The Ideology Behind The End Of Democracy

Written By Leeja Miller

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Transcript:

To understand the widespread chaos so far in the Trump administration, you need to know about the names, faces, and ideologies of the people behind the scenes pulling the strings. So today I’m going to try to untangle the dark web of ideologies driving this administration that go way beyond the top level analysis. It’s one thing to look at DOGE as a means to save money while handing billionaires some tax cuts, or at Project 2025 as a backlash to progressive ideals, but there is a deeper ideology animating some of the actors that are pulling the strings behind Trump and see him as a convenient CEO figurehead to push through their biggest ideological initiatives. And understanding the underlying theories and beliefs makes everything that’s happening much clearer and can also help paint a picture for the direction we’re headed.

Now, before we dive in, let me please preface this by saying that I’m in no way insinuating that there’s some giant underground cabal of anyone making master plans to take over the United States and then the world. I think there is scheming happening, I mean Project 2025 was a major undertaking that brought together literally hundreds of people and organizations. But I’m not here to sow giant underground conspiracy theories. I think what’s going on is the result of a lot of disparate actors who happened to know each other and to be influenced by the fringe thoughts of a few guys with blogs, and they now have the ear of the president and the power to experiment with those ideas.

Okay first, let’s break down the theories and the people we’re talking about to get a lay of the land. These have been reported on variously over the last few years but I still think it’s not well known, I learned a lot in diving into the research for this episode, so hopefully you will too.

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Elon Musk is absolutely tied up in the ideologies underpinning the second Trump administration, and in a bit of a foreshadowing of what we’re going to talk about today, I saw this headline from the publication Futurism that says “Elon Musk’s Credibility Sinking as He’s Caught in Web of Lies.” It’s helpful to see in the Ground News browser extension that this publication leans left, so to get a fuller picture of the story I can click on Full Coverage. On the Ground News website I can see that 181 sources are covering this topic: OpenAI countersues Elon Musk, claims harassment. As with these ideas we’re talking about today and Elon Musk himself, coverage of these types of stories is going to vary wildly depending on the bias of the publication you’re reading.

For example, left leaning HuffPost uses the headline “Musk Wants To 'Harm' OpenAI Because He Can't Stand Its Success Without Him: Lawsuit” while right leaning The Epoch Times uses the headline “OpenAI Countersues Musk Over Alleged Harassment.” Depending on where you get your news, you’re going to get very different takes on the same story. And if you only pay attention to one side or the other you might miss the full picture.

This is where Ground News comes in - and why I've been using them for over a year. Today’s partner Ground News is an app and website that offers tools to help you critically analyze the news you read, providing context to understand the full picture.

By using the Ground News Vantage Subscription, I can also see the blindspot feed where I can see stories disproportionately covered by one side of the political spectrum. For example, for some reason there are zero left leaning sources covering the story “US imposes visa bans on India travel agents for facilitating illegal migration.” I feel better equipped to make sense of what’s happening in the world without being influenced by just one perspective. And listen I’m not the only one who loves Ground News, the Nobel Peace Center even called it "an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview.”

I’m always really impressed with Ground News and genuinely think they’re a great resource. If you want to stay informed on US Politics and more Subscribe through this QR code or our link below at ground dot news slash leeja for 40% off this unlimited access Vantage Plan. It comes out to $5 a month for unlimited access to ALL the features I’ve mentioned. Thanks Ground News!

First, Dark Enlightenment. To be enlightened, but make it dark enlightenment, means to be disenchanted with everything. Basically, to trust and believe in nothing. Especially when it comes to truth and information but also philosophy and government. To be red pilled–to have had the wool of progressive propaganda pulled from your eyes so you are above the masses and able to see the world for what it really is. You’re no longer a sheep following the elite, the intellectuals, the mainstream media, and going along with everything they say.

Neo-reactionary, shortened to NRx is described variably as the same as Dark Enlightenment, part of the same movement, distinct from it. In any event, they’re related. NRx criticizes traditional enlightenment thinking about equality and democracy, instead equality and democracy are sowing chaos and make government incredibly inefficient. Liberal democracy is a failed experiment and equality should not be the desired outcome because it doesn’t actually make peoples’ lives better. Prosperity, order, and freedom aren;t achieved through “individual rights” but through a government able to manage the country efficiently without things like civil liberties getting in the way.

