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On the weekend of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin traveled to Washington, D.C., for the Coronation Ball, a glitzy inaugural gala hosted by the ultraconservative publishing house Passage Press. The gathering, hosted in the ballroom of the Watergate Hotel, was designed to celebrate the ascent of the new conservative counter-elite that has risen to power on the tide of Trump’s reelection — and Yarvin, who has arguably done more than anyone to shape the thinking of that nascent group, was an informal guest of honor.
Even the ball’s name spoke to Yarvin’s outsize influence over the Trumpian right: For over a decade, Yarvin, an ex-computer programmer-turned-blogger, has argued that American democracy is irrevocably broken and ought to be replaced with a monarchy styled after a Silicon Valley tech start-up. According to Yarvin, the time has come to jettison existing democratic institutions and concentrate political power in a single “chief executive” or “dictator.” These ideas — which Yarvin calls “neo-reaction” or “the Dark Enlightenment” — were once confined to the fringes of the internet, but now, with Trump’s reelection, they are finding a newly powerful audience in Washington.
When I called him up recently to talk about the second Trump administration, Yarvin told me that during his trip to Washington, he had exchanged friendly greetings with Vice President JD Vance — who has publicly cited his work — had lunch with Michael Anton, a senior member of Trump’s State Department, and caught up with the “revolutionary vanguard” of young conservatives who grew up reading his blogs and are now entering the new administration.
Yarvin is skeptical that Trump can actually carry out the type of regime change that he envisions, but he told me that there are signs the new administration is serious about concentrating power in the executive branch. We spoke before the Trump administration announced a sweeping freeze on federal aid programs, but he pointed to the coming fight over impoundment as a key test of the new administration’s willingness to push the bounds of executive authority. And he detected a newfound confidence and aggressiveness in Trump’s GOP.
“Every time the old Republicans wanted to do something, it was like the nebbish guy asking the hot prom queen out for a date — they were just terrified that they were going to ask and the answer is going to be ‘no,’” he said. “That attitude does not seem to be present here.”
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
You were in Washington during Trump’s inauguration. How was the mood among the people that you spent time with?
The mood is really good. You’re definitely dealing with a lot of people who have spent the last four or eight years thinking about why the first Trump administration basically did not achieve anything for its supporters as opposed to its lobbyists. I’m not talking to the high strategic command or whatever, but just my impression from my connections among low- and mid-level people is that they’ve figured some things out.
The first and most important thing they’ve figured out from a political standpoint is that the situation that Trump is in is a little like Duke Leto and Arrakis.
We’re talking Dune here.
Yeah. There’s a little bit of landing on the mostly enemy planet D.C. You’re landing there, and one of the general assumptions of the controlled opposition — the old Republican establishment — is that this is not really a symmetric political system.
Instead of a left party and a right party, we have an inner party [a bipartisan elite] and an outer party [the anti-establishment insurgents]. This outer party is basically the party that exists to collect and market the votes of unfashionable America.
You’re saying that the conservative elite in D.C. have become newly aware of themselves as a kind of vanguard of the outer party, and they’re starting to act like one?
Basically, the deal when you’re a Republican in office is that you get a certain number of things to show off to your constituency to prove that you’re really Republican, but you’re basically there to play ball and help the system work. But what Trump and his team have realized now is that the best defense is a good offense. He’s not just doing these little things to scare people and to take home as a chit to his supporters. He’s actually trying to move all of the levers of this machine that he can move.
From the neo-reactionary vantage point, what is the best-case scenario for a second Trump administration?
The way that I think metaphorically about the problem of what can be done with the powers of the presidency is untangling the Gordian knot. I often say, “Look, D.C. is run by Congress, not by the president.” The president stands in front of it and waves his hands and watches the system go, but the real decisions are funding decisions, and those kinds of decisions are made by Congress or the agencies. Actually, if the White House didn’t exist, America would still work.
Do you think that a second-term Trump can untie the Gordian knot?
I think that is the fundamental question. The answer is interesting, because what he’s doing is not at all what I would do with an opportunity like this. But I think that what I would do is probably not possible.
What would you do?
I would cut the Gordian knot. For example, a straightforward way to cut the Gordian knot is to say, “Look, the [Federal Reserve] is clearly under executive authority.” It’s clearly not part of the legislative branch, it’s clearly not part of the judicial branch, so it’s clearly part of the executive branch. And because the Fed actually controls the monetary system, I can order it to mint the trillion-dollar coin, or more to the point, I can basically order the Fed to buy assets. And because I can order the Fed to buy assets, I can order the Fed to buy notes issued by new institutions.
