MAGA, the Dark Enlightenment, and the Opposition's Need for New Ideas

Filling the ideational gap to build a new future after Trump

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

About a week ago, I asked the question on Facebook: We can see that the Trump people and their right wing supporters are burning down the traditions and institutions of our government, but does anyone know what they are building? It was a serious question. Try as a I might, I asked every right-leaning person I knew, and they never had an answer. They’d deflect to some complaint about how bad USAID was or the problem of transgender people, but they would never articulate an idea of what is going to replace the burned out structures of our government. For the life of me, I could not figure out what was going on. Until now. Together with a friend of mine, I think we found the ideas animating the Trump MAGA team. I’m going to share those with you, but first a little history.

Precursors to Today

Back in 2006 I published a book titled Call to Liberty in which I sought to understand the currents stacked against American liberal democracy at the time. We were in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. The invasion of Iraq was a mess. The Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay detention center were at the center of battles over rights, privacy, and spying on Americans. The George W. Bush administration was defending the extension of executive power, particularly under the theory of the so-called unitary executive. All of this culminating in a three word philosophy Bush declared at the time: “I’m the decider.”

All of this concentration of executive power was occurring on the back of a historic trend in ideas brought on by neoconservatism. The neocons, as they were called, developed a program for The New American Century and published a report by that title—not dissimilar in form from Project 2025. It laid out a blueprint for their plan, part of which was the ongoing concentration of power in the executive branch so as to make government efficient. The neocons had various think tanks and promoting organizations, many of which are the same names we are hearing today—the Heritage Foundation, Center for the American Experiment, American Enterprise Institute, and others. They were well funded and they paid contributors well. Many people commented that as a scholar, intellectual, or policy wonk, the pay was much better with the neocons, so many people contributed their energy. They joined the think tanks. Ideas flourished.

Meanwhile, there were virtually no new ideas on the left. Mired in its own factionalism, it settled on a set of policy prescriptions known as the Green New Deal. Although the idea of a Green New Deal could be compelling, it’s collapse into a laundry list of competing issues made it internally contradictory and impossible. In fact, it bound the left into infighting among itself over policies rather than creating a beacon of ideas to animate the vision of where society could go. Where the Green New Deal should have promulgated ideas about the creation of a green economy and solving climate change, it got mired in indigenous rights, anti-poverty and anti racism programs, politically correct directives, and what not. You can see more about that here.

Beyond that, the Left had the old hackneyed ideas of Marx and socialism—notions that could never get widespread support in America. Or, it had the notion that American traditions and the Constitution were the final defense. As I wrote at the time, these may be fine defenses so long as the leader wielding extended executive branch powers was as docile as Bush. He at least respected the traditions government. e at elesHBut woe to America should we put those powers into the hands of one more belligerent and less benevolent than Bush. Indeed, it seems we have come to that now.

What I learned from this analysis back then is that major changes in a society usually have a root in powerful ideas. I look with bitter amusement today at the neocons’ criticism of the Trump administration and the anti-democratic wielding of executive power. William Kristol and his compatriots at The Bulwark are a good example. While they foam at the mouth against Trump, they seem to have no awareness of the fact that they were instrumental in creating Trump. They articulated the need for the concentration of power in the executive branch, which led to a slew of documents, findings, and even legislation that codified it. In other words, their ideas mattered. They helped concentrate the power Trump wields.

Today, the Left, and most of America, stands without ideas for the future. Nearly all the arguments and discussion is about the violation of the Constitution, which is now an argument for a quaint past rather than an invigorating vision of the future. Donald Trump and his people have already shredded the Constitution—they just haven’t told anyone about it yet. “Going back” will be a losing game for as long as we choose to play it instead of finding a way forward. I’ll get to how we move forward in a moment.

Introducing… the Dark Enlightenment

Just as the neoconservatives were behind Geroge W. Bush’s power grab, another group is behind Trump’s. Two men, Curtis Guy Yarvin and Nick Land, are credited with founding a philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment. They have been described as neo-fascists and neo-monarchists, and they also go by the moniker of neoreactionary movement (NRx).

Fundamentally, this philosophy is anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic. Wikipedia describes Yarvin as arguing “that American democracy is a failed experiment that should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to the governance of corporations.” He favors a techo-monarchy, which explains his appeal to the tech executives.

Dark Enlightenment ideas have been manifesting for at least 15-20 years. The core of the idea is that liberal democracy is broken and can’t be fixed. It has led us forward not into greatness, but into mediocrity and even slovenliness. While they use the term meritocracy, merit is reserved for those who are in the successful classes of society—the merit being obviously self-evident via one’s “success.” Behind this is an idea of race superiority built on old tropes of white supremacy. Instead of a democratic republic, they believe in corporate fiefdoms, each led by a CEO/king who has ultimate authority over everything but who is accountable to “shareholders.” They hold up Singapore as an example of their vision, and 19^th century cameralism in Prussia as an ideal.

