“For years, Curtis Yarvin had been writing online about political theory in relative obscurity. His ideas were pretty extreme, that institutions at the heart of American intellectual life, like the mainstream media and academia, need to be dissolved. He also believes that government bureaucracy should be radically gutted and that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a monarchy run by a C.E.O.” “Monarch is good. It’s a neutral term.” “But while Yarvin himself may still be obscure, his ideas are not. Vice President-elect JD Vance has alluded to his notions of forcibly ridding American institutions of so-called wokeism. And Yarvin has also found fans in the most powerful and increasingly political ranks of Silicon Valley, like Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist turned informal advisor to President-elect Trump.” “We are living under F.D.R.’s personal monarchy.” “Peter Thiel, a Republican mega-donor, has called him a powerful historian. On top of it all, Yarvin has become a fixture of the right-wing podcast universe. He’s been a guest on the shows of Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, among others.” “Thank you for that lovely intro, Tucker.” “I’ve been aware of Yarvin for years, but always thought of his work as pretty fringe. A lot of what Yarvin has to say is disturbing. And the historical evidence he justifies it with is riddled with exaggeration, distortion and sometimes just plain inaccuracy. But given that his ideas are now finding an audience with some of the most powerful people in the country, Yarvin can’t be so easily dismissed anymore.” “When you say to a New York Times reader, ‘Democracy is bad,’ they’re a little bit shocked. But when you say to them politics is bad or even populism is bad, they’re like, of course, these are horrible things.” “I’m David Marchese, and here’s my conversation with writer Curtis Yarvin.” [MUSIC PLAYING] “To my understanding, one of your central arguments is that America needs to — I think the way you put it in the past is — get over our dictator phobia, that American democracy is a sham, beyond fixing, and having a monarch-style leader, or call it a C.E.O., or call it a dictator, that’s the way to go. So why is democracy so bad? And why would having a dictator solve the problem?” “Let me answer that in, I think, a way that will be relatively accessible to readers of The New York Times. You’ve probably heard of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” “Yes.” “I do a speech sometimes where I’ll just read the last 10 paragraphs of F.D.R.’s first inaugural address, in which F.D.R. essentially says to the American people, ‘Hey, Congress, give me absolute power, or I’ll take it anyway.’ So did F.D.R. actually take that level of power? Yeah, he did. And so there’s a great piece that I’ve sent to some of the people that I know that are involved in the transition —” “Who?” “I mean, there’s all sorts of people milling around in there.” “Name one.” “Name one. Wow. Name one. Well, I definitely know Marc Andreessen. And so I sent this piece to Marc Andreessen. And it’s an excerpt from the diary of Harold Ickes, who was F.D.R.’s secretary of the interior. And it’s a little diary entry describing a cabinet meeting in 1933. And what happens in this cabinet meeting is that Frances Perkins, who’s the secretary of labor, comes in to this meeting and is, like, here, I have a list of the projects that we’re going to do. FDR personally takes this list, looks at the projects in New York. He’s like, this is crap, this is crap. I don’t know what you’re doing. Like, humiliates Frances Perkins in the Oval Office, or wherever they’re having their cabinet meeting. And then at the end of the thing, it’s like everybody agrees that the bill will be fixed and then passed through Congress. This is just a picture of FDR acting like a CEO. And so the question of, Was FDR a dictator? What does it mean to be a dictator? What does this pejorative word mean? I don’t know. What I know is that Americans of all stripes, Democrats, Republicans and everyone except for a few right-wing Republicans, basically revere F.D.R. And F.D.R. ran the New Deal like a start-up.” “So as I understand it, the point you’re trying to make is that we have had something like a dictator in the past in American history. And therefore, it’s not something to be afraid of now. Is that —” “Yeah.” “— right?” “What we see in the course of — to look at the objective reality of power in the U.S. since the revolution — you’ll talk to people about the Articles of Confederation. And you’re just like, name one thing that happened in America under the Articles of Confederation. And they can’t unless they’re a professional historian. Next, you have the first constitutional period under George Washington. If you look at the administration of Washington, what you’ll see is that basically what is established looks a lot like a start-up. It looks so much like a start-up that this guy, Alexander Hamilton, who was recognizably a start-up bro, is running the whole government. He’s basically the Larry Page of this republic. He’s nominally the secretary.” “I have to say, I feel like I’m asking you, What did you have for breakfast? And you’re saying, well, the dawn of man, when cereals —” “I’m doing —” “— were first —” “— a Putin.” “— cultivated —” “I’m doing a Putin. I’ll speed this up.” “And then answer the question, what’s so bad about democracy?” “All right. To make a long story short, whether you want to call Washington, Lincoln and F.D.R. dictators, this opprobrious word, what