Opinion | Why I Debated Curtis Yarvin at Harvard

His ideas have followers. That’s what makes them dangerous—and important to answer seriously.

Danielle Allen

May 6, 2025 at 5:02 pm ET

The author, moderator David Vega and Curtis Yarvin at Harvard's faculty club in Cambridge, Mass., May 5. Photo: Elise A. Spenner/Harvard Crimson

This week I debated the right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin. Harvard students had worked with his publisher to book event space, and they asked me to debate him. When students ask for help thinking about intellectual material, my job is to provide that help.

I’ve been surprised by Mr. Yarvin’s influence among Harvard students. He is known for founding the “Dark Enlightenment” movement. People need to understand his argument, its attraction—and its profound errors. Here’s one example from his recent book, “Gray Mirror”: “Democracy ends once everyone realizes that without it, everyone can just win.”

Mr. Yarvin argues that for most of human history people have believed in a hierarchy of races and lived under absolute monarchies. He thinks this combination has served people well by generating efficient governments with missions that are “the same as the mission of a company: to maximize the value of its capital.” Since capital for a state is its land and people, and since Mr. Yarvin believes in a hierarchy of races, maximizing the value of capital means not being afraid of racial cleansing.

In his telling, our age, beginning in the early 20th century, is founded on lies: that human beings are equal and that self-government by free and equal citizens is possible. DNA, he argues, disproves the former; our current political situation disproves the latter. We don’t govern ourselves—because we have become a weak and frivolous people, and because an oligarchy has captured our institutions, including universities, the media and the professions. These figures operate a “ministry of truth” to keep people under control. Because their lies are now foundering on reality, Mr. Yarvin maintains, the time has come for regime change—for an absolute monarch.

He does mean absolute. He writes: “Sovereignty, ultimate and absolute command without limit, is always conserved. We are not asking whether there should be unlimited, unaccountable, absolute power—we are just asking who should have it.” He also writes, “A new regime rules by decree. The only alternative is stasis or chaos. . . . To succeed in the transition is to use this state of emergency to build a new rule of law. . . . The government is reduced to its executive branch. . . . In a full transition, all institutions of the old objective regime are dissolved, except (a) security forces and (b) financial organs—both of which must instantly come under the clear and unconditional authority of the new regime, or the transition is in danger.”

Mr. Yarvin believes the monarch is Donald Trump, and the time has arrived for consolidation of his power. He writes: “The key question of a 21st-century Caesarism in America or Europe is whether our moribund democracy has enough of a spark left to replace oligarchy with monarchy. Most objective observers would say it obviously doesn’t. But there are always tricks . . . generally involving not commitment, but cohesion. People these days do not cohere well automatically—but a lot can be done with the Internet.”

Why is his argument attractive to so many? He is right that our political institutions are failing. He is also right that their members have failed to see the depth of our governance problems and their own contributions to them through technocracy and political correctness. The ability to unmask the hypocrisies of priests has always won adherents. But Mr. Yarvin leads them astray with his vision of absolute monarchy and racial cleansing.

He gets his first principles wrong, so we have to return to ours. Most important, human equality precedes human differences. We can identify differences among us only because we are all human, and in that regard equal. As humans we share a capacity for moral judgment and an innate striving to choose actions that make tomorrow better. This is how our drive and capacity for freedom show themselves.

The proposition that all humans are created equal has never meant that we are all the same. Our equality lies in these features of humanity that make us moral beings. Nor does human difference yield fixed and permanent groupings or determine where and how human talent in its immense variety will show itself. The government that will best help humans flourish will start by protecting human freedom. This requires maximal space for self-government, and also government of the whole people that is by and for the people. Not in the interest of those who govern, but in the interest of the governed.

The principle of equality articulated in the Declaration of Independence was meant so seriously that it grounded the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Vermont before the end of the Revolutionary War, and in Rhode Island even before the Declaration. The Confederacy’s own declaration of succession was explicitly a rejection of the founding Declaration. America’s history has always reflected this inconsistency, but the egalitarian principle has been there from the beginning. It isn’t a weak-minded invention of the 20th century.

Mr. Yarvin’s identity politics are the mirror image of the worst versions on the left. His historical inaccuracies mirror those of leftist historians who seek to paint all history as white supremacy. The past is a story of the contest between equality and freedom on the one hand and supremacy on the other. We face that contest again.

If our constitutional democracy is weak today—failing to help us meet our governing challenges—that may be because we have lapsed in civic participation. We have ceased to claim our own equality through our institutions, which offer it. We have allowed political parties to capture our institutions, and to govern for their own sake rather than the public good. We need to renovate our democratic institutions, starting with party reform.

But our more basic work may need to be on ourselves. Here Mr. Yarvin’s words are a warning: “Americans of the present are nihilistic and narcissistic,” he writes. “They are frivolous about the present and ignorant of the past. While these qualities may not make the Americans of today suitable for an 18th-century democracy, they may be just the right qualities for a 21st-century regime change.”

We don’t need his regime change. We need democracy renovation and renewed seriousness about our lives as citizens. This means reconnecting to our civic power, experience and responsibility. This requires civic practice and education. It also means redesigning institutions so they reward participation and deliver effective governance. We need to understand why and how separation of powers, checks and balances, due process, and a national legislature that functions are necessary to protect human freedom.

We must act so that we can take pride in our basic and longstanding American national character—claimed early by Thomas Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, and Prince Hall and later by Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells and Martin Luther King Jr. We can lean into our national character and make our constitutional democracy anew for a new age. Our republic is ours to keep, if we want it.

Ms. Allen is a university professor at Harvard.

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The chickens come home to roost for elite universities. Photo: Sophie Park/Getty Images

Appeared in the May 7, 2025, print edition as 'Why I Debated Curtis Yarvin at Harvard'.