159 upvotes, 4 direct replies (showing 4)
View submission: Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Jesus Christ their plan seems to be working.
Comment by Fickle-Syllabub6730 at 19/01/2025 at 16:13 UTC
82 upvotes, 6 direct replies
The point that sticks out to me is how the conservative movement is blatantly admitting they have no allegiance to ideas or principles, just the pursuit of raw power. It's clear that Yarvin's roadmap is the future of the American conservative movement and the GOP. Peter Thiel, JD Vance, the whole MAGA movement is prepping the right wing Fox News "normies" group to accept this framing.
As an anecdote I still listen to a conservative video game personality named Colin Moriarty out of of morbid curiosity. For a decade, he's been a prototypical libertarian conservative. Free markets, lots of companies competing, Milton Friedman and Ron Paul were right, all that kind of stuff. Recently, he goes "I've listened to this Curtis Yarvin guy after he was on a couple of podcasts I follow. I really like his ideas of how a company like Amazon or Wal Mart has proved that they're most efficient at doing things. So *why shouldn't* they be the effective monopoly who gets to dictate everything?"
Just instantly, utterly, totally contradicting decades of on the record proof that he used to passionately advocate for the exact opposite. And it becomes crystal clear that conservatism is about the consolidation of power for an in-group. If they can justify that with free markets, then they'll do that. If the public catches on, then they'll find a new scapegoat and make it seem like it's the most natural, historical, American, time honored way of looking at the world. It's utterly blatant the way they're actually doing this in 2025, when we have digital records of them saying the exact opposite, on video, on audio, in print, all over the place.
Noam Chomsky pointed out that the day the Soviet Union fell, the elite Party Leaders who yesterday were passionately defending communism immediately became the elite oligarchs who were ardent supporters of the free market capitalism the country was transitioning to. And it was such an obvious and blatant display of their ideological bankruptcy, their ulterior motives, the way that these things (communism, capitalism, democracy, free markets) people spend their lives defending are just tools to justify the greater amassing of power by an elite. I feel like I'm seeing the American conservative movement do the exact same thing. They've realized they have hit a brick wall in how much power they can consolidate with a free market and democracy framing, so they're moving on to another one, right in front of our eyes.
I also think it's interesting that Yarvin actually does use a Noam Chomsky analogy. Chomsky has long said that the structure of a company is an authoritarian monarchy. Where the one at the top determines who gets paid what, what you wear, what times you have to be in a place, how you have to behave and so on. He meant this as a critique of companies under capitalism and how democracy should come to the workplace. Yarvin enthusiastically agrees that these companies are authoritarian monarchies and thinks it's so cool and effective that this style of organization should leave the workplace and become the framing of government and society.
Comment by AnOnlineHandle at 19/01/2025 at 07:50 UTC
186 upvotes, 6 direct replies
Conservatives have clearly been in complete control and above the law for the near 40 years I've been alive, while any alternative is dismissed by the conservative-owned mouthpieces shoved in everybody's ears as invalid.
Yet they still can't stop playing victim and acting like they're some scrappy underdogs who have to take more power to stop some terrible evil things, like climate science and virology, which reveal things they don't want to be real and would rather destroy the messengers.
Comment by bullcitytarheel at 19/01/2025 at 09:35 UTC*
10 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It’s been working for fifty years, the technocrats have just turbocharged it for the last twenty
Comment by waconaty4eva at 19/01/2025 at 11:44 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
This will create a bunch of problems for them that will only be solved by……