Curtis Yarvin, the computer engineer who has become the neo-monarchist blogger, nowadays seems to be everywhere.
His argument that American democracy has exhausted itself and must be replaced by a form of one -man rule, reportedly made him a star, reportedly Catch the ear of powerful figures Just like Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel and JD Vance. Since President Trump’s re -election, he has attracted increasing attention from regular points of sale, included this.
And on Monday evening he seemed to have arrived in the heart of ‘the cathedral’, while calling the intertwined elite intellectual institutions that form our society.
“I want to thank Harvard University,” Mr. Yarvin told a state room of about 100 in the university’s faculty club before he corrected himself. “I mean, the school where we are.”
Mr. Yarvin was in the city to debate Danielle Allen, a prominent political theorist and democracy lawyer at Harvard. From the moment the event was announced, some wondered why Professor all would run the risk of providing legitimacy to such an extreme figure by debating him. Others hurried to pick up the limited tickets.
The debate – organizers (and the university’s press office) hurt to emphasize – was not an official Harvard event. Instead, it was organized by Passage PublishingThe publisher of the new book by Mr Yarvin, “Gray Mirror: Fascicle 1, Storance” and the John Adams Society, A conservative student group that regards itself brutally as Harvard’s ‘Premier organization for the reinvention of man’.
It was a collision between monarchism and liberal democracy, the west coast of techno-uprising and in the east coast institutions, the black leather jacket of Mr. Yarvin and the tomato-red blazer Allen. (“Dark lighting” versus “clear lighting”, as she placed it in her opening comments and noticed the Tailor Contrast.)
The debate unfolded at the home grass of Professor Allen at a time that Harvard – for Liberals, at least – became A heroic symbol of resistance to Mr. Trump. But it is also a moment when liberal democracy, she noticed, the underdog is in global politics.
Professor Allen said in an e -mail before the event she had agreed to participate because students had asked her, and that helps them to understand intellectual material “My task is in private and in public.” But she also did it in her strong conviction that democracy is sick, and that universities must extend their commitment To the open and fearless dispute of ideas.
“I think people should understand Yarvin’s argument, both what people experience and attractions and their mistakes, who are in -depth,” she said. “The bet is very high.”
The moderator started the debate with a warning that everyone who disturbed the event would be removed. He then read the first resolution to be discussed: “Resolved: the long -term stability and the flourishing of our society is better protected by concentration of executive authority than by democratic institutions.”
Professor Allen started with a short biography, who quoted ancestors who had founded a NAACP chapter in Florida on her father’s side and, on her mother, once helped to lead the League of Women -Voters. She then launched a passionate articulation of her vision of democracy, which is understood by freedom and equality.
Our current democracy, she said, is deeply worried. There is an urgent need to renovate it, she said – not, as Mr Yarvin argues, just throw it away. “The question is not to have democracy and protection of freedom,” she said, “but only how.”
When it was his turn, Mr Yarvin, the son of a foreign service provider and an employee of the US Department of Education, described himself as grew up in ‘the deep state’. He said he had just read the recent book by Professor Allen “Justice through democracy” And found it full of elevated abstractions with little resemblance to our actual system.
“It gave me the feeling that I read a work of Islamic history written by a Muslim,” he said. “This is someone who completely believes in the system she describes.”
Conditions such as ‘civil society’ and ‘institutions’, he said, do not seem to ‘correlate with the reality’ of democracy, which he claimed was well defined by just one thing: how much power do people have to choose their leaders?
In her next answer, Professor Allen, at a non -characteristic spicy moment, said that she was happy that he acknowledged that her book had been written with conviction. “Being a narcissistic nihilist is not my jam,” she said. “Maybe it’s yours, but it’s not mine.”
In the course of the debate, they passed between topics such as human equality (or, for Mr. Yarvin, the lack thereof), the administrative state, meritocracy and, yes, Harvard. The debaters do not shake hands and they rarely looked at each other or talked directly to each other. There were few smiles cracked.
