Elon Musk, Curtis Yarvin, and the Enshittification of the American State

There are certainly better ways to spend your sick days than coughing on the couch and reading the works of neo-fascist wannabe-philosophers. Nonetheless, this is where I found myself the last 48 hours, waist-deep in the overlong ravings of Curtis Yarvin, Nathan Cofnas, and Nick Land. Mostly the former two; by the time I got to Land on my tour of personality disorders masquerading as political analysis,  I was full to bursting with bullshit and had to take a break.

I had been somewhat aware of these spiritually-corrupted shitbirds prior to Trump’s inauguration; the New York Times, who never met a psychopathic right-winger they weren’t eager to breathlessly profile, published an interview with Yarvin just a couple days before Trump’s second inauguration. A few days ago, like many other terminally-online left-wingers, I stumbled across this YouTube video detailing the specifics of the world Yarvin and co. yearn to build: one in which the United States, already seen as heading toward collapse, is intentionally brought down by a fifth column appointed within the federal government and replaced by a ‘patchwork’ of hyper-capitalist AI states exercising autocratic power over their residents.

This video was posted over two months ago on 13 November 2024, just over a week after the 2024 general election in which Trump defeated Harris, but it seems to have taken on a new life in the wake of Elon Musk’s rampant running-through of the US government, in the last week pushing above 1 million views and becoming the talk of the town among those in my corner of the internet. The video mostly confirmed what I already knew about the AI bros in California, namely that they are ahistorical, amoral, useless sacks of shit who have nothing to offer to any human being still in possession of what more religious minds call a soul, and in a just world they would be yanked unceremoniously from their gamer chairs and sent to a life sentence in the salt mines.

However, I did find myself drawn to learn more about Yarvin’s connection to these people. I knew from my vague understanding of him that he was anti-democracy and a crypto-fascist, but prior to watching this video I did not fully grasp the one-to-one connection between him, the apocalyptic AI bros, and what Elon Musk is currently attempting to achieve in his vivisection of the federal government. Down into the hellscape I dove, in search of understanding exactly how or why anyone with more than a few brain cells still kicking could intellectually support what was happening in Washington, and what the end goal of Musk’s DC slaughterhouse really was. I got my answer scattered across the more than 30,000 words of Yarvin’s writing I subjected myself to over the last few days.

The starting point for understanding Yarvin’s work in the context of our current political climate is, as noted by Blonde Politics’s aforementioned YouTube piece, “The Butterfly Revolution.” It is hard to overestimate the seismic shock inside the mind of any mentally sound homo politicus upon reading this essay in the context of Trump and Musk’s actions over the last couple weeks. The effect was much like a sculpture by Michael Murphy: what had previously seemed to be disparate and nonsensical actions by the Trump administration with only tenuous logical connections between them all suddenly  aligned into a terrifyingly coherent and strategic whole.

In the time I have been writing this, Yarvin has locked the piece behind a paywall (what’s the point in being a revolutionary if you can’t skim a little cream off the top for yourself?). And so, since I obviously am not giving this dipshit any of my money, I will have to go entirely off the chunks of the essay that remain public, along with memory of what he described when I read the full piece prior to its paywalling. The essay argues that Trump, rather than attempting to be ‘CEO of the government’ himself, should take a role more comparable to that of ‘chairman of the board’ and appoint a different person as CEO, bestowed with near-autocratic powers over the federal government and answerable only to the president. This CEO will be given, as Yarvin describes, power over the US government equal to the power executed by the Allies over the government of occupied Japan: “absolute sovereignty to a single organization,” in Yarvin’s words. This person will be able to “run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or the courts, probably also taking over state and local governments.”

And if the other branches of government do attempt to interfere? Yarvin has a solution for that, too: “Congress may pass any bill it likes. The courts may have any opinion they like. [...] But respecting the legislative and judicial branches is not the executive’s only job, nor does the constitution say it is. He [the president] is accountable to them [the voters] and no one else; we call this representative democracy.” In other words: ignore Congress, ignore the courts, achieve the Trump-Musk vision for America by any means necessary short of straight-up political violence (although, of course, it’s equally likely Yarvin includes that qualifier only to prevent this piece from arousing the concern of the few FBI agents left who still consider protecting domestic peace their sworn duty). Is this starting to sound familiar? If the Musk brigade in DC did not take this piece as a guidebook to their actions in office, it would be an incredible coincidence.

