Neomonarchism, catholicism, majoritarianism: The new right ideologies driving Trumpism

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Curtis Yarvin’s techno-monarchy

“There’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin,” J.D. Vance casually remarked in a 2021 interview at a time when he was running for an Ohio Senate seat. A few minutes after raising Yarvin’s name, the future Vice President offered a bit of advice to his future boss: “I think that what Trump should do, if I could give him one piece of advice — fire every mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people. And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say ‘The chief justices made this ruling. Now let them enforce it.’”

Yarvin, a far-right blogger, neomonarchist, and the most prominent figure of the neoreactionary movement, wrote for years under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, laying out his vision for reengineering America. In Yarvin’s view, democracy is weak and ineffective. Any real initiative gets bogged down in a bloated bureaucracy. No one has the power to drive meaningful change. Power lies instead with what he calls “the Cathedral” — an informal network of elite universities, liberal media, progressive activists, and entrenched bureaucrats. According to Yarvin, this group uses its influence solely to legitimize the status quo.

Yarvin describes the Cathedral’s influence as a process: a Yale professor publishes a study proposing a new political approach; The New York Times picks it up, pushing the idea into the public sphere; activists rally behind it, demanding reform; under their pressure, bureaucrats implement the change. Then the professor writes another paper praising the reform’s success — closing the loop.

This decentralized system lacks accountability, and the average citizen has no capacity to change it. But Yarvin has a plan — or rather, a vision:

“A government is just a corporation that owns the country. Nothing more, nothing less. It so happens that our sovereign corporation is very poorly managed, and there is a very simple way to replace that… You need a CEO. And a national CEO is what’s called a dictator. There’s no difference between a CEO and a dictator. If Americans want to change their government, they’ll have to overcome their dictator phobia,” he lectured back in 2012.

To clear the way for this dictator, Yarvin proposes RAGE — an acronym that stands for Retire All Government Employees. That’s essentially the entire platform: fire the bureaucrats, dismantle the Cathedral, and install a national CEO with unlimited power. In his view, America came close to monarchic rule once already — under Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Yarvin’s ideas align closely not only with J.D. Vance’s comments but also with Trump’s controversial “Schedule F” executive order, which sought to strip “disloyal” federal employees of their civil service protections. Journalists have also noted the obvious similarity between Yarvin’s RAGE and Musk’s DOGE.

Unlike Vance, neither Musk nor Trump is likely to quote Yarvin publicly. Most politicians wouldn’t cite a niche blogger who once published a post titled “The Indisputable Humanity of Anders Behring Breivik,” — certainly not one arguing that violence is necessary in order to establish order. Breivik, Yarvin claimed, simply lacked any method preferable to a “gang massacre.” Yarvin has also defended slavery, claiming white people are genetically predisposed to higher IQs than Black people.

Despite these fringe views, Yarvin continues to attract media attention — even from those he labels as part of the Cathedral. The New York Times ran a sympathetic interview with Yarvin, giving him access to an audience far larger than his own (his Substack has 50,000 subscribers, compared to NYT’s 11 million). Journalists aren’t necessarily interested in the absurdity of Yarvin’s ideas, but rather his influence on the White House and Silicon Valley — especially since almost no one (aside from other fringe bloggers and a few scholars) has seriously unpacked his ideology.

Yarvin’s corporate vision of the state has drawn criticism from economists. Steven Horwitz has explained — using Trump as an example — why business success offers no advantage in running a national economy (assuming a government can even “run” an economy). Horwitz argues that business operates on zero-sum logic: one party’s win is another’s loss. The goal is to maximize profit relative to competitors.

But the economy isn’t zero-sum. The “loss” of one company can benefit society as a whole. The same logic applies to international trade deals, which might seem like failures to a CEO. Horowitz writes:

“That China and Mexico have become richer by trading with the U.S. does not mean they have won and we have lost. It means we all have won: they are richer for being able to sell us the things they make most cheaply (as we do for them), and we are richer for being able to acquire those goods at lower prices and have income left over to buy other goods and services and create new jobs in those industries.” Horowitz concludes that a president with a CEO-style mindset — like Trump’s — could lead to economic disaster if applied to national governance.

Writer Max Borders further critiques Yarvin’s worldview, noting how little we know about this hypothetical CEO-king. Yarvin envisions a leader who would launch grand national initiatives — akin to the Apollo program or the Manhattan Project. But he glosses over the costs and trade-offs of such ambitions. It’s also unclear what the monarch would actually do, beyond vision-setting and chasing profits. Then again, maybe that’s all Trump and Musk are looking for.

Patrick Deneen’s post-liberalism

Patrick Deneen, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame, blames not democracy but liberalism for America’s decline. His books — Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change — have both become bestsellers. In the former, Deneen outlines the unintended consequences of liberalism’s success.

According to Deneen, liberalism has instilled a false sense of freedom — defined as the ability to live and make choices free from oppressive social norms or legal constraints. But in his view, this has led to disaster. Expanding personal freedoms has led to the breakdown of the family, declining education, loss of religious faith, and the disintegration of local communities, ultimately leaving people “vulnerable, weak, frightened, and alone.”

