revolution that they’re a part of.” “But one thing I
noticed when I was going through your stuff is that you make
these historical claims like the one you just made about no
genocide in Europe between 1000 A.D. and the Holocaust,
essentially. And then I poke around with it. Huh, is that true?
And then you think, well —” “You have the sack of — — there
was Tamerlane. He killed —” “Tamerlane was not — I meant
Europe, though.” “Well, OK, on the edges of Europe. And
then, that’s sort of like a goalpost shift there. But then you
think, well, there were there’s the French wars of religion.
They killed millions of people, including the massacre of the
Huguenots.” “Wait, wait, wait, wait.” “So I often find, when
you just scratch a little at some of the historical —” “Wait.
There was no massacre of Huguenots. I think you’re
confusing it with a sack of Béziers and the massacre of the
Albigensians.” “So they got massacred, not the Huguenots.”
“Yeah. But the thing is, when people look at the Holocaust,
they saw it like a new species of deviltry that had not really
existed in the world in that way before. When you see a city
sacked in the Middle Ages, you see just, like, wild,
undisciplined troops raging around. You don’t see lines of
people marched to their deaths.” “My skepticism comes
from what I feel like is a pretty strong cherry-picking of
historical incidents to support your arguments. And then I
look, and the incidents that you’re pointing to are either not
necessarily factually settled or there’s a different way of
looking at them. But I actually want to — just because some
of the historical references are now actually making my head
hurt, I just want to ask a couple very concrete questions
about some of the stuff that you’ve written about race, for
example, which seems pretty provocative, to say the least.
I’ll read you some examples. ‘This is the trouble with white
nationalism. It is strategically barren. It offers no effective
political program.’ To me, the trouble with white nationalism
is that it’s racist, not that it’s strategically unsophisticated.”
“No —” “There’s two more. There’s two more. ‘It is very
difficult to argue that the Civil War made anyone’s life more
pleasant, including that of freed slaves.’ Come on.” “Let’s go
— The third one. The third one. ‘If you ask me to condemn
Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, but adore
Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you’d like to
[BLEEP].” - [LAUGHS] “So —” “That was so, so, so, oh, let’s
go, let’s go — let’s go through each —” “And this is a guy
who’s saying —” “Let’s go —” “— we’ll live through —” “Let’s
go, let’s go —” “— we’ll achieve harmony.” “Let’s go, let’s go
through each of those examples. And so when you look, for
example, at Mandela, the reason I said that — most people
don’t know this — there was a little contretemps when
Mandela was released because he actually had to be taken
off the terrorist list.” “Maybe the more relevant point is that
Nelson Mandela was in jail for opposing a viciously racist
apartheid regime, but —” “The viciously racist apartheid
regime, basically, they had him on the terrorist list. So if you
look at —” “Let’s get the —” “Let’s get to the other two.” “But
again, your quote was, ‘If you ask me to condemn Anders
Breivik but adore Nelson Mandela’—” “I’d prefer to condemn
them both. And the thing is, basically, when you look at the
impact, you see —” “What does this have to do with equating
Anders Breivik, who shot people on some bizarre, deluded
mission to rid Norway of Islam, with Nelson Mandela?”
“Because they’re both terrorists. And because they basically
both violated the rules of war in the same way. And they both
basically killed innocent people. We valorize terrorism all the
time. This valorization of —” “So Gandhi, then, is your model.
Martin Luther King, nonviolent —” “It’s more complicated
than that. But —” “Is it?” “— I could say things about either.
