Lambert here: Includes a potted history of Curtis Yarvin Thought. Yarvin is, IIRC, a monarchist. I would speculate that he regards a “CEO Dictator” as a subtype of, or a step along the road to, kingship. To the extent I am familiar with conservative thought, his fellow travellers at the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society would not view the “unitary executive” in this way, though pragmatically it may amount to the same thing. And of course “government should be run like a business is a shop-worn conservative trope (given the starting point that businesses, even including Walmart, are of trivial scale and scope compared to government). We are also, through DOGE, being given a view into how business is done by the careless people in Silicon Valley (intimidation, greed, sycophancy, fraud, mendacity).
Wrote Yarvin [April 2022]:
We’ve got to risk a full power start—a full reboot of the USG. We can only do this by giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization—with roughly the powers that the Allied occupation authorities held in Japan and Germany in the fall of 1945. This level of centralized emergency power worked to refound a nation then, for them. So it should work now, for us.”
(The metaphor of “full power start” comes from Star Trek and entails a risky process of restarting a fictional spaceship in a way that might cause “implosion.” The World War II metaphor casts the federal government as a conquered enemy now controlled by an outside force.)
Yarvin wrote that in a second term, Trump could appoint a different person to act as the nation’s “CEO.” This CEO would be enabled to run roughshod over the federal government, with Trump in the background as “chairman of the board.” The metaphors clarify the core idea: Run the government as a rogue corporation rather than a public institution beholden to the rules of democracy.
What once seemed like a fringe theory is now being carried out by the corporate powers that have wholly captured our government. While there are some minor differences between Yarvin’s approach and Musk’s, here’s a summary of what they have in common:
- Install a CEO Dictator
- Yarvin’s Blueprint: Trump appoints a CEO to run the country like a private corporation, bypassing Congress and the courts.
- Musk’s Moves: Acts as federal CEO, demands unilateral control over sensitive government programs, positioning himself as an unelected decision-maker as Trump stays in the background.
- Purge the Bureaucracy
- Yarvin’s Plan: “Retire All Government Employees” (RAGE) – fire career civil servants and replace them with loyalists.
- Musk’s Moves: DOGE is gutting teams, demanding mass resignations, locking employees out of offices, and threatening mass layoffs in federal government. Meanwhile, DOGE is recruiting inexperienced young men who owe their loyalty to Musk/Thiel.
- Build a Loyalist Army
- Yarvin’s Blueprint: Recruit an “ideologically trained” army to replace experts and enforce the new regime.
- Musk’s Moves: Surrounding himself with young, inexperienced loyalists who enforce his will without question. Project 2025 will also provide Republican cadre to run what’s left of the federal government.
- Dismantle Democratic Institutions
- Yarvin’s Blueprint: Strip power from federal agencies, courts, and Congress, centralizing authority under the executive branch.
- Musk’s Moves: Undermining the credibility of the federal government, downplaying legal oversight, and defying regulatory authorities. Dismantling government agencies and functions with no plan for their replacement.
- Seize Media and Information Control to Maintain Power
- Yarvin’s Blueprint: Take over government, journalism, academia, and social media to control public narratives.
- Musk’s Moves: Buying Twitter, firing journalists, boosting propaganda, and promoting fringe narratives while attacking traditional media. Leading the hostile tech takeover as Trump’s “CEO.”
Did I miss anything?
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