Vandals (can be resisted)

Lately my mental cope regarding the current political situation has been to think of it as “the horribleness” and then do my best to briefly forget about it and go about my life. A few times a day Kia and I will yell horrible headlines from our respective home offices and agree on how horrible they are. Not very functional, admittedly. Definitely not resistance, which I aspire to.

I know there’s more I could be doing. And I’m gearing up to it. But the first step is trying to understand what happened (and is happening) to our country.

My current model of reality looks something like this: Trump and his ilk won not only because of their tried-and-true strategy of blaming economic problems on immigrants (along with a big dose of fear-mongering and race-baiting), not only because they probably rigged vote-counting machines in key counties, but also because Democrats failed to sufficiently emphasize economic issues, focused too much on identity politics, and basically ignored the crisis in Gaza. That, and many U.S. voters get the “ick” when they think of Democrats and progressives because of performative virtue signaling and cultural elitism.

So that covers what happened, more or less. Trump didn’t win because half the country is terribly racist, hates women, or likes the idea of a dictator/king president. While I still think Trump voters were deeply misled and deeply wrong, I can at least understand why many of them voted that way. I blame Russian and Facebook disinformation as much as I blame any individual Trump voter.

As for what is happening, that’s been harder to wrap my head around. There’s a plan, Project 2025, and they’re trying to roll it out as quickly as possible. But what’s the real goal, the end game? Save the US taxpayer money? Destroy the state apparatus and replace it with a corporate structure where the CEO/dictator/king has absolute power? “Take back” the national identity so that white Anglo Christian culture is completely dominant and unopposed? Destroy the welfare state (and probably the middle class along with it), once and for all? Become actual Nazis/fascists and put all their enemies in camps? Invade Canada? Invade Greenland? All of the above?

I don’t know. What it looks like is pure chaos. Trump is firing people, lots of people, the thing he loves to do most in world. Musk and his team of youthful sycophant techies are running amok, gaining access to root systems and wildly sensitive data, campaigning to dismantle Social Security and Medicare. Throw in some sig heils. Use ICE as your goon squad. Start a trade war with every major economic power. Terrify every potential U.S. tourist or immigrant, no matter how rich or talented. Disrespect and threaten Canadians, who are leaving imported American fruit to rot in grocery stores while stockpiling ammo at home, reasonable behaviors given Trump’s rhetoric. What the actual fuck?

So I’ve been reading and listening to people who are smarter and better educated than I am, trying to get a grip.

Vlad Vexler

Vlad is a political philosopher/Youtuber. He was born in Soviet Russia, emigrated to Israel and eventually England, was educated at Oxford, and suffers from a debilitating chronic illness. His insights into world politics, the war in Ukraine, Putin, and Trump make a great deal of sense. I highly recommend subscribing to his channels if you want to increase your understanding of current geopolitics and the psychological pathologies of the personalities involved (e.g. Trump’s bottomless need for narcissistic supply).

Recently Vlad discussed the Trump administration’s “orgy of vandalism.” He argues that framing the current administration’s disruptive moves as vandalism (as opposed to fascism), helps us resist the impulse to prematurely comply, to freeze our own speech and expression out of fear, even if no one has threatened us (or our group) directly. Fascists are scary, but vandals are more annoying than anything. After they go away you can clean up the mess and get back to some kind of normality. It might take a long time (it did when the actual Vandals sacked Rome, not only raping and pillaging but also destroying aqueducts and other crucial infrastructure), but you can eventually recover.

Thank you Vlad–I found that perspective to be helpful. I’ll keep watching your channel.

Curtis Yarvin

Curtis Yarvin is a programmer/blogger/author (like myself) with many thousands of followers (unlike myself) and the ear of billionaires like Peter Thiel and right-wing politicians including J.D. Vance (very much unlike myself). His ideas have influenced Project 2025 as much as or more than Christian white nationalists have. I previously did a shallow dive into the thoughts and writings of Christian white nationalists when I was writing my essay How to Be Less Racist. (There’s some performative virtue signaling, right? But also sincere.) I only managed a shallow dive because their perspectives are so obviously hateful, demonstrably incorrect, but most of all profoundly boring.

Yarvin, on the other hand, is definitely not boring. He has some early associations with the group I once labeled Libertarian Space Men, but he’s largely abandoned Libertarianism is favor of authoritarianism. He spitballs Orwellian and authoritarian ideas at a rapid pace. His writings are eloquent, colorful, shocking, and deeply entertaining. His “Dark Enlightenment”, far-right neoreactionary vision (NRx for short) is equally fascinating and disgusting, like watching an episode of Dr. Pimple Popper.

