Gish-galloping America back to monarchy
Harvard University’s Danielle Allen this week “debated” right-wing influencer and monarchist, Curtis Yarvin, sage of the “dark enlightenment.” It was a non-sanctioned event. “His work is not of a caliber that passes an academic bar. It is too full of historical error and sophistical argument,” she told Harvard magazine, but students asked her to engage them.
“I think people do need to understand Yarvin’s argument, both what people experience as its attractions, and its errors, which are profound,” she added.
The Guardian reported last week:
“Students asked me to participate,” said Allen, when asked about why she was debating Yarvin. Multiple requests for comment sent to Harvard about the debate went unanswered.
In a meandering and widely cited interview with the New York Times in January, Yarvin tried laundering his ideas under the guise of advocating for a CEO-led US government, which is shorthand for an unelected dictatorship. Whenever challenged to answer direct questions on some of his most controversial blogs, Yarvin obfuscated.
Allen explained in The Wall Street Journal that Yarvin’s influence on students surpised her. (We’ve covered Yarvin here multiple times.) He calls for an absolute monarch and believes Donald Trump fits the bill. He should rule by decree. “Mr. Yarvin leads them astray with his vision of absolute monarchy and racial cleansing,” she explains.
Allen told MSNBC was it was not so much a debate as Yarvin gish-galloping (my word) his way through a slurry of ideas. Harvard magazine’s decription concurs:
As the conversation developed, Yarvin shared extended tangential anecdotes and name-dropped philosophers and historians. He twice discussed chimpanzees and early humans, first as evidence of the inherent human desire to dominate others and then as a rebuttal to innate human equality. Allen rarely engaged with Yarvin’s specific stories, but did question his reading of Aristotle.
Allen pushes back in the Journal:
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 secession 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.
Amen. Working on it while I’m polishing my greaves.
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