they were was basically national C.E.O.s. And they were running the government like a company from the top down.” “So why is democracy so bad?” “So it’s not even that democracy is bad. It’s just that it’s very weak. And the fact that it’s very weak is basically easily seen by the fact that very unpopular policies like mass immigration persist despite strong majorities being against them. So the question of basically, is democracy good or bad, is, I think, a secondary question to, Is it what we actually have? When you say to a New York Times reader, ‘Democracy is bad,’ they’re a little bit shocked. But when you say to them politics is bad or even populism is bad, they’re like, of course, these are horrible things. And so the thing is, when you basically want to be say democracy is not a good system of government, just bridge that immediately to saying populism is not a good system of government. And then you’ll be like, yes, of course. Actually, policy and law should be set by wise experts and people in the courts and lawyers and professors and so forth. Then you’ll realize that what you’re actually endorsing is aristocracy rather than democracy.” “Your ideas are ones that have been pointed to by people in real positions of power in the Republican Party. I think it’s probably overstated the extent to which you and JD Vance are friends.” “It’s definitely overstated.” “He has mentioned you by name publicly and referred to de-wokeification ideas that are very similar to yours. You’ve been on Michael Anton’s podcast. And Michael Anton has been tapped by Trump to be high up in the State Department, talking with him about how to install an American caesar. Peter Thiel, a major Republican donor, has said you’re an interesting thinker. And so let’s say people in actual positions of power said to you, Curtis, we’re going to do the Curtis Yarvin thing. What are the steps that they would take to change American democracy into something like a monarchy?” “My honest answer would have to be, ‘It’s not exactly time for that yet,’ because what I see happening in D.C. right now, nobody should be watching this panicking thinking I’m about to be installed as America’s secret dictator. And I don’t think I’m even going to the inauguration.” “Were you invited?” “No, no, no. Like, I’m an outsider, man. I’m an intellectual. And the actual ways in which my ideas get into circulation is actually mostly through the staffers and the kind of younger people who basically kind of swim in this very online kind of soup. And I think that’s fine. I think that what’s happening now in D.C., to distinguish my much more radical ideas from what’s happening now — I would say that’s what’s happening now is there’s definitely an attempt to revive the White House as an executive organization, which governs the executive branch. And the difficulty with that is if you go to Washington and say to anyone who’s professionally involved in the business of Washington that Washington would work just fine or even better if there was no White House at all, and they’ll basically be like, ‘Yeah, of course.’ The executive branch works for Congress. So you have these poor voters out there who elected, as they think, a revolution. They elected Donald Trump and maybe the world’s most capable C.E.O. is in there.” “And your point is, he can’t — the way the system is set up, he can’t actually get that much —” “He can’t actually do that much to it. He can block things. He can disrupt it. He can create chaos and turbulence, or whatever. But he can’t really change what it is.” “Do you think you’re maybe overstating the inefficacy of a president? You could point to the repeal of Roe as something that’s directly attributable to Donald Trump being president.” “Yes.” “One could argue that the Covid response was attributable to Donald Trump, I think.” “I think the Covid response is a slightly better example. Certainly many things about Covid were different because Donald Trump was president. I’ll tell you a funny story —” “Sure.” “— at the risk of bringing my children into the media. In 2016, my son —” “Who’s how old?” “He’s now 14. He was 6 then. And my children were going to a chichi, progressive Mandarin-immersion school in San Francisco. And so —” “Oh, you send your kids to a — sorry I’m laughing. You send your kids to a chichi progressive school.” “At that time — Mandarin immersion.” “The rubber hits the road, if that’s what happens. Yeah.” “Indeed. And you can’t isolate children from the world, right? And so, at the time, my late wife and I did not. We just adopted the simple expedient of not talking about politics in front of the children —” “Smart move.” “— which I recommend to everyone. But of course, everyone’s talking about it at school. And my son comes home, and he has this very concrete question. He’s like, Pop, when Donald Trump builds a wall around the country, how are we going to be able to go to the beach? And I’m like, wow, you really took him literally. Like, everybody else is taking him literally, but you really took him literally. And I was like, If you see anything in the real world around you, over the next four years, that changes as a result of this election, I’ll be surprised.” “In one of your recent blog posts — I guess it’s a newsletter, not a blog, at this point — you referred to JD Vance as, I think, a normie.” – [LAUGHS] “What do you mean?” “I would say that the thing that I admire about Vance, and the thing that’s really remarkable about him as a leader, is that I think that he contains within him all kinds of Americans. His ability to