Democracy is a played out experiment that has proven itself to be very weak. Everyone can agree that politics are bad and populism is bad because decisions should actually be made by experts, which is really a class of people worthy of leading, and so really aristocracy should be the answer–a country run by people who have been groomed to be great leaders and experts, not subject to the whim of the unwashed masses. Americans are too afraid of the idea of “dictatorship” and should in fact be more openminded that maybe they’d like living under an autocrat! But this isn’t your average feudal monarchical system of old, this new form of aristocracy or monarchy should also include running the country like a start up. And so limits to the executive’s ability to run the country like a CEO are actually bad because it means the government doesn’t work as well. The reason the government doesn’t work well is because of all these intellectuals and bureaucrats who have bought into the progressive bubble getting in the way of someone who really knows what he’s doing taking over and running the place.

I mean, if Apple ran California it would work better for people, because look at all the great products they make. Companies are really just little tiny monarchies, and we’re surrounded by amazing stuff made by these amazing little monarchies I mean IMAGINE if the government made your laptop, the horror!

In fact, the expansion of democracy through things like abolishing slavery and giving everyone the right to vote, hasn’t really benefitted people much. I mean so many formerly enslaved people suffered when they were set free after the civil war!! The ladies in Jane Austen novels seem like they were having a great time!! The government would simply work better for everyone if we had a CEO running things. Neo-reactionary thinking involves cherry picking history and facts, whitewashing reality, ignoring the fact that most start ups fail, and blindly accepting that capitalist “progress” is the thing that should be valued above all else, all while calling yourself “enlightened.”

And then there’s accelerationism, the idea that Western democracy is irreparably corrupt, participating within the system through things like voting and mass politics is pointless, and the best way to more quickly move away from these corrupt, inefficient governmental models, to accelerate their demise, is by creating chaos and political tension, as much as possible, until it all comes crumbling down, at which point the rich white smart christians will come out on top as they are preordained to do. So don’t bother voting, but if you do vote, vote for the most extreme candidate, the one that will bring it all down faster. But really, violence is the ultimate answer. Accelerationist ideals are frequently cited by especially white nationalist mass shooters and terrorists as the source of their ideology and the reasoning behind their violence. Neo-reactionism grew out of early accelerationism. As Vox describes the beliefs, “egalitarian and democratic policies described as “progressive” by left-liberals are, in fact, a way of slowing down the only progress worth having — acceleration toward techno-capitalist singularity. Neoreaction is a version of accelerationism adapted to address this problem.”

With each of these intertwined ideologies–Dark Enlightenment, Neo-Reactionism, and Accelerationism, the underlying through line is anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, and in favor of technological advancement above all else, wherein the individual matters less than the overall progress towards financial growth spurred on by technological advancement. Voting rights and DEI and woke-ism and bureaucrats following rules get in the way of progress when the central idea of progress revolves around how to use computers to make as much money as possible. And so having a single autocratic ruler who is a “genius” and doesn’t have to abide by the sticky slow norms required by democracy is better for everyone, because in this world everyone benefits from this techno-progress. If a few individuals (meaning 99 percent of the population) have to, you know, have zero say in the functioning of their society, experience daily racism or sexism, and live in constant fear of an autocratic government that doesn’t allow dissent, and enjoy zero of the riches that their daily labor creates, so be it!! For the good of mankind!!

And some of the more important quote unquote “philosophers” of these ideologies have largely flown under the radar until recently. Those names include Nick Land, a former professor of Philosophy from England, who is seen as the originator of the modern right-wing accelerationist philosophy. He was originally associated with the University of Warwick, but when his philosophies started really flying off the fucking hinges he and his associated group of faculty members, known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, or CCRU, split from the University in 1998 and moved into, I shit you not, a house formerly owned by a prominent British satanist, where the group took copious amounts of amphetamines and scribbled diagrams all over the walls. In his own book, Nick Land admits that quote “after perhaps a year of fanatical abuse [of amphetamines], [I] was, by any reasonable standard, profoundly insane.” But yeah, go off king. After his self-described mental breakdown, Land moved to China where he worked as a journalist and deeply admired the Chinese regime’s accomplishments and leaders. By the 2010s he had made contact and began working with the purported godfather of Dark Enlightenment and Neo-Reactionism, Curtis Yarvin.

