Curtis Yarvin's Critique of Centrism

The Name of Love

Far Right Nutjob
This essay was inspired by Curtis Yarvin's latest essay: "Persuasion and the Mensheviks." Read it if you like. It's a pretty good article that provides his critique of Centrism, which pretty much sums up my entire problem with them as a group. In this essay, I will be summarizing Yarvin's critique of centrism and adding my own commentary to it. In other words, this will be the TL;DR of the essay.

Centrism and Cancel Culture

But first, what is a Centrist? A Centrist is someone who wants to reform the current way of doing things rather than destroy it. He is a small but good person with small, good solutions. And because he's small, he believes that even the lightest shakes are big earthquakes, that a rubber bullet is a nuclear warhead. In short, a Centrist believes that even the most inoffensive, ineffectual solutions are these grand, groundbreaking fights against the machine.

Centrists are people like the signers of the open letter at Harper's Magazine or the newsletter Persuasion. These are people who, in another age, would have been seen as leftists or liberals, but have taken a stand against "Cancel Culture." Cancel Culture is a newfangled term that refers to the phenomenon of a cultural boycott against a particular person. It's essentially rule of the press. Those who have bad press lose their financial livelihood. In the age of social media, it works something like this: you do something offensive or controversial, bad press is created about you (either by a social media mob or by journalists ex nihilo), and then you lose your job. Take, for instance, the Hispanic electrician fired after people on social media thought he was making a white power sign. If you get bad press, you lose your livelihood.

Okay, this does seem like a problem. This rule of the press is a mockery of rule of law (which is the ideal). You want rule of law so that you don't have arbitrary rules being made willy-nilly. Rule of the press means that if you get good press, you can get away with anything, and if you have bad press, you can suffer any punishment for anything. It's a bit like rule of force (might makes right), except it makes a lot less sense. At least with rule of force, you have one guy calling the shots. If you can understand that guy's psychology, you can game the system. It's a lot harder to do that under rule of the press.

The Centrist Solution

Centrists are well-intentioned, or, at the very least, what they want isn't a bad thing. They want to stop Cancel Culture. So what are they proposing to end Cancel Culture? Well, let's look at Zaid Jilani's "A Better Remedy for Cancel Culture." The founder of Persuasion, Yascha Mounk, said he was "proud to run this as one of the first pieces,” so judging the magazine by one of its finest works shouldn't be too much of a generalization, no?

Jilani's solution to the Cancel Culture problem is the abolition of "at-will employment." He describes how, in America, most workers can be fired for any reason as long as it is not "on the basis of a narrow set of protected characteristics, such as gender, race, and sexual orientation." There is no due process involved in this firing. This allows the companies to fire their employees on the basis of fantasies cooked up by the social media. "As in many other cases," Jilani writes, "both parties would have been better off if the law had required the company to afford due process to an accused worker before deciding whether or not to fire him."

Sounds like a fine, sensible, and Centrist solution, no? Totally moderate, totally sensible, and totally ineffectual given our current climate. To understand why, Yarvin translates Jilani's "language of the dream" into something closer to reality.

In reality, America has what Yarvin calls "race laws." A race law is a law that recognizes race. Race laws have been around since mankind was categorizing different people into race, which has been centuries. Whether or not these categories are categories of the mind or categories of reality are up to you; what matters is that the legal system you live under recognizes them. The point is that people have long considered other groups of people different than them to be other "races" and judged them as such.

Our current race laws are little more than fifty years old, and they were meant to draw a distinction between people of European descent and people of West African descent (i.e. White Americans and Black Americans). It draws upon the same distinctions that the old Code Noir did, but for different ends (which I'll get into later). Then, through the magic of Civil Rights, it was extended by analogy to other groups - first to other "people of color," then to women, then to homosexuals, then to transsexuals. On and on down the list.

Modern race laws are designed to protect officially-recognized races from being bullied, both on an individual and collective level. If someone is being mean to you at work, and you are a member of the right race, you can sue. In short: these race laws grant extra legal protection from bullying to certain races. How this circle of race-based privileges fits with the square of equal protection under the law will be explained in the next section.

Under this framework, we can see right off the bat that there's something odd about Jilani's proposal. In the words of his own legal jargon, Jilani's idea would end "at-will employment" for people with non-woke politics the same way that at-will employment has ended for people of color, women, and sexual minorities. In plain English, Jilani would extend race laws to make Republicans a "race" the same way it already made women and homosexuals "races." In the words of Yarvin, this idea is "something Ben Shapiro would come up with, if you bought him a lifetime subscription to acid and appointed him to the Supreme Court."