That allows me to basically come face to face with two very clear facts. One is that the U.S. doesn’t really have an executive branch — it has a legislative branch, and it has an administrative branch, which is basically managed not by a monarchical president, but by an oligarchical Congress.
The second fact is that, when I look at any part of the federal government as a start-up guy, and I say, “OK, first, let’s take for granted that this is trying to solve [a real] problem,” for almost anything that you can look at, the right way to fix that organization is just to stand up a new one.
There are some parts of the U.S. government that have a very clear role and are not politicized in any way. If the president had the exclusive executive power over the Coast Guard, would the right choice be to create a new Coast Guard or to reuse the existing Coast Guard? I’m going to [reuse] the Coast Guard. But when I get to something like the State Department, I’m no longer anywhere near assured of that.
Why do you think Trump is unwilling to do what you’re suggesting here?
I think he’s unready. I think that America is unready for that level of change.
I want to get your read on the divide that seems to be opening up between the tech right and the populist-nationalist right, or what you’ve called the “rationalists” and the “traditionalists.” How real do you think this divide is, and what do you think is underlying it at a sort of fundamental level?
I came up with this sort of Tolkien-esque classification of the social forces in America today, and I identify two kinds of people.
Ah yes, the elves.
Yes. There are the elves — the blue state, [professional managerial class], ruling-class people — and the hobbits, the ruled-over lower-middle-class. The fear among elves that the hobbits will organize and come and kill them with pitchforks — because there’s a lot of goddamn hobbits — has driven a lot of things in the 20th century.
But what happens when you have a group of people who are elves either by education or by background — because, of course, we have this remarkable system called “college” for promoting people in the elf aristocracy — is that you have a certain set of people who, like me, are dark elves who dissent from the [progressive] Obama worldview, right? They don’t believe in the state religion anymore.
So there’s a conflict there [between the dark elves and the hobbits], definitely, but whenever you see a conflict, you should want to heal a conflict, right? I think that where that conflict comes from is that you’ll go to something like the Passage Press party, and I’m there, and Steve Bannon is there — who apparently feels like it’s appropriate to go to a black-tie event looking like a homeless dude.
You’re apparently on his enemies list now.
Am I on his enemies list? I don’t know.
Do you see Steve Bannon as an enemy?
No, no, my God. I mean, I’ve never met or talked to him. I don’t see him as an enemy. Why would he be an enemy? I mean, it’s a little funny to be talking about someone whose revenues come from Seinfeld. But Bannon has a kind organic connection with MAGA world. He has an organic connection with the great American hobbit. He really loved those people, and there’s something sort of right about that.
The way the relationship between the dark elf and the hobbits should work is [based on the understanding] that [the hobbits] have been pouring their energy and their hope and their fear for decades into shit that doesn’t work.
Do you think this tension within the MAGA coalition can be managed, or is one side going to have to win?
It’s entirely able to be managed. What Trump is showing in his effort to sort of reactivate all of these incredibly rusty, broken levers of the top-down control of the New Deal, is just like, “Wow, the president can do this.” The president can cancel the 1965 affirmative action executive order and nobody questions that legally he can just do that. Imagine if you’d suggested that in a meeting of the Bush administration. You would be on the next plane out. So what I think that the MAGA people are going to see is that shit is happening.
You’ve said that your relationship with Vance has been overstated by the press. What is your relationship with him?
I’ve interacted with Vance once since the election. I bumped into him at a party. He said, “Yarvin, you reactionary fascist.” I was like, “Thank you, Mr. Vice President, and I’m glad I didn’t stop you from getting elected.”
He said that to you?
That’s what he said. I don’t think he meant it in a bad way, but I don’t think he meant it in a good way, either.
Do you guys talk regularly?
No, no, definitely not. And I think that’s not really the important relationship. [The New Right] is still a vanguard, which means it’s still fundamentally oligarchical in a lot of ways. I don’t need to name names, but there’s a guy in D.C. who has a big house which a lot of the revolutionary vanguard hangs out in.
Are we talking about Peter Thiel? Who are we talking about?
No, no, no, this is someone you’ve never heard of.
Who is it?