Yarvin is a 50-something blogger who makes his living mostly from spewing academic sounding blather on his Substack. He hates elites and intellectuals while also declaring himself an intellectual. He went to Brown university for undergrad, graduating in 1992, and then got a year and a half into a computer science PhD program at Berkeley before dropping out to work for a tech company. He went on to found a computer platform called Urbit in 2002. Getting embedded into the early silicon valley libertarian tech community seemed to really radicalize young Curtis. He began blogging in 2007, pontificating on his dark enlightenment, neo-reactionary theories to a fringe audience. In 2013 he expanded the work of Urbit through a company he co-founded thanks to venture capital funding from none other than Peter Thiel, with whom he reportedly watched the 2016 election results roll in, and whom he has described as “fully enlightened.” Peter Thiel is also the tech billionaire who helped fund ventures JD Vance was involved with before throwing his hat in the political ring. Peter Thiel is also closely connected to Elon Musk, with whom he worked on PayPal in the early 2000s.

And of course the Silicon Valley billionaires love Yarvin because his argument is “Democracy is weak and that’s why there are unpopular policies (like mass immigration) that persist despite people not liking them.” And he turns the blame for the ills of society on democracy and says actually if we have a few powerful people take over then everything would be better. As opposed to the reality which is that incredibly unpopular policies persist because our current democracy is overrun by monied interests and so our elected officials aren’t answerable to us, they’re answerable to the 1%. This has been studied. In Yarvin’s camp, the answer to this corruption isn’t to try to move more towards democratic ideals by, I don’t know, banning billionaires from government, but instead to do away with democracy altogether. And so Curtis Yarvin, through his learned mannerisms and ability to make the asinine sound profound by calling himself an “intellectual,” using words like “opprobrius” and speaking in a condescending tone, is able to make it seem like the billionaires killing us all are actually here to save us, and we’re all stupid idiots who fell for the progressive lies being fed to us by society. WE’RE in the cult, he’s the red pilled enlightened profit here to save all those who will listen. This is a computer nerd who took the idea of playing “devil’s advocate” WAY too far, and who’s also stumbled on the right words to say to get powerful people to listen to him, and in this day and age if you have someone who understands tech or computers we then love to impute a greater genius or higher understanding onto them despite the fact that they haven’t earned it. Just because a white guy founded a tech company does not mean he’s smarter than the average person. Let me say that again. JUST BECAUSE A WHITE GUY FOUNDED A TECH COMPANY DOES NOT MEAN HE’S SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE PERSON.

And this is also why white nationalists love Yarvin and the neo-reactionary philosophy–it gives them a convenient excuse, cloaked in pseudo-intellectualism, for why they shouldn’t have to bother themselves with equality, and why actually their racism and misogyny is good because those democratic values just get in the way of true progress. It makes them feel enlightened, philosophical, above it all, after decades of being made to feel ashamed for being raging fucking bigots. It assures them there’s a natural order to things and they are at the top of that order.

And I wanted to talk about this today because I think it’s important to understand this underlying philosophy, to call it what it is, to put names and faces to the people pulling the philosophical strings behind the madness. But also because I think it’s important to talk about this stuff in light of what is clearly waning democracy in the United States.

I talked about this last week, but it is very easy, I do it too, to look backwards to try to figure out where we’re going. These are all the ways Trump is like Hitler, here’s how Hitler did it, let’s look into that to learn from history so we can try and predict what Trump is going to do next. But 2025 is not the same as 1935. And much like the industrial revolution of the 100 years leading up to the 20th century fundamentally changed the order of society, so too has the advent of the internet in the 50 years leading up to this present moment.

The accumulation of wealth that the internet has fast-tracked, either directly or indirectly, spurred on by governments that were fumbling to pass regulations quickly enough to keep up, and have largely failed, and now the computing power that has been and continues to be created by AI, another computing revolution that governments have no idea how to handle, is entirely new in the history of the world. Technological advancements have shaped the world over and over throughout history, from the printing press to the steam engine, but the internet has accelerated how quickly innovations can change us all, and AI is the latest advancement that I do not think it’s an overstatement to say is a full on technological revolution with the power to shape our global systems, our societies, our governments, and more. There was the initial wave of discovering that ChatGPT can write your homework for you, which has died down as we’ve all discovered that it’s actually not that good at it, and also uses unconscionable amounts of energy to operate. But that was truly just the start, and AI’s potential beyond individual user inputs is only just beginning to be unpacked.