connect with flyover Americans in the world that he came from is, of course, very, very great. But the other thing that’s neat about him is that he went to Yale — Yale Law School, in fact. And so he can connect at a — he’s a fluent speaker of the language of The New York Times, which you cannot say about Donald Trump. And one of the things that I believe really strongly, that I haven’t touched on when I talk about monarchy, is I think that it’s utterly essential for anything like an American monarchy, you have to be the president of all Americans. And I think this is something that, basically, the new administration could do a much better job of reaching out to progressive Americans and not demonizing them and basically saying: Hey, you want to make this country a better place. I feel like you’ve been misinformed in some ways. You’re not a bad person. This is, like, 10 to 20 percent of Americans. This is a lot of people are, like, the N.P.R. class. But they are not bad people, evil people who want to do —” “Yeah.” “But the thing is, they’re human beings. We’re all human beings. And, human beings can support bad regimes.” “The question was, why did you call JD Vance a normie?” “Because he contains within him normie-ness.” “All right. There you go.” “But he is also an intellectual, and he contains within him intellectualness.” “And so what you just said about the administration could do a better job of reaching out to progressives, and we’re all human beings, as you well know, that’s a pretty different stance than the stance you often take in your writing, where you —” – [LAUGHS] “Right. You’re laughing because you know it’s true — where you talk about things like de-wokeification how people who work —” “Those things are —” “— at places like The New York Times should all lose our jobs. You have an idea for a program called RAGE, Retire All Government Employees. You have ideas, which I hope are satirical, about how to handle nonproductive members of society, that involve basically locking them in a room forever. So why is your tone — has your thinking shifted?” “No, no, no.” “Is your rhetorical tone different in a setting like this?” “You’re looking for different — my thinking has definitely not shifted. And you’re finding different emphases. It’s like when I talk about RAGE, for example, both my parents worked for the federal government. They were career federal employees.” “It’s a little on the nose, from a Freudian perspective.” “It is.” “But yeah, go on.” “It is. But the thing is, basically, when you look at the way — when you look at the way to treat those institutions, I’m just like, treat it like a company that goes out of business. But sort of more so because these people, having had power, have to actually be treated even more delicately and with even more respect. And winning means these are your people now. And so the thing is, when you understand the perspective of the new regime with respect to the American aristocracy, their perspective can’t be the sort of anti-aristocratic thing of, like, we’re going to bayonet all the professors and throw them in ditches or whatever. Their perspective has to be that you were a normal person serving a regime that did this really weird and crazy stuff.” “How invested do you think JD Vance is in democracy?” “It depends what you mean by democracy. I mean, I think that the problem is, basically, when people equate democracy with good government. When you use that word, you’re using a very tricky word. I would say that what someone like — I’m on very safe ground, despite not knowing him well at all — that someone like JD Vance believes essentially in the common good and the idea that government should serve the common good. And I think that people like JD and people in the broader intellectual scene around him, which is a very varied intellectual scene, would all agree on that principle. Now, if that principle — I don’t know what you mean by democracy, in this context. What I do know is that if democracy is against the common good, it’s bad. And if it’s for the common good, it’s good.” “I think what you just described might be something that Peter Thiel would agree with. And there was —” “I think a progressive could agree with it.” “And there was a reporting that I saw. I think it was 2017, reporting done by BuzzFeed, where they published some emails, I think, between you and the right-wing provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, where you talked about watching the 2016 election with Peter Thiel and referred to him as fully enlightened. What would ‘fully enlightened’ have meant in that context?” “’Fully enlightened,’ for me, generally means fully disenchanted. When I look at, basically, what the kinds of people that I know, not really that well, in Silicon Valley think, I’m basically like, Have people like this been exposed to my ideas? Yes. Do they agree that America should be a monarchy? I doubt it, but I have no idea. But what they agree on is not a belief but a disbelief. So I think that when a person who lives their life within the progressive bubble, liberal bubble, use whatever term you like, of the current year, looks at the right, or even the new right, or whatever you want to call it, I think what’s hardest to see is that what’s really shared is not a positive belief but an absence of belief. Basically, we don’t worship these same gods. We do not see The New York Times and Harvard as divinely inspired in any sense. Or we do not see their procedures as ones that always lead to truth and wisdom. We do not think that the way the