Kevin Doremus

I was invited to participate in youtube channel’s Sunday stream.  I came across his channel searching for videos for my students to help them understand theories better.  I was impressed by videos on Offensive Realism & Power Transition theory for a YouTube channel. We agreed to connect a do a video month in advance and on the day of I was surprised to wake up to find that I would be joined by another guest.

Through the presentation, Moldbug (Dark enlightenment) was brought up which led to a disagreement.  I hope my rejection of NRx is clear from a realist view.  As a realist, I consider realism to be the antithesis to such a dark version of idealism and I 100% do not want to be associated with such abhorrent views.  I made one mistake.  I considered that NRx was a regime-type theory (Critiquing democracy and replacing it with a monarchy with the reactionary’s current normative values).  Upon further thinking, I realized it is a form of right-wing critical theory.

As sourced by Andrew Jones’ Critical Theory and the Humanities in the Age of the Alt-Right. It is an inversion of critical theory with far-right normative values combined with a regime-type theory. “we must burn the current structure to the ground and rebuild a political system around the normative values of the reactionary holder.”

“NRx is a fundamentally anti-modernist project; it tries to balance the traditionalism and reactionary politics of the counter-modernists/enlightenment thinkers with the postmodern accelerationism of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century thinkers” (Source).

Why does Yarvin, by all rights an intelligent person, ignore the social science literature that has explored the social changes over the past hundred years that would explain the shifting political and cultural values that he examines? Yarvin understands politics from the eyes of a rational engineer who works on computer systems, rather than as an expert in political science. For Yarvin the existing body of literature is dominated by the left-wing liberal elites within the Cathedral, which is why finding old texts from pre-postmodern academics is the only way to advance his arguments while claiming legitimacy from their authority as primary or academic sources.

NRx shares some similarities with critical theory, which is associated with post-structuralism, post-colonialism, Austrian Economics, and other post-positivist theories.

What makes Yarvin and the broader NeoReactionary movement fascinating for critical scholarship to examine is how close many of them are to a Far-Left critique of the state and liberal institutions. Take think tanks, as Yarvin is right to point out they have been writing American state policy from privately funded university think tanks attached to universities. “Essentially, for everything your government does, there is a university department full of professors who can, and do, tell it what to do.” However, he misses the organization one step past the university, the corporate or private figure funding the department with dark money. The influence of academics and media can be significant, but for Yarvin he only sees the academy pushing for left-wing policies. These claims are categorically untrue if we take Yarvin’s arguments at face value because for the past 40 years as right-wing or third-way economic and international relations policy has been the norm, only in cultural policies have we seen any substantial left-wing movement.

What Yarvin is arguing is not that the left has complete control, but rather that liberalism holds a dominant and hegemonic position within academic institutions which propagate liberal state policy…From this position, we can and should read the NeoReactionary project as a critique of neoliberalism and the social hegemony of liberal institutions over the media through a policy of manufacturing consent.

What arguably puzzles and attracts people to the work of Curtis Yarvin is at least partially the post-structural critiques of truth and the reason-progressive-liberal axioms of the enlightenment. Yarvin’s work evades the simple right-wing conspiracy framework, that many in the Far-Right fall into focusing on a small group of people rather than the systemic impact of policy over time. Yarvin’s critique is always one of the systemic issues rather than individuals. The left-wing critique of scientism and the interconnection between the neoliberal state’s technocratic institutions and the rule of science are well established.

On the concept of the Cathedral:

Unlike other Far-Right movements which critique the university or the coordination between liberal media and government, the Cathedral is not presented or conceived of as a conspiracy theory, but rather as a Gramscian/Foucauldian understanding of social and cultural hegemony through the university-bureaucracy-culture industries, which sets the limits for acceptable discourse within society.

NeoReactionaries critique structural institutions, specifically universities/media, just as the critical left does, but without a focus on the role of capitalism/racism/sexism.

NRx’s regime type:

If the Cathedral is akin to Capitalism in Marxist theory, Neocamerialism is the ideal Communist state. Neocamerialism is based on the idea that “a state is a business which owns a country. A state should be managed, like any other large business, by dividing logical ownership into negotiable shares, each of which yields a precise fraction of the state’s profit….Each share has one vote, and the shareholders elect a board, which hires and fires managers.”

