Lincoln, Marx, and Falcon Labor: A Left-Critique of Curtis Yarvin

I wrote this after watching the debate between Curtis Yarvin and Professor Danielle Allen of Harvard, hosted by Passage Press, which can be found here. I finished watching the debate and was left disappointed, as Professor Allen failed to provide a meaningful critique of Yarvin; therefore, I've decided to write my own.

Yarvin wants a new government modeled on the corporate system, with a strong CEO leading the state, in a corporate structure, as its dominant feature. For Yarvin, American “democracy” has naturally transformed into an oligarchic system, wherein journalists and academics are able to effectively control the state. Congress, controlled in practice by non-democratic forces, has come to dominate the executive. The administrative state is beyond political and social control and, in fact, is in control. This system is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, as one sector of the administrative state funded research that led to a global catastrophe. People died because the cathedral considered gain-of-function research important despite the obvious risks of working with unmonitored foreign labs beyond the writ of the American state. Even if they were under the state's writ, the labs would have done the same thing and created COVID-19 because they have the power to do so.

My critique of Yarvin is less about proving him wrong than about changing how and where I think he is right. I agree that what we could call the cathedral exists. My main contention, however, is that the cathedral is downstream of a broader and deeper crisis. Focusing so much on the cathedral can obscure the broader political and economic crisis of contemporary American society, and Western political-economy more broadly.

This is a critique, not a debate, because Yarvin is right about a few things, and there's no denying that. He's also wrong about a lot, which I'll argue here.

Part 1: Falcon Labor

To begin, a classical Marxist analysis of the contemporary political economy of the United States is irrelevant. Bourgeoisie and proletariat are irrelevant. Yet, we can find in Roman history, just as Marx did, language that is relevant. Language provides us with a way to discuss the possession of wealth and citizenship. In Rome, there were three classes of people: the patricians, the plebeians, and the oft-forgotten, peregini. The patricians were wealthy and empowered citizens, the plebeians were poor, middling, and farming citizens who had less political power, and the peregini were non-citizen foreigners, often urban workers or farmhands.

Foreign-born labor in the United States today totals 19%, 21% in the UK, more than 10% in France, 15.6% in Germany, and 13% in Spain. In most Western countries, 10-25% of the labor force consists of non-citizen or foreign-born workers. In the United States, 6.7% of all workers are undocumented, and in the UK, 9% of the total foreign-born population are illegal immigrants. This second, smaller group of undocumented or undocumented non-citizen workers is concentrated in specific occupations. It exerts a sharp wage-suppression effect in certain professions, such as construction.

The importation and exploitation of peregini and the question of resolving this crisis is the crisis of our time, and my contention is that the “cathedral” is downstream of this crisis. This crisis has emerged logically from a series of economic problems, which a segment of the patrician class resolved through the importation and exploitation of foreign labor, which created the necessary conditions for the cathedral to emerge. To chart out a few important historical elements, I will describe a few relevant and important elements of the 19th century. 

Northern industrialization and Southern chattel slavery were created as a result of the British mercantile system. In the case of the American North, supported by the careful investments of Alexander Hamilton, early industrialists such as Tench Coxe, Benjamin Rush, and Samuel Slater actively worked to industrialize North America to exit mercantilism. Excess capital—cultivated over many years in the wealthy, prosperous farms of the American Northeast—financed industrialization, and idle men, women, and children were readily brought to work in the new industrial system. Industry and manufacturing offered an alternative to the mercantile economy, thereby granting the early republic more independence from the tyranny of the Crown, a powerful concern for early Americans well into the 1830s.

In the South, agricultural cultivation of rice, tobacco, and cotton found ready buyers in Britain and Europe. Slavery itself was the result of white class conflict. The white rich and white poor, what we might call patricians and plebeians, united to formalize the lower status of black peregini labor, which stabilized the status of white yeoman and the poor. In early America, as much as 50% of labor was done by indentured servants. Thus, their status, in addition to the import of black workers, created an uncomfortable ambiguity. Formalizing slavery, non-citizen inherited status, diffused white class conflicts, and the 1807 prohibition of the import of slaves promised legal limits on the competitiveness and scale of slave labor. In Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution, the Framers used “migration” and “importation” in sequence to refer to the purchasing of slaves from abroad.