Immediately, plenty of sensible people might think "there something wrong with this. Won't this allow for abuse?" That, my friends, is not the question you should be asking. What you should be asking is "why isn't this screwy system being abused right now?" The answer to that question is that the system was designed to be abused. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Logic of Woke Law

Modern Race Law (which from hereon out I will refer to as "Woke Law") is born from the magic of 20th-century jurisprudence. Woke Law is Orwellian in nature. Just look at Jilani's language: "on the basis of a narrow set of protected characteristics, such as gender, race, and sexual orientation." Yes, yes. it's so narrow that everyone has all three!

This language of "protected" is especially interesting. In a previous essay, I talked about this phenomenon, but it bears repeating. The creation of protected classes is a social hack used by the Left to gain more power for themselves. The Left comes up with a conspiracy theory that explains a problem they wish to fix, they find some poor asshole that happened to do something that offended a protected class member, and then string them up as the scapegoat behind the problem. Rinse and repeat until you have destroyed all your enemies and have ultimate power. And because ordinary people are unaware of this power dynamic, they will just see some asshole being punished for being an asshole and go along with it, not realizing that that wasn't his actual crime. His real crime was being an asshole to a member of the protected class. The members of the protected class reap the benefits of being a quasi-aristocrat, and the Left gets the allegiance of those members. Ingenious, no? Here, I will discuss in fuller detail how this dynamic plays out in the legal system, rather than in the culture at large.

Here in America, we used to have something called equal protection of law. This was our justifying claim to fame: no more aristocrats, no more protected classes. Everyone is equal under the law. You can argue whether or not this was ever true, but it was what our country was founded on, and it's the idea that we spread to the entire world. And yet, our modern race laws separate people into protected classes and unprotected classes. How can this be? Looking at the history of race laws, we can see how our ancestors squared the circle. First, they did so by saying "slaves weren't people but property, so the law doesn't apply to them." Of course, the very notion of slavery went against liberalism itself, as the Founding Fathers knew well. After slavery was abolished, they then used the idea of "separate but equal." Legal segregation between the races was allowed, so long as it treated both races "equally." On paper, this sort of ghetto was very much in line with the idea of equal protection of law, but in reality, Jim Crow was simply systematic humiliation (I mean, separate water fountains? Really?!).

So we can see how race laws and equal protection under the law can co-exist within the same system: Orwellian doublespeak. But even these past race laws have nothing on Woke Law! The opinion given by Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke puts it best: "in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently." Yes, indeed. Some animals, it appears, are more equal than others. Napoleon nods approvingly.

Well, that's mildly disconcerting, but what is it that justifies this decision? Is it racism? Was Dinesh D'Souza right all along? Possibly, but probably not. It's always in bad form to assume bad motives on the part of your opponents. Let's instead look at the full quote: "in order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently. We cannot—we dare not—let the Equal Protection Clause perpetuate racial superiority." The Equal Protection Clause is perpetuating racial superiority? Was Blackmun on crack? Possibly, but I think Yarvin better describes this reasoning better:

The thumb of state power must counteract this malign, invisible force. Our race laws work by recognizing the existence of a shadowy counter-government, sovereign itself in silence and night, whose criminal exception must be countered by the exceptional and sovereign power of the state. The existence of a counter-government implies the situation of civil war: inter arma silent leges. Race law is raison d’etat.

Raison d'etat is French for "reason of state." It refers to those instances where the state must violate rule of law in order to defend itself from an enemy. This makes sense. If the United States were to treat those it's at war with as if they were citizens within its own country, it would be handicapped. This is why we have different rules for wartime than we do for peacetime. We're at war with white supremacy, don't you know? Seen in this light, Woke Law is not law in the strictest sense. It's a weapon of war deployed against a shadowy enemy. Homosexuals, women, and POCs have to unite, you see. "There is one common enemy: the white man... [and] we need to get rid of them."

Here, I smell every witch-hunter's best friend, a conspiracy theory. Now, conspiracies like this have existed in the past, but Yarvin gives two reasons for why we ought not take this very seriously. First, repression of this kind tends to work well - too well. So well, in fact, that it is able to change the public's opinion on other races, on women, and even on homosexuals. Seriously, "homophobia" has been a fact of life in the West since the dawn of Christendom, and we got rid of it in just a few generations? Repression is some pretty good stuff. Repression is also addictive to the people doing the repressing, so you can't expect these people to just let off the boot once their job is done.