U.S. government works, really works well or seems to be perfect in any respect.” “And this absence of belief is what you call enlightened.” “Yes.” “OK.” “Yes. It’s a disenchantment from believing in these old systems. And the right thing that should replace that disenchantment is not, ‘Oh, we need to go do things Curtis’s way,’ and is basically just a greater openness of mind, and a greater ability to look around and say, you know, like, we just assume that our political science is superior to Aristotle’s political science because our physics is superior to Aristotle’s physics. What if that isn’t so?” “You’re basically saying there’s a historical and political recency bias that people are susceptible to.” “Yes, exactly.” “But I think the thing that you have not quite isolated yet is why having a strong-man figure would be better for people’s lives. Can you answer that question?” “Yes. Number one, I think that having an effective government and an efficient government is better for people’s lives. And I think that the best answer, when I ask people to answer that question, I ask them to look around the room and basically point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy. Because these things that we call companies are actually little monarchies. And then you’re looking around yourself and you see, for example, a laptop. And that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy. And it has a little thing on it that says designed in California and made in China. It is made —” “This is an example you use a lot, where you say, and if Apple ran California, wouldn’t that be much better?” “Whereas if your MacBook Pro was made by the California Department of Computing, you can only imagine it. I’m sorry. I’m here in this building, and I keep forgetting to make my best argument for monarchy, which is that people trust The New York Times more than any other source in the world. And how is The New York Times managed? It is a fifth-generation, hereditary, absolute monarchy. And so we’ve basically taken, in some ways — and this was very much the vision of the early progressives, by the way. The early progressives, even, like, the pre-World War I progressives, you go back to a book like ‘Drift and Mastery’ are very —” “I have to say, I find the depth of background information to be obfuscating rather than illuminating. But —” “How can I change that? How can I make that —” “By answering the questions more directly and succinctly, I think would be the simple reply.” “Fine. I’ll try.” “But the thing I’d like to say, just to tie this back a little bit to something we spoke about a minute ago, is there is this idea that the incoming Trump administration is interested in the idea of a more powerful executive office. Are there things that you would like to see or, if you saw them, would be hints to you that the Trump administration is taking the right steps, as you might see it, towards actually enacting that reality and becoming a stronger executive, a more monarchical executive office.” “I would say that the incoming Trump administration, with all due respect — and there’s a lot of great people there and people who are working extremely hard. Unfortunately, I would say that they’re essentially finding themselves in a position where they’re trying to untangle the Gordian knot.” “Meaning what?” “Meaning that they’re basically trying to — let’s take just NASA, in specific. So for example, if you compare NASA to SpaceX, that’s a fine example of, actually, all of the principles that I’ve been describing because NASA was once as efficient as SpaceX. So if you basically say, OK, at a very abstract level, forget the rest of the government. Elon, go and fix NASA. The goal of NASA is to give us cool space [BLEEP]. We feel like we’re not getting enough cool space [BLEEP]. You have $25 billion a year. Go and do cool space [BLEEP]. I think you would get a lot more cool space [BLEEP]. under that principle. But one of the basic principles of kind of the California startup way of thinking is just to realize it’s way easier to create a new NASA than it is to fix the old NASA. And that principle extends around the government.” “Your ideas, and I guess it’s been called a neo-reactionary cast of mind, are seemingly increasingly popular in the Silicon Valley world. Don’t you think there’s some level on which that world is responding to your ideas because you’re just telling them what they want to hear? If more people like me were in charge, things would be better. It’s an ideologically useful set of arguments for them to latch onto.” “The funny thing is, I think that’s almost the opposite of the truth. It’s like, let me give you a very simple illustration of this. Someone I have actually never met, believe it or not, is Elon Musk. Now, Elon tweeted the other day. He was like, the proper structure of government on Mars should be not just a democracy but a direct democracy. Let me examine the thinking behind Musk saying this, because I find it extremely odd, in a sense. Because one of the things about monarchy that’s been known for quite some time — and again, even in very, very anti-monarchical regimes and periods, an exception is made for this — is that a ship always has a captain. An airplane always has a captain. Basically, in any very safety-critical environment —” “You should have someone in charge.” “You should have someone in charge. But the thing is, you look at, basically, a Mars colony, and you’re just like, really? Are the citizens of the Mars colony going to vote on how to replenish the oxygen supply or whatever? No, of