The industrial North and agrarian South emerged as two distinct economies that nonetheless worked to undermine the most popular and egalitarian economic vision for the early Republic: the Jeffersonian vision. Fearing that urbanization would lead to tyranny as poor masses would vote to end democracy, the Founders saw in the American West—past the Appalachia and in the farms of the North and South—the possibility of simple republic of virtuous citizen farmers, of white male landowners, who could secure liberty through working land, which would cultivate wisdom and honor in the populace. For most white male Americans, who by 1820 were eligible to vote, this vision represented the era’s ideal of a 9-to-5 workday and a white picket fence. In both common thought and high political philosophy, land ownership was understood to be the vital foundation of a dignified body politic, a responsible citizenry, and a righteous and simple country.

This vision was under assault by both Northern industrialization and the emergence of the slaveholding interest. I want to emphasize the “slaveholding interest” rather than “slavery” because historically, slavery was not the problem. The slaveholding interest, represented by slaveholders, was. Americans understood “Dixie” was an attempt to recreate in America an aristocratic culture and system incompatible with democracy. The promise of new land in the West, which may have offered a haven for the Jeffersonian dream, was immediately under assault by the slaveholding interest that sought to expand the legal allowance of slavery in the West.

The result of the collapse of the Jeffersonian vision, the rise of Northern industry (which came with tremendous inequality), and the establishment of the slaveholding interest gave rise to Jacksonianism, which was a coalition movement. Under Andrew Jackson—one of President Trump’s great heroes—expansion Westward, limited industrial tariffs and protectionism, and a temporary truce between Northern workers and the slaveholding interest came together to form a coalition of anti-elite egalitarianism that fought off a strong central government and perceived corruption in professional culture. The corrupt Northern patricians were challenged by white plebeians while the slaveholding interest was temporarily limited in political ambition. White plebeians blamed the rich for corrupting American institutions, especially the institutions of law and medicine.  

In the Jacksonian era, many states eliminated the requirements to become a lawyer or to practice medicine, thereby opening the fields to every white male of good standing. The bar exam and traditional apprenticeship system were radically reformed to become more accessible to plebeians. “Accessible,” as in, “optional.” This was a revolt against the aristocracy, as many perceived these professions to be captured by an elite that hated Andrew Jackson’s common man. The growth of patronage systems and a nexus of immigrant labor and early manufacturing further fueled public outrage against the Northern elite. The Jacksonians had their own patronage systems, placing unqualified but loyal people into power to bring the common man to the center of political life. Elite corruption was fought with common corruption. After all, if they could get rich, why couldn’t we. Wage labor, which was newly emerging for men and women, was understood to be a threat to citizenship and the republic. If men were to earn wages by the selling of their time, but the republic was supposed to be founded on a virtuous citizenry of farmers, then what honor would there be in a republic of wage earners? The changing economic landscape of 1820s America threw white plebeians into crisis.

The American Civil War itself resulted from the conflict between the slaveholding interests and the interests of free labor. For decades, political leaders sought to avoid settling the issue of slavery, pursuing political compromises, including the Three-fifths Compromise of 1787, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and the Compromise of 1850. Throughout the 19th century, particularly from 1820 to 1861, Congress was inept and incapable, divided by regional interests related to slavery. Slavery broke Congress. Marx himself famously supported Lincoln, seeing in the Republican Party and Lincoln the opportunity to defeat the slaveholding system, furthering the interests of free labor and advancing the capitalist and industrial system, which required the destruction of slavery and would push America closer to socialist revolution.

As to the peregini, composed primarily of slaves, there were two main proposals for what to do once the institution itself was abolished: the deportation of slaves to Liberia and other colonies, or their full emancipation and assimilation into American society. The motivations to end slavery were not moral, but economic. The solutions were mass deportations of slaves, remigration; or mass amnesty, or emancipation. The peregini question had to be resolved at the federal level because this was a national question, a question about the total orientation of the American economy, and a question about the nature of citizenship itself. Northern manufacturing, industrialism, and a constrained system of citizenship were directly opposed to an agricultural economy reliant on non-citizen labor. The Southern system was in a mercantile economy focused on the export of goods rather than an industrial one, which substituted capital for labor to advance manufacture, the key feature of industrialization in America.  

Like the emergence of slavery, peregini labor in the 21st century has obvious and clear economic and cultural causes for their importation and exploitation.

First, a real decline in population and economic growth slowing (as populations became less productive relative to the productivity rise from 1920-1970) encouraged Western states to view immigrant labor as a growth strategy. Certain nations relied on migrant labor more than others, especially nations like the United Kingdom, which adopted immigration as the state’s main industrial growth strategy, or “human quantitative easing.” If states could not have more productive people, they settled for more people producing. Having more people to produce reduced labor value and made workers more replaceable, just as monetary quantitative easing reduced monetary value and increased liquidity. Labor was substituted for cheaper and less-entitled labor. At the same time, as Renaud Camus has pointed out, peregrini import can often bring in persons who have no economic benefit in terms of production, but solely in terms of consumption: taxes become welfare for asylum seekers, who in turn purchase goods. What we might call Keynesianism via biomass-piling, artificially inflated consumption.

