Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.

There are political theories that arise at universities, accompanied by footnotes, research grants, and the faint smell of 1970s carpeting. And there are political theories that arise at half past two in the morning on the internet, between comment sections, blog posts, and the firm conviction that the world works badly above all because its institutions are structurally mis-programmed.

Back behind the revolutions

Yarvin views modern societies as a digital system whose structure produces fundamental misincentives. While others propose reforms, he proposes to replace the political operating system itself. „Replace” for him means: CEO kings instead of democracy. In public coverage he is often stylised and mystified like a figure from pop culture, somewhere between Darth Vader and a ringwraith. A dark, almost uncanny figure, whose outer appearance — black leather jacket, long hair — reinforces this perception.

When Yarvin first spread his ideas in 2007 on his now-defunct blog Unqualified Reservations under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, the response of branding him an obscure crank may still have been plausible. In 2026, by contrast, his radical critique of democracy has become common sense in many American milieus. Be it the Alt-Right, the tech oligarchs around Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, or the MAGA movement. In view of the obvious steering problems of liberal democracies, trust in the ability of democratic institutions and their elites to find solutions has been lastingly shaken. The oldest modern democracy wobbles. And Trump posts AI videos in which he wears a crown.

„Die Zeit der Könige ist vorbei, weil die Völker ihrer nicht mehr würdig sind.”

Yarvin wants to go back beyond the ideas of 1789. If one locates the birth of the modern political world in the revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic, then it is precisely this foundation that Yarvin wants to undermine. The three great ideologies of the 19th century, liberalism, conservatism, and socialism, all referred to the French Revolution but no longer wanted to reach back behind it. Even conservatism, which at first still wished for the return of the ancien régime, soon made its peace with the new order — not so Yarvin. Neoreaction (NRx) and the Dark Enlightenment, especially tied to his name and that of Nick Land, rest on a modern engineering mentality and on classical Victorian pre-democratic thinking. From these sources springs a biting critique of democracy.

What’s wrong with democracy?

„It was actually about a year and a half ago, I decided I didn’t believe in democracy anymore. It was great. Just like deciding not to believe in God.” To follow Yarvin’s critique of democracy, it is worth looking into his early blog posts like The Case Against Democracy: Ten Red Pills and How I Stopped Believing in Democracy. Yarvin gathers there under demotism an ideology that holistically reaches from democracy to communism:

Let’s define demotism as rule in the name of the People. Any system of government in which the regime defines itself as representing or embodying the popular or general will can be described as „demotist.” Demotism includes all systems of government which trace their heritage to the French or American Revolutions—if anything, it errs on the broad side.

Demotism, on this view, recasts the ideas and practices of democracy as an invention, since the will of the people is too arbitrary and too varied to form a coherent basis. No people has a will, only individuals. The purpose of elections, then, is not to express the „will of the people” but only to keep politicians from doing what people really hate. Minimal democracy, in other words. When one looks at the justifications for democracy, by contrast, the weaknesses of the „best form of rule” quickly come to light, according to Yarvin.

Like father, like son

Yarvin’s critique of democracy is of course not without theoretical predecessors. Before Yarvin began to think about monarchies, patchwork states, and the structural errors of democratic systems, the economist and former doctoral student of Jürgen Habermas, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, had written a radical critique of democracy in his 2001 book Democracy. The God That Failed. For him, the transition from hereditary monarchy to democratic constitutional states in the course of the bourgeois revolutions and the Enlightenment is no history of progress, but a civilisational decline. The European hereditary monarchies with their noble houses were, on his telling, not anachronistic and barbarian rule systems of the dark Middle Ages, but, in modern terms, sovereign corporations in family ownership, whose business was the administration of a defined territory and of the people living on it, the natural resources, and much more.

The king as absolute ruler — and that is the quintessence of Hoppe’s pamphlet, which dresses itself in the cloak of an economistic rhetoric — thinks and acts like an entrepreneur. The tragedy of the commons can be solved, since the king, who owns the land and everything on it, wants at some point to pass it on. So he tends and cares for it until then, for his children and their children, and tries to expand the capital stock sustainably. Quite the opposite of a government elected for a term, which throws everything into being re-elected and meanwhile exploits and bleeds the land.

From this perspective Hoppe’s project takes on the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy: viewed from a strictly rationality-oriented standpoint, a monarch who has the well-being of his realm in view would have to prefer that socio-economic model which best serves this aim. Libertarians naturally identify this model with libertarianism itself. From this arises a circular logic: libertarianism, at least in Hoppe’s vision, favours absolute monarchy, and this in turn creates the conditions for more libertarianism.

