Some of my best friends are Trump supporters (and who on earth is Curtis Yarvin?)

Some of my friends support Donald Trump. This is perplexing to me, but true. No, they are not ex-friends. Some are very close to me. Most I admire or respect in one way or another, and it is not as though I avoid getting into debates with them, some of which have devolved into snarling and worse. Mind you, to be clear, many of them dislike Trump the man. They like Trump the tool, the enforcer.

Some readers of this column, I presume, are also pro-Trump. But, in the bubble I live in, both online and IRL, it is a rare thing indeed. I have certain problems with Kamala Harris, but there is a very clear choice here, and I really have tried to see the other side’s logic.

Trump has a long (very long) rap sheet of moral failings (quite apart from his legal rap sheet), which goes back decades. Why would anyone trust the leadership of the free world — with its nuclear codes — to Trump? Harris’ policies, (which I have read) seem to be a relatively safe middle-of-the-road set of policy planks. She’s just your vanilla Democrat, and her rap sheet is very short.

It looks (as of the last few days) as if the scales are starting to tip Trump’s way, so clearly my view of things is not the prevailing one, at least, not in the US. All of this has been confusing to me, until the last week or so when a sudden slew of commentary has elevated one name above the usual suspects, a name previously unknown to most of us.

Curtis Yarvin. Curtis who?

What follows is a story about the emergence of a new intellectual force in the US. They are called the New Right (or the Dark Enlightenment or the neo-reactionary movement, NRx, depending on who’s talking). Many of them are young, educated, fashionable, aware, driven, amiable, and they are predominantly white and male. They live in New York and Washington and Silicon Valley, as well as among their real (or imagined) constituents in working-class towns and cities across the US.

The movement has been funded by tech billionaires, most notably ex-Meta board member Peter Thiel. Vanity Fair covered this phenomenon in a long feature written by James Pogue back in May 2022. It has only strengthened since then, snagging more tech billionaires as friends and backers — Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Vivek Ramaswamy and, unsurprisingly, Elon Musk. Not to mention intellectuals and “big thinkers” like Walter Kirn and Nick Land, as well as national GOP office-bearers like Blake Masters and Josh Hawley.

And, especially, JD Vance. He is the big prize, but more about him later.

This group is definitely not the deranged, racist, gay-baiting, conspiracy-mongering deplorables of the Left’s imagining. These people are as educated as anyone in the “progressive” movement, especially when it comes to epoch-changing technologies like AI, crypto, energy tech and synthetic biology. Of course, there is a noisy cohort of hangers-on and fans who harbour less than savoury opinions but, hey, some supporters of the Democratic party are equally ill-informed, intolerant and gullible.

And then there is the movement’s philosopher king, Curtis Yarvin.

Yarvin is 51. He grew up in a traditional East Coast liberal family and has a background as a software developer in Silicon Valley and, more recently, as a blogger. He succeeded wildly at the latter, writing a series of right-wing rants in a blog called Unqualified Reservations (between 2007 and 2014), and then later publishing a more carefully articulated set of opinions on his Substack page Gray Mirror. As his arguments and positions have matured, his influence has not only spread wide, but deep, capturing the enthusiasm of both the intellectual New Right elite and the more populist leaders of the conservative working class.

So, what does Yarvin have to say? Here are some quotes:

“Democracy is a failed and dying form of governance.”

“The masses are too stupid for self-rule.”

Or this —

“If democracy is so decrepit and ineffective, one might ask how it is that America became the world’s great superpower and maintained that position for the last century. My answer contains two parts: first, that nothing lasts forever. Second, while American supremacy may once have rested on innovation and growth, the country, now a bloated empire, has been surviving for decades on the power of myth-making and mass illusions.”

I have read through some of his posts and blogs. He is wonkish, quoting history and precedent, often constructing dense, articulate and well-reasoned arguments to support his position.

He is not your typical right-winger or GOP flagbearer. In the US, right-wing positions are often described in terms of their cultural and social compasses — anti-abortion, the primacy of religion, resistance to minorities, women’s rights and identity protections, etc. Others are economic in nature (high tariffs, lower taxes, less business regulation).

Yarvin is not really interested in any of these. The entire edifice of his philosophy is governance. How to structure a society. He thinks democracy has failed. He believes that the US should be a patchwork of techno-monarchies, run by CEOs, authoritarian in nature, with no namby-pamby, one-person, one-vote in sight. He thinks the US government has been enslaved by what he calls “the Cathedral” — a collaboration between the media, political elites and other special interests. He advocates overthrowing the Cathedral, for the sake of his dream of a reinvigorated US.

All of this would be an interesting fringe position, except that his adherents are rich, influential and smart. Most importantly, they are inflamed and have started wearing the cloak of true zealotry.

Which brings us back to JD Vance, who could well become US president sometime in the next four years, if Trump wins and is subsequently led offstage at some point during his tenure, mumbling and rambling and cognitively impaired.

Peter Thiel (with his billions) knows this. He hand-picked Vance, making him rich as a partner in his VC company and then paying his way into politics. Vance has a parasitic loyalty to Thiel; he is the perfect Manchurian Candidate. The New Right seeks a new order, and Trump will be irrelevant the moment he is elected. Vance is their true Trojan horse.

None of them have the balls to say what they believe out loud, for fear of committing societal and political suicide. Except for Curtis Yarvin. He yells it from the rooftops — Democracy has failed, and corporate techno-autocracy is the future, the US’s great new shining city on the hill.

To most of us, Yarvin’s world may sound like lunacy. But, given the power and wealth and influence he has accreted around him, we ignore it at our peril. It is not that great a leap from Trump to Yarvin. DM  

Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg. His new book It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in the UK/EU. It’s available now.