Professor Allen held on to her weapons and parsed basic principles such as freedom and equality. (At one point she disputed the interpretation of Mr Yarvin van Aristoteles, a shared favorite.) Mr. Yarvin often made his points through historic anecdotes, including a Cotton Mather, the 17th-century Puritan minister whose surname is on campus.
Mather registered at the age of 11 in Harvard, but could never follow in the footsteps of his father and become university president. Mr. Yarvin said that although he himself was also a ‘failed children’s wonder’, he told Robert Calef more, a fabric dealer in New England who wrote a book that Mather’s enthusiasm wrote for the Salem Witch Trials.
Calef was furiously attacked by the Mathers. At one point Yarvin noticed with some pleasure, his book was even burned in Harvard Yard.
Mr. Yarvin also focused on more contemporary figures demonized by law, such as Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and virology researchers whose laboratory experiments, he claimed, had created the coronavirus that millions of people killed.
Professor Allen left shortly after the debate of one hour, which was closed with loud applause. But most guests kept mixing over cocktails and snacks, with a table full of other offers from Mr Yarvin’s publisherSuch as the Highbrow Manosphere Journal The world of man and a $ 395 “Patrician Edition” From essays from the “Race Realist” Steve Sailer, who often writes about Race and IQ.
For an hour and a half, Mr. Yarvin in a corner, surrounded by two dozen guests who leaned in the neighborhood to hear him field questions and to offer disquisitions that lots between the Italian theorist of the pre -war Julius EvolaThe occult novelist Aleister Crowley and Gavin Newsom’s travails with high-speed rail in California.
The crowd seemed to be running hard to the Yarvin-newsigious one, even as his ideas, a member of the Republican club of Harvard, still said outside “the Overton window” for many campus conservatives. The questions for Mr. Yarvin were not all softballs. At one point a young man sewed him about whether President Trump or Elon Musk was ‘the prince’, accused him of saying various things in public and private life.
Aidan Fitzsimons, a senior in the graduated seminar by Professor Allen about democracy, said he found the debate fascinating. “He is a true political philosopher,” he said about Mr. Yarvin. “Not in the same way as she is, but those are the costs of dealing with him – people have to recognize that.”
But Mr. Fitzsimons said that the discussion never came to the heart of the case: Yarvin’s confirming case for monarchy.
“When she called him a narcissistic nihilist, it was hilarious, but also in deeper,” he said. “The nihilist does not believe in something higher, is not willing to take bets on any kind of faith.”
Dean Sherman, a co-president of the Harvard Law School Republicans, also said that the speakers had largely spoken past each other. “It’s hard not to do that if you have such different basic line principles,” he said.
Mr. Sherman said he wish that Professor had all pursued Mr Yarvin’s question about whether democracy should be liberal democracy. “Can you vote harmless?” he said. “Or is democracy a one -way racket?”
Professor Allen, who spoke by telephone later that evening, said she was happy that she had participated. It was important, she said, to acknowledge the powerful parts of Mr Yarvin’s criticism of American democracy while trying where he goes dangerously wrong.
“On the page his argumentation is loose and refined,” she said. “That is also personally true.”
When the party separated, Mr. Yarvin said that he appreciated the recognition of Professor that American democracy had deep problems. But he compared her with Soviet reformers from Gorbachev era who thought they could repair the system just to collapse.
Asked for her who called him a ‘narcissistic nihilist’, he was diplomatic and said that it would be more productive to talk about their intellectual differences in an off-the-record beer. “I think that would lead to a much more interesting conversation,” he said.
But he gave her the honor for the appearance and be prepared to participate. “She didn’t have to do that,” said Mr. Yarvin. “I don’t know that there was necessarily something for her.”
So he thought he won this round? He shrugged and laughed briefly.
“That’s for others to say,” he said.
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