I can’t tell you. He’s not in government. He’s a lawyer. But this is a tradition that goes way back in D.C., with the House of Truth — where Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Hay and those guys hung out [during the Progressive Era]. Always, in a town like [D.C.], you’ll have this vibe of a society of young, smart people. When you’re at this place, maybe you’ll run into a Clarence Thomas clerk or someone like that. There’s this whole world of people in their 20s and 30s who are basically arriving to take jobs in D.C. now. And a lot of these dark elf-y people are hanging out in various places. Not that many of these people are not Christians — many of them are Christians, of course, but they’re more likely to be like TradCaths than cradle Catholics, right?
The important thing is the vibe among the staff and the staffers. You have a bunch of people coming to Washington who don’t have this traditional fear of the old establishment.
Let’s go back to the Gordian knot analogy: I’m like, “OK, cut the Gordian knot. Where’s the sword?” But we’re not quite ready for that, so what they’re actually doing is they’re pulling on the Gordian knot.
When you talk about tugging at the Gordian knot, you’re saying they’re taking incremental steps toward a type of systematic political change — a revolution, for lack of a better word.
Yeah, I’m talking about — America just has a really shitty government and needs a new government.
Do you think Vance is better suited than Trump for that type of work, by virtue of his background and intellectual orientation?
That’s a good question. I think they’re going to be an amazing team, because basically, in almost every way, JD is perfect. One of the perfect things about him is that he has this deeply American background, and then he was just completely re-socialized into the American elite. It’s like, the Marines taught him how to hold a fork or whatever, and then he’s graduated from Yale Law School, and he knows exactly how to eat at the right banquets. He’s more comfortable with elite liberal Americans than Trump will ever be, and Trump just doesn’t care.
There’s an old blog post of mine from 2011 where I talk about kingship and the vibe of being a king, and I’m basically like, the guy in America who has this vibe is Donald Trump — and this is well before there was any serious talk of him having a political career, if I can pat myself on the back for that. Trump has this incredible energy — he’s the guy who Ali G’s bullshit doesn’t work on. Cutting through bullshit is his strength.
What is Vance’s strength in that matrix?
JD is more analytical. He’s much younger, so he has more IQ points left. As you get older, you feel your IQ points going away, but they get replaced by wisdom.
And he has more of an appetite to pull on the strings of the knot?
JD has a lot of honor — honor goes very, very, very deep, in JD. I don’t think he would ever be satisfied with being a grifter. What’s so terrible about the outer-party Republicans is that people get into it, and they don’t want to be grifters, and then they find that they are grifters.
I think even with a professional mercantile class, you can say to them at a certain point, “Wouldn’t it be easier to just be a dark elf?” Think about the elf career track. There’s a cursus honorum — a standard path that you follow. If you want to work in government, you go to Harvard, then you go to D.C. to be an intern; you’re opening people’s mail, you climb your way up the staff after 10 years; you don’t write legislation exactly, but you influence the direction of the legislation, et cetera. It’s a really hard thing. And then here these guys and girls who by virtue of reading Curtis Yarvin in middle school are getting jobs more easily, because the ratio of people to jobs is a lot smaller.
I [recently] had lunch with Mike Anton at a coffee shop across the street from the State Department —
Michael Anton, incoming senior State Department official, for the record.
Yes, incoming senior State Department official. And I was like, “Here’s this academic position that they can fill, has anyone thought about filling this position?” And they’re like, “I don’t think so.” And I’m like, “What about this guy?” And they’re like, “Oh, he’d be perfect.” And then, you know, bam, bam, bam, it’s done.
They took your staffing recommendations, is what you’re saying?
Well, we’ll see — but the path is easier. The path from, “I’m a maverick dark elf” to “I have a position with this administration” is just suddenly like, “Whoa — there is a lot less competition.”
There’s a debate over the scope of your influence in Washington, so I wonder how you measure your own influence, and how you think it compares now to four or eight years ago?
It has obviously increased since four years ago, but how I measure my influence is that I try not to. For the first six years when I was blogging, from 2007 to 2014, I barely talked to anyone about this stuff, and then I started to get letters from Washington being like, “Wow, it seems like you’re talking about the same Washington that I work in, and nobody ever talks about it.” All this stuff about the civil service, the deep state, the administrative state — there were academics who knew about it, but it was just not a part of the discourse.
Saying, “Oh, I’m talking to the vice president daily,” or like, “I got this guy this job” — that is just not my role as an intellectual. There are other people who are better at that. The way to fulfill your duty as an intellectual is to cast your bread upon the water — and actually, the more personal it gets, the worse it is.