course not. The Mars colony that Elon establishes will be a subsidiary of SpaceX, and it will have someone in charge. And it will have a command hierarchy, just like SpaceX does. And so I’m like, Elon, when you say that this should be a democracy, what are the people voting on. And so there’s this world of actually real governance that someone like Elon Musk lives in every day. And actually applying that world, applying that thinking to being like, Oh, this thinking is directly contradictory, in a sense, to the ideals that I was taught in this society — that’s a really difficult cognitive-dissonance problem, even if you’re Elon Musk.” “When I hear you talk about the need for a monarch — and we’ll just use that term, encompassing C.E.O.s or dictators. I’ll just say monarch for now.” “’Monarch’ is good. It’s a neutral term.” “It would be an understatement to say that humanity’s record with monarchs is mixed at best. Roman Empire under Marcus Aurelius seems like it went pretty well. Under Nero, not so much. Spain’s Charles III is a monarch you point to a lot. He’s sort of your favorite monarch. Louis XIV, he’s starting wars like they’re going out of business. And then in — those are all before the age of democracy. And then if you look in more —” “The monarchs in the age of democracy are just terrible.” “Terrible. I can’t believe I’m saying a phrase like this. If you put Hitler aside and only look at Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Idi Amin, we’re looking at people responsible for the deaths of something like 75 to a hundred million people. So given that historical precedent, do we really want to try dictatorship?” “Your question is the most important question of all. Because, basically, understanding why Hitler was so bad, why Stalin was so bad, is really essential to the riddle of the 20th century. But I think it’s important to note that we don’t see, for the rest of European and world history — human history as a whole is a mixed bag. The history of the age of democracy in the last 250 years is also a mixed bag. And —” “But we don’t see in human history what? You didn’t finish the thought.” “A holocaust. You can pull the camera way back and basically say, wow, in Europe since basically the establishment of European civilization from 1000 A.D. to 1750 A.D., we didn’t have this kind of chaos and violence. And then you can’t separate Hitler and Stalin from the global democratic revolution that they’re a part of.” “But one thing I noticed when I was going through your stuff is that you make these historical claims like the one you just made about no genocide in Europe between 1000 A.D. and the Holocaust, essentially. And then I poke around with it. Huh, is that true? And then you think, well —” “You have the sack of — — there was Tamerlane. He killed —” “Tamerlane was not — I meant Europe, though.” “Well, OK, on the edges of Europe. And then, that’s sort of like a goalpost shift there. But then you think, well, there were there’s the French wars of religion. They killed millions of people, including the massacre of the Huguenots.” “Wait, wait, wait, wait.” “So I often find, when you just scratch a little at some of the historical —” “Wait. There was no massacre of Huguenots. I think you’re confusing it with a sack of Béziers and the massacre of the Albigensians.” “So they got massacred, not the Huguenots.” “Yeah. But the thing is, when people look at the Holocaust, they saw it like a new species of deviltry that had not really existed in the world in that way before. When you see a city sacked in the Middle Ages, you see just, like, wild, undisciplined troops raging around. You don’t see lines of people marched to their deaths.” “My skepticism comes from what I feel like is a pretty strong cherry-picking of historical incidents to support your arguments. And then I look, and the incidents that you’re pointing to are either not necessarily factually settled or there’s a different way of looking at them. But I actually want to — just because some of the historical references are now actually making my head hurt, I just want to ask a couple very concrete questions about some of the stuff that you’ve written about race, for example, which seems pretty provocative, to say the least. I’ll read you some examples. ‘This is the trouble with white nationalism. It is strategically barren. It offers no effective political program.’ To me, the trouble with white nationalism is that it’s racist, not that it’s strategically unsophisticated.” “No —” “There’s two more. There’s two more. ‘It is very difficult to argue that the Civil War made anyone’s life more pleasant, including that of freed slaves.’ Come on.” “Let’s go — The third one. The third one. ‘If you ask me to condemn Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you’d like to [BLEEP].” – [LAUGHS] “So —” “That was so, so, so, oh, let’s go, let’s go — let’s go through each —” “And this is a guy who’s saying —” “Let’s go —” “— we’ll live through —” “Let’s go, let’s go —” “— we’ll achieve harmony.” “Let’s go, let’s go through each of those examples. And so when you look, for example, at Mandela, the reason I said that — most people don’t know this — there was a little contretemps when Mandela was released because he actually had to be taken off the terrorist list.” “Maybe the more relevant point is that Nelson Mandela was in jail for opposing a viciously racist apartheid regime, but —” “The viciously racist apartheid regime, basically, they had him on the terrorist list. So if you look at —” “Let’s get the —” “Let’s get to the