Curtis "Mencius Moldbug" Yarvin has recently been thrust into a spotlight due to being interviewed by the New York Times. How the stupidest and most arrogant organ of the bourgeois press thought it would achieve anything other than mainstreaming their mortal enemy is beyond the scope of this text, but that they did so isn't surprising at all. The interviewer was the strawman Yarvin has been fighting for the last two decades: a liberal journalist who, when faced with the truth that his outlet holds positions not too dissimilar from technocracy, cannot help but invoke easy gotchas and look like a fool to anyone with a shred of a brain.

In neo-reactionary theory, the progressive establishment is often referred to as the "Cathedral". The name is self-explanatory: a Cathedral is a closed coalition of institutions which push their ideology and grant it credence via a network of authorities which affirm each other, influencing the political direction of the State. Opposed to this Cathedral is an absolutist dictatorship which would naturally tend towards the best possible policy rather than to the reaffirmation of the progressive dogma¹. It is a very underdeveloped notion of base and superstructure, meant to get the point across to people who are incapable of acquiring an understanding of the world around them without four-thousand-word fictional analogies.

Of course, neo-reactionarism is still democratic; Despite its disavowal of democratic principles, it cannot escape from coming across as the "true democracy", an honest democracy which can achieve its goals via emphasizing successes and qualitative improvements to society rather than a number of votes. But it doesn't stop being reactionary: it seeks to establish a regime which can only succeed in a small state, or a state with little habitable land and a need for continuous control, which must nevertheless seek to advance production to fulfill its purpose.

Communists know that a true advancement in production cannot be achieved without overcoming the barriers of commerce, that national unity only exists insofar as there is unity of the capitalists, which is sovereign over the will of any single dictator. Keep in mind, this does not mean that reactionary programs cannot cause any harm, especially the program of neo-reactionarism, which even with its childish positions and with its inability to completely abandon mass politics, can still influence change. Despite the outreach to Democrats, this movement, when it is a movement at all, still exists mostly within the Republican Party. It is the newest pipeline through which new techno-libertarian atheist blood is introduced to the geriatric evangelical ranks of the ruling fraction of the United States.

The link with tech can't be understated. One cannot peer into the "Dark Enlightment" without realizing that it is an allegory for a world surrounded by screens, where developers must deal with the ever-increasing mob of users, whose demands are immediate and unreasonable, who occasionally stand against the betterment of essential tools they use, because they cannot envision a big picture and do not understand the details of creating good software. Is the world not one big userbase? Would your country, your planet, not work better if it was ran by one CEO, which knew how to oversee projects and bring forth optimal improvements each quarter? True, consistent progress?

A good narrative. We're not saying that its theorists are fakers, much on the contrary! What they are seeing now are some very real gains. A legacy media, that has seen the noose tighten around their necks, faced with the fact their audience is tuning out instead of building a new "resistance", has come to them. They are begging, begging that Yarvin will become one of the main characters of this new chapter, one of the "true brains" behind Trump's evil. While a growing audience is self-reinforcing and can create a series of new narratives from a simple original one, a shrinking audience must be placated with novelty directly from the source, with more intellectually sophisticated opponents. Unfortunately, the Times is anything but sophisticated, and it constantly falls for the trap of having to take its mask off: "Okay, the people need to rule, but the ones writing the policy of the state must be capable, objective, they must have educational credentials granted by our institutions, blah, blah blah"

But the "Dark Enlightment" is losing, and the Cathedral is losing with it. The Cathedral is trading the shame on their faces for a little more time, and the neo-reactionaries are trading their grand plan for a bright future in the Republican Party, where they will serve as a means to reconcile an important sector of the middle-class and petty-bourgeoisie (the capital-owning workers and startup owners of Silicon Valley) with the large capitalists which compete with them and employ them. It is the second front of the strategy to make big tech march in line with the Republicans, and only time will tell if it has any success.

---

¹ One could even say, a Bazaar...