I’ve been thinking about an opinion piece published a little over a year ago in The New York Times by Ross Douthat and his reflections in that piece regarding Curtis Yarvin and the broader right-wing political movement termed “neoreaction.” Douthat argues that Yarvin’s political theories, while aimed that understanding the real-world struggles of the American republic and its slide into a decentralized oligarchy, are much better applied to understanding the political realities of social media, specifically Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
I have written a fair amount in the past about Yarvin’s theory of the “Cathedral,” which holds that liberal democracy has by and large devolved into a decentralized oligarchy predicated upon the converging ideological interests of several public and private institutions (the Times included). His insights on this topic are valuable in the sense that they explain a wider problem that the beleaguered American republic has been facing for quite some time.
But again, the Cathedral is decentralized, and should not be mistaken for typical online speculation about a secret global cabal that controls everything. The defining feature of this modern oligarchy—comprising the combined might of government bureaucrats, big tech overlords, prestigious universities and mainstream media—is that it has no center. There is simply no group of evil rich politicians and billionaires sitting in a dimly-lit board room filled with cigar smoke wringing their hands about how to make our lives worse.
Formal conspiracies often need not exist when ideological interests already converge informally and organically. In this sense, the Cathedral is really an analogy for society as it currently stands—a way of explaining liberal democracy’s decay into a distillate oligarchy. Yarvin does not seem to know the exact origins of the Cathedral, but I’d be willing to bet modern liberalism’s near-religious devotion to credentialism, or the notion that the people are better governed by the “experts” from the government bureaucracy or Harvard, has something to do with it. One need only to remember the phrase “Follow the Science,” which was chanted by liberals with near-evangelical rectitude during the COVID-19 pandemic to justify the despotic increase of the power of unelected public health bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci to know just how politically consequential this credentialism is.
Yarvin’s theory of the Cathedral illustrates a supply chain of credentialism. It starts in the nation’s most preeminent universities, from which those students graduate and are inaugurated as newly-minted members of the “educated class,” the majority of whom subsequently go on to work in various mainstream news outlets, universities, government agencies, and so-on. The Cathedral describes the broad deference to those with “credentials” over the expressed political will of average people through traditional democratic means. This is especially true when democratic bodies (state legislatures, for instance) go against the grain of modern liberalism, which again, is the de-facto orthodoxy disseminated by the Cathedral. Many liberals, for instance, would be content with unelected public health bureaucrats determining the legal status of abortion over the will of elected state legislatures that seek to outlaw it, because again, the Republicans are a “threat to democracy,” and their democratic choices must be thwarted in the name of liberal democracy.
But Yarvin’s proposed solution to this problem, the replacement of this republic-turned-oligarchy with a modern-age king-CEO, as Douthat correctly concludes, doesn’t work in the real world. The neoreactionaries are correct in recognizing the tangled web of various powerful institutions and how those interests often converge to undermine political developments that do not conform to the broader scheme of Western liberalism, but their proposed political remedy for that problem seems to be a sort of neo-feudalism. There is inevitably a bit of naive wishful thinking embedded within the notion that the answer to our present political afflictions lies in the return to the ancient tradition of the rule of one, somehow modified to make sense in our modern age.
Yarvin’s conception of monarchy, however, does make sense when evaluating the political struggles of Twitter. In this context, Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform represents the dismantlement of what has been an informal oligarchy of “educated,” or credentialed people, their status being indicated by a blue checkmark. In effect, the old regime, which inconsistently enforced its guidelines and propped certain people up while silencing others based on ideological affiliation, has by and large been replaced by King Elon, who has become known for making decisions about the platform unilaterally, usually to the disdain of those on the left.
For the past year, we’ve watched Twitter undergo immense change, with Musk overhauling many of the platform’s features, most notably the discontinuing of the old verification process, where anyone can now pay a monthly fee to have a blue checkmark, provided they produce a valid ID. This has since been marketed as a way of enfranchising the previously disenfranchised, a way of finally making Twitter live up to its promise of being a “public square.” But of course, the political realities of the platform are a bit more complex than that. In his piece, Douthat writes:
“Musk claims to want Twitter to serve as a digital town square. But that seems like a category error: Social media includes aspects of a town-square experience, but fundamentally it’s a larger parallel reality, a prototype of the immersive virtual world that Mark Zuckerberg has so far failed to build. It’s a place where people form communities and alliances, nurture friendships and sexual relationships, yell and flirt, cheer and pray. And all this happens transnationally, the system spreading itself across borders while policing who can cross its own.”
Yarvin’s dream of an American Caesar will likely never come to fruition, but such a dream may very well prove instructive to the future of social media platforms, particularly Twitter, which hosts the vast majority of online political discourse. The user base seems to function as a sort of polity, and that polity must be governed by someone who will inevitably set “the rules of citizenship,” and “who gets banished or ostracized or dumped in Twitter jail.”
The libertarian fantasy of an online “free speech absolutist” democracy falls apart when one realizes that Elon Musk is the de-facto “king” of Twitter who now unilaterally controls the means by which one is credentialed, i.e. the blue check, a fact Yarvin already acknowledged a while back. The new verification scheme where users are now able to pay for the check gives the illusion of a democratized public square, but the gold check reserved for “organizations” like large news companies or anything else requiring such notability, is placed behind a much larger paywall inaccessible to the average user. The end result is merely a change concerning which regime gets to decide who is credentialed.
Editor’s Note: This post has since been edited to reflect some minor revisions as a result of a few oversights when it was originally drafted. The email version of this post does not reflect the most up-to-date website version.