At Harvard, a clash between democracy and monarchy

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Curtis Yarvin, the computer engineer turned neo-monarchist blogger, seems to be everywhere these days.

His argument that American democracy has exhausted itself and needs to be replaced by a form of one-man rule has made him a star on the right, reportedly catching the ear of powerful figures like Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel and JD Vance. Since the reelection of President Donald Trump, he has drawn increasing attention from mainstream outlets, including this one.

And on Monday night, he seemed to have arrived at the heart of “the Cathedral,” as he calls the intertwined elite intellectual institutions that shape our society.

“I want to thank Harvard University,” Yarvin said to a standing-room crowd of about 100 at the university’s faculty club, before correcting himself. “I mean, the school where we are.”

Yarvin was in town to debate Danielle Allen, a prominent political theorist and democracy advocate at Harvard. From the moment the event was announced, some wondered why Allen would risk lending legitimacy to such an extreme figure by debating him. Others rushed to snap up the limited tickets.

The debate — organizers (and the university’s press office) were at pains to emphasize — was not an official Harvard event. Instead, it was organized by Passage Publishing, the publisher of Yarvin’s new book, “Gray Mirror: Fascicle 1, Disturbance,” and the John Adams Society, a conservative student group that cheekily bills itself as Harvard’s “premier organization for the reinvention of man.”

It was a clash between monarchism and liberal democracy, West Coast techno-insurgency and East Coast credentialed establishment, Yarvin’s black leather jacket and Allen’s tomato-red blazer. (“Dark enlightenment” versus “bright enlightenment,” as she put it in her opening remarks, noting the sartorial contrast.)

The debate unfolded on Allen’s home turf at a moment when Harvard has become — for liberals, at least — a heroic symbol of resistance to Trump. But it’s also a moment when liberal democracy, she noted, is the underdog in global politics.

Allen, in an email before the event, said that she had agreed to participate because students had asked her, and that helping them understand intellectual material “is my job in private and in public.” But she also did it out of her strong belief that democracy is ailing, and that universities need to renew their commitment to the open and fearless contestation of ideas.

“I think people do need to understand Yarvin’s argument, both what people are experiencing as attractions of it and its errors, which are profound,” she said. “The stakes are very high.”

The moderator began the debate with a warning that anyone who disrupted the event would be removed. Then he read the first resolution to be debated: “Resolved: The long-term stability and flourishing of our society is better secured by concentration of executive authority than by democratic institutions.”

Allen began with a brief biography, citing ancestors who, on her father’s side, had founded an NAACP chapter in Florida and, on her mother’s, once helped lead the League of Women Voters. She then launched into an impassioned articulation of her view of democracy, which is undergirded by freedom and equality.

Our current democracy, she said, is deeply troubled. There is an urgent need to renovate it, she said — not, as Yarvin advocates, simply throw it out. “The question is not whether to have democracy and protection of freedom,” she said, “but only how.”

When it was his turn, Yarvin, the son of a foreign service officer and an employee of the U.S. Department of Education, described himself as having grown up inside “the deep state.” He said he had just read Allen’s recent book “Justice by Means of Democracy” and found it full of lofty abstractions bearing little resemblance to our actual system.

“It made me feel like I was reading a work of Islamic history that was written by a Muslim,” he said. “This is someone who believes entirely in the system she is describing.”

Terms like “civil society” and “institutions,” he said, seem “uncorrelated with the reality” of democracy, which he contended was properly defined by just one thing: How much power do the people have to choose their leaders?

In her next response, Allen, in an uncharacteristically spicy moment, said she was glad he recognized that her book was written with conviction. “Being a narcissistic nihilist is not my jam,” she said. “Maybe it’s yours, but it’s not mine.”

Over the course of the debate, they skipped between topics like human equality (or, for Yarvin, the lack thereof), the administrative state, meritocracy and, yes, Harvard. The debaters did not shake hands, and they rarely looked at or talked directly to each other. Few smiles were cracked.

Allen stuck to her guns, parsing basic principles like freedom and equality. (At one point, she challenged Yarvin’s interpretation of Aristotle, a shared favorite.) Yarvin often made his points via historical anecdotes, including one about Cotton Mather, the 17th-century Puritan minister whose family name is emblazoned across campus.

Mather enrolled at Harvard at age 11 but was never able to follow in his father’s footsteps and become university president. Yarvin said that while he himself was also a “failed child prodigy,” he related more to Robert Calef, a New England cloth merchant who wrote a book assailing Mather’s enthusiasm for the Salem witch trials.

Calef was furiously attacked by the Mathers. At one point, Yarvin noted with some delight, his book was even burned in Harvard Yard.

Yarvin also took aim at more contemporary figures demonized by the right, like Dr. Anthony Fauci and the virology researchers whose lab experiments, he claimed, had created the coronavirus that killed millions of people.

Allen left shortly after the hourlong debate, which concluded with loud applause. But most guests stayed to mingle over cocktails and canapes, perusing a table filled with other offerings from Yarvin’s publisher, like the highbrow manosphere journal Man’s World and a $395 “patrician edition” of essays by “race realist” Steve Sailer, who writes frequently about race and IQ.

For an hour and a half, Yarvin stood in a corner, surrounded by two dozen guests who leaned in close to hear him field questions and offer disquisitions that looped between, say, pre-World War I Italian theorist Julius Evola, occult novelist Aleister Crowley and California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s travails with high-speed rail.

The crowd seemed to run heavily toward the Yarvin-curious, even if his ideas, one member of the Harvard Republican Club said, still fall outside “the Overton window” for many campus conservatives. The questions for Yarvin were not all softballs. At one point, a young man needled him about whether Trump or Elon Musk was “the monarch,” accusing him of saying different things in public and in private.

Aidan Fitzsimons, a senior in Allen’s graduate seminar on democracy, said he found the debate fascinating. “He’s a real political philosopher,” he said of Yarvin. “Not in the same way she is, but that’s the cost of her engaging with him — people have to recognize that.”

But Fitzsimons said the discussion never got to the heart of the matter: Yarvin’s affirmative case for monarchy.

“When she called him a narcissistic nihilist, that was hilarious, but also true in a deeper sense,” he said. “The nihilist does not believe in something higher, isn’t willing to take bets on any kind of faith.”

Dean Sherman, a co-president of the Harvard Law School Republicans, also said the speakers had largely talked past each other. “It’s hard not to when you have such different baseline principles,” he said.

Sherman said he wished Allen had pursued Yarvin’s question about whether democracy had to be liberal democracy. “Can you vote illiberally?” he said. “Or is democracy a one-way racket?”

Allen, speaking by telephone later that night, said she was glad she had participated. It was important, she said, to acknowledge the potent parts of Yarvin’s critique of American democracy while parsing where he goes dangerously wrong.

“On the page, his argumentation is loose and sophistical,” she said. “That’s also true in person.”

As the party broke up, Yarvin said he appreciated Allen’s acknowledgment that American democracy had deep problems. But he compared her to Gorbachev-era Soviet reformers who thought they could fix the system, only to see it collapse.

Asked about her calling him a “narcissistic nihilist,” he was diplomatic, saying it would be more productive to talk about their intellectual differences off-the-record, over a beer. “I think that would lead to a much more interesting conversation,” he said.

But he gave her credit for showing up and being willing to engage. “She didn’t have to do that,” Yarvin said. “I don’t know there was necessarily anything in it for her.”

So did he think he won this round? He shrugged, giving a short laugh.

“That’s for others to say,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.