But let’s move on to one of your other examples. I think the
best way to basically grapple with that period directly —”
“Which period are we talking about now?” “1860s.” “OK,
yeah. So now we’re talking about the Civil War.” “African
Americans in the 1860s. The thing that you can do, that any
Times reader can do, just go to your Google bar and google
‘slave narratives.’ Just go and read random slave narratives
and get their experience of the time. So the thing is that,
basically, the treatment of the freed slaves after the war is
extremely — there was a recent historian who published a
thing. And I think this is — I would dispute this. This number
is too high. But his estimate was that something like a
quarter of all the freedmen basically die in between 1865
and 1870.” “Yeah. Well, again, I can’t speak to the veracity of
that.” “That’s too high. Anyway, anyway, the thing is,
basically, like, you know —” “But you’re saying there are
historical examples in slave narratives where the freed slaves
themselves expressed regret at having been freed. But this,
to me, is another prime example of how you selectively read
history. Because if you read other slave narratives where
they talk about the horrible brutality of it.” “Absolutely.” “So,
so what that there are some slave narratives —” “And I say
this, and I say this —” “How does that justify —” “And I say
this in the conversation.” “—’made anyone’s life, more
pleasant.’ Difficult to argue that the Civil War made anyone’s
life more pleasant, including freed slaves. Their children were
no longer sold out from under them.” “When I said ‘anyone’—
OK, first of all, when I said ‘anyone,’ I was talking about a
population group rather than individuals.” “But are you
seriously arguing that the era of slavery was somehow better
than the era —” “The era of 1865 to 1875 was absolutely —
and the war itself wasn’t good either — but if you look at the
living conditions for an African American in the South, they
are absolutely at their nadir between 1865 and 1875. They
are very, very bad because, basically, this economic system
has been disrupted —” “But abolition was a necessary step
to get through that period to make people free. I can’t
believe I’m arguing this.” “Brazil abolished slavery in the
1880s without a civil war. And so the thing is, when you look
at, basically, the cost of the war or the meaning of the war,
you’re basically just, like, it just visited this huge amount of
destruction on all sorts of people, Black and white, just
massive. I’m just, like, all of these evils and all of these goods
existed in people at this time. And what I’m fighting against
in both of those quotes, also in the way that people respond
to Breivik, I’m like, basically, you’re responding in this kind of
cartoonish way to something that terrorism, which is — what
is the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter?
That’s a really important question in 20th-century history. To
say that I’m going to have a strong opinion about this stuff
without having an answer to that question, I think is really
difficult and wrong.” “Now maybe you think I haven’t been
red-pilled or whatever, or I’m not thinking through these
issues enough. But I feel like, to me, you can call it
cartoonish. I call it very morally clear. I can say something
like, I think slavery was bad. I’m glad there are no longer
enslaved people. And then to hear you then say, well, you
have to look at it from this other perspective. This is a one-
dimensional view of history. I think, well, no, I think it’s pretty
cut and dry. It just is very fascinating to me that your ideas,
which strike me as pretty extreme — there were fringe ideas,
to me, that apparently are no longer on the fringe. And I
don’t know. What do you think that says about conservatism
today? Your ideas.” “I think that American conservatism is in
the long and very, very difficult grieving process of realizing
that it has always been a fraud. And I think one of the
especially dangers in American conservatism is that there’s
so much grift in it, and so much of it consumes so much
energy and so much attention, and produces so little. You
are still a factor of a hundred from being able to give the
people who are voting for you and donating to you anything
like what they imagine they’re going to get from you.” “And
when you say it’s a fraud, I take that to mean, insofar as it’s
conservatism is just —” “The Washington Generals are never
going to win the game. It just doesn’t have the power to give
anything that it promises.” [ELECTRONIC MUSIC] After the
break, I call Curtis back to ask more about the incoming
administration. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me
again. I appreciate it. “Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
It was fun. Let’s have some more fun.” “You do so often draw
on the history of the pre-democratic era, which is a historical
period exactly coterminous with, for example, women being
treated as second-class citizens. And the status of women in
that time period, which you valorize, is not something I’ve
really seen come up in your writings. Do you feel like your
arguments take enough into account the way that
monarchies and dictatorships historically tend not to be
great for big swaths of demographics?” “OK, so let’s look at
enfranchisement in specific. So when I look at the status of
women in, say, a Jane Austen novel, which is well before
enfranchisement, it actually seems kind of OK. The women
in Jane Austen’s book seems to be fine.” “Who are desperate
to land a husband because they have no access to income
without them.” “Well, have you ever seen anything like that in
the 21st century? I mean, the whole class in Jane Austen’s
world is the class of, like, UBI-earning aristocrats.” “But are
you not willing to say that there were aspects of political life
in the era of kings that were inferior or provided less liberty
for people than political life does today?” “It’s very hard. So
first of all, when we say when we say ‘liberty,’ for example —
so you did a thing that people often do where they confuse
freedom with power. Free speech is a freedom. The right to
vote is a form of power. And so the assumption that you’re
making is that through getting the vote in the early 20th
century in England and America, woman made life better for
themselves.” “Do you think it’s better that women got the
vote?” “First of all, I don’t believe in actually voting at all.”
