When now Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate Tim Walz spoke these titular words in reference to JD Vance, his opposition on the Republican ticket, the feeling resonated with many observers.
Whether it was the awkward manner by which Vance ordered at a donut shop, or the widely spread, sexually humiliating, and ultimately false rumors about his affinity for furniture, something about him just felt “weird”. Similar to the political epithets popularized by Donald Trump in recent years (Lying Ted, Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe, etc.), these ideas only stick around when they are quippy and somewhat aligned with popular perceptions (see the failure of Kamabla). So, why has “these guys are weird” stuck around as a Democrat campaign beat, and what does this have to do with democratic erosion? To answer this question, we need to examine how Vance came to be on the presidential ticket, and more specifically, who wanted him there.
JD Vance entered the public spotlight in 2016 with his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, a story reflecting on life in rural Appalachia. His book garnered broad praise for spotlighting the difficult living conditions of economically disadvantaged Appalachians and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for two consecutive years. Vance flitted between legal, political, and venture capital spaces until running for the US Senate as a Republican representing Ohio in 2022, with the unprecedentedly massive financial backing of Peter Thiel. The obvious connection between Thiel and Vance comes from Vance’s time spent working for Thiel’s venture capital firm Mithril Capital. However, another, less frequently explored, facet of the connection between Thiel and Vance is their mutual affinity for political blogger and cult-hero of the “New Right”: Curtis Yarvin.
Yarvin, known online by the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, rose to political prominence through his writings on his blogs Unqualified Reservations and Gray Mirror. He is an extremely prolific writer, making it almost impossible to succinctly summarize his entire political ideology, but one key point to highlight in this context is his unabashed disdain for democracy. Yarvin favors a monarchist system of governance akin to a modern corporation, and he makes frequent reference to the merits of a system helmed by a “benevolent dictator” or a “sovereign CEO”. This particular point of his has not successfully worked its way into mainstream public discourse, but that is not the case for some of his other ideas. Namely, Yarvin has repeatedly advocated for the government to “retire all government employees” (RAGE), derivations of which have spread all the way to the Project 2025 platform.
The rhetorical voice Yarvin uses in his writing blends the aesthetics of academia, with the wry, ironic humor of an internet troll, and the self-importance of a tech CEO. These traits neatly represent his primary influences, and indicate the circles where Yarvin’s work is disseminated. While he does not have access to the Austrian economics crowd he cites as an early inspiration for himself, Yarvin’s influence is widespread in Silicon Valley and the edgier forums on 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit. His cooptation of the “red pill” from The Matrix film franchise has exploded in popularity among conspiracy theorists, incel communities, and even more mainstream meme communities. A one-dimensional view of Yarvin and his audience might relegate them to the larger umbrella of weird internet people, alongside geeks, nerds, gamers, redditors, and discord mods. However, this pejorative classification is reductive because it fails to account for an obvious fact about the individuals within these communities: the weird people of the internet also exist offline. Tim Walz’s remark that “these guys are weird” resonates with so many people because it is true. Vance, Thiel, Yarvin, and their ideological associates have made it out of the shadowy forums of the internet, onto the presidential ticket. As self-proclaimed classical liberalist Tyler Cowen writes in his blog post on the New Right, “the internet is gaining in intellectual influence, relative to university professors.”
The New Right’s threat to democracy is not limited to the explicitly authoritarian rhetoric of its chief ideologues. Rather, the tool kit prescribed by thinkers like Yarvin as a means of bringing about the desired political restructuring is far more insidious. For example, take the aforementioned “retire all government employees” or “RAGE” proposal. New Right thinkers recognize the crucial role that bureaucracy plays in the checks and balances of democratic governments. By restructuring the bureaucracy to center the current executive, not the daily operations of the state, the elected executive would be better positioned to wrestle power away from the judicial and legislative branches. This tactic is frequently employed by populist leaders around the world, but they typically do not entirely cast aside the veneer of democracy.1 Yarvin and his peers, on the other hand, do not hide their ultimate ambitions of pursuing a legal route towards an end to democracy.
The brazen disregard of even democratic dressings poses a unique challenge to academic studies of democratic erosion. In the post-Cold War world, the threat of coups and clear breaks in regime type have become less common.2 Subsequently, the academic field’s focus has shifted towards a more incremental model of democratic erosion, rather than democratic collapse or failure.3 Moving in this direction makes sense given the rise in populism4, stealth authoritarianism5, and other subtle forms of pulling democracies towards authoritarianism, but the power of explicitly authoritarian internet communities must not be overlooked.
In this blog, I chose to focus on Yarvin, Vance, Thiel, and their section of the New Right, but one could just as easily swap in QAnon or potentially examples from outside the United States (such as the pro-Bolsonaro “Patriotas”).The extent of Vance’s willingness towards and aptitude for actually incorporating these New Right ideas if elected to the Vice-Presidency, and in his future political endeavors, remains to be seen. Regardless, the rise of internet-based, anti-democratic communities should be taken seriously as a threat to both our understanding of democratic erosion and democracy itself.
- Müller, Jan-Werner. 2016. What Is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. p.31 ↩︎
- Powell, J. M., & Thyne, C. L. (2011). Global instances of coups from 1950 to 2010: A new dataset. Journal of Peace Research, 48(2), p.255. ↩︎
- Bermeo, Nancy. 2016. “On Democratic Backsliding.” Journal of Democracy 27(1): p.5 ↩︎
- Kendall-Taylor, Andrea and Erica Frantz. 2016. “How Democracies Fall Apart: Why Populism is a Pathway to Autocracy.” Foreign Affairs. December 5 ↩︎
- Varol, Ozan. 2015. “Stealth Authoritarianism.” Iowa Law Review 100(4): p.1684 ↩︎
I really enjoyed this post! I think it gives necessary attention to an emerging area of study that many aren’t attuned to or as you mentioned, believe is limited to internet culture.
You make a compelling point that Yarvin’s comments are not at all subtly undemocratic but obviously a direct threat to the existing status quo, and I’m wondering how rhetoric (if at all) fits in the larger definition of democratic erosion which seems to be largely focused on concrete actions. After reading the bulk of your argument and thinking more to myself, I believe that this rhetoric, such as the kind that internet moguls like Yarvin adopt, can normalize anti-democratic values or erode distrust in institutions. For instance, when political figures amplify conspiracy theories, they can gradually weaken trust in democratic norms. We all saw this clearly during the coronavirus pandemic.
I also leave this post now questioning the Vice Presidential Candidate Tim Walz’s strategy. I’m starting to believe that associating this real attack on democracy with “weirdness” risks oversimplifying and distracting from addressing the real structural threats posed by figures like Yarvin and Vance.