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As a long-time Moldbug/Yarvin reader, this is a surreal take.
What Moldbug wrote back from 2008 to 2012 was that the Republican party was fake opposition, that Republican presidents were basically pretending to be a CEO while in fact all hiring and firing is done by civil service laws, broader ideology is set by the Cathedral, and the Republican president impact is minimal. The steering wheel was not connected to the rudder.
Moldbug's proposed solution was to use the internet to route traditional mainstream media power, and hold a "true election" where a majority elects a president who promises to exercise the full executive authority of the Presidency, as FDR and Lincoln did, and to cut through or ignore the strata of civil service rules, administrative state rules, to re-attach the steering wheel to the rudder, etc. etc. in order to break the oligarchical Cathedral/administrative state.
A lot of men on the right read Moldbug, did route around the Cathedral, did do a hostile takeover of the Republican party, and are now at least starting to attempt what he proposed. I'm still worried that they are going to declare victory way too soon and it will all go off half-cocked. But it is a promising start. The Trump administration has yet to go full-Yarvin, and to the extent they hold back I think they are more likely to ultimately fail.
In 1972, the Cathedral could slander and smear a president and the normal Republican would believe the Cathedral over the president. In 2024, this is not the case. In part this is because of the Internet, in part because the Cathedral itself has hemorrhaged talent and dropped kayfabe -- but also in part because Yarvin himself exposed the Cathedral for what it was.
It's like Yarvin said, "Ah, I diagnosed your problem, it is far more fatal than people think, and the cures other people are selling will not work on it. However, I think I may have a treatment that just might work ..." And the person then tries the treatment and starts feeling better, and someone else says, "Ah, Yarvin said you would die of this disease, but you are feeling better, he is discredited!"
In fairness to your view, though, Moldbug and the neoreactionaries have written a lot of stuff and have gone back and forth on what might actually work, what will be allowed, etc, as is to be expected in any longrun and wide-ranging conversation. Yarvin has waffled and said that maybe the medicine won't work, maybe you need a different medicine, etc. With regards to the 2024 election, there was a lot of disagreement in the dissident right about whether the Cathedral would be strong and unified enough to find or manufacture enough votes to overcome its deep unpopularity. Yarvin himself said he did not know. Yarvin also just emailed an apology for underestimating Trump 47 and over-estimating the strength of the Cathedral in 2024.
But overall, to see this as a massive L for reactionaries is ridiculous. What we are seeing is actually the fruition of 17 years of intellectual trench-work and public persuasion.
ADDENDUM:
Moldbug's diagnosis was that we don't live in a two-party system, we live in a system where the Republicans or the "right" are basically fake opposition. They are allowed to win small victories every now, in part to make their opposition look real, and in part to fix obvious problems of too much leftism, but they are never allowed to win on existential questions and in general the country moves to thee steps to the left for every step to the right. It's unclear if Trumps actions will amount to a full regime change and rightward shift on existential questions -- or if it will actually be a re-invorgation of the two-party system just as people were catching on to the fact that the Republicans were fake opposition. IN this scenario, there will be some right-ward shift on the craziest of the left-wing stuff from the past ten years, but the Cathedral will remain in-tact and the country will continue to move to the left after Trump leaves, and very little about our system will have fundamentally been altered or fixed by Trump.
Thus, Moldbug's analysis was and is correct, and as long as the Trumpist-right follows is prescribed treatment plan, they can defeat the Cathedral and cure the country. But if they go off the treatment plan and don't actually bother to follow through in enforcing these executive orders and in firing workers and taking control of the budget and defunding the NGO/academia/non-profit complex, etc, then all Trump will have done is to reboot the fake two-party system with a more exciting season of TV.
You can't expect much more from democracy than occasionally fixing obvious problems of too much leftism or too much rightism. Other regimes have a hard time clearing that bar.
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It's hard for me to understand how Yarvin's "true election" is significantly different from "a candidate who prioritizes stuff I prioritize." The reason the Bushes or Reagan didn't do mass deportations or try to dismantle the civil service isn't because they were just powerless puppets while Trump isn't, it's because that's not what they ran on. It's not like Bush said he was going to get rid of birthright citizenship and then said "psych!" as soon as he got into office. They may have been anti-immigration or anti-federal bureaucracy in comparison with their opponents, but they didn't make that their entire platform the way Trump did. When a candidate actually runs on those things, and gets elected...he does them.
As a side note, it's bizarre to me this "FDR was a dictator!" thing Yarvin returns to again and again. In the very "true election" piece under discussion, he notes that FDR's power was significantly circumscribed by the judiciary, and that he couldn't order someone arrested and shot if he wanted to. But he was still a dictator because...he got a lot of stuff done, I guess? Any dictator worth his salt wouldn't have failed to pack the court. FDR didn't even really control congress for the second half of his time in office, the Republicans and the southern Democrats regularly united to thwart his agenda, and it worked. It was hardly a "rubber stamp."
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