other two.” “But again, your quote was, ‘If you ask me to condemn Anders Breivik but adore Nelson Mandela’—” “I’d prefer to condemn them both. And the thing is, basically, when you look at the impact, you see —” “What does this have to do with equating Anders Breivik, who shot people on some bizarre, deluded mission to rid Norway of Islam, with Nelson Mandela?” “Because they’re both terrorists. And because they basically both violated the rules of war in the same way. And they both basically killed innocent people. We valorize terrorism all the time. This valorization of —” “So Gandhi, then, is your model. Martin Luther King, nonviolent —” “It’s more complicated than that. But —” “Is it?” “— I could say things about either. But let’s move on to one of your other examples. I think the best way to basically grapple with that period directly —” “Which period are we talking about now?” “1860s.” “OK, yeah. So now we’re talking about the Civil War.” “African Americans in the 1860s. The thing that you can do, that any Times reader can do, just go to your Google bar and google ‘slave narratives.’ Just go and read random slave narratives and get their experience of the time. So the thing is that, basically, the treatment of the freed slaves after the war is extremely — there was a recent historian who published a thing. And I think this is — I would dispute this. This number is too high. But his estimate was that something like a quarter of all the freedmen basically die in between 1865 and 1870.” “Yeah. Well, again, I can’t speak to the veracity of that.” “That’s too high. Anyway, anyway, the thing is, basically, like, you know —” “But you’re saying there are historical examples in slave narratives where the freed slaves themselves expressed regret at having been freed. But this, to me, is another prime example of how you selectively read history. Because if you read other slave narratives where they talk about the horrible brutality of it.” “Absolutely.” “So, so what that there are some slave narratives —” “And I say this, and I say this —” “How does that justify —” “And I say this in the conversation.” “—’made anyone’s life, more pleasant.’ Difficult to argue that the Civil War made anyone’s life more pleasant, including freed slaves. Their children were no longer sold out from under them.” “When I said ‘anyone’— OK, first of all, when I said ‘anyone,’ I was talking about a population group rather than individuals.” “But are you seriously arguing that the era of slavery was somehow better than the era —” “The era of 1865 to 1875 was absolutely — and the war itself wasn’t good either — but if you look at the living conditions for an African American in the South, they are absolutely at their nadir between 1865 and 1875. They are very, very bad because, basically, this economic system has been disrupted —” “But abolition was a necessary step to get through that period to make people free. I can’t believe I’m arguing this.” “Brazil abolished slavery in the 1880s without a civil war. And so the thing is, when you look at, basically, the cost of the war or the meaning of the war, you’re basically just, like, it just visited this huge amount of destruction on all sorts of people, Black and white, just massive. I’m just, like, all of these evils and all of these goods existed in people at this time. And what I’m fighting against in both of those quotes, also in the way that people respond to Breivik, I’m like, basically, you’re responding in this kind of cartoonish way to something that terrorism, which is — what is the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? That’s a really important question in 20th-century history. To say that I’m going to have a strong opinion about this stuff without having an answer to that question, I think is really difficult and wrong.” “Now maybe you think I haven’t been red-pilled or whatever, or I’m not thinking through these issues enough. But I feel like, to me, you can call it cartoonish. I call it very morally clear. I can say something like, I think slavery was bad. I’m glad there are no longer enslaved people. And then to hear you then say, well, you have to look at it from this other perspective. This is a one-dimensional view of history. I think, well, no, I think it’s pretty cut and dry. It just is very fascinating to me that your ideas, which strike me as pretty extreme — there were fringe ideas, to me, that apparently are no longer on the fringe. And I don’t know. What do you think that says about conservatism today? Your ideas.” “I think that American conservatism is in the long and very, very difficult grieving process of realizing that it has always been a fraud. And I think one of the especially dangers in American conservatism is that there’s so much grift in it, and so much of it consumes so much energy and so much attention, and produces so little. You are still a factor of a hundred from being able to give the people who are voting for you and donating to you anything like what they imagine they’re going to get from you.” “And when you say it’s a fraud, I take that to mean, insofar as it’s conservatism is just —” “The Washington Generals are never going to win the game. It just doesn’t have the power to give anything that it promises.” [ELECTRONIC MUSIC] After the break, I call Curtis back to ask more about the incoming administration. