"I’m an American, and we haven’t done kings for 249 years." To be fair, George III was a constitutional monarch. I'm English, and we haven't done absolute monarchs for 336 years; that is, since the Glorious Revolution of 1689 and our Bill of Rights.
Pardon my ignorance, but my understanding is that the British constitution is unwritten. Is the same true for your Bill of Rights? I’d crow about the evident superiority of having a written constitution, but in practice, that doesn’t seem to have helped very much.
In the end, constitution written or unwritten doesn't really matter. What matters is the identity of the judges on the Supreme Court. Cases in point: Sir William Blackstone in England and Roger B Taney in USA. A study in contrasts.
The British constitution is written, but it isn't written in one document with a big title that says CONSTITUTION. So it's the combination of laws, conventions, and historical documents like the Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights.
The demarcation line between constitutional and quasi-absolutist British monarchs was a bit blurred in the 18th century. George III was too much hands on to be considered "constitutional" in the mold of Elizabeth II or even Queen Vic. Too many rotten boroughs and all that! And of course too much rule by royal decree in North America.
Had George III pursued an Act of Union with the North American colonies after completion of the 7 years war aka French&Indian W in 1763, as with Scotland in 1707 and Ireland 1801, there would have been no American revolution.
Iin the saner times before the Awokening I used to read the NYT and I loved to occasionally stumble on the comments you left on some of their op-eds. They were surprisingly popular given the leftist readership.
Steve should do some reading on patrimonialism: Patrimonialism, a term coined by Max Weber, refers to a system of governance where a ruler's power is based on personal loyalties, patron-client relationships, and kin ties. It's characterized by a ruler who doled out rewards and punishments, rather than relying on rational-legal bureaucracy or charisma. Patrimonialism is often associated with corruption, opportunism, and weak state capacity.
What Yarvin is proposing is a form of patrimonialism.
This is the governance model in Arab monarchies like the United Arab Emirates, befitting their paternalistic cultures and low human capital overall.
It should be noted that rulers have taken advantage of their fabulous wealth, technology, and globalization to increase "state capacity," in the sense of the sheer size and reach of government and preventing any challenges to their rule.
New Hampshire was the first state to have no ownership requirements in 1792 while North Carolina is the last in 1856. Would one have rather been living in North Carolina or New Hampshire in 1856?.
Most would rather be a white tradesman or farmer in New Hampshire than a hillbilly or live in the low country in North Carolina. North Carolina did not have many counties with large number of slaves or successful ports.
The first lawyer/politician among my ancestors did very well in NC before the War, though the big plantation he bought was in SC. The Baptist preacher from VA married two NC heiresses (in succession). Transportation was definitely a problem, but there were a few railroads. I have a long bench from a prewar railroad hotel's fancy two-story, wraparound porch on my porch right now. One of these years, I'll repaint it.
I’ve tried reading and listening to Yarvin a few times but have given up after a few minutes as he is so circumlocutious.
Steve OTOH has a fine (although not superlative) prose style. Where Steve is head and shoulders above any peer is his ability and willingness to write exactly what he means. Many lack ability or willingness and some in fact lack both.
One of the key reasons why I read Steve. He gets to the point with superb efficiency. Whatever excess prose there may be is thrown in for humor or as an interesting aside.
Yarvin always struck me as someone less interested in respecting the time of his readers by making his point and succinctly and directly as possible, and more of someone who likes to show off how much he knows. Many such cases.
Attended the event on Monday. Jointly marveled with a Passage Press representative about Steve's ability to write so clearly and directly with good humor.
That's a common and irritating fact of writing in the post-editor era. I love the age of blogs but, unless I've been reading you for years and we have established trust, I need you to reveal the point in the first paragraph. If it's interesting I'll follow your reasoning and evidence for several paragraphs. As a new reader, I'm not following you on a twenty page journey in which you slowly, incrementally, convince me of your point, finally revealed in the ultimate paragraph.
I agree that Yarvin is circumlocutious (did I spell that right?), but I love his style. Maybe it’s because I’m a fellow computer scientist, but his micro-style is familiar and amusing, and his long winded macro-style is helpful to me when I don’t “buy” his point.
Interesting. De gustibis non es disputandum, I suppose. I like my writing like I like my code: clear, concise and readable. Imagine having to debug a Yarvin blogpost.