One of Yarvin’s big ideas, as I understand it, is that government can’t get anything done or solve any big problems (which I think neoreactionaries would mainly identify as crime, illegal immigration, wasteful spending, inflation, excessive income tax and maybe taxation in general–though I’m still not totally clear on which problems they’re trying to solve). In any case, government is ineffective and real change is impossible because the “deep state” (government agencies) employ mainly libs and progressives who’ve been brainwashed with bad socialist/Marxist ideas. This liberal brainwashing is accomplished by “the cathedral” (a loose alliance of universities and liberal media). Did I mostly get that right?

Yarvin, in many ways, has a deep understanding of reality. His ideas that I completely agree with include:

• It’s almost impossible to understand your own place in history because you’re in it, like a fish in water. You have to zoom out, but how far? In that context he criticizes Paul Graham’s recent essay about the origins of “wokeness” here on his “Gray Mirror” (hilarious title) Substack.
• The direction and nature of scientific research is perverted by which ideas are the most popular and get the most attention, and thereby the most funding. This results in all kinds of useless, wasteful, and in some cases harmful research being performed. I think Sabine Hossenfelder might agree with some of his points here.
• Ideas and beliefs held by individuals are similarly influenced by popularity (as opposed to truthfulness); it’s socially beneficial (and safer) to believe (or appear to believe) certain ideas. He mostly agrees with Steven Pinker on this point. Yarvin references a Darwinian marketplace of ideas where “wokeness” and performative virtue signalling are reinforced because they’re socially adaptive, but I think he understands that the same principles operate on the right (certainly within the MAGA cult). It’s easy to be a liberal progressive in San Francisco, but downright dangerous if you’re surrounded by rabid red-hats in rural Texas. And the converse: you’re going to have a rough time openly expressing your conservative ideas within the mostly liberal university system.

So Yarvin understands human nature and history pretty well. But his ideas for “fixing things”? That’s some next-level horribleness:

• Evict everyone from Gaza, turn it into a real estate corporation, and issue non-voting stock shares to all it’s ex-residents. Yes, this was Yarvin’s idea before Trump’s! But ten bucks that Vance read it on Yarvin’s Substack and then mentioned it to Trump, who left out the “compassionate conservative” stock shares part. Why is this a horrible idea? Aside from the massive human rights violations, I think we can look at Russia’s privatization voucher system to see what happens when such things are attempted in the real world. The rich criminals end up with all the vouchers or stocks, one way or another, and everyone else is left impoverished.
• R.A.G.E. – retire all government employees. Here’s a younger, more fiery Yarvin (under his previous blogging alias Mencius Moldbug) advocating for the destruction (“rebooting”) of U.S. government by firing every mid-level bureaucrat who works at a government agency, and shutting down as many government agencies as possible. Sound familiar? According to Yarvin, this is the only way to purge all the communists and socialists who’ve infiltrated those positions. The ultimate solution is to install a national dictator/CEO, so we can really get some things done! Why is this a terrible idea? Most government employees are just trying to do their job, serve the American people, and collect a paycheck. When you fire large swaths of them, you get rid of the mostly good functionality of the federal government (like servicing National Parks, issuing tax refunds, helping kids with learning disabilities, etc.). It’s a baby-bathwater thing. And as for dictators, we can just look around and see how that’s going. Hey there, North Korea! Why the fuck do I even need to explain this? But somehow in the NRx worldview, unchecked top-down executive power is a good thing. Who needs checks and balances? What could go wrong?

Yarvin has horrible ideas, but he doesn’t strike me as a horrible person. You can catch his more current vibe here, where he’s being interviewed on some kind of science conspiracy channel. The kind of guy you might talk to at a party and be fascinated by his ideas for a solid ten minutes, and then start looking for an exit around minute eleven. Not because you’re bored, but because every time you try to get a word in he reflexively shuts you down (if only to circle back and kind of state your own point for you a few minutes later). He’s obnoxious, and a bad-idea guy, but not really a bad guy. He’s not purely evil (selfish, power-hungry, narcissistic, sociopathic) like Trump, Musk, Vance, and Putin. He’s too smart and self-aware for that.

IMO the fundamental flaw in Yarvin’s thinking is that he’s a traditional utopian. He wants a better world, but sees the only way to get there is to wipe the slate clean. As Steven Pinker has written about in depth, humanity’s worst crimes have all been committed in the misguided pursuits of “perfect” societies. What’s the alternative? Messy utopias, based on gradualism and the acceptance imperfection. Of course, Yarvin would say the essential flaw in Pinker’s view is a belief in (uneven but steady) human progress. But I’m on team Pinker, 100%.

It’s a question of power. The most effective type of power is generative/innovative (in the non-coercive, non-zero-sum quadrant, according to my Four Types of Power theory). Societies that pursue innovation (which is enabled by free speech, open collaboration and knowledge sharing, STEM funding, etc.) generate more wealth than authoritarian societies (coercive, zero-sum power). It’s not even close. Iain Banks’ liberal progressive Culture is far more likely than Heinlein’s authoritarian Terran Federation.

