Digital media has played a significant role in the rise of right-wing populism, facilitating the circulation of extremist propaganda. Around the world populist movements are wreaking economic destruction and social turmoil in the name of moral principles. The biggest takeaway from this research is that social emotions like anger, envy, and spite are very powerful motives. They often outweigh economic self-interest, and they tap into the brain’s reward centres – the same brain areas that play a role in addiction. These emotions can fuel a behavior called ‘costly punishment’: where people take on a personal cost to punish another person for being unfair. It appears people just wanted to hurt the person who had hurt them, and that’s an anti-social motive. Most likely people might be punishing for antisocial reasons but telling themselves and others they are punishing for moralistic reasons. Populist messaging has been very effective in channelling retributive impulses into votes.1
For Guénon (1886 – 1951) and other Traditionalists, a caste system that placed a spiritual elite at the top and manual workers at the bottom was the natural order of human society. The increase in an individualist ethos, especially one that treats all humans as equal because of their status as consumers, erodes the caste system in the “west.” In tandem with the falling away of caste and the rise of individualism is the ascendance of the value of equality and its attendant institutionalized political form in democracy. Over and against such a vision of society Guénon promoted a hierarchical social order rooted in a primordial tradition, where people know their place, and because they know their place (whether as a cook, blacksmith, mother, or father) had a clear meaning and purpose in their lives. This political theology sought to preserve hierarchy, suppress the individual, and enforce conformity to an ideal only known by a select few.2
Curtis Guy Yarvin (born 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American blogger. He is known, along with philosopher Nick Land, for founding the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary movement. In his blog Unqualified Reservations, which he wrote from 2007 to 2014, and on his later Substack page called Gray Mirror, which he started in 2020, he argues that American democracy is a failed experiment that should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to the governance structure of corporations. In the 1980–1990s, Yarvin was influenced by the libertarian tech culture of Silicon Valley. Yarvin read right-wing and American conservative works. He has been described as a “neo-reactionary” and “neo-monarchist” who “sees liberalism as creating a Matrix-like totalitarian system, and who wants to replace American democracy with a sort of techno-monarchy”.3
The libertarian University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds introduced Yarvin to writers like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. The rejection of empiricism by Mises and the Austrian School, who favored instead deduction from first principles, influenced Yarvin’s mindset. Yarvin’s reading of Thomas Carlyle convinced him that libertarianism was a doomed project without the inclusion of authoritarianism, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s 2001 book Democracy: The God That Failed marked Yarvin’s first break with democracy. Another influence was James Burnham, who asserted that real politics occurred through the actions of elites, beneath what he called apparent democratic or socialist rhetoric. In the 2000s, the failures of US-led nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan strengthened Yarvin’s anti-democratic views, the federal response to the 2008 financial crisis strengthened his libertarian convictions, and Barack Obama’s election as US president later that year reinforced his belief that history inevitably progresses toward left-leaning societies.
Far-right intellectuals like Steve Bannon claim to speak for a working class put upon by out-of-touch liberal elites. But their anti-modernist, hierarchical vision of the world doesn’t offer workers what they really need: more money in their pockets, and more power at the workplace. He turns to Yarvin and Guénon to support his ideas. In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful and should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose “shareholders” (large owners) elect an executive with total power, but who must serve at their pleasure. The executive, unencumbered by liberal-democratic procedures, could rule efficiently much like a CEO-monarch. Yarvin gave a talk about “rebooting” the American government at the 2012 BIL Conference. He used it to advocate the acronym “RAGE”, which he defined as “Retire All Government Employees”. Vice president-elect JD Vance has cited Yarvin as an influence.