As neo-monarchists, one can understand the appeal of these ideas to the tech CEOs who flooded to Trump after his electoral victory. Tech CEOs, including Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, and others, essentially model these city-state kings the neo-monarchists are clamoring for. Peter Theil, the tech investing billionaire, is a major supporter of the Dark Enlightenment, and actually named Curtis Yarvin as the most important person in his network. Yowser. That’s some pull as far as ideas go.

And what is the biggest obstacle to this neo-monarchy and neo-fascist state? Liberal democracy. With all its defense of individual rights, in their view, liberal democracy skewers the elite and the successful, and lowers everyone to a least common denominator. It raises the less able to a standard they don’t deserve and suppresses the rise of the good. And who are these good, elite people being suppressed? White men, of course. As always, these visions of the Great Society involve the re-assertion of caste—that some people are better off in servitude than in free expression, that society will be better served by them being quieted and kept in their place, and that destiny will draw out the greatness in great men. Dark Enlightenment, indeed.

So, What Do We Do?

As we watch this insanity unfold—this crazy dismantling of the greatest nation on earth—the question is what to do. There are many people calling us to resistance, and that is a crucial aspect of what needs to be done. Protest, raising voices, campaigning, and voting. Yet as the recent vote by Democrats to continue to enable the Trump disaster demonstrates, there remains no compass in the opposition. No vision. No idea. “Resistance” is a cry to keep things as they have been—not in terms of policy so much as in terms of method. Liz Cheney added her remarkable voice in this regard. To paraphrase her position: Disagreeing on policy is one thing; undoing the system is something completely different. Her support of the Trump opposition was based on this distinction. For the most part, resistance works against policy; it does not work against attacks on the system. And resistance carries no vision.

Further, however far Trump gets in this revolution, there will come a time when it runs out. As Milton Friedman used to say, when a disruption or crisis occurs, you look at what ideas may be laying around and try to implement them. If Democrats and the left do not cultivate any ideas, they will have no place in that discussion. Our vision cannot be to go back to the old Constitution. Our ideas cannot be those of Karl Marx. We need to eschew, or at least deeply examine, our habitual ideas like class warfare (tax the rich!), save the earth, and elections as the solution to everything. “The people,” after all, voted for this destruction of our old system. Even democracy has its limits.

I’m not sure what these ideas are yet, but I am certain we need to pull them together. Trump is ripping apart the way of ordering the world for capitalism. American democracy and American capitalism, after all, go hand in hand and always have. As I have written in my two books on postcapitalism, however, the new digitalization of the economy, including the development of AI and robotics, is moving us into a world in which capitalism can no longer function. Markets can no longer function. This means we will be coming into a new era, a postcapitalist era, in which the rules of capitalism will collapse. Two metaphors can guide the way forward. One is the effort to return to monarchy—that is, the effort to re-establish a king in America. The monarch is the metaphor. It aligns with very old, pre-modern modes of consciousness, and is deep within the collective unconscious. This is the way of the Dark Enlightenment.

The second metaphor is that of the network—a key idea that can move us past the machine metaphor of the last five hundred years. Ever since Descartes and Newton imagined the mechanistic universe, it shaped the way human beings perceive the world, and even more the way we think about it. Everything is a process or a machine. It has inputs, it goes through some kind of change process, and it creates outputs. The universe was mechanical and hierarchical. We created corporations to concentrate capital, maintain the hierarchy, and practice mechanistic social control. We imagined nature as a machine, calling it an “ecosystem.” We imagined the body as a system of inputs from diet and exercise, with outputs as health or disease. System as machine. System as mechanism.

Networks, however, do not operate that way. The hierarchy disappears. One can argue there are levels of influence, but they are not levels of control. Rather, in a network, it all has to do with connection, and the larger the network, the more influential the network is. More importantly, the network is a guiding metaphor for the future, and therefore can be a foundation for the construction of new ideas and a new vision. This yields relevant, invigorating possibilities that people can get behind. The new ideas we seek are absolutely anathema to monarchy.

There is a lot of work to do to create the vision of the future that we need. I don’t claim to have all the answers. While I am certain that the network will be central to a new organizing principle for society, the ideas for that society need to be developed. While many people resist, the rest of us need to be developing these ideas that will animate the world. We need to develop them so they are ready when the inevitable fall of Trumpism occurs. If we do not, we cede our future to the neo-monarchists. Good king or bad king, this is not a future I would choose.

Anthony Signorelli

Please add your ideas in comments. Let’s invigorate the discussion. A primary task of this work is to develop the ideas needed to win the future. We can all participate.

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