Second (and more importantly), what we're repressing specifically are bad motives, not bad groups. Woke law is supposed to be purging people on the basis that they are mistreating a member of a specific class because they are a member of a specific class. The judges would have to be either lucky or telepathic in order to successfully ferret out these motivations for themselves, which means these cases always boil down to a "he said, she said." The judge will have to make a decision call, and he's only human. Assuming the best possible motives on the part of the judge, he only has two priorities: act morally in accordance with what he believes is moral and look good on the news. While we might hope that the judge will make rules symmetrically (after all, our race laws are nominally symmetrical; anyone can be a "racist."), in practice, our judge has probably been trained in Critical Law Theory or some nonsense and is most likely going to side with the "protected" person. Especially in if he wants to get good press.

From here, the familiar pattern emerges. Conspiracy theory in hand, our brave little witch-hunter leads the charge against racists - I mean, witches. "Get rid of the great conspiracy of racism, without which, we'd all be gloriously tolerant! Throw the Jew down the well!" Of course, instead throwing a Jew down a well, they're getting Hispanic electricians fired for cracking their knuckles.

Centrists like to present their proposals as being logical. And indeed, since Centrists tend to be mildly intelligent, moderate, and reasonable people, their proposals tend to reflect this. The problem is, as any good logician will tell you, if you start out with unreasonable premises, you are going to end up with an unreasonable answer, no matter how logical your line of reasoning is. If your goal is to work within the system, and the system is unreasonable, then your logical proposals are going to be unreasonable too. And boy does Jilani's proposal look unreasonable in light of this fine piece of work. He essentially wants to add another group to the list. Worse yet, he wants to add a group that every witch hunter worth their salt is taught to despise. Is this reasonable on its face?

No, the actual solution isn't to make this system more confusing, but less. We need to rip out Woke Law from the roots! We can't just let people be purged for being an asshole. The law should not concern itself with such trifles. "Oh," the Centrist cries, "but what about Black poverty?" News flash, being an asshole to Black people doesn't impoverish them. More importantly, you can't enforce a law that requires the judges to be mind readers. If we were to bring back freedom of association, strengthen libel laws, and enforce common-law tortious interference against blacklists, we'd be able to have something resembling actual freedom of speech in America, and we wouldn't have to worry about being fired from our jobs because some witch hunter decided he needed to hang another old lady. This seems like a perfectly reasonable, classically liberal view to take. Why aren't the Centrists on this already?

Utopian Centrism

Unfortunately, Jilani's praxis is about as reasonable as his theory. Which is to say, it's a load of crap.

Just look at this:

New employment regulations always face an especially tough uphill battle in Congress. But, though it will not be easy to win legislative approval for such reforms, every major faction of American political life has its own reasons for supporting them.

The left should be sympathetic to the wish to expand job protections for American workers, which lag significantly behind those of other developed countries. While conservatives are usually hostile to such regulations, they should recognize that these reforms would help to protect them against the growing influence of cancel culture.

And philosophical liberals—those of us who believe in a pluralistic society that encourages ideological diversity—have the most principled reason to get on board.

Only someone who thinks Schoolhouse Rock accurately reflects the way Capital Hill functions would write this sort of crap. Congressmen are, in reality, just a bunch of petty bureaucrats. They are meant to raise money, gain influence, and get good press, not debate statesmanship. If you want to get your Congressmen to care about anything, you have to have one of three things: money, voters, and positive press. Ideally, you'd be packing all three. If not, then your bill has a snowball's chance in Hell.

Besides this, Jilani doesn't just want to make Republicans a new race protected under Woke Law. No, no, no. We can't let those evil witches go free!
[E]mployers have a legitimate interest in protecting their staff from the hateful conduct of colleagues: Clearly, for example, no member of an ethnic minority should have to endure racist taunts at their place of work. But this could also be addressed through carefully worded legislation. Seattle already offers exemptions for political conduct that would cause “substantial and material disruption of the property rights of the provider of a place of public accommodation.” Employers also have an affirmative obligation to protect employees from racist harassment.

Balancing competing goods is one of the core purposes of any legal system. There is no reason to think that our laws could not protect the speech of political minorities, without hampering the operation of overtly political organizations or burdening ethnic, religious, or sexual minorities with the fear of harassment.