Yarvin advocates an American ‘monarch’ dissolving elite academic institutions and media outlets within the first few months of their reign. Drawing on computer metaphors, Yarvin contends that society needs a “hard reset” or a “rebooting”, not a series of gradual political reforms. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts sees the think tank’s role as “institutionalizing Trumpism” and is a friend of Vance, whom he’s referred to as “one of the leaders of our movement.” Under Roberts, Heritage has shed its former identity as a home for free trade fanatics and Reagan Republicans and has fully leaned into an ultranationalist MAGA ethos. Vance wrote the foreword to Roberts’ book Dawn’s Early Light, whose publication date was pushed back from September until November – after the election. With Project 2025, the foundation has positioned itself as a policy and personnel force in the next Trump term, similar to how the thinktank proved critical to Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Yarvin supports authoritarianism on right-libertarian grounds, claiming that the division of political sovereignty expands the scope of the state, whereas strong governments with clear hierarchies remain minimal and narrowly focused. According to scholar Joshua Tait, “Moldbug imagines a radical libertarian utopia with maximum freedom in all things except politics.” He has favored same-sex marriage, freedom of religion, and private use of drugs, and has written against race- or gender-based discriminatory laws, although, according to Tait, “he self-consciously proposed private welfare and prison reforms that resembled slavery”. Tait describes Yarvin’s writing as contradictory, saying: “He advocates hierarchy, yet deeply resents cultural elites. His political vision is futuristic and libertarian, yet expressed in the language of monarchy and reaction. Yarvin wants American democracy toppled, and he has prominent Republican fans who have read and admire his work.
According to Tait, “Moldbug’s relationship with the investor-entrepreneur Thiel is his most important connection.” Thiel was an investor in Yarvin’s startup Tlon and gave $100,000 to Tlon’s co-founder John Burnham in 2011. In 2016, Yarvin privately asserted to Milo Yiannopoulos that he had been “coaching Thiel” and that he had watched the 2016 US election at Thiel’s house. In his writings, Yarvin has pointed to a 2009 essay written by Thiel, in which the latter declared: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible… Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron. Investor Balaji Srinivasan has also echoed Yarvin’s ideas of techno-corporate cameralism. He advocated in a 2013 speech a “society run by Silicon Valley […] an opt-in society, ultimately outside the US, run by technology.
Curtis Yarvin and the rising right are crafting a different strain of conservative politics. No one online has shaped Vance’s thinking more than this neoreactionary blogger, Vance said on a right-wing podcast in 2021. Vance didn’t stop at a simple name-drop. He went on to explain how former President Donald Trump should remake the federal bureaucracy. “I think what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” Vance is smart enough not to cite Yarvin in public now that he’s the vice president, and he hasn’t publicly supported some of the blogger’s more repugnant views. But that doesn’t mean he’s not plugged in.4
On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to re-sign an executive order known as Schedule F, which could reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants into at-will political appointments, who Trump could fire and replace with loyalists. He’s also assigned billionaire Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to run the “Department of Government Efficiency,” an advisory board that will explore ways to slash the federal budget. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead a new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE for short. The theory: Putting up a target of at least $2 trillion in annual government spending cuts – one-third of federal outlays, excluding interest on the debt. The goal: A weaker regulatory apparatus or infrastructure allows business to do a lot more and have a lot more freedoms than it did previously, so business executives or those in the private sector may call this efficiency.
Trump is the conduit for the alt right. This is how US extremism is going mainstream. In parallel and closely associated with the expansion of populist politics there has been a surge in alt-right politics that usually articulate populism’s anti-establishment appeals to far-right ideologies based on race, ethnic and nationalist forms of identification. Trump used populist rhetoric to get elected. Now elected, he is supported by enablers, profit mongers and blind believers. Trump is governing as an elitist, promoting an authoritarian democracy. Authoritarian democracy is a type of democracy in which democratic institutions and processes are used to legitimize an authoritarian regime. Political opposition will be suppressed, civil liberties will be restricted, and the media can expect to be censored or controlled by the government. The general public will have limited opportunities for political participation, and decisions will be made by a small group of individuals.
1 https://www.weforum.org/stories/2017/01/how-populism-taps-into-the-human-desire-for-punishment/
2 https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/theorizing-modernities/political-theology-traditionalism/
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
4 https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/16/24266512/jd-vance-curtis-yarvin-influence-rage-project-2025