"Or perhaps Professor Allen would make a worthier president, but she’s probably more focused on scholarship than fundraising." She's happy to do fundraising, and she very much wanted to be president. I was astonished they picked Gay over her. But then I remembered what I heard from a campus lifer the first time I was surprised by an unimpressive university president, which is that the boards are looking for someone they can control. Professor Allen isn't any kind of dissident, but she isn't going to be intimidated.
Thanks. I always figured that if Harvard decided that the Theory of Intersectionality required them to get a black woman president, they'd, being Harvard, get the best black woman president.
But this explains why they got Gay instead of Allen.
"People who write frequently about race, like Jennifer Schuessler, are actually writing frequently about race and IQ. They just are ignorant of that fact."
Like others here, I find Yarvin's prose impenetrable. On the other hand, we do need someone to point out that the US and Western European Republics are in some kind of late stage collapse, similar to the Roman Republic in the 100 years before Caesar. Successful republics become imperial, which in turn seems to empower the elites (e.g., the Senatorial class in Rome) to capture the forms of democracy to serve their narrow interests, while impoverishing the lower classes from which "New Men" might come to threaten their hegemony. The gridlock in Congress (which cannot seem to pass any significant legislation--including budgets and debt--without recourse to a single Omnibus bill late in the fiscal year) would be familiar to the Roman citizens of 100 B.C. Ironically, the US (as the UK, Germany and France) IS being run as a business--by and for a small class of mediocre, connected types such as the Bushes, Clintons, Obamas and--most absurdly--Bidens.
“we do need someone to point out that the US and Western European Republics are in some kind of late stage collapse, similar to the Roman Republic in the 100 years before Caesar.”
These kind of assertions are in Popperian terms unfalsifiable by evidence so I tend to avoid these kids of writers.
I'm trying to imagine a written work consisting entirely of falsifiable propositions. What are we talking here, a bookshelf of engineering and scientific textbooks?
The issue with all of the democracies is that the voters want a long list of benefits from the government while refusing to pay for those benefits with an appropriate level of taxes.
"His argument that American democracy has exhausted itself and needs to be replaced by a form of one-man rule has made him a star on the right" . . . Uhh, no. His monarchy argument makes no sense, but startles people and he uses it as counterpoint to discuss all the problems inherent in democracy. AFAIK, Yarvin has never named the person or persons he thinks would make a suitable monarch. The reason Harvard was willing to host him for a debate and Antifa wasn't moved to violence is that his monarchist position is absurd and non-threatening.
Like others here, I find Yarvin nerve-wracking to listen to as he bounces from a half-formulated political argument, to an obscure historical reference, to explosive laughter at something he just said, to nervous hems and haws, while dropping the occasional bon mot. His 2009 Unqualified Reservations post on how blacks form a new American aristocracy is classic.
Good for Curtis, saying the quiet parts out loud since the collapse of ideological conservatism with the GW Bush administration. Adrian Vermeule is at Harvard Law as well.
Our Sacred Democracy was way overdue for critique by the time Curtis started blogging. But we can't have kings because we no longer believe in the Divine Mandate, and the monarch is the First Family of the Families and nationhood is illegal as well (except for Israel or, if you're a college student, Palestine; the Native American tribes and Ukraine are nationhood for white liberals). So it's ironic that there's so much revealed preference for monarchy in popular culture (Wakanda, Lord of the Rings, Princess Leia). Curtis compromises with a technocratic, cameral model, selected by actual stakeholders and not everybody who can fog a mirror. As Curtis points out, the universal franchise effectively means anarchy (Hoppe derides it as "soft communism"), and sovereign power will be captured by a State infrastructure, i.e. a Deep State or, what's that term I'm looking for, a "Cathedral."
Trump is the product of a populist reactionary movement who hoists democracy on its own petard because, as it turns out, the Chief Executive has all sorts of power happily ceded by a supine Congress over the years. The Crown Jewel of democracy, the Legislature, no longer governs; iIt was captured by individual gain and the public choice problem long ago.
Great post. I personally don't know how anyone could look at the US government (or really any Western nation) and conclude that 'democracy' as it's currently practiced provides wise or accountable policy to the public it ostensibly serves. As a lot of doomers note, the Constitution was written with a completely different public and culture in mind than the one we have today, and while I admire it conceptually the reality is that the left has long treated it as a speedbump in the way of what they actually want to do, and a growing share of the right is coming to see it the same way. The latter state of affairs is what has given rise to "democracy advocates" who are just progressives alarmed that their political opponents are deciding that they are no longer interested in being good losers.
