Christopher Rufo & Curtis Yarvin debate the American Revolution, Power, Strategy, and more.
Curtis Yarvin: A conservative is someone who thinks our national story has gone off the rails. The windows are closed, but he feels a terrible bump and clatter under his seat, and a most untrainlike tilt to the passenger carriage. Everything is in slow motion. He cannot avoid the feeling that he is no longer traveling into the future – but plunging, terribly, into some unfathomable ravine.
If you are a conservative, whether you have asked yourself this specific question or not, you must have some idea of (a) when our country went off the rails, (b) how far we are from those rails, and (c) what kind of political force would be required to get us back on track.
Most conservatives’ instinctive answer is probably: (a) maybe 1963 or so, (b) not far, and (c) a conventional railway crane – a Republican President, House and Senate, and a Supreme Court majority. No RINOs or squishes please! With this gear and a good engineering team, free from grifters, cowards, climbers, neocons, etc, we can hoist the locomotive back on track, make Washington work for America again, and keep traveling toward our real destiny.
I am not a conservative. I am a radical – a radical monarchist. I believe there are no rails – and never were any. America has no manifest destiny. Her constitution was not divinely inspired. No special providence was involved in her founding, nor has she discovered any unique principle of human governance. Nor can any theory of historical determinism, whether liberal, Marxist or libertarian, explain, predict or guarantee her future – which, like all future history, is a contingent and unwritten blank page in the hands of men only.
And while she is indeed plunging into a ravine, every realistic way to save her starts with centralizing all sovereign power in a single person – or at most a small team. This historically normal political structure is the appropriate way to terminate a failed experiment in political science, which appeared to work only because it started off with an amazing population in an empty continent on the threshold of an industrial revolution.
From this standpoint, let me explain my attitude to you and your political work. I believe you’re doing something useful – but it is not useful in the way you think or seem to think. It is not useful because it is simply disproportional to the problem. It is useless to pass a law that bans discriminating against white people, for instance – we already have such a law. It is called the Civil Rights Act of 1965. In a nation with maybe a million diversity professionals, it is useless to get eleven staffers laid off from the University of Florida, or even to convert a low-grade hippie college into a lower-grade baseball college. (Whose bright idea was that?)
Up close, these must seem like huge and unprecedented achievements – and they are! On the relative scale established by 90 years of increasingly feeble resistance to the real American constitution – the informal personal monarchy of Franklin Roosevelt, changed by his death into a permanent and unaccountable oligarchy – they are a break in the trendline. But on an absolute scale, they are still nothing.
Rather, I believe, America is an ordinary country with an ordinary government. Even its form of government – an institutional oligarchy – is historically unusual but is hardly unique. Due to the compounding rise of technology, we are at a unique point in human history – but nothing at all has changed about political science. In fact, Aristotle would understand us better than we understand ourselves.
From this standpoint, let me explain my attitude to you and your political work. I believe you’re doing something useful – but it is not useful in the way you think or seem to think. It is not useful because it is simply disproportional to the problem. It is useless to pass a law that bans discriminating against white people, for instance – we already have such a law. It is called the Civil Rights Act of 1965. In a nation with maybe a million diversity professionals, it is useless to get eleven staffers laid off from the University of Florida, or even to convert a low-grade hippie college into a lower-grade baseball college. (Whose bright idea was that?)
Up close, these must seem like huge and unprecedented achievements – and they are! On the relative scale established by 90 years of increasingly feeble resistance to the real American constitution – the informal personal monarchy of Franklin Roosevelt, changed by his death into a permanent and unaccountable oligarchy – they are a break in the trendline. But on an absolute scale, they are still nothing.
The conservatives, when they feel the bumps under their seats and realize the train is not on rails, feel each bump as a problem to be solved. DEI is a problem to be solved. Mass migration is a problem to be solved. The fentanyl epidemic is a problem to be solved.
Yet not only are the conservatives’ solutions wildly, fantastically disproportionate – by orders of magnitude – to these problems, they are not the real problems. They are only symptoms of the real problem – that our country is lost in history. There are no rails. There never were any.
But your quixotic, but energetically and even brilliantly conducted, fight against just one of these symptoms, in which even when your sword goes home and sinks to the hilt, you only demonstrate what a pinprick it is to this Brobdignagian monster, serves a different purpose. You are not defeating the enemy. You are only revealing it – showing everyone that the monster is real, and brave and capable men can fight it. Let us learn to fight it well – and let us learn to make it show its face. I complain, but I do not know of – for now – a better way.
Christopher Rufo: Let’s begin by clearing up some misconceptions. First, we have different objectives. Your goal seems to be accelerating the cycle of regimes from democracy to monarchy. My goal is to halt and reverse political decomposition and return to the beginnings of the republic — counter-revolution.
We also have a deep disagreement over the nature of history. You argue that there are no rails, no destiny, no divinity, and nothing beyond human contingency. This nihilistic argument creates considerable problems for you because it eliminates all possibility of making normative judgments. What is the ground of your convictions? What is the telos of your political system? And, if America is ordinary, contingent, and accidental, why care about its future at all?
My conviction is that there is a logical structure to human nature and, consequently, a structure of political order. The American founders were not ordinary politicians, but men of extraordinary vision and virtue who solved the core political problem posed by classical political philosophy and thereby created the most secure, free, and virtuous republic in history, with unprecedented innovations in commerce, technology, and the arts. You ridicule the category of “problems to be solved,” but pragmatism is the Anglo-American political spirit.
I see in your pessimism an excuse for inaction. I am grateful that you recognize that my work is valuable in “revealing the enemy” and that “brave and capable men can fight it.” This is enough. I have no illusion that my work alone will topple the regime. But I am doing what I can to contribute to that possibility in the future. Small victories yield new insights and open up new lines of action. Politics is not an abstraction; real-world fights generate greater practical knowledge than idle fantasies.
You sneer about “eleven staffers laid off at the University of Florida,” which I cannot help but find puzzling. In fact, we abolished all public university DEI departments in multiple states, poisoned the concept of DEI in the realm of public opinion, and sent the private DEI industry into contraction, with prominent firms slashing DEI programs to the bone. This is only a beginning, of course, but there will always be a beginning — and it is better to fight, win, and build in small succession than to speculate about some future cataclysm.
American history teaches us that every revolution, or counter-revolution, begins with a “break in the trendline.” Well into the 1770s, Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty despaired that the fight with the Crown would never come. But they patiently seeded the ground, disseminated their propaganda, established their small conspiracies, and drew the British into a series of dramatic fights. It was because of that work they were ready when the moment came able to turn a triviality — three hundred crates of spilt tea — into a world-historical event.
You assert that you’re a radical. But who is really the radical here? As we both know, the word “radical” means striking at the roots, which is earthly, tangible, physical work. Your work, while providing valuable concepts and metaphors, is not grounded in experience. It is ethereal, rather than earthly; literature, rather than politics. You are not digging to the roots, but grasping at clouds.
I am a “conservative,” but not in the way you imagine. I use the label as a convenient way to position myself in the political debate, but I am neither conservative by temperament, nor by political ambition: I want to destroy the status quo, rather than preserve it. But I am not so naive as to think that it can, or it should, be destroyed all at once. There are principles and elements deeper in the structure that hold profound truth. And I believe that excavating and reanimating those principles is what we should be doing.