Second, the expansion of the digital economy required cheap labor at both the upper and lower income levels. The gig economy required cheap labor that was not accustomed to the dignities and entitlements of the extant American working class—dignities and entitlements such as benefits, regular hours, and pensions. Simultaneously, technology companies required pliant labor forces, which meant non-union labor. The best way to prevent unionization and to suppress wages was the importation of peregini through programs such as the H-1B visa. Foreign labor does not unionize and demands less. The loss of benefits and stability is offset by the fact that peregini may easily attain citizenship to escape their own corrupt and incapable governments and societies.

Third, culturally, the triple intersection of post-colonial liberalism in Europe, post-Jim Crow antiracism in the United States, and national deculturation and the rise of pop culture created a social environment where the negatives of perigini labor reliance were suppressed. Post-colonial liberalism encouraged liberal and left Europeans to understand peregini labor, even if there were downsides, as a postcolonial responsibility. Post-Jim Crow antiracism, and the real presence of white supremacists and racists in the anti-immigrant camp, prevented any reasonable discussion of the downsides of wage suppression and job loss due to reliance on peregini. Literary deculturation and the simultaneous rise of pop culture created a situation where in the United States and Europe, literary heritage—the cultural heritage of Western countries, including classical culture and music—were deemphasized. This created a condition where the average person felt that either they had no culture or that their culture was poor. Thus, multiculturalism would be a revitalizing and essential dimension of life.

Similarly to the slaveholding interest and slaves, the peregini interest and the peregini are distinct. The peregini interest is at once the corporate interest, the agricultural and construction interests which rely on cheap labor, the Democratic Party’s interest, and the interest of government, which has few other levers to improve society beyond a race to the bottom for cheap goods and labor and the desire to shore up pensions through biomass import. Since 1970, the West has raced to the bottom, when the textile producers and consumers of Britian and New England chased cheap cotton around the world, from the South to India and Turkey, to Kazakhstan and beyond. The chase for cheap cotton was the chase for cheap labor, as we now race today for cheap goods, for cheap labor.

Fourth, the rise of Islamic terrorism heightened global tensions and furthered the rise of the securitization of society. Multiculturalism was strengthened as a liberal frontlash against Islamophobia. Day-to-day life was increasingly securitized for law-abiding people, even as police forces became less able to exercise authority against criminals, resulting in a general condition of what conservatives call “anarcho-tyranny.” A great crusade against Islamophobia began at the same time everyone began to go through the TSA, and the NSA began monitoring everybody.

Throughout this period, governments across the West were increasingly stymied by legislative division on the central question of peregini labor, and so failed to resolve the housing crisis, reform healthcare, and improve quality of life. The left likes to say everything is getting worse because every Western government since 1980 has all had the same ideology: neoliberalism. Of course, this explanation ignores visible reality.

The right prevented all positive social reforms, fearing they’d be manipulated or exploited by non-citizens, while the left advanced ever greater social reforms, ignoring the problem of peregini entirely. The sharp pains of globalization hit people in just the right way to create widespread feelings of decline, condemning rural people to post-industrial agrarian hinterlands without economic opportunity and urban people to crime, rising rents, and highly competitive job markets. Instead of resolving these issues through any of the innumerable tools of government, the state adopted an ever-tighter securitization of society to tamp down on political radicalization, which came about as the consequence of the ever-decreasing possibility of having a good life. The patricians became divided on the question of peregini, and so the Senate failed to act.

School shootings, extremist violence, and gun and knife crime were resolved through police strategies that radicalized the left, which saw these as authoritarian and racist measures, and radicalized the right, which saw these as ignoring the problems of mass migration. The examples are countless—solving UK knife crime with dull knives, transparent backpacks in schools, barriers at German Christmas markets, the widespread suppression of free speech, French laïcité being replaced by niqabs in public school, anti-extremism programs targeting the public and right-leaning people, anti-BDS pledges mandated as part of state contracting—neoliberal governance became security governance to manage the downstream effects of mass migration, the import of peregini, and HQE, which were cultural fragmentation, crime, violence, ethnic competition, and political radicalization. In short, the peregini question has spawned a bifurcated politics across the West.