The UK Conservative Party leader used to be chosen by an opaque “magic circle” process in which the voice of the outgoing premier and the best socially-connected politicians weighed heavily. This method seemed pretty successful at choosing leaders who kept the party in power. Standardizing the rules to a formal vote of the party’s MPs in 1965 and then all party members in 2001 produced socially gauche, relatively unsuccessful leaders.
US political parties did something similar--we transitioned from power brokers choosing the nominee in smoke-filled rooms to primary elections choosing them. This has some benefits but also some costs....
The theory was that the Conservatives loyally asked their monarch to choose their leader for them. In 1963, Elizabeth II had the sense to pass the buck back down to the outgoing Harold Macmillan. Being a Scot and a snob, he chose Alec Douglas-Home, a very able man and also the 14th Earl of Home. When his soon-to-be successor Harold Wilson predictably made an issue of it, Douglas-Home nicely observed that "Mr Wilson is, presumably, the 14th Mr Wilson"; but it was he who abolished the "magic circle" procedure.
Basically the US government is a combination of all 3 types of governance: Congress is democracy, the President is monarchy and the Judiciary is aristocracy/oligarchy.
Only because the legislature has decided it would rather be a collection of junior varsity TV pundits than actual lawmakers, and delegated that task to the executive.
"I’m an American, and we haven’t done kings for 249 years." To be fair, George III was a constitutional monarch. I'm English, and we haven't done absolute monarchs for 336 years; that is, since the Glorious Revolution of 1689 and our Bill of Rights.
Pardon my ignorance, but my understanding is that the British constitution is unwritten. Is the same true for your Bill of Rights? I’d crow about the evident superiority of having a written constitution, but in practice, that doesn’t seem to have helped very much.
In the end, constitution written or unwritten doesn't really matter. What matters is the identity of the judges on the Supreme Court. Cases in point: Sir William Blackstone in England and Roger B Taney in USA. A study in contrasts.
The British constitution is written, but it isn't written in one document with a big title that says CONSTITUTION. So it's the combination of laws, conventions, and historical documents like the Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights.
Thank you. The subject has never been entirely clear to me.
The demarcation line between constitutional and quasi-absolutist British monarchs was a bit blurred in the 18th century. George III was too much hands on to be considered "constitutional" in the mold of Elizabeth II or even Queen Vic. Too many rotten boroughs and all that! And of course too much rule by royal decree in North America.
Had George III pursued an Act of Union with the North American colonies after completion of the 7 years war aka French&Indian W in 1763, as with Scotland in 1707 and Ireland 1801, there would have been no American revolution.
I wonder how many times Mr. Sailer's name has been in the NYT?
18 times:
https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22steve+sailer%22
And counting! Very impressive!
Iin the saner times before the Awokening I used to read the NYT and I loved to occasionally stumble on the comments you left on some of their op-eds. They were surprisingly popular given the leftist readership.
I don't think this 18 is counting comments.
There is a 6 year hiatus 2019-2024 coincident with peak woke?
Steve should do some reading on patrimonialism: Patrimonialism, a term coined by Max Weber, refers to a system of governance where a ruler's power is based on personal loyalties, patron-client relationships, and kin ties. It's characterized by a ruler who doled out rewards and punishments, rather than relying on rational-legal bureaucracy or charisma. Patrimonialism is often associated with corruption, opportunism, and weak state capacity.
What Yarvin is proposing is a form of patrimonialism.
Yarvin is proposing a form of cameralism in which the state is run like a business.
Yarvin is proposing that the federal government be operated like a mafia family.
This is the governance model in Arab monarchies like the United Arab Emirates, befitting their paternalistic cultures and low human capital overall.
It should be noted that rulers have taken advantage of their fabulous wealth, technology, and globalization to increase "state capacity," in the sense of the sheer size and reach of government and preventing any challenges to their rule.
I have long assumed that Steve - like myself - uses multiple Google alerts to keep track of obscure topics that he’s interested in.
But I suspect that “”site:nytimes.com “Steve+Sailer”” was never one he expected to receive an actual alert for.
A vibe shift indeed.
Just imagine the country we’d have if voting was limited to land owning males.
New Hampshire was the first state to have no ownership requirements in 1792 while North Carolina is the last in 1856. Would one have rather been living in North Carolina or New Hampshire in 1856?.
Depends on your skin color.
Most would rather be a white tradesman or farmer in New Hampshire than a hillbilly or live in the low country in North Carolina. North Carolina did not have many counties with large number of slaves or successful ports.