"There is no reason to think" that those judges can read minds. "There is no reason to think" that the press won't hop onto a polarizing case and put their fingers on the scales to make sure one side wins. "There is no reason to think" that the case won't go to whoever has the most cash to burn. "There is no reason to think" that this idea is anything other than bullshit.

By the way, he mentions Seattle, which does have political anti-discrimination laws on the books. How is that going? Is Seattle a free speech paradise? Well, let's ask Jilani.

But even this [anti-discrimination] law mostly serves to protect people with relatively common political views. After the 2016 election, for example, local rental listings began to discourage Trump supporters from applying. “If you are a landlord,” city government spokesperson Elliot Bronstein, wrote in response, “you cannot discriminate on political status.”

And then they all stopped discriminating against Republicans. Because law or something. Riiiiight.

In short, while Centrists style themselves as being realistic, here we see one proposing a law which could never be passed, would be impossible to enforce in the way he intends, and which we all know won't work because practically every state on the West coast has these laws already! If that's not utopian, I don't know what is.

Centrism is Neo-Girondism

What could account for the shallowness of Centrist thought? Yarvin believes it can be explained as them not being able to grasp the situation at hand. They believe Cancel Culture is a new phenomenon. But what if cancel culture is really the latest incarnation of a venerated political tradition? Yarvin believes he has been able to identify this tradition. He calls it social justice. While this movement always sheds old names to keep up with the times, it will keep certain phrases between incarnations if the language is useful. Thanks to the magic of Google, we can track the use of words like "racism" and social justice" in works of literature over time.

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As we can see, racism has been around at least since the mid-1930s. Social justice has been around even longer. What makes this phenomenon seem so recent is the increasing level of relevance of the ideology. Power does strange things when the wrong people get it. Woke ideology's weirdness is simply the 21st-century equivalent of Pope Stephen VI exhuming the dead body of his predecessor to put him on trial (look it up)

But hang on now: the use of the word "social justice" isn't exactly at zero at 1900. Let's have a closer look, shall we?

("Computer, enhance.")

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Interesting. So, we see some ups and downs throughout the 19th century before it starts climbing up steadily around the time of the Hayes Administration. Yarvin goes into some speculation on the intellectual history of this, but I will let the readers decide whether or not they find him persuasive. Point is, we can safely say that this ideology has some much deeper roots than anyone thought. Much, much deeper roots.

Why do Centrists not see this? That's easy: it'd implicate them as being part of the problem. Let's go back over Jilani's essay.

Employers have a legitimate interest in protecting their staff from the hateful conduct of colleagues. Clearly, for example, no member of an ethnic minority should have to endure racist taunts at their place of work.

"Racist taunts"? You mean like... white power signs? He's acting like it's just so obvious.

But more Centrist weirdness abounds. From the inaugural message by Persuasion's founder, Yascha Mounk.

The primary threat to liberal democracy is posed by the populist right. From Brasilia to Warsaw and from Delhi to Washington, authoritarian populists are attacking free speech, stoking the ugliest passions of bigots and racists, and concentrating power in their own hands.

However, these institutions also suffered from two important shortcomings. First, the people they admitted into their gilded halls only represented a small slice of America’s population: sexism, racism and homophobia were far more prevalent in these institutions than they are today. The views they considered serious sometimes included the morally abhorrent.

Or even the open letter from Harper's:

The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

The message rings loud and clear: we are "determined to defend freedom of speech" for our ideas; we "seek to persuade, rather than to mock or troll, those who disagree with us," provided your views are "serious." Cancel Culture may be an issue, but the real problem is the "illiberalism" represented by "Donald Trump" and other "right-wing demagogues" in the "populist right" that are "exploiting" Cancel Culture to fuel their "morally abhorrent" views.

The Centrist position is clear. "Witch hunts are essential. Witchcraft is a serious concern for our society." The only problem is that the witch hunters aren't burning the real witches, but us poor little Centrists. Go after Donald Trump! He's the real witch!

But the biggest catch is this paragraph from Mounk's inaugural statement:

It is difficult to convey just how many amazing writers, journalists, and think-tankers -- some young and some old, some relatively obscure and others very famous -- have privately told me that they can no longer write in their own voices; that they are counting the days until they get fired; and that they don't know where to turn if they do. (Astonishingly, a number of them are far enough to the left to have supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries.)