And what, a curious reader asks, is the purpose of all this? The purpose, for Yarvin, is to bring down the federal government in order to replace it with what Blonde Politics’s video (I keep mentioning it because it’s required fucking viewing. Seriously, if you didn’t watch it before, queue it up the moment you’re done reading this) so aptly describes as his fantasy of post-American hyper-capitalist techno-states, a sort of Holy Roman Empire of mini-countries run by the various idiot man-children of Silicon Valley. For Musk, I would guess the imagined ideal future is far less visionary than that and far more directly corrupt, focused on his own desire not to bring down the government but instead to reorient it toward his own ends, such as co-opting the data on Americans stolen from the Treasury Department in order to turn Twitter/X into the mandatory universal payment system he’s desired to control ever since he set up PayPal with his fellow wannabe techno-dictator Peter Thiel.

All of this is, of course, premised on the idea that Trump and Musk can successfully circumvent Congress and the courts in their efforts to remake the federal government in their and Yarvin’s image. Congress is unlikely to be any barrier whatsoever; the (albeit slim) Republican majority in both houses has made very clear through their inaction that they are perfectly willing to roll over and abdicate their role among the three branches of government, whether by allowing Trump to disband a congressionally-created federal organ such as USAID (nominally illegal) or permitting Musk’s cronies to hold up congressionally-allocated federal funds by closing off the spigot of payments at the Treasury Department (also illegal). The Politburo, as it were, has in two weeks become little more than a rubber stamp.

This leaves only the federal court system as a barrier between the Trump-Musk borg’s plans for America and their ability to execute them. Already we have seen the beginning of judicial pushback: federal judges have blocked Trump’s freeze on federal grants and loans, and unions are currently suing the Treasury Department over Musk’s infiltration into its highly sensitive systems that govern everything from Social Security disbursements to payments for government contractors. The salient question is, will Trump and Musk allow themselves to be stymied by the courts? Yarvin and his breed feel that to follow court orders is tantamount to suicide for the current Republican political project, and we know that Vice President JD Vance believes the same, having announced on a 2021 podcast that he believes Trump should follow President Jackson’s lead in ignoring court rulings which he finds distasteful (for this specific clip, once again, check the Blonde Politics video).

Trump’s denial of judicial supremacy, of course, would prompt a constitutional crisis of a magnitude not seen since the runup to the Civil War. Yarvin seems to believe that Trump and Musk cannot achieve the desired end-state without doing so, and it seems as if the latter two are well aware that the courts present their biggest roadblock. The courts seem to be aware of it, too. In his ruling blocking Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, Reagan-appointed federal judge John Coughenour said plainly that “The rule of law is, according to him [Trump], something to navigate around or simply ignore [...] There are moments in the world’s history where people look back and ask, ‘Where were the lawyers? Where were the judges?’ In these moments, the rule of law becomes especially vulnerable. I refuse to let that beacon go dark today.”

Coughenour’s purple prose, while admirable, stands only as long as the White House feels the obligation to let it stand. Americans thus hold the position of having little between us and technocratic autocracy besides (1) the spines and future good health of a few Reagan- and Clinton-era federal judges, most of whom are elderly and still stuck in 20th century ideas of “rule of law,” whatever that means anymore, and (2) Trump and Musk’s current unwillingness to take the next step in Yarvin’s plan of simply ignoring the courts entirely. Law’s obstinance in the face of Trump, Musk, and Yarvin’s brave new world does not amount to much, all things considered; especially since it will take only one grand act of political will for the White House to rip the Band-Aid off and simply announce that they will not abide by the courts. Without Congress or a bona fide mass movement, however, it may be all we have for the foreseeable future.