The victory of Republican Donald Trump in the November election would be the greatest achievement of the neo-reactionary techno-libertarian movement, which is part of the so-called new right in the United States.
It was sponsored by Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance peter thielOne of Silicon Valley’s top billionaires. Thiel and other luminaries of the “tech world”, including investors Marc Andreessen (founder of the company Netscape), Ben Horowitz and David Sachs, are followers and financers of Curtis Yarvin, one of the exponents of the neoreactionary movement.
Like his mentors, Vance has endorsed many of Yarvin’s ideas. Neo-reactionarism (abbreviated as NRx) seeks to replace democracy with an almost feudal regime in which the ruler would act like a king or CEO with absolute powers over public officials. It would put technology at the center of everything.
Neoreactionaries oppose traditional Republicans and their gradual strategy of incorporating conservatism into government.
Yarvin, a 51-year-old former programmer and blogger with long hair and nerd glasses, fights what he calls “The Cathedral.” This would be an elite made up of government bureaucrats, universities and mainstream media that would preach progressive values to the population.
He popularized the concept of the “Red Pill” (in reference to the film The Matrix) with the meaning of opening one’s eyes to the reality that progressives were trying to hide.
“Yarvin is an odd sort of monarchist, wanting a government made up of visionary CEO-kings, heroic figures who understand the world, and a group of ordinary people who would be conservative subjects,” said Henry Farrell, a professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University who has published an academic article on the subject.
Neo-reactionarism began as a marginal movement on the Internet, part of the so-called alt-right (short for alternative right). In this area, Yarvin gained fame in 2010 with his blog, where he used the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug.
The former programmer gained the status of “Prophet Yarvin” only after being embraced by his friend Peter Thiel, who had helped him fund a startup. It was a mix of techno-libertarianism with neo-reactionaryism.
In 2012, the blogger coined the acronym RAGE (Retire All Government Workers in Portuguese) as a first step toward overthrowing the government in the United States.
That’s exactly what Project 2025 proposes, a government plan crafted by names and organizations close to Trump, from which he is trying to distance himself.
And Trump’s running mate Vance himself fully embraced Yarvin’s view in a 2021 interview with right-wing YouTuber Jack Murphy.
“There’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who’s been writing about this,” Vance said, proposing what he defined as a program of de-Baathification (the mass dismissal of members of Saddam Hussein’s party who held government positions after the invasion of Iraq), or a devocalization (the term “woke” is used by the right to refer pejoratively to extreme left positions).
Vance echoed Yarvin’s words in 2021, saying, “I think Trump is going to be up for office again in 2024 and this is what he should do: Fire all the government bureaucrats, all the public servants, and replace them with our own people.” In other statements, the vice presidential candidate echoed Yarvin’s concepts related to the red pill and the cathedral.
Thiel, the common godfather of Vance and Yarvin, crossed paths with the Republican in 2011, when the senator was studying law at Yale.
After graduation, Vance worked at Thiel’s venture capital fund and left there to open his own fund with the billionaire’s backing. Both named their companies after places and characters from the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
Thiel, an early Facebook investor, was the biggest donor to Vance’s Senate campaign, investing $15 million in 2022.
Along with Sachs, Elon Musk, another member of the so-called PayPal mafia (among the founders of the online payment company), Andreessen and Horowitz, Thiel declared support for Trump and they all became major financiers of his campaign.
They oppose the Biden administration’s efforts to regulate artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies and social networks, and antitrust measures against big tech. They preach the gospel of the new right in their crusade to empower the private sector and combat the “deep state,” a term that refers to alleged elites in state bureaucracies who protect their own interests.
Farrell said, “It’s as if they build a sense of identity around their company’s business model and turn it into a philosophy, borrowing ideas from thinkers like Curtis Yarvin that fit their ideology.” According to him, these businessmen see themselves as heroes, as engines of humanity’s progress, which are being hindered by government bureaucracies.
Andreessen, whose company manages $42 billion in resources, also released a “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” last year celebrating the “technocapital machine” and its potential to bring all that is good into the world.
“According to this view, technology entrepreneurs are not only the leaders of their businesses, but also defenders of the social order, free from what Andreessen calls ‘the enemy’: social responsibility, trust and security (on social networks), and ethics in technology”, wrote the digital strategist Elizabeth Spiers In the New York Times.
Thiel even stated in a seminar at the Cato Institute that he no longer believes that “democracy and freedom are compatible”.
Trump and Vance have embraced the new right’s support for authoritarianism and are betting on an unprecedented centralization of power.