The first lawyer/politician among my ancestors did very well in NC before the War, though the big plantation he bought was in SC. The Baptist preacher from VA married two NC heiresses (in succession). Transportation was definitely a problem, but there were a few railroads. I have a long bench from a prewar railroad hotel's fancy two-story, wraparound porch on my porch right now. One of these years, I'll repaint it.
Looking forward to listening to the book. I love audio books! It makes you a king among men. It’s like you have a personal courtier who reads to you.
I also bought the book but that was just to go in my bookshelf so I can impress my #altright friends during our clandestine meetings.
I’ve tried reading and listening to Yarvin a few times but have given up after a few minutes as he is so circumlocutious.
Steve OTOH has a fine (although not superlative) prose style. Where Steve is head and shoulders above any peer is his ability and willingness to write exactly what he means. Many lack ability or willingness and some in fact lack both.
Is Yarvin a kind of anti-Steve?
One of the key reasons why I read Steve. He gets to the point with superb efficiency. Whatever excess prose there may be is thrown in for humor or as an interesting aside.
Yarvin always struck me as someone less interested in respecting the time of his readers by making his point and succinctly and directly as possible, and more of someone who likes to show off how much he knows. Many such cases.
Attended the event on Monday. Jointly marveled with a Passage Press representative about Steve's ability to write so clearly and directly with good humor.
That's a common and irritating fact of writing in the post-editor era. I love the age of blogs but, unless I've been reading you for years and we have established trust, I need you to reveal the point in the first paragraph. If it's interesting I'll follow your reasoning and evidence for several paragraphs. As a new reader, I'm not following you on a twenty page journey in which you slowly, incrementally, convince me of your point, finally revealed in the ultimate paragraph.
Newspaper editors knew this.
I agree that Yarvin is circumlocutious (did I spell that right?), but I love his style. Maybe it’s because I’m a fellow computer scientist, but his micro-style is familiar and amusing, and his long winded macro-style is helpful to me when I don’t “buy” his point.
I get about two pages in and want to beat the dude over the head until he gets to the f--king point.
Interesting. De gustibis non es disputandum, I suppose. I like my writing like I like my code: clear, concise and readable. Imagine having to debug a Yarvin blogpost.
I always found Rod Dreher, another big conservative writer, to be the wordiest and the worst at getting to the point.
"Or perhaps Professor Allen would make a worthier president, but she’s probably more focused on scholarship than fundraising." She's happy to do fundraising, and she very much wanted to be president. I was astonished they picked Gay over her. But then I remembered what I heard from a campus lifer the first time I was surprised by an unimpressive university president, which is that the boards are looking for someone they can control. Professor Allen isn't any kind of dissident, but she isn't going to be intimidated.
Thanks. I always figured that if Harvard decided that the Theory of Intersectionality required them to get a black woman president, they'd, being Harvard, get the best black woman president.
But this explains why they got Gay instead of Allen.
Ordinarily it requires a 2/3rds majority to elect the pope.
When a programmer (especially one of Yarvin's age) talks about cathedrals, good chance he's referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
Thanks, which led me to a selection of excerpts of Yarvin's essay "The Cathedral or the Bizarre" that I found _slightly_ readable:
https://wentworthreport.com/2022/04/02/the-cathedral-or-the-bizarre-americas-experiments-with-democracy-and-oligarchy-have-both-failed-leaving-only-one-option/
"People who write frequently about race, like Jennifer Schuessler, are actually writing frequently about race and IQ. They just are ignorant of that fact."
sick burn, Steve.
Like others here, I find Yarvin's prose impenetrable. On the other hand, we do need someone to point out that the US and Western European Republics are in some kind of late stage collapse, similar to the Roman Republic in the 100 years before Caesar. Successful republics become imperial, which in turn seems to empower the elites (e.g., the Senatorial class in Rome) to capture the forms of democracy to serve their narrow interests, while impoverishing the lower classes from which "New Men" might come to threaten their hegemony. The gridlock in Congress (which cannot seem to pass any significant legislation--including budgets and debt--without recourse to a single Omnibus bill late in the fiscal year) would be familiar to the Roman citizens of 100 B.C. Ironically, the US (as the UK, Germany and France) IS being run as a business--by and for a small class of mediocre, connected types such as the Bushes, Clintons, Obamas and--most absurdly--Bidens.
“we do need someone to point out that the US and Western European Republics are in some kind of late stage collapse, similar to the Roman Republic in the 100 years before Caesar.”
