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In the May 2022 issue of Vanity Fair,
James Pogue writes "Free Radicals,"
subheaded in this way: "They're not
MAGA. They're not Q. They're the
intellectual New Right. And they're
ready to burn it down."
The subhead is hyperbolic – they say they're
ready to burn it down, but they
really aren't. They say that shit to
garner attention and because they
know, thanks to their privilege,
that they will never have to soil
their hands by manning the
barricades. They are rhetorical
reactionaries with a taste for wordy
pyromania—spoiled brats,
really.
Pogue focuses a lot on J.D. (James
David) Vance and Curtis Yarvin as
the house political theorists who
postulate the existence of something
called "the regime," described by
Pogue, by way of Vance, as "an Ivy
League intellectual and management
class—a
quasi-aristocracy—[out] to
adopt a set of economic and cultural
interests that directly oppose those
of people in places like Middletown,
Ohio, where he grew up." Populated,
in other words, by people very much
like the Yale-educated venture
capitalist Vance—but don't say
that too loudly.
There is also "the Cathedral," by
way of Yarvin, here in Pogues' word:
"[L]iberal ideology holds sway in
the important institutions of
prestige media and academia—an
intertwined nexus he calls 'the
Cathedral' … an oligarchy of
the educated who care more about
competing for status within the
system than they do about
America's national interest."
Their solution is to put a strong
man (and it will be a man) in
control: "And the way conservatives
can actually win in America,
[Yarvin] has argued, is for a
Caesar-like figure to take power
back from this devolved oligarchy
and replace it with a monarchical
regime run like a start-up. As early
as 2012, he proposed the acronym
RAGE—Retire All Government
Employees—as a shorthand for a
first step in the overthrow of the
American 'regime.' What we needed,
Yarvin thought, was a 'national CEO,
[or] what's called a dictator.'
Yarvin now shies away from the word
dictator and seems to be trying to
promote a friendlier face of
authoritarianism as the solution to
our political warfare: 'If
you're going to have a monarchy,
it has to be a monarchy of
everyone,' he said." (Just to note:
a "monarchy of everyone" makes no
sense, and what he is talking about
is a coup.)
Vance, Yarvin and the rest of the
poseurs that Pogue portrays are not
really serious about what they say,
that is, they are not creating the
cells and committees of
correspondence and political
education classes and all the
infrastructure needed to create the
revolutionary vanguard because,
truth be told, they like the fever
dream they've concocted because it
feeds their bank accounts, political
egos and thirst for influence.
They like to appear as serious
intellectuals posing serious
questions to trigger serious change,
but the only image of a post-regime
world that they can come up with is
a country run by a dictator where,
according to Blake Masters,
president of the Thiel Foundation
and running for the U.S. Senate in
Arizona, stability will be reached
by "on-shoring industrial
production, slashing legal
immigration, regulating big tech
companies, and eventually
restructuring the economy so that
one salary would be enough to raise
a family on."
This is not an emancipatory vision
of society: it is a nostalgia that
American conservatives have always
had for a time (usually labeled as
the 1950s) when "people of color"
and their problems did not exist as
such and, according to Vance, "it
will mean that my son grows up in a
world where his
masculinity—his support of his
family and his community, his love
of his community—is more
important than whether he works for
fucking McKinsey."
This loss of homogeneity, the grudge
they feel about having to cede power
to people who have moved in from the
margins to take a seat at the table,
this yearning for a life where
"God's in His heaven— / All's
right with the world!"—these
seem to be some of the true drivers
of their dyspepsia and desire to be
dominated by a Caesar while also
having the power to Caesar-like
dominate others below them.
I find their ideas airless and their
sense of grievance ridiculous, and
if their "program," if it can be
called that, came into being, it
would cement in place all the
inequities in American society
without providing any means to
redress them (after all, Caesar is
not going to institute direct
democracy).
It is ironic that they accuse the
Cathedral and the regime of being
driven by people who only want to
satisfy their own desires for status
rather than work for the greater
good of the nation, but, of course,
they want to do the same thing, just
on a different broadcast frequency
and for a subset of American
citizens who have the proper skin
color and who have profited from
their privilege without having to
apologize for anything.
Pogue states that Vance believes
that "our universities are full of
people who have a structural,
self-serving, and financial interest
in coloring American culture as
racist and evil." But this sentence
could easily be restructured to
describe this cohort: "our
right-wing mediaverse is full of
people who have a structural,
self-serving, and financial interest
in coloring American culture as
white, male, and aggrieved."
They are revolutionaries without any
sense of emancipation, radical
authoritarians, libertarian
Caesarists. The fact that they are
taken serious at all is a sign of
just how close we are to a precipice
that no Caesar can save us from
(and, really, what Caesar in his
right mind would want to take
ownership of this burning house?).
One last thought, sparked by the
RAGE nonsense: Michael Lewis' recent
work on government employees (The Fifth Risk)
and his podcasts about experts. You
may think you can gut the government
of its workers and still have a
functioning polity, but it ain't
true. Our well-being relies upon on
active government work that is not
profit-driven and done for the good
of all—that is the armature
upon which our democratic society is
built: not markets, not stock
exchanges, not influencers and
political stuntwork but public
servants doing subsidized work to
build knowledge, process and
accountability. I'll take the Deep
State any day over the Shallow Seas
of the peacocks and pretenders.
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