What separates this Neocamerialism from the neoliberal project is a profoundly different philosophical understanding of the state. For the neoliberal, the state ought to be run as a business, with the techniques transferring from the corporate world to the state, which is still a state regardless of the techniques of governance. In contrast, the Neocamerialist system envisions the state as a corporation, with shareholders rather than citizens. To facilitate this transition from citizen to shareholder, the Cathedral needs to become audited and its power divided up. How much control or sway over society does an organic intellectual, a voter, media figure, or administrator have? For the NeoReactionary, the solution is to create an algorithmic system, which calculates the total value of every institution and figure within the Cathedral and allocates shares in the government accordingly, then puts them up for sale on a government market. By transforming the cultural and social power of the Cathedral into a numerated and tradable financial instrument, the connections between the capitalist class’ economic power, which is easily quantified in monetary terms, and the broader political and cultural groups, which maintain hegemony over politics/culture, can be audited without the need for political reporters or professors with social science and humanities doctorates.

One could consider NRxers are descendants of right-wing liberalism who embraced the critical theory (a right-wing version of A critical theory of transnational regimes)

From a political theorist’s point of view, its “understanding of political theory literature is very limited” and offers no value. If a conservative wants to embrace critical theory there are better options as Felix Rösch demonstrates there is are similarities between classical realism and critical theory.

Normatively, I see proximity between classical realism and critical theory in their critique of modernity, as both their scholars criticize modernity for establishing an imaginary, to use a term by Cornelius Castoriadis. The imaginary ‘gives a specific orientation to every institutional system, which overdetermines the choice and the connections of symbolic networks, which is the creation of each historical period, its singular manner of living, of seeing and of conducting its own existence, its world, and its relations with this world’. It is the ‘source of that which presents itself in every instance as indisputable and undisputed meaning, the basis for articulating what does matter and what does not’ (Castoriadis, pp.145, 1987).

This implies that the imaginary constitutes social life-worlds, as it prescribes the realm of meaning upon which socio-political orders are being shaped. This is not problematic, per se, because people cannot exist without some degree of security and any imaginary promises an element of carefreeness because it structures social life-worlds. However, classical realists and critical theorists problematize modernity, as it leads to moral decline. This is the case because modernity neither considers questions of morality nor emotions; consequently, both theoretical stances aim to focus on the human condition of politics again. This focus on the human helps to explain current readings of classical realism as political theology, although this reading is not without its problems because it excludes the human potential for meaning-autopoiesis, as evidenced in Morgenthau’s and Arendt’s notion of power.  Still, their concern of modernity depriving people of the ability to experience themselves in their subjectivity can be interpreted as a contribution to manifold attempts to re-instill spirituality in people and overcome the “transcendental homelessness” of modernity (Lukacs, pp.41, 1963).

Being concerned about the effects of modernity on human beings, educationally, classical realists as well as critical theorists support dissent by promoting what Karl-Heinz Breier (pp.7, 2011) calls, in reference to Arendt, a Bürgerwissenschaft. Classical realism and critical theory do not believe that knowledge can provide absolute answers to political questions and they do not support academic attempts to socially plan the world. Rather, they aim to support people in their ambition to live freely in the sense of being able to critically reflect on the current political status quo and have the opportunity to create their life-worlds (cf. Pin-Fat 2005; Cozette, 2008; Klusmeyer, 2011; Rösch, 2013). To establish this kind of scholarship and to help people engage critically in and with the public sphere, classical realists like critical theorists argue that scholarship has to be a corrective of the political status quo. This happens through discerning people’s interests through discussions and by establishing fora in which the political can evolve. Therefore, scholars have to act as facilitators in the public sphere through which people can transcend various constraints in modern societies in order to free them in their thought and action and to help them creating their life-worlds. However, convincing others of their capacities by challenging vested interests causes discomfort among the public because habitual ways of thinking are questioned. During the height of the Cold War, for example, when McCarthyism was striving in the USA, critical thinking was not well-received because questioning the foundations of common beliefs was considered a societal threat. Consequently, many early classical realists and critical theorists faced personal and professional consequences. Forced to the fringes of academic, and sometimes even societal, life, however, helped them to rethink (world) politics whose potential the discipline is just beginning to explore.