In practice, a lot of your ideas point toward consolidating a significant amount of power in the executive branch. What would indicate to you that the Trump administration is serious about doing that?
There’s no question that Donald Trump is completely serious and sincere about saying, “I’m going to use all the power I have to make America great again.” I think he completely believes that. I don’t think he wants to be a grifter in any way, shape or form. I think that the question is the limits of what can be done with that.
But what are the practical measures that you’re looking for? Is it reviving impoundment authority or what?
Yeah, so look at Russ Vought at the Office of Management and Budget — another person whose hand I maybe shook once but who I haven’t talked to. Impoundment is a perfect example of an issue where in the first Trump administration, the Office of Legal Counsel would have said, “Oh, you can’t do that — there’s a law.” Well, is the law constitutional? I don’t think the law is constitutional. I think the law is clearly a straight-up violation of the Constitution.
The courts are still a question here, and the idea that we control the court — I think anyone on the Supreme Court would resist that description, certainly the swing centrist bloc on the Supreme Court would resist it. Among his mistakes in his first term was that Trump basically appointed three centrists [to the Supreme Court] — so I don’t know if Amy Coney Barrett is going say, “Hey, let’s revisit this birthright citizenship question.” But when it comes to the anti-impoundment act, it seems very plausible you could get that through the Supreme Court. And even if you can’t, why not ask?
Every time the old Republicans wanted to do something, it was like the nebbish guy asking the hot prom queen out for a date — they were just terrified that they were going to ask and the answer is going to be “no” and it’s going be devastating. That attitude does not seem to be present here.
And if the courts say no, then what?
I think if the courts say no, you’ll see more and more pressure put by the Trump administration on Congress. I think that as the machine gathers strength, victories have to build bigger victories. You win these small things, and then you’re just like, “Wow, we can actually do something bigger.” And before you know it, you’re writing bills in the White House and sending them to Congress to be rubber-stamped.
Should they defy the court if that’s not on the table?
That is a question that depends very much on circumstances.
Under what circumstances should they do it?
I think it has to feel right. If you’re going to defy the court, it has to feel unifying above all. If you’re going to say, “Hey, you know what? Marbury v. Madison was wrongly decided, the Constitution actually does not specify the precedence of the branches, judicial review was just this invented thing,” it has to be the right moment. If you’re doing that in a situation where the vibe is like, “This is going to be the first shot in the civil war between red America and blue America” — if you’re doing that as part of a divisive path where you have an opposition — I think it’s bad.
For example: I think they corrected this a little bit, but you know when at the start of the campaign, the Trump team didn’t really know what JD was going to be used for, and they tried to use him a little bit like Sarah Palin 2.0? I was like, “Oh my god, this is terrible.” The thing that JD can do that’s amazing is he can go and talk to the New Yorker and he can sit down with the liberal media and basically be like, “No, get these caricatures out of your head. This is not Hitler 2.0. We’re not here to send you to Guantanamo. You can actually get behind what’s happening here even if you went to Harvard.”
Have you articulated this point of view to him?
Um — he knows it’s what I think.
You said you talked to him once since the election?
I texted him once about a small issue, and then I shook hands with him at a party, because it’s really important to shake hands with dignitaries.
But he knows that your point of view is that he can serve as a kind of unifier to sell what would otherwise be divisive issues to a broad swath of the American public?
Yes, and specifically to the American ruling class.
Is he on board with that?
I don’t know. The thing is, when you talk to powerful people, they should be getting to know you — you should not be getting to know them. I’m not a reporter.
Can you imagine a scenario in the next four years where an effort to defy a Supreme Court order would be unifying rather than divisive?
Let me think.
I realize it’s a hypothetical.
It’s hard to picture. I think it would have to come about in a situation in which Trump had done so much through the ordinary course of ripping handfuls out of the Gordian knot that things had visibly changed for people. Fix New York City. Fix San Francisco.
What the elves have to realize is that their paranoid Handmaid’s Tale fantasy in which hobbits from Ohio establish a new Hobbit fundamentalist regime and their daughters are enslaved or something is not going to happen.
Is there a scenario in the next four years where the Republican political elite is able to achieve the type of regime change you’re discussing?
I think it’s very unlikely. I would say that you would have to draw a straight flush on that, or maybe a royal straight flush. But royal straight flushes have been heard of, right? Cards are very random things.
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