"Astonishingly." Why would you be astonished, Mr. Mounk? Unless, of course... you weren't expecting the beast to turn on you.

If you'll allow a moment, I'd like to analogize this to the French Revolution. During the Revolution, the Girondins were the more moderate liberals, while the Jacobins were more radical and socialistic in their orientation (there were even more radical factions than them, but they never got close to power). The Girondins and the Jacobins started out as one group. They swore the Tennis Court Oath together. They stormed the Bastille together. They overthrew the ancien regime together. They fastened the guillotine together. And yet, when the time came, when the Girondins stood in the way of the revolution, it was their heads on the chopping block.

Joseph de Maistre, the great Catholic author, commented on the tragic but fitting death of the Girondins.

It is long since such an appalling punishment has been seen visited on so many sinners. No doubt there are innocent people among the unfortunates, but they are far fewer than is commonly imagined.

It is frightening to see distinguished intellectuals fall under Robespierre’s ax. From a humane standpoint they can never be too much mourned, but divine justice is no respecter of mathematicians or scientists.

Too many French intellectuals were instrumental in bringing about the Revolution; too many approved and encouraged it so long as, like Tarquin’s wand, it cut off only the ruling heads. Like so many others, they said, a great revolution cannot come about without some distress.

But when a thinker justifies such means by the end in view; when he says in his heart, a hundred thousand murders are as nothing, provided we are free; then, if Providence replies, I accept your recommendation, but you shall be one of the victims, where is the injustice?
In Christian theology, we believe that God allows for evil in order to bring about some good from evil. In this case, the evil of the guillotine brought forth the death of the wicked Girondins that helped build it. You don't have to be a Christian to see this. The Hindus have a word for it too: Karma.

If I were to analogize this instance to the modern day, then the Cancel-happy Leftists would be the Jacobins and the Centrists would be the Girondins. The analogy is really fitting, and I'm not alone in noticing this. Sarah "oh man it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men" Jeong has written a little response to Harper's open letter. A choice quote:

Chaos is not the same thing as evil. And although the Reign of Terror may have followed the French Revolution, the terrors wrought by the system that preceded it were far greater.

"Don't worry," says the Neo-Jacobin. "We're not as bad as what came before." Mmhm, yeah, there's a trope for that.

The Centrists are last generations' Leftists. They are Neo-Girondins. They didn't care when people to their Right were being led to the intellectual guillotine. Matter of fact, it was important to get rid of those racists, sexists, and homophobes (by the way, anyone else weirded out how these words are less than a century old, yet seem so pervasive in our discourse today?). In fact, they approved of the Revolution. It was their Revolution. These Neo-Jacobins are a mutation of what was once good and decent and pure. But now, the Reign of Terror has begun. They speak out in favor of free speech only because their neck is on the line.

That said, not all Centrists are as blatantly self-serving and cynical as this lot. No, I believe that most Centrists reading this were good-hearted little Leftists previously. They would describe it as "the Left left me," but in fact, they were the ones that got off of their own free will. The Left has been going down the same path for the past hundred or so years. Every time the Left gained a bit more power, it would throw off one of their "unprincipled exceptions" - a violation of its own deepest principles tolerated for historical or practical reasons - and move forward towards their utopia. You, dear Centrist, didn't like where it was headed, so you left the Left. This emotional attachment to an earlier incarnation of the Left lies at the beating heart of Centrism.

The Final Answer to the Centrist Question

Maybe that appeals to you. Whatever. But it do you well to be honest about what you're doing and who you are. The sort of lukewarm aura given off by Centrists doesn't win them any allies. It was Jesus who said "I know about your activities: how you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were one or the other, but since you are neither hot nor cold, but only lukewarm, I will spit you out of my mouth." If our all-loving Lord and Savior didn't like the wishy-washy, why should anyone else?

As for me? I don't want Leftism 1.0. I want something new. I'm not entirely sure what that looks like yet, but I'm reasonably intelligent. If I don't find out for myself, I'll find someone who will. I'll keep my options open until the time comes. And who knows? Maybe the Centrists will save the day. If they manage to get a little more self-awareness, then they might have a chance to make a difference. After all, understanding the game afoot is the first step to winning it.
 
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Wonderful essay.

I personally think a lot of the people in the open letter were just terrified that the forces they supported now have turned on them. Bari Weiss being one.

One other point is who defines the "Center". Today's centrist is yesterday's progressive and tomorrow's reactionary. Its all a never ending drive.
 

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