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me again. I appreciate it. “Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It was fun. Let’s have some more fun.” “You do so often draw on the history of the pre-democratic era, which is a historical period exactly coterminous with, for example, women being treated as second-class citizens. And the status of women in that time period, which you valorize, is not something I’ve really seen come up in your writings. Do you feel like your arguments take enough into account the way that monarchies and dictatorships historically tend not to be great for big swaths of demographics?” “OK, so let’s look at enfranchisement in specific. So when I look at the status of women in, say, a Jane Austen novel, which is well before enfranchisement, it actually seems kind of OK. The women in Jane Austen’s book seems to be fine.” “Who are desperate to land a husband because they have no access to income without them.” “Well, have you ever seen anything like that in the 21st century? I mean, the whole class in Jane Austen’s world is the class of, like, UBI-earning aristocrats.” “But are you not willing to say that there were aspects of political life in the era of kings that were inferior or provided less liberty for people than political life does today?” “It’s very hard. So first of all, when we say when we say ‘liberty,’ for example — so you did a thing that people often do where they confuse freedom with power. Free speech is a freedom. The right to vote is a form of power. And so the assumption that you’re making is that through getting the vote in the early 20th century in England and America, woman made life better for themselves.” “Do you think it’s better that women got the vote?” “First of all, I don’t believe in actually voting at all.” “Do you vote?” “No. I believe that voting is providing this almost kind of pornographic stimulus. It becomes more like supporting your football team or something. It basically enables you to feel like you have a certain status. But the thing is, ‘What does this power mean to you?’ is really the most important question. And I think that what it means to most people today is that it provides a source of meaning for them and makes them feel relevant. It makes them feel like they matter, in a sense. And I think that there’s something deeply illusory about that sense of mattering that goes up against the very, very important question of we need a government that is actually good and that actually works. And we don’t have one.” “So the solution that you propose it has to do with, like we’ve said multiple times now, installing you can call it a monarch, you can call it a C.E.O. figure. And the result of investing an individual with the power of a C.E.O. would be hopefully a more efficient, more responsive, more effective government. Why do you seem to have such faith in the ability of C.E.O.s? I mean, most start-ups fail. And we can all point to C.E.O.s who are effective, C.E.O.s who have been ineffective. And putting that aside, that a C.E.O. or dictator is more likely to think of a state’s citizens as pure economic units rather than living, breathing human beings who want to flourish in their lives, who deserve the dignity of a secure retirement or meaningful leisure time. So why are you so confident that a C.E.O. would be the kind of leader who could bring about better lives for people? It just seems like such a simplistic way of thinking.” “It’s not a simplistic way of thinking. And having worked inside the kind of salt mines where C.E.O.s do their C.E.O.-ing business, and having been a C.E.O. myself, I think I have a better sense of it, maybe, unfortunately, than most people. Last time we spoke, I used the example of, imagine if your MacBook had to be made by the California Department of Computing, or if your car, or your electric car, had to be made by the U.S. Department of Transportation. The thing is, the things that make companies succeed or fail —” “I will say, Apple and Tesla, by the way, though, have both benefited greatly from government help in various forms.” “Well, they live in a governed society. And so the thing is, basically, when libertarians talk about Apple and Tesla, they’re saying, OK, here are the benefits of freedom, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That’s sort of true, in a sense. But the benefit of freedom is that these organizations have used freedom to establish monarchies, which are completely top-down command units.” “We’ve gotten away from the central question a little bit, which is —” “Let me — that’s the question —” “Why are you so confident that C.E.O.s —” “That’s the question —” “Yeah.” “That’s the question of efficiency. And so when I basically look at systems run by C.E.O.s, I’m just, like, basically, I think that if you took any of the Fortune 500 C.E.O.s, some of them are good, some of them are bad. But the overall quality, just pick one at random, and put him or her in charge of Washington, and I think you’d get something much, much better than what’s there. It doesn’t have to be Elon Musk. The median performance is so much better. But you asked something that I think is a more important and more interesting question, which is, you’re like, OK, America needs a C.E.O. who will be economically efficient. The C.E.O. who will be economically efficient will think of human beings as pure economic units and will do things like, wow —” “Well, no, just the idea that a company has goals that are not necessarily the same goals as what a government might have, insofar as providing for its citizens.” “Perfect, perfect question. The thing is, normally we think of the goal of a company as making a profit or just selling more stuff. But that’s not, actually, really the goal of a company. The real