Trump’s return supercharged a once-niche blogger’s influence. What he — and the circles around him — actually believe.

WASHINGTON / SAN FRANCISCO

Until last November, Curtis Yarvin was a name mostly traded among programmers, online theorists and a handful of Silicon Valley insiders. Since Donald Trump’s re‑election, the 52‑year‑old computer engineer‑turned‑writer has found himself invited to salons, podcasts and donor dinners where the American right’s future is argued in real time. The sudden interest has less to do with personal charisma than with a set of ideas Yarvin has worked at for nearly two decades — a critique of liberal democracy and a proposal to replace it with something closer to a CEO‑run state.

Yarvin first wrote under the pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug” on a blog called Unqualified Reservations, where he developed an argument that modern democracies are mired in inertia and self‑deception. He later resurfaced under his own name with a Substack, Gray Mirror, and a five‑part series dubbed “the clear pill.” Across those venues, he has popularized a vocabulary — “the Cathedral,” “patchwork,” “exit over voice” — that now circulates well beyond niche message boards.

Who is he, exactly? Born in 1973 and trained in computer science, Yarvin co‑founded the software project Urbit and moved in the orbit of venture investors long before he became a political lodestar. In interviews and essays he argues that America should abandon electoral competition and adopt a form of accountable autocracy: a single executive running the country as one would a firm, constrained not by voters but by a board of owners and by the hard feedback of profit‑and‑loss‑style metrics. Critics call this techno‑monarchy; admirers prefer “realism.”

At the core of Yarvin’s worldview is the “Cathedral,” his shorthand for the informal network of elite universities, prestige media and credentialing guilds that, in his telling, generate and enforce a progressive consensus. Because those institutions shape what counts as expertise and set the bounds of respectable opinion, he says, they form a kind of distributed regime that survives elections. Trying to reform such a system via normal politics is, in his words, like debugging a program with the program itself — possible only at the margins.

If that is the diagnosis, the remedy is “exit.” Rather than argue within a gridlocked system, Yarvin imagines a future of competing jurisdictions — a “patchwork” of city‑states or corporate polities — where citizens can sort themselves by preference and competence. The model borrows as much from start‑ups as from monarchy. Leaders would be hired for performance, fired for failure and insulated, by design, from the short time horizons of mass politics. It is a vision that flatters builders and founders and unnerves anyone who regards universal suffrage as non‑negotiable.

The movement that has gathered around these ideas resists neat labels. Its members are post‑liberals, techno‑optimists, Catholic integralists, Nietzscheans and old‑fashioned national conservatives who agree mainly that the status quo has failed. Some are attracted to moral order and protection of the family; others to hierarchy and elite selection. The coalition’s texture is more social than institutional — Substack newsletters, podcasts, Telegram channels and, increasingly, real‑world parties where donors, influencers and young staffers mingle.

Trump’s second term has intensified the tug‑of‑war over where the American right goes next. On one flank are the Catholic and “national conservative” figures pushing for a state that enforces traditional norms and limits markets in the name of the common good. On another are the accelerationists and techno‑elites who see innovation throttled by bureaucracy and dream of handing executive power to an energetic manager. Yarvin has fans in the latter camp and an audience in the former, even when they disagree about ends. What unites them is impatience with the checks and balances that slow abrupt change.

Yarvin’s proximity to influence is indirect but real. Venture capitalists cite him approvingly; younger operatives treat his essays as strategy memos; and elected Republicans — notably those aligned with Silicon Valley money — have echoed his language about a captured bureaucracy and the need for a more consolidated executive. Profiles this summer have treated him as a kind of court philosopher for a restless elite. He is not crafting policy line‑by‑line, but his terms have seeped into the conversation that surrounds power.

The appeal is obvious in certain rooms. For founders and engineers, the promise of “move fast” government feels like a corrective to drift. For dissidents who see universities and newsrooms as hostile, the Cathedral provides a scapegoat with a name. For the faction of the right nursing post‑pandemic grievances — over speech rules, school closures, the entrenchment of DEI — Yarvin’s explanation turns scattered frustrations into a unified theory of capture.

But there are hazards in the fine print. Yarvin’s corpus includes racial claims and paeans to pre‑liberal orders that most Americans would find offensive or worse. His proposed cure — replacing a flawed democracy with an efficient autocrat — assumes that selecting and constraining a ruler is easier, and fairer, than persuading a public. Constitutional lawyers warn that any serious attempt to translate these ideas into policy would collide with bedrock rights and the separation of powers. Historians add that strongmen are rarely “accountable” in the way slide decks promise.

Even on the right, there is pushback. Populists bridle at the notion that ordinary voters should be sidelined in favor of a governing class. Catholic conservatives want moral guardrails, not a shareholder state. Internet‑native thinkers such as the anonymous “Bronze Age Pervert” mock Trump‑era industrial policy from a very different direction, prizing elite vigor over factory nostalgia. The contest is less left versus right than a cage match among rights — with Yarvin supplying one influential script.

What, then, does the “new, new right” stand for? First, that legitimacy flows from performance, not ballots — a premise that leads naturally to executive centralization. Second, that culture is upstream of law: win the institutions that define reality (schools, media, HR) and politics will follow. Third, that exit beats voice: build alternatives, whether in towns, companies or online spaces, rather than trying to capture legacy ones. Around those pillars swarm disagreements about religion, trade, immigration and the role of the state in family life.

If Yarvin’s program ever gets road‑tested, watch three arenas. The first is the civil service: expect efforts to concentrate appointment power in the White House and to curtail the independence of career officials, paired with rhetoric about “efficiency” and “accountability.” The second is information infrastructure: pressure on public broadcasters and universities, experiments with state‑backed alternatives and a push to de‑fund diversity bureaucracies that the new right views as political machines. The third is federalism reimagined as competition — using grants, tax incentives and deregulation to create showcase jurisdictions that can “exit” the national consensus in practice.

For now, the Yarvin phenomenon is less a governing program than a mood: a blend of aesthetic rebellion, policy maximalism and party‑scene networking that flatters insiders while leaving the governing coalitions of a vast country mostly untouched. That may be enough. Ideas matter not just when they are enacted, but when they shift the Overton window and supply a vocabulary for people near the levers. By that humbler measure, the man once known as Moldbug has already won something: he made his critique legible to those who count.

The question that remains is whether that vocabulary can govern a plural republic. America’s tradition of democracy has survived panics, depressions and waves of elite contempt. It may yet absorb this one, borrowing what is useful — an impatience with sclerosis, perhaps — while rejecting its illiberal temptations. Until then, Curtis Yarvin will keep testing the line between outsider and oracle, and the “new, new right” will continue to decide whether it wants a revolution or merely new management.