Like the United States in the 19th century, the entire West is now confronted with the question, "Who is a citizen, and who belongs in the nation?" This question is tied to the economic question, which is a choice between two opposite visions: industrialism and a constrained system of citizenship or a globalized economy reliant on non-citizen labor, which in essence is a mercantile international economy. One may nod to the service economy as a great source of prosperity, but the fact remains that we had to buy ventilators from China. The service economy is not stable either, as plebeians must compete with peregini across sectors, introducing tension and competition.

These questions are being answered in the context of extreme paranoia, of random and inchoate terrorism unlike any known before in history, of the increasingly stupid and unfair exercise of state power beyond the comprehension of any person before 2000, all of which heightens the tendency towards transnational bifurcation.

COVID-19 heightened these tendencies, including the tendency toward suppression. The peregini class was greatly increased in many nations or doubled in size after the pandemic as a result of Western states not preparing for increased migration and because of the intentional non-enforcement of immigration law to pursue a policy of human quantitative easing in order to reduce inflation. As examples, in the United States there were 11 million illegal immigrants in 2019. Today, there are more than 18 million. In the UK, the famous “Boriswave” saw an actual doubling of total net migration.

Part 2: The Holy Family

One of Marx’s key ideas is that culture is downstream of economics. The superstructure, belief, follows from the base, the political economic system of law, property, and capital: that which meaningfully composes class power.

Yarvin defines the cathedral as “…a short way to say ‘journalism plus academia’—in other words, the intellectual institutions at the center of modern society, just as the Church was the intellectual institution at the center of medieval society.” He has also written that we are “governed by a permanent administrative state which implements policies designed by liberal professors at prestigious institutions, and supervised by liberal journalists at prestigious institution.”

His argument is that this system cannot be reformed. In his words,

“In a bureaucracy, decisions at every level are not taken by individuals; they are taken by processes. All work is according to process. Managers in a bureaucracy are not bosses; they are exception handlers. The fundamental rule of success as a bureaucrat is that while it is important to get credit for things that go right (everyone in the process will get credit), it is essential to avoid blame for things that go wrong. Fortunately, decision by process spreads and multiplies the thrill of success, while it diffuses and dilutes the sorrow of failure. But if he can export accountability and responsibility outside the government itself, the bureaucrat feels like he is dumping this toxic waste in the deep ocean. Or in a blue mountain lake. What pig farmer wants a lagoon full of manure on his farm? Even the pigs hate that smell… and that’s why the Mutopian bureaucracy leaks power. As does every other bureaucracy, perhaps unless it’s brand-new. And this is why you can’t fix it. An organization which focuses responsibility toward the top, without leaking, is an organization structured like an army or a corporation. In this form of organization (used by almost everything that isn’t a government), your manager actually is your boss. Final authority and responsibility lands on one person. …. government is making decisions that are not just random, but actively perverse and self-destructive, because its brain is the cathedral, which is structurally biased toward these dominant ideas, many but not all of which are just plain bad ideas.”

As evidence, one would note the near lockstep agreement of the NYT, Harvard, Biden DOS and DOJ, The Atlantic, and even Jacobin on issues including global trade, multiculturalism, state power, climate change, and

COVID-19.

I view the uncoordinated but lock-step movement of academia and the university as the intellectual and cultural reaction to the neo-Jacksonian coalition we call MAGA, which is seeking to remigrate and mass deport the peregini to preserve, through the work of a patrician-plebeian coalition, the value of citizenship. They also seek through coalition affiliates who are intellectuals or MAHA moms to challenge a corrupt elite in the law, academia, and medicine, who they feel have become corrupted by ideology and money.  Of course, then, all the people in those professions—elites—generally agree that they hate MAGA.

This class of elites are the authors of what I might call Neo-Dixie, reproducing all the same aristocratic pretension, Atlantic fantasy, and multiracial paternalism of the South itself—which saw in its multiracial, prosperous, cultured society, a more noble civilization than the rude and ill-gotten culture of the American North, which stunk of tar and iron. Consider the popular joke about liberals, aghast and screaming, “How dare you, sir!” In America, “How dare you, sir!” was always more likely to be said in a slow, dramatic drawl than a smooth Atlantic rhythm. Dixie’s pretense of cultural finesse and refinement was a mask for a multiracial system of two-tier labor, integrated into global mercantilism, that ended with goober peas.