A CEO monarch to rule them all

This perspective, however, does not go far enough for Yarvin. In his Open Letter to Open Minded Progressives he writes:

„the tactical error of the libertarian (…) is to believe that the state can be made smaller and simpler by making it weaker. Historically, the converse is the case: attempts to weaken an authority either destroy it, resulting in chaos and death, or force it to compensate by enlarging, resulting in the familiar ‘redgiant state.’ The pronomian prefers a state that is small, simple, and very strong.”

His CEO monarch takes its bearings less from the baroque Sun Kings than from today’s company leaders whose names we read and hear all too often: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel. A recurring example of Yarvin’s is the iPhone. He holds it up and claims that this product was brought forth by a „monarchy”. What democracy could achieve anything comparable?

To implement that, he introduces the idea of the Patchwork: cities and regions become competing government companies; citizens choose not parties but providers. Notice period: a moving van. Democracy is replaced by customer service. Anyone unhappy should not vote, but move out. Political participation degenerates into a kind of expanded tenancy law.

Here Yarvin’s central intuition shows itself: he does not distrust democracy because it is tyrannical, but because in his view it does not really belong to anyone. Responsibility diffuses. Politicians govern without being owners; voters decide without being liable; bureaucracies persist no matter who wins. In that respect Yarvin appears as the illiberal, more radical successor of Hoppe. Where Hoppe still tries to compare the economic incentive structures of various forms of rule, Yarvin draws a much more drastic conclusion: if democratic systems structurally produce false incentives, why keep them at all?

Ironically, this radical pre-modern critique of democracy reveals a very modern longing: for clear accountability and a visible centre of power. When political decisions fail, one wants to know who is actually responsible. Democracy appears in this view as a system of distributed irresponsibility, in which political responsibility dissolves further and further. The seat of power is empty.

But while Yarvin reproaches democracy with being too dependent on the goodwill of countless people, he wants to replace it with a system that would be completely dependent on the goodwill of a single person. He distrusts collective irrationality and trusts the individual reason of a monarch, whom one must imagine apparently as an especially rational administrator of political power. The objection that politics consists precisely of conflicts looks, in this perspective, almost like a user error. Democracy lives off the collision of interests; Yarvin’s model lives off pure decisionism, in the hope that someone is sitting there who handles power better than anyone before.

Neoreaction is dead, Yarvin lives

Yarvin is at the height of attention right now, with regard to his person and his theory. His movement, neoreaction, by contrast is dead. He himself has, with his turn to Trump, also freed himself from the elitism inherent in neoreaction. His blog is only an archive now.

Neoreaction may stage itself as a radical counter-design to liberal modernity, but for the European and German right it remains a parasitic foreign body. Too futuristic, too individualistic, too committed to the primacy of the individual, ultimately therefore still too American and too liberal. Where here in Germany one still speaks of organic community, cultural rootedness, and collective identity, the neoreactionary focus on the sovereign individual seems almost like an echo of the liberal order one actually wants to overcome. So, of all things, this supposedly anti-liberal approach turns out to be too liberal for German conditions: too little „Volk”, too much „I”. A theoretical import that does not really want to dock in the political climate of Germany, and probably never will.

Even so: Yarvin combines historically revisionist, social-Darwinist, and openly anti-democratic theses with set pieces of pop culture into a peculiarly attractive ideological mix. That is his charm, especially for those media that now stylise him. He turns against everything that is sacred to liberal modernity: universalism, humanism, egalitarianism.

Ironically, however, hardly any political rhetoric is so clearly marked by a form of adolescence as his: obsessed with status and hierarchies, drunk on the fantasy of extraordinary greatness, and deeply impatient with the laborious procedures, compromises, and imperfections of ordinary political life. Yarvin offers his readers a castle in the air and invites them to picture themselves on the throne. It drips with infantility.

As fantasy it does work. For a certain kind of alienated reader, mostly young highly educated men, this idea has a suggestive power of seduction: what reads like a mix of political manifesto and Warhammer 40K rulebook is no serious theory of political order. Like pornography, it does not reflect real sexuality, but excites just as much and so produces effect.

Yet ideas that at first look like thought experiments can have real consequences. Not because they are particularly convincing, but because they connect easily, upward to the economic elites who see in democracy an obstacle to expanding their power, and downward to those who long for power and who suffer the daily narcissistic injuries of everyday life. The influence of this connection should not be underestimated.