The Leading Democracy Hater Thinks Democracy Will Win
Curtis Yarvin says American fascists "cannot even imagine what winning looks like."
Curtis Yarvin sees through the charade.
Yarvin, the world’s leading monarchist intellectual, gutter racist, enemy of democracy, and the guy who believes the world would have been better if the US had lost its war for independence, has all but given up on the Trump regime’s simulation of authoritarian rule, seeing no path to the sort of consolidation required to boil small-d democratic institutions in a vat of hate and bile. The regime, Yarvin seems to believe, lacks the smarts or the guts – or maybe both – to overthrow the American government, an exercise that usually requires great effort, not just edgelord posting and rad meme generation.
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Yarvin sees the regime for what it is: One big, harried dopamine rush, a complex and multifaceted show put on by a fascist clownish showman who lacks the intellectual capacity to follow through with the dissolution of the American experiment. He sees it so clearly – along with the aftermath of this fascist assault on the country – that he’s openly planning on fleeing a post-Trump America.
Don’t let Yarvin’s leather jacket and rebel intellectual aesthetic fool you: This guy is a fucking wimp.
Denny Carter
I’ve written (and talked) about Yarvin so much over the past year because he provides useful, revealing insight into what would actually be required to decimate self governance in the US. It would, as Yarvin has argued, require great society-wide upheaval that would touch every part of American life. A real authoritarian project would not dispatch troops into opposition-held cities to create dank memes and movie trailer-quality social media videos; it would tell those troops to Do Whatever It Takes to put down the opposition, to terrorize them, intimidate them, and leverage the state’s capacity for violence against those who stand up and say no, this is wrong. Authoritarian takeovers are bloody business. Yarvin knows that, and he’s not seeing the necessary puddles of blood. He bemoans the fact that millions of Americans go about their everyday lives without any clue about the counter-revolution that's supposedly happening.
This isn’t to minimize the pain and horror visited upon marginalized groups, including anyone who even appears to be an immigrant, as defined by Brett Kavanaugh in one of the most shockingly racist Supreme Court rulings in American history – one that the public never heard about because it’s easier to base media coverage on the god-king’s senile social media posts. Every day we scroll through harrowing videos of Latino men and women being beaten and kidnapped off the streets of thre regime’s opposition strongholds, begging passersby to help them before they are thrown into the legal blackhole created by a white supremacist regime determined to shift the country’s demographics one kidnapping at a time.
Denny Carter
That’s the thing though. Triggering the libs by shipping in some white South Africans and hunting Latino folks for sport in the streets of Portland and LA and D.C. and Chicago isn’t going to establish the kind of 1,000-year monarchy for which Yarvin pines. Snatching innocent people off the street and sending them to third-world death camps might be a good time for the masked blackpilled fascists operating above the law – everything they know about fascism they learned from scrolling on the X platform – but this will in no way be a kill shot for multicultural democracy, Yarvin believes. This is not the overwhelming show of force required in a nation of 350 million people.
The second Trump revolution, like the first, is failing. It is failing because it deserves to fail. It is failing because it spends all its time patting itself on the back. It is failing because its true mission, which neither it nor (still less) its supporters understand, is still as far beyond its reach as algebra is beyond a cat. Because the vengeance meted out after its failure will dwarf the vengeance after 2020—because the successes of the second revolution are so much greater than the first—everyone involved with this revolution needs a plan B for 2029. And it is not even clear that it can wait until 2029: losing the Congress will instantly put the administration on the defensive.
Yarvin points to Stephen Miller’s bloviating – his performative fascism – as an example of the regime’s unseriousness in unwinding the republic and installing a Real Authoritarian Regime that will rule without the consent of its people. Yarvin – and others on the far right – consider themselves enlightened for desiring a master. Only a high IQ human, Yarvin says, could want such an arrangement.
The reward for Stephen Miller and his ilk is also on earth. They look tough. They’re doing something. That they are not even doing 0.01% of what it would take to solve the problem—that, at much more risk to themselves, the most they could probably do is 0.05%—matters not. They can milk it as far as it goes. They, too, will sell books. I’m sure they understand this and are doing all they can! Yet this does not change the facts.
Yarvin mocks the right-wing calls to impeach so-called liberal judges – jurists who abide by the U.S. Constitution – as kabuki theater, a political game that keeps lawmakers and regime officials busy in their day to day. Threatening judges who don't go along with the king's program keeps people scrolling online, keeps eyeballs glued to cable news, and keeps people like Miller and Pam Bondi – both of whom seem to understand this will not last forever – relevant and important in the most superficial ways. None of the regime's top people, Yarvin whines, seem to understand what is necessary to consolidate power like the 20th century democracy-devouring monsters Yarvin holds so dear.
"Getting rid of all the liberal judges is easier than getting rid of all one liberal judge. Getting rid of all the judges is easier than getting rid of all the liberal judges," Yarvin writes. "Getting rid of the whole legal system is easier than getting rid of all the judges. Getting rid of the whole machine of government is easier than getting rid of the whole legal system."
Denny Carter
Doing the little shit, Yarvin says, is much harder and less impactful than the big shit. Overthrowing a nation with entrenched small-d democratic institutions ingrained into every part of society would take a brand of brutality and domination that can't be achieved by flooding the American public with splashy propaganda or putting a far-right hatchetlady in charge of CBS News or sending Confederate troops to pro-democracy cities only to have them called back because they're too fat. It can't be done by bringing farcical charges against high-profile people who have been mean to the god-king or telling universities and colleges they can't say the word "transgender" anymore or pressuring a media company into suspending a comedian's late-night show for one week. It can't be done by doing performative mass federal government layoffs before begging those workers to return to work.
In fact, Yarvin writes, those who support the Trump regime "cannot even imagine what winning looks like. This is literal. You literally can’t picture it. You can picture winning on this, winning on that, winning on the other thing. But winning overall? You can’t picture it, because you can’t handle the truth. Try anyway—then put yourself in that headspace, and look back at the things the Trump administration is trying to do today. Unfortunately, I rather expect you’ll laugh."
The man who hates the United States so much he wishes it had never existed in the first place sees the Trump machine failing at every turn. He sees the resentment and fury building in the populace, even those who are usually listless and unengaged. Yarvin, for all his amorality, for all his nihilism and hatred of himself and you and me, sees a future in which this revolution-by-meme falls apart. He sees it being swept away because the people in charge were unwilling to rip out American self governance at its roots. They would rather play authoritarianism, not actually do authoritarianism.
Yarvin is so sure of this outcome, this disintegration of a movement that's made to seem all powerful, that he's "thinking realistically about how to flee the country" after the regime suffers its final losses and crumbles (a line he later removed from his blog post). There will be lots of fleeing in those days, as I imagined in some speculative BFT writing. That Yarvin thinks he's important enough to escape some Dark Woke post-Trump regime is either funny or pathetic. Maybe both. Definitely both.
The intellectual stalwart of the American far right sees through the shiny, attention-seizing bullshit of the Trump regime. So why don't you?
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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