I am not really saying, “Democrats are the real racists” because even in the 19th century, the Republicans were racist too—Lincoln wanted Liberian colonization—but rather, that most of our liberal elite grasp that the multiracial, multicultural society they love relies upon an underclass of non-citizen workers to thrive. They rely on them for cheap labor, for growing the population, for “solving” pension trouble, for diversity and cultural refinement, and to ensure that even as houses rise in price and wages experience successive wages of stagnation and suppression, goods remain cheap. They believe this condition is fine as long as everyone has an equal chance to sip sweet tea and escape the fate of goober peas.

Neo-Dixie promises you that 6% is a small portion of the workforce, doing jobs you don't want. Yet, at the same time, they have to actively, culturally, make all of this seem okay.

Adam Curtis, in part three of The Century of the Self, documented the work of a 1960s group of radical psychotherapists who sought to make everything okay.

Adam Curtis wanted to show how these radicals brought together white and black people in meetings called “Racial Encounter and Transcendental Experience” for the goal of transcending racism. These radicals believed that if they had black and white people express their true feelings about each other, they would be able to come out the other side pure. The transcendence of the self was the transcendence of society. For Neo-Dixie, what allows this state of affairs to be acceptable is the notion that everyone has discarded their racial, ethnic, or religious identification, and through meritocracy, we will be sorted into tea-sippers and goober pea eaters. Through the individual transcendence of personal racism, society would transcend racism and tribalism. While many have argued that woke and DEI are responses to the persistent inequalities and indignities of post-feminist, post-racial American society, the actual enforcement of woke and DEI policies across society did not emerge until after the first Trump administration and the BLM riots, which heightened the importance of the citizenship question, in terms of illegal alien labor and racial inequality.

Neo-Dixie learned, just as Adam Curtis’ radicals learned, that people are generally not willing to sacrifice their racial identity, which provides life meaning and people power. So, Neo-Dixie's colorblind meritocracy decided to embark on a journey of social transcendence, just like those white radicals so many years ago. They believed that the transcendence of race, through racial confrontation and social reprogramming, could allow for racial redistribution of power and wealth. Too many whites were sipping sweet tea, too many non-whites were eating goober peas. Culturally, the concepts of “woke” and DEI became and still are enmeshed in important institutions, including universities, magazines, and corporations. There is a religious devotion to this, less because this is a church or religion, a cathedral re: Yarvin, but rather because this is a system of class enforced through relative status, one dimension of which, is moral. A group of patricians sought to stabilize the class system, demonstrating that plebeians and peregrini could both rise to positions of authority, suggesting that Neo-Dixie was indeed the promised land at the end of history. Like the blue blood of aristocrats, the moral display of nobility became a signifier of class status. Who could afford indulgences? Why are there DEI classes at Lockheed Martin and not Wendy's? Because Lockheed Martin's CEO feels guiltier than a line cook, because Lockheed Martin's CEO likes to believe he's a CEO because he feels guiltier than a line cook.

Because working men believe that being Scottish is genetic, and they loved their white only clubs. Post-racial politics, guaranteed through the high-techniques of race relations (both transcendent-psychological and as mundane as HR powerpoints), became a signifier of whig politics. And everyone loves to signify their politics.

The cathedral is insulated from the negatives of peregini labor way of benefiting from it. Lawyers are insulated from competition with peregini for jobs. Academic and cultural producers enjoy the cultural diversity of peregini and their labor, which keeps gig economy services cheap, and homes cheaper than they would be if plebeians performed construction labor. The lack of assimilation means that foreign language speakers consume foreign language culture, insulating culture producers. The only negative they experience is the advancement of securitization in society, such as CVS locking shampoo behind plexiglass, which they are more likely to blame on corporate greed than on people stealing. Private property is bourgeois anyway, so why do you care if people steal?

Sectors which do not produce culture—plebeian sectors—are directly affected by peregini: construction, software jobs and coding, transportation services and shipping, resource extraction, law enforcement, and so on. Construction workers, those workers who are in factories and manufacturing, and coders, all well understand the problem of foreign labor, which in some professions is upwards of 30% of the workforce. Blue collar worker-citizens, plebeians, grasp that their direct and actual competition is peregini. This is changing, as companies increasingly rely on contractors in foreign countries to meet the growing demands of corporate leadership for content creation. Consider how many gaming and media companies now contract out artistic design and creation.

All of this is to say, there are obvious reasons why a Democratic coalition of patricians and culture industry plebeians opposes Trump. They benefit from non-citizen labor, are insulated from its negatives, and are more concerned with democracy than with the nation's economic reality.