Oddly, after reading some Yarvin, I feel vaguely reassured. He’s just a guy with an active mind spitballing weird ideas, not entirely unlike myself. He’s got a blog with a virtual begging cup just like the rest of us. Some of his ideas are wildly bad and unfortunately now wildly popular among the very worst people, but he’s not some scary mastermind controlling the world.

Maybe he’s one of Peter Turchin’s overproduced elites, an Ivy League educated smarty-pants with less status and wealth than he feels he deserves, and therefore doing his best to create political instability. A textbook case, really.

So What’s Really Going On?

In a perverse example of Yarvin’s own belief that beliefs don’t need to be good or true to be popular, it turns out that some of his weird, destructive ideas (like R.A.G.E.) are convenient and useful for people who are seeking unchecked power and permanent minority rule (like Christian nationalists, wannabe dictators, and billionaire CEOs). Congrats, Curtis, you went viral!

So who’s gonna end up in power if the current gang manages to implement their vision of completely gutting the federal government and rolling over the courts and Congress? Who knows–they’ll have to fight it out amongst themselves. One thing is for sure–they can’t all end up on top. Their egos are too big, their visions too uncompromising. Musk will probably be the first fall guy, then Trump. That leaves Vance, but he has a -2 CHA modifier and can’t even properly order a donut. So who the fuck knows. Putin, I guess, pulling his puppet strings from the East.

What does Yarvin himself think is going to happen? In his most recent blog post, he predicts Trumpism will fizzle out before getting anything done. He divides the current players into Barbarians (private-sector folks, Trump, Elon) and Mandarins (public sector government wonks). The Barbarians like to break shit (vandalism, again!) but have no interest in building new systems or actually governing. The Mandarins like to rule but have no interesting in destroying everything and starting from scratch (clean-slatism, Yarvin’s flawed ideal).  Since the two groups don’t see eye-to-eye and aren’t really working together, Yarvin sees one likely scenario as kind of a slow fizzling out of momentum after this initial burst of executive orders and DOGE hacking. If the current administration doesn’t keep breaking bigger shit and violating bigger norms, the system will eventually eject them and repair itself.

Maybe Yarvin is right, in that Trump will destroy Trumpism the same way McCarthy ultimately destroyed McCarthyism. Things will go back to “normal,” more or less. That’s generally a good thing (federal employees will be able to go back to serving American people, regardless of who is president), but great damage will still have been done. We are Rome and we’re being sacked, and the repair will take a long time. The U.S. will be a weaker country, with much less political influence, for a very long time. The KGB’s investment in Trump will have paid off, many times over.

But I don’t think the great democratic experiment of the United States is over, just yet. Even though our origin story includes genocide and slavery, it also includes real freedom (of expression, of religion), pluralism, an innovative spirit, and a genuinely anti-fragile system of government. Fourteen years ago (when Obama was president) I was worried about fascist elements infiltrating our government, and I’m even more worried now, but framing the current shitshow in terms of Vexler’s vandals and Yarvin’s Barbarians somewhat buoys my spirits. It’s time to stop wringing my hands about fascism and start fighting back against vandalism.

How to Resist?

The vandals aren’t as strong as they appear. They’re a disorganized gang with weak alliances and wildly divergent goals and worldviews.

So how do I resist?

• Keep yelling my ideas and opinions into my minuscule corner of the internet. A bit quixotic, but it’s better than self-silencing, and you never know when an idea or post might go viral.
• Refute and challenge any kind of divisive categorization/classification of people, be it by ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age/generation, or voting record. This is the Russian and also billionaire/plutocrat playbook, to separate and divide us. This doesn’t mean I’m ready to debate any Trump voter at any time (I don’t have that much energy), but it does mean I’m going to adjust my thinking and framing. Yes, Boomer Karens and Gen Z incel misogynists exist, but I’m not rushing to categorize people. People are individuals, and people change their beliefs all the time. Some people voted for Obama, Trump, one-or-more of the Clintons, Biden, and then Trump again! People are complicated.
• Vote for and contribute to Democrats (and any politicians) who are pushing for economic justice and opportunity, such as universal healthcare, workers’ rights, free pre-K through university education, library access, public parks, and other universal wealth/health levers (including basic income). That’s the winning strategy, and also the right thing to do. Lift all boats. Does this mean I’m against affirmative action, DEI efforts, and slavery reparations? Nope, I approve of all those things, as well as gay marriage, trans rights, and reproductive rights. But the Dems can’t focus primarily on minority group rights and expect to win elections. Well, maybe they could if the other side wasn’t cheating. But they are cheating, so we need to win big.