Deneen sees nothing redeeming in liberalism. He even criticizes the emancipation of women, arguing that liberalism worsened their position by pushing them into the labor market and making them more dependent as a result. To overcome what he sees as a spiritual crisis triggered by liberalism, Deneen proposes a return to small, local communities with greater power vested in local self-government. Moreover, he calls on society to reject all-encompassing ideologies like communism and instead re-embrace traditional institutions — namely, the Church and the family.

Critics of Why Liberalism Failed pointed to its weak conclusion, citing a lack of specific proposals. Deneen addressed this in his second book, Regime Change, which is no longer a historical analysis but a full-fledged post-liberal manifesto. In it, he identifies the working class as liberalism’s main victim. Opposing them, he writes, is the managerial elite, which marginalizes blue-collar workers while placing obstacles in the path of those attempting to climb towards them on the social ladder. Egalitarian initiatives aimed at promoting the welfare of racial and sexual minorities, according to Deneen, are merely justifications for elite privilege, and a means of pressuring the working class — who can easily be accused of homophobia, misogyny, or anti-immigrant sentiment.

At some point, Deneen writes, members of the elite must emerge as leaders who help the working class recognize its power. This should culminate in a peaceful regime change, establishing a new political order. Deneen envisions a hybrid system — part democracy, part aristocracy — built on an alliance between the working class and a newly reformed ruling elite. But first, the current elite must be replaced.

He writes that “existing political forms may be preserved, but only if they are guided by an entirely new ethical framework and staffed by individuals with new convictions.” Those convictions, it turns out, are quite old — Catholicism, Deneen argues, should form the moral foundation of this new order. It will help shape a new aristocracy, one that serves the interests of the working class.

He also proposes rotating the location of the U.S. capital, establishing a national service program for youth, breaking up tech monopolies, and making universities more accessible to working-class Americans rather than prioritizing racial and sexual minorities. This, according to Deneen, would be the shape of a post-liberal America. As noted by a reviewer in Vox, however, Deneen’s supposed “regime change” is really just swapping liberal elites for conservative ones. Still, the reviewer concluded that Regime Change is “too dull to be dangerous.”

And yet, the book found one exceptionally influential reader: J.D. Vance. In 2023, he appeared alongside Deneen at a panel discussion on the book, describing his own political stance as “anti-regime” and declaring himself a post-liberal. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, likely sees post-liberalism as a vehicle for reasserting the Church’s role in American life, while also arming himself with more arguments against the bureaucratic state. The results speak for themselves: at the first meeting of the new U.S. cabinet, one of the secretaries thanked God for Donald Trump.

Deneen is not the only post-liberal in the conversation — nor the most radical. His peers are more confident and outspoken, with some pointing to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary as an imperfect but viable model of a post-liberal state.

Christopher Caldwell’s majoritarianism

In 1964, the United States passed one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in its history: the Civil Rights Act, which banned segregation in schools and public spaces and prohibited discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

“That day, our Nation moved closer to our North Star, the founding ideal of America,” President Joe Biden declared in 2024, marking the act’s 60th anniversary.

But journalist Christopher Caldwell sees things differently. In his book The Age of Entitlement, he argues that the Civil Rights Act inflicted serious harm on American democracy. He claims it enabled various minority groups to bypass democratic institutions and secure ever-expanding rights — so much so that it’s now the white majority, not minorities, who are deprived of their rights.

Caldwell concedes that dismantling the system of racial segregation that existed in the 1960s required extraordinary measures. Bureaucrats were given more power to implement new laws, and judges were entrusted with deciding what did or did not constitute discrimination. But the problem, he argues, is that this apparatus was not decommissioned after achieving its original goals. Over time, as the civil rights movement expanded, it began granting rights to other groups — LGBTQ+ individuals, feminists, and transgender people — to the point that, Caldwell says, these expansions began infringing on the rights of the white majority.

He believes this decision ushered in a wave of profound societal changes, many of which occurred without direct democratic consent. One of the clearest examples, he writes, is the legalization of same-sex marriage: “Between 2003 and 2015, what you see is 33 consecutive referendum votes against gay marriage, three votes for gay marriage, and then a removal of the issue from the democratic part of society and the conferring of the authority to decide it on the judiciary.” As a result, Caldwell claims, the majority now feels excluded from the democratic process, and he believes the issue cannot be resolved without revisiting the Civil Rights Act.

Unlike Yarvin and Deneen, Caldwell does not propose an alternative system. Instead, he emphasizes the irreconcilable divide between Democrats and Republicans: the former continue to expand and reinforce the Civil Rights Act, often at the expense of the majority, while the latter are left with no choice but to dismantle it.

Conservative commentators have praised Caldwell’s work for its boldness, while the liberal press has responded with skepticism. Though Caldwell presents the book as a historical account, critics note that it relies on the false assumption that the U.S. Constitution remained unchanged until 1964. Caldwell argues that taxpayers footed the bill for minority access to education and social services — but he provides no statistical evidence, relying instead on anecdotal quotes and selective polling data.

Despite the weak evidence base, there are growing concerns that the Trump administration may adopt Caldwell’s ideas. For instance, the law firm of presidential adviser Stephen Miller, who oversees domestic policy, has been involved in defending white individuals claiming they were subjected to racial discrimination. Media outlets predict that Miller is poised to take charge of the White House’s policy on race.