“Do you vote?” “No. I believe that voting is providing this
almost kind of pornographic stimulus. It becomes more like
supporting your football team or something. It basically
enables you to feel like you have a certain status. But the
thing is, ‘What does this power mean to you?’ is really the
most important question. And I think that what it means to
most people today is that it provides a source of meaning for
them and makes them feel relevant. It makes them feel like
they matter, in a sense. And I think that there’s something
deeply illusory about that sense of mattering that goes up
against the very, very important question of we need a
government that is actually good and that actually works.
And we don’t have one.” “So the solution that you propose it
has to do with, like we’ve said multiple times now, installing
you can call it a monarch, you can call it a C.E.O. figure. And
the result of investing an individual with the power of a C.E.O.
would be hopefully a more efficient, more responsive, more
effective government. Why do you seem to have such faith
in the ability of C.E.O.s? I mean, most start-ups fail. And we
can all point to C.E.O.s who are effective, C.E.O.s who have
been ineffective. And putting that aside, that a C.E.O. or
dictator is more likely to think of a state’s citizens as pure
economic units rather than living, breathing human beings
who want to flourish in their lives, who deserve the dignity of
a secure retirement or meaningful leisure time. So why are
you so confident that a C.E.O. would be the kind of leader
who could bring about better lives for people? It just seems
like such a simplistic way of thinking.” “It’s not a simplistic
way of thinking. And having worked inside the kind of salt
mines where C.E.O.s do their C.E.O.-ing business, and
having been a C.E.O. myself, I think I have a better sense of
it, maybe, unfortunately, than most people. Last time we
spoke, I used the example of, imagine if your MacBook had
to be made by the California Department of Computing, or if
your car, or your electric car, had to be made by the U.S.
Department of Transportation. The thing is, the things that
make companies succeed or fail —” “I will say, Apple and
Tesla, by the way, though, have both benefited greatly from
government help in various forms.” “Well, they live in a
governed society. And so the thing is, basically, when
libertarians talk about Apple and Tesla, they’re saying, OK,
here are the benefits of freedom, et cetera, et cetera, et
cetera. That’s sort of true, in a sense. But the benefit of
freedom is that these organizations have used freedom to
establish monarchies, which are completely top-down
command units.” “We’ve gotten away from the central
question a little bit, which is —” “Let me — that’s the
question —” “Why are you so confident that C.E.O.s —”
“That’s the question —” “Yeah.” “That’s the question of
efficiency. And so when I basically look at systems run by
C.E.O.s, I’m just, like, basically, I think that if you took any of
the Fortune 500 C.E.O.s, some of them are good, some of
them are bad. But the overall quality, just pick one at
random, and put him or her in charge of Washington, and I
think you’d get something much, much better than what’s
there. It doesn’t have to be Elon Musk. The median
performance is so much better. But you asked something
that I think is a more important and more interesting
question, which is, you’re like, OK, America needs a C.E.O.