And listen AI is very central to this discussion about Dark Enlightenment and Neo-reactionism because it is truly the pinnacle of techno-capitalism and has been floated as a potential tool for future governing. Not to be used by future governments but instead to take the place of governments. ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAi was cofounded by Elon Musk and now CEO Sam Altman. Altman has been increasingly friendly with Trump, just this last week appearing at an event with Saudi officials during Trump’s middle east trip. Despite origins that indicated a dedication to transparency and safety in their development of AI, Sam Altman has increasingly pushed OpenAI towards faster and faster product launches, foregoing safety for quote unquote progress, according to reporting in the Atlantic based off the forthcoming book Empire of AI by Karen Hao, which is absolutely now on my reading list. The article for the Atlantic quotes Bloomberg, saying that research into the actual effects of AI, “raises an uncomfortable prospect: that this supposedly revolutionary technology might never deliver on its promise of broad economic transformation, but instead just concentrate more wealth at the top.” Indeed, Sam Altman has touted the benefits of OpenAI’s work as moving us ever closer to the promised land, also known as Artificial General Intelligence or AGI, meaning autonomous AI that has reached or surpassed levels of human intelligence. Altman claims the arrival of AGI would bring quote “massive prosperity.” But according to the article in the Atlantic, “AGI is largely rhetorical—a fantastical, all-purpose excuse for OpenAI to continue pushing for ever more wealth and power. Under the guise of a civilizing mission, the empire of AI is accelerating its global expansion and entrenching its power.”

So it’s no wonder why Sam Altman and OpenAI is associated with Elon Musk who is associated with Peter Thiel who is associated with JD Vance who all at various points tout the teachings and philosophy of Curtis Yarvin and other proponents of Dark Enlightenment, neo-reactionism, and accelerationism. AI offers the ultimate example of potential “progress” at the expense of individuals who happen to get in the way of that progress. So what if you’re a worker in Kenya earning a pitiful wage to become deeply traumatized while filtering out violence and hate speech from OpenAI’s technologies. So what if you’re an artist or journalist getting phased out by the AI that is using your art or words to spew out art or articles faster than any human could. So what if you live in a contaminated area or a region regularly devastated by increasing natural disasters because of the climate change being hastened by the further development of AI. All of it is worth it, in the end, in the name of progress. And anyway, it doesn’t matter really because the ultimate height of human achievement and technological progress is to colonize Mars, where we can escape from the disasters that AI has brought about. And by “we” I mean a select few billionaires but again, it’s all in the name of progress!! And that’s all that matters.

And while all of this is very new and spurred on by technologies the world has never seen before, it is also, in some ways, a tale as old as time. So long as your philosophy posits you as preternaturally ordained for greatness, as a genius among men, you’re absolved from contending with the humanity of the people your actions are hurting. You can point to a higher purpose while stamping out the life around you. That is not new.

And when you understand this background–the rise of these uniquely 21st century ideologies like Dark Enlightenment, neo-reactionism, accelerationism, and the men like Curtis Yarvin who have garnered fame from developing them, or like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and JD Vance who have gained power and fortune from adhering to them, or like Trump who’s definitely too stupid to understand any of this but delighted to act as a dummy figurehead to wave to the crowds and sign the decrees, you then are better able to understand why the disparate groups of people behind Project 2025 and who are pulling the strings in the White House now are able to pull this all off despite the apparent chaos its causing, despite their apparent disagreements–they’re all in some way united behind a greater purpose wherein their greed, bigotry, and sociopathic inability to feel empathy is all justified. Where the world order that puts them–white Christian men and the women who are willing to birth their babies–at the very top is re-established. And where the pain their ideologies cause, whether through higher prices because of tariffs or deporting toddlers or keeping a legally dead woman on life support to act as a flesh receptacle for her 9 week old fetus despite her family’s wishes, can be justified as necessary to their ultimate goal of “progress.”

And I think all of us collectively recognizing this and calling it out for what it is is an important first step. It can be easy to fall into cynicism when faced with such a large, deeply entrenched and very scary ideology, so I’m trying not to do that by at the very least shedding more light on these things. I also think it’s an important lesson for those of us who wish to counteract this incredibly cynical force that has taken over our government. We have to be driven by something bigger than us. Something that is genuinely deeply meaningful. Something that will align us across differences of opinion and background in an effort towards that deeply meaningful goal. I’m not sure what that is, but I refuse to let right wing cynicism infect my belief that there’s gotta be something positive we can all get behind for the benefit of each other and humanity generally.

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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from Wednesday about Hasan Piker brief Customs detention and what that means for us all.

Leeja Miller
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