One could speak of the “cathedral” in 1829, winking at the rich New Englanders who had been lawyers for generations, who didn’t let men without well-known last names take on legal apprenticeships, and who, in lockstep, opposed Andrew Jackson, and who the Jacksonians upset by allowing any white man to become a lawyer.

There is a cathedral. Universities and the media are in lockstep. They actively suppress oppositional ideas and, in practice, oppose populism, democracy, and egalitarianism, even as they proclaim to be democratic and egalitarian. So did the Whigs. There is a cathedral, down the road from the Walt Disney Company, which replaced Americans with H-1B workers and came out against the “Don’t Say Gay” law.  

Liberals, in academia and in universities, reacted to the rise of Trump exactly as the Whigs reacted to Andrew Jackson. The Whigs were more concerned with the experience of authoritarianism of the prior century than the crisis of the America they lived in. The Whigs feared King George lay in wait behind Andrew Jackson, just as our modern liberals fear Hitler is crouching in Trump’s shadow. Both ideas are obviously quite silly because they miss that Jacksonians and MAGA both represent a reaction to a collapsed vision of the American dream in the context of the problem of non-citizen foreign labor. Neither were nor are authoritarian movements. In fact, authoritarian power in the form of the strong presidential executive was and is only an end to a means: helping white male plebeians, whose status was jointly threatened by elitist Northerners and the import of peregini, retain status and prosperity.

We do not need the “cathedral” to explain why people oppose Trump’s policies, and the cathedral is not why they oppose Trump. If we had a cathedral as powerful as Yarvin said it was, we’d have parental leave already.

Harvard, Yale, and the NYT all hate Trump for the same reason he hates them: they represent oppositional interests. The status quo, which has allowed Harvard, Yale, and The New York Times to become respected institutions of authority with considerable financial resources, does not benefit from attacks on its status, qualifications, or from efforts to change the status quo. Losing foreign students and dollars is bad for Harvard, so they’re mad. Trump, the national capitalist, is forcing Harvard to recruit Americans and not foreign students, as Harvard has done for most of the institution’s history. It is easy to say that reform is impossible, but MIT and the University of Michigan are undergoing reform, even if far more has to be done in both cases. In a way, getting mad at Harvard for recruiting foreign students—foreign patricians who can pay much more than American plebeians—is like punishing a plantation rather than reconstructing the southern economy. Of course, MAGA won’t do this, because they are Jacksonian, and liberal students saddled with debt aren’t part of their coalition. Yarvin likes to say reform is impossible. He is wrong. Reform is possible if you want reform and are willing to wield the type of power Lincoln wielded.

The story of the changing political parties and of the question of executive power in the early 19th century was a prelude to the question of what to do about slaveholding interests, which was the same as asking how to maintain the value of citizenship, which was the same as asking what the economy ought to be. The state, citizenship, and economy were all interlinked because the type of economy one had shaped the types of citizens one had, which shaped the type of state they needed.

Let's learn from that today and see that in our own time, the great challenge and question we have before us is not executive authority or the lockstep unity of opposition to that authority, but quite simply, what we do about the economy and citizenship post-globalization? How do we transition to national capitalism successfully?  

Liberal culture is downstream of a deep economic crisis, not late capitalism, not neoliberalism, not the cathedral, not globalism, but the simple and obvious economic fact of non-citizen labor—which has thrown to the fore the long-settled questions of what America is, who America is for, what an American is, and what the economy ought to be. These are important questions with great moral weight; why would we be surprised that a liberal elite would view a populist articulation of an answer with suspicion and seek to culturally purge those articulations? The Whigs thought Jackson would hang them.

Our society is “doing society” in a state of heightened security never before seen. We can’t be normal anymore, and the reason is not the cathedral. The reason is that we have a security state that we need to prevent another 9/11 because global mercantilism and human quantitative easing rely on the transnational movement of people, which means bad actors can go wherever they want and kill. Dissent is impossible if everyone is paranoid. Balkanization makes us paranoid. Paranoia makes us partisan and makes solving problems impossible. Congress in the 19th century was ineffective.

Part 3: Fear of Backyard Flowers

The total dominance of corporate power, the financial control of the political process by donors to the left and right, and the exploitation and importation of peregini labor have raised fundamental questions about the nature of government and citizenship. This had led to a vast divide between the parties, with one fully identified with foreign labor and yet at its most extreme ends, superficially opposed to big money interests, and one that is superficially opposed to foreign labor but in league with big money interests. Both parties accept corruption as the price of truer service to the people.  

This crisis will not be resolved with an anti-democratic revolution with no roots in the history and traditions of the United States. That is a neo-reactionary fantasy that has no popular base, no love from the people, no support, and no humility. That is a fantasy that inspires fear.