goal of a company is to maximize the worth of its assets and to make the stock price go up. It’s basically, like, one of the ways to unify the worldview of, say, Charles I and Elon Musk is to realize that when Charles I is thinking about his people, he is both thinking of them as economic assets and as human assets. He basically wants to see his country thrive. And in order to see his country thrive, he wants people to be — of course, he wants them to be producing as much wool, or whatever England exports, as possible — but the sense of him being kind of the pater patriae, kind of the father of the country, and feeling about the people in his society — not exactly the way a parent should feel about his children, but sort of like way a parent should feel about his children — that sense of having a reciprocal obligation. So my goal as a C.E.O. is not to rake in the bucks but to make my operation flourish.” “Earlier you had said that you believe that, regardless of what his goals are or what he says, Trump isn’t likely to actually get anything transformative accomplished just because of the entrenched government bureaucracy that exists. But putting that aside, what is your opinion of Trump generally?” “I think that Trump — the funny thing is, I talked about F.D.R. earlier in our conversation, and I think, actually, a lot of people might, in different directions, not appreciate this comparison — but I think that, in a lot of ways, Trump is very reminiscent of F.D.R. Because what F.D.R. had was this tremendous charisma and self-confidence combined with a tremendous ability to be the center of the room, be the leader, cut through the BS, and make things happen. I think one of the main differences between Trump and F.D.R. that has really held Trump back is, of course, that F.D.R. is from one of America’s first families. He’s a hereditary aristocrat. And Trump is not really from America’s social upper class. And I think the fact that Trump is not really from America’s social upper class has hurt him a lot, in terms of his confidence. I think it’s hurt him in his ability to delegate to and trust people who are not part of his family. I think that that’s limited him as a leader, in various ways. And one of the encouraging things that I do see is I do see him executing with somewhat more confidence this time around. It’s almost like he actually feels like he knows what he’s doing. That’s, I think, something that’s very helpful because insecurity and fragility is just — it’s his Achilles’ heel, I think.” “What’s your Achilles’ heel?” “What’s my Achilles’ heel? I think I also have self-confidence issues. I rarely — I won’t bet fully on my own convictions.” “Are there ways in which you think your insecurity manifests itself in your political thinking?” “That’s a good question. I think that, if you look at especially my older work, I think I had this kind of joint consciousness that, OK, I feel like I’m onto something here. But I also — the idea that people would be, in 2025, taking this stuff as seriously as they are now, when I was writing in 2007, 2008 — I mean, I was completely serious. I am completely serious. But it led to, I think, a certain level of — it’s like when you hit me with the most outrageous quotes that you could find from my writing in 2008 or whatever. I’m basically like, yeah, the sentiments behind that I can explain and articulate. And they were serious sentiments, and they’re serious now. Would I have expressed it that way? Would I have trolled? I’m always trying to get less trollish. Over time, you’ll see that I’ve definitely gotten less trolly. On the other hand, if you read my recent blog posts, I can’t really resist trolling Elon Musk, which might be part of the reason why I’ve never met Elon Musk.” “Do you think your trolling instinct has maybe gotten out of hand?” “No, it definitely hasn’t gotten — it hasn’t gone far — I mean [LAUGHS] no. I mean, the trolling — what I realize when I look back is that actually —” “Do you think your trolling has now become a political program?” “The instinct to revise things from the bottom up is very much not a trollish instinct. It’s a very serious and important thing that I think the world needs.” “I got to say, there were a lot of things to do with your ideas that we just didn’t get to. But the thing that I still find myself deeply unconvinced about is why blowing up democracy, rather than trying to make it better, would somehow lead to better lives for the people who are struggling the most.” “Well, I can’t — I can lead a horse to water, of course. I think that, as the walls fall away and you start to explore ideas that are outside the very narrow bubble of the present that we live in, because I think it’s impossible to deny that the variety of ideas in the space which intelligent, thoughtful people like you consider has grown sharply narrower in the 20th century. And if there’s really one thing that I kind of want to do the most, say with this conversation, is to make people feel like they can basically step outside of the kind of very small box that they grew up in. And they can say: Not everything outside that box is perfect. Many things outside that box are absolutely horrible. I’m not asking anyone to become a Nazi or an anti-Semite or even a misogynist, whatever that means. There are cases in which our judgment of the past is completely right. And yet there are also ways in which the whole past would very unanimously point to things that we’re doing and saying, and say: That’s crazy — I can’t believe you’re doing that.” [ELECTRONIC MUSIC]