who will be economically efficient. The C.E.O. who will be
economically efficient will think of human beings as pure
economic units and will do things like, wow —” “Well, no, just
the idea that a company has goals that are not necessarily
the same goals as what a government might have, insofar as
providing for its citizens.” “Perfect, perfect question. The
thing is, normally we think of the goal of a company as
making a profit or just selling more stuff. But that’s not,
actually, really the goal of a company. The real goal of a
company is to maximize the worth of its assets and to make
the stock price go up. It’s basically, like, one of the ways to
unify the worldview of, say, Charles I and Elon Musk is to
realize that when Charles I is thinking about his people, he is
both thinking of them as economic assets and as human
assets. He basically wants to see his country thrive. And in
order to see his country thrive, he wants people to be — of
course, he wants them to be producing as much wool, or
whatever England exports, as possible — but the sense of
him being kind of the pater patriae, kind of the father of the
country, and feeling about the people in his society — not
exactly the way a parent should feel about his children, but
sort of like way a parent should feel about his children — that
sense of having a reciprocal obligation. So my goal as a
C.E.O. is not to rake in the bucks but to make my operation
flourish.” “Earlier you had said that you believe that,
regardless of what his goals are or what he says, Trump isn’t
likely to actually get anything transformative accomplished
just because of the entrenched government bureaucracy
that exists. But putting that aside, what is your opinion of
Trump generally?” “I think that Trump — the funny thing is, I
talked about F.D.R. earlier in our conversation, and I think,
actually, a lot of people might, in different directions, not
appreciate this comparison — but I think that, in a lot of
ways, Trump is very reminiscent of F.D.R. Because what
F.D.R. had was this tremendous charisma and self-
confidence combined with a tremendous ability to be the
center of the room, be the leader, cut through the BS, and
make things happen. I think one of the main differences
between Trump and F.D.R. that has really held Trump back is,
of course, that F.D.R. is from one of America’s first families.
He’s a hereditary aristocrat. And Trump is not really from
America’s social upper class. And I think the fact that Trump
is not really from America’s social upper class has hurt him a
lot, in terms of his confidence. I think it’s hurt him in his
ability to delegate to and trust people who are not part of his
family. I think that that’s limited him as a leader, in various
ways. And one of the encouraging things that I do see is I do
see him executing with somewhat more confidence this time
around. It’s almost like he actually feels like he knows what
he’s doing. That’s, I think, something that’s very helpful
because insecurity and fragility is just — it’s his Achilles’
heel, I think.” “What’s your Achilles’ heel?” “What’s my
Achilles’ heel? I think I also have self-confidence issues. I
rarely — I won’t bet fully on my own convictions.” “Are there
ways in which you think your insecurity manifests itself in
your political thinking?” “That’s a good question. I think that,
if you look at especially my older work, I think I had this kind
of joint consciousness that, OK, I feel like I’m onto something
here. But I also — the idea that people would be, in 2025,
taking this stuff as seriously as they are now, when I was
writing in 2007, 2008 — I mean, I was completely serious. I
am completely serious. But it led to, I think, a certain level of
— it’s like when you hit me with the most outrageous quotes
that you could find from my writing in 2008 or whatever. I’m
basically like, yeah, the sentiments behind that I can explain
and articulate. And they were serious sentiments, and
they’re serious now. Would I have expressed it that way?
Would I have trolled? I’m always trying to get less trollish.
Over time, you’ll see that I’ve definitely gotten less trolly. On
the other hand, if you read my recent blog posts, I can’t
really resist trolling Elon Musk, which might be part of the
reason why I’ve never met Elon Musk.” “Do you think your
trolling instinct has maybe gotten out of hand?” “No, it
definitely hasn’t gotten — it hasn’t gone far — I mean
[LAUGHS] no. I mean, the trolling — what I realize when I
look back is that actually —” “Do you think your trolling has
now become a political program?” “The instinct to revise
things from the bottom up is very much not a trollish instinct.
It’s a very serious and important thing that I think the world
needs.” “I got to say, there were a lot of things to do with
your ideas that we just didn’t get to. But the thing that I still
find myself deeply unconvinced about is why blowing up
democracy, rather than trying to make it better, would
somehow lead to better lives for the people who are
struggling the most.” “Well, I can’t — I can lead a horse to
water, of course. I think that, as the walls fall away and you
start to explore ideas that are outside the very narrow bubble
of the present that we live in, because I think it’s impossible
to deny that the variety of ideas in the space which
intelligent, thoughtful people like you consider has grown
sharply narrower in the 20th century. And if there’s really one
thing that I kind of want to do the most, say with this
conversation, is to make people feel like they can basically
step outside of the kind of very small box that they grew up
in. And they can say: Not everything outside that box is
perfect. Many things outside that box are absolutely horrible.
I’m not asking anyone to become a Nazi or an anti-Semite or
even a misogynist, whatever that means. There are cases in
which our judgment of the past is completely right. And yet
there are also ways in which the whole past would very
unanimously point to things that we’re doing and saying, and
say: That’s crazy — I can’t believe you’re doing that.”
[ELECTRONIC MUSIC]