Many of the reforms that would make American life better and increase democratic control are well-known and understood. These include overturning Citizens United, public funding of elections, curtailing the influence of lobbyists, and establishing term limits on Congress. This includes strengthening the executive and limiting the power of the judiciary. Many solutions to improve our economy are known as well, such as tariffs and federal investment in domestic manufacturing, raising the minimum wage, mass deportations and remigration to create a tight labor market, preventing corporations from purchasing homes, regulatory simplification and deregulation.

These are ideas that some on the internet would call “normie,” and that is precisely why they are good ideas. They are relevant, popular, and appropriate to our historical crisis. This crisis does not demand a dark enlightenment revolution: we only need to do major comprehensive, economic reform, which is much harder than revolution.

The class of intellectuals we have now, including Yarvin, is less relevant to regular people than ever, not because they are not smart or wise, but because they choose the beauty of revolutionary dreams over the pragmatic, practical task of reform. They are happy being beautiful losers with podcasts, tending to backyard flowers on Substack. They would prefer this to political change. Those who do pursue politics now are those most emotionally and morally motivated, with all of the feeling, but none of the wisdom.

We then wonder why our society seems to be collapsing. The smart people aren’t normie enough. In fact, they terrify the normies. They tell them from the river to the sea and about their perfect CEO.

Discussing monarchy and a CEO is both fantastical and terrifying to most Americans. Normal Americans retreat from reform when reformers call for king-like rule, just as they retreat from Medicare-for-All when the people who want that ignore that shampoo is behind plexiglass. Trump is nowhere near king-like rule, but people are going to the streets anyway, because they're afraid. Nobody is normal anymore. In the Jacksonian era, the greatest thinkers would have been those who found ways to make the legal and medical professions more egalitarian, less corrupt, and more accountable, rather than those who temporarily discarded professional requirements. Progress was not made by intellectuals on the outskirts looking in, content to be backyard flowers.

We have to be more normal and active. If we are not, this story ends in a bad way. We have to dispense with the faux radicalism of the 2000s and 2010s. We are no longer in the halcyon days of blogging without stakes. We are actually in a crisis, the whole West, which has almost no parallel in human history, but for the fall of Rome and the American Civil War. We need to be great reformers who are not terminally online. Great reform will always scare some people, but some people are doing bad things. We are smart enough to know the difference between scaring the plantation owners and yeoman farmers, between the patricians and the plebeians.

We cannot make those we hope to save and protect afraid of us. And they are afraid. They are afraid because of DOGE, they are afraid because of crime, they are afraid because of climate change, they are afraid because there is no one there to offer them a vision of the future that does not include wearing a hard hat and transparent backpack.

It's good that when a strong movement for an executive emerged, Yarvin did not retreat into theory. That is a good sign. But at the same time, I saw him say the other day, “Nothing ever happens.” You're 51, and people respect you.

Yarvin is at his best when advocating positive ideas and at his worst when he adopts neo-reactionary views for normal neo-reactionary reasons: genius, laziness, petulance, elitism, and boredom. Miraculously, unlike many online writers, Yarvin has positive ideas. His embrace of the Italian school of political philosophy is particularly relevant to our naïve political and intellectual culture. His proposal for scientific reform in Barbarians and Mandarins is actually good. Though in that essay, maybe as the last, final critique I’ll leverage, he got something silly-wrong.

The fact is: the Mandarins (our Mandarins, not the immense faceless mass of faithful system slaves) are the best people in DC. And will probably always be. They are also not good enough—not, at least, by themselves. But this is not their fault, not really.

He’s right about the people that he is talking about. But the people actually inside the Trump administration are not Yarvin’s Mandarins—they are their much more popular friends, the ones who go on podcasts, who are related to important people, who are loyal but without any ideology or critique at all—faithful slaves to MAGA, not avid readers of Gray Mirror—the actual Mandarins are busy. The people in administration are not Barbarians or Mandarins. They're Hill staffers who appear on podcasts, girls who have inherited last names and are rarely competent. Most Mandarins are busy at Heritage reading Yarvin and learning to say things that make normies piss their pants. Really, most people are more afraid of Yarvin readers than Brigitte Macron truthers. There is something scary in the former and silly in the latter. I even love Brigitte Macron truthers, I really do.

But they are often uninterested in the census. They make barbecues fun, but the census is power. (The day after I originally drafted this, something very funny happened where Yarvin asked Renaud Camus about Brigitte Macron. He said something like, “We are in the greatest crisis of our civilization's history, and you're asking about Mrs. Macron?”)