These kind of assertions are in Popperian terms unfalsifiable by evidence so I tend to avoid these kids of writers.
I'm trying to imagine a written work consisting entirely of falsifiable propositions. What are we talking here, a bookshelf of engineering and scientific textbooks?
Don’t get me wrong I like history.
But using it to make positive claims about the present is unwise.
The issue with all of the democracies is that the voters want a long list of benefits from the government while refusing to pay for those benefits with an appropriate level of taxes.
"His argument that American democracy has exhausted itself and needs to be replaced by a form of one-man rule has made him a star on the right" . . . Uhh, no. His monarchy argument makes no sense, but startles people and he uses it as counterpoint to discuss all the problems inherent in democracy. AFAIK, Yarvin has never named the person or persons he thinks would make a suitable monarch. The reason Harvard was willing to host him for a debate and Antifa wasn't moved to violence is that his monarchist position is absurd and non-threatening.
Like others here, I find Yarvin nerve-wracking to listen to as he bounces from a half-formulated political argument, to an obscure historical reference, to explosive laughter at something he just said, to nervous hems and haws, while dropping the occasional bon mot. His 2009 Unqualified Reservations post on how blacks form a new American aristocracy is classic.
Good for Curtis, saying the quiet parts out loud since the collapse of ideological conservatism with the GW Bush administration. Adrian Vermeule is at Harvard Law as well.
Our Sacred Democracy was way overdue for critique by the time Curtis started blogging. But we can't have kings because we no longer believe in the Divine Mandate, and the monarch is the First Family of the Families and nationhood is illegal as well (except for Israel or, if you're a college student, Palestine; the Native American tribes and Ukraine are nationhood for white liberals). So it's ironic that there's so much revealed preference for monarchy in popular culture (Wakanda, Lord of the Rings, Princess Leia). Curtis compromises with a technocratic, cameral model, selected by actual stakeholders and not everybody who can fog a mirror. As Curtis points out, the universal franchise effectively means anarchy (Hoppe derides it as "soft communism"), and sovereign power will be captured by a State infrastructure, i.e. a Deep State or, what's that term I'm looking for, a "Cathedral."
Trump is the product of a populist reactionary movement who hoists democracy on its own petard because, as it turns out, the Chief Executive has all sorts of power happily ceded by a supine Congress over the years. The Crown Jewel of democracy, the Legislature, no longer governs; iIt was captured by individual gain and the public choice problem long ago.
Great post. I personally don't know how anyone could look at the US government (or really any Western nation) and conclude that 'democracy' as it's currently practiced provides wise or accountable policy to the public it ostensibly serves. As a lot of doomers note, the Constitution was written with a completely different public and culture in mind than the one we have today, and while I admire it conceptually the reality is that the left has long treated it as a speedbump in the way of what they actually want to do, and a growing share of the right is coming to see it the same way. The latter state of affairs is what has given rise to "democracy advocates" who are just progressives alarmed that their political opponents are deciding that they are no longer interested in being good losers.
The UK Conservative Party leader used to be chosen by an opaque “magic circle” process in which the voice of the outgoing premier and the best socially-connected politicians weighed heavily. This method seemed pretty successful at choosing leaders who kept the party in power. Standardizing the rules to a formal vote of the party’s MPs in 1965 and then all party members in 2001 produced socially gauche, relatively unsuccessful leaders.
US political parties did something similar--we transitioned from power brokers choosing the nominee in smoke-filled rooms to primary elections choosing them. This has some benefits but also some costs....
The theory was that the Conservatives loyally asked their monarch to choose their leader for them. In 1963, Elizabeth II had the sense to pass the buck back down to the outgoing Harold Macmillan. Being a Scot and a snob, he chose Alec Douglas-Home, a very able man and also the 14th Earl of Home. When his soon-to-be successor Harold Wilson predictably made an issue of it, Douglas-Home nicely observed that "Mr Wilson is, presumably, the 14th Mr Wilson"; but it was he who abolished the "magic circle" procedure.
Home also gave up his earldom. I can't remember if Heath gave him another peerage after he retired or just a knighthood.
Basically the US government is a combination of all 3 types of governance: Congress is democracy, the President is monarchy and the Judiciary is aristocracy/oligarchy.
And the judiciary has invested itself with final authority.
Only because the legislature has decided it would rather be a collection of junior varsity TV pundits than actual lawmakers, and delegated that task to the executive.