No one can think about power all day. The issue, though, is that actual MAGA people love Candace Owens and think Yarvin is a bit weird. How many MAGA people actually get that Yarvin wants a census because he wants a state? How many people actually grok why we need to turn peasants into Frenchmen? I mean, why do this when your heart is already red, white, and blue, baby? Why bother? We have a glitterhouse to raid!

Most of the conservatives in D.C. I respect (and who I am fortunate enough to have the respect of) are not working for Trump. They are not well-connected enough. The people working for Trump are closer to Tim Pool than they are to Renaud Camus; they are, in that sense, just like Andrew Jackson’s common man, uneducated and ill-equipped for power, but nonetheless in power because the people once in charge needed replacing.

Closing Statement: Excuses, Excuses

“Comrades! I understand the energy here, comrades. But is it really serving the cause? For me, the best defense against ugly actions is that they really don’t work well at all. Generally, everything ugly is stupid. Or in other words, retarded. Don’t be retarded. There is no ethical system in which it is okay to be retarded. Not even Nietzsche—evil German philosopher guy with mustache—not even Nietzsche will let you be retarded.”

We need to start thinking big about reform and being relatable to the general public. Currently, the right is coasting on a thinly held victory, a backlash to the Bidenwave and DEI, and the right has successfully ridden a burst of egalitarian sentiment to power. That will not last forever. The Trump 2024 coalition was, after all, a coalition, and a precarious one at that.

The year is no longer 1799, and the most pressing question is not “monarchy or not.” The year is 1835, and Andrew Jackson will soon have left office. The next two decades will be vital and perilous. The parties are reshaping themselves; the fate of the national economy and new frontiers is not yet decided. An unusual generation of industrialists has begun to realize that their fate is not as simple as mills and waterways beyond cities. The most pressing question is the status of non-citizen labor, which, curiously, could be left out of a book about American industrialization in the 19th century, yet which ultimately led to the actual Civil War.  

Unlike in 1835, when intellectuals in America were genuinely and deeply concerned with the fate of democracy, rights, and their society, our intellectuals mostly laugh at the notion that ordinary people are afraid. When they tell you what they truly believe, about normal things like Citizens United, you laugh and say, “cathedral,” as “socialists” laugh and say “neoliberalism,” and as Danielle Allen says, “systemic.” Comrades, do you see the energy you have?

Do you know where you end up if you see the world through a singular word?

You end up saying lazy and ugly things. You say that the reason that there are riots in Ballymena is because of neoliberalism, not rape. You say that the reason why there are black and white bonus discrepanices at Lockheed martin is systemic racism, not merit. You say the reason that Geert Wilders is failing is because of the cathedral, not ego, because he, like Farage, considers himself above building a political organization.

I am noticing more and more that when right-wing efforts fail, people say “cathedral” and don’t think critically or strategically. Like “neoliberalism” and “systemic,” “cathedral” is a wonderful way to turn your brain off and give up because everyone has a magical implant in their head preventing you from winning. Comrades, you are being lazy, being lazy is ugly, and being ugly is being a backyard flower.

What is much more effective is spending time and energy in learning how to advance reform. For example, one of the best things the Trump administration could do to support European efforts to curtail illegal immigration and mass migration would be to make NATO membership and membership in the European Convention on Human Rights mutually exclusive. After all, the ECHR is what prevents European states from deporting terrorists and violent criminals.

NATO members, sought to “safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples,” and the ECHR undermines this by limiting liberty, democracy, and the rule of law. The ECHR prevents states from securing their borders, requires them to accept hostile populations, and forces them to suppress speech to maintain stability. All Marco Rubio has to do is release a memo stating that the United States would interpret membership in the ECHR as a notice of denunciation.  Don’t end NATO. Bend NATO. Make NATO read its founding treaty, which a leftist would find eerily similar to the 14 words.

Finally and most importantly, though I saw Yarvin beat Allen in their debate, and many others did too, most normal people, not normies, would have seen something different. Most people do not defend democracy with “civil society” and “our institutions.” They defend democracy with the simple fact that they can vote, they have rights they cherish, and they know that these things can be taken from them. They defend the rights they have, including the right to vote, rationally on the basis that this allows them to express their views. They do not defend these rights because they are stupid or because some grand and vast architecture of ideological manipulation has tricked them. They are smart and feel that you're full of shit, because when you say “cathedral,” when you say “neoliberal,” they say, “the schools aren't as good as they used to be.”