The Divine Right of CEOs

Hey,

Longtime readers know I have a gripe against new ideas in politics. For those unfamiliar with the argument, it goes like this. Most new ideas in politics aren’t new. But adherents of old ideas—fascism, communism, socialism, nationalism, corporatism, technocracy, theocracy, etc.—have a bunch of incentives to pretend that they’ve come up with something new. Sometimes they claim the idea is wholly novel. Other times, they claim that they have new insight that demonstrates the wisdom and the superiority of some old ideas. Or they think the moment we are living in is so novel, so unprecedented, that these old ideas have taken on new relevance. 

For instance, there’s nothing new to DEI. Or rather, virtually everything new to it is just fresh marketing of old ideas about social justice or identity politics. But because people fell for the marketing as some new and/or improved thing, it made remarkable headway in a lot of institutions. Its critics believed that it was new, too. And as a result, they believed that they needed new tactics and new arguments to combat it. The problem is that the old arguments against racial preferences, government-enforced “equity,” etc., were all we needed. Tom Sowell didn’t write about “DEI” in the ’80s and ’90s because the term didn’t exist then. But he demolished the ideas at the heart of  DEI all the same. 

I will give credit to the peddlers of postliberalism and nationalism; they at least concede that their ideas are old. They just think this new moment confers on them new sagacity and seriousness. They benefit enormously from the fact that so much of the left, particularly in academia, has given up on defending classical liberalism and the “political science” (as it was understood in the Federalist Papers) of the founders and the enlightenment. 

The left has long been addicted to the most desired thing in intellectual life today—transgressive edginess, hip non-conformity. That’s how I see the long tradition of left-wing radicalism from Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, to all of that Frankfurt School folderol, Howard Zinn’s and Noam Chomsky’s anti-American claptrap, to the more recent iterations of the same ideas that go by a dozen different labels and buzzy phrases: institutional racism, antiracism, anticolonialism, etc. What they all share is a desire to seem authentically rebellious by attacking the foundations of our nation and our civilization. The problem is that such ideological non-conformity has become so institutionalized that it’s become an expression of ideological conformity. When writing a college essay with just “#BlackLivesMatter” repeated 100 times gets you into Stanford, any pretensions to radicalism look ridiculous. It calls to mind Eric Hoffer’s famously misquoted line, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” (Our new editor Valerie informs me that the real line is “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.”)

In such an environment, claiming that the Enlightenment was a mistake, the Constitution is an “outdated” relic, and nationalism, socialism, corporatism, (new age) theocracy, or authoritarianism are better than liberal democratic capitalism is a banal conformist racket when it comes from the left. 

But it is edgy cool radicalism from the right.  

I for one find it hilarious when progressives are stunned and outraged at such arguments from the right, when they’ve spent decades yawning at, or cheerleading for, the same illiberal hokum from the left. The left counted on the right to make the arguments against identitarianism and for the Constitution, the free market, and property rights. Now that some on the right are making the same arguments, for superficially right-wing rather than left-wing ends, leftists are horrified and broadly ignorant of the counterarguments. If all you’ve done is read anti-liberal broadsides from Foucault and Fanon, Marx and Marcuse, you’ve got little in your quiver to shoot at rightwingers making basically the same arguments, other than vague allusion to norms, lame charges of hypocrisy, and, of course, lots of ad hominem outrage.

That outrage is a great gift to the new anti-liberals on the right, because it makes them seem cool. And there’s nothing a certain breed of intellectual craves more than seeming cool. That in itself is kind of ironic, given that one of the things a lot of the new illiberals detest about American culture is the obsession with the shallow culture of cool and the chasing of radical chic. But that’s what Steve Bannon and many of his more intellectual imitators love about their status: they finally get to cosplay as radicals. 

The new monarchs.

I listened to the full New York Times interview with Curtis Yarvin the other day. Also known by the nom de cyber Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin is one of the intellectual leaders of the so-called neo-monarchist or neo-reactionary movements. We have some similar interests and observations (we also have massive disagreements), but for the most part, I’ve ignored his writings. Recently, though, he’s become more popular, particularly in Silicon Valley, and has been name-checked by people like J.D. Vance and Marc Andreessen. So it made sense for the Times to interview him, and I figured it’d be worth my time to give it a listen. 

To say I was underwhelmed with this introduction to The World According to Yarvin is a wild understatement. This is not to say I disagreed with everything he said. I’ve written tons about the way people misunderstand democracy. I revisited some of that just last month. Anyway, the point Yarvin made over and over again should be familiar to my readers because I make it all the time. Most institutions—businesses, newspapers, political parties, the military, etc.—are not internally democratic, and it would be disastrous if they were. Soldiers don’t get to vote on what hill to take and employees don’t get to vote on what products a company makes. Surgeons don’t poll the nurses and orderlies about what organs to remove or cut into. This is not a shocking insight. Or at least it shouldn’t be. I think everyone understands that the Catholic Church wouldn’t work if the pope held referenda on doctrine. 

But Yarvin takes this observation and reaches a bewilderingly wrongheaded conclusion: Government shouldn’t be democratic either. We need a monarch or, if you prefer, a CEO to run the nation. Apple is a great company, so America should be run like Apple, Yarvin says. No, really. Indeed, he says every business is a monarchy and the New York Times is an “absolute monarchy.”

But you know what? The Times is not a monarchy, absolute or otherwise. In absolute monarchies, people are subjects lacking agency. At Apple, you can quit. In medieval France, you couldn’t quit your obligations to the social order as defined by the regime —at least not without permission from the monarch. Apple employees have rights—rights enforced by our constitutional regime. They can worship as they please. They can say what they want in their private lives for the most part. They can marry who they want without the permission of their feudal lord. They have private property the CEO cannot take away. Oh, and the CEOs are often answerable to shareholders—and to the government, which protects the intellectual property and physical safety of these corporate campuses. 

The whole thing is just one giant category error on stilts.  

Now, I’d guess that Yarvin’s preferred monarchical America would not involve King Elon invoking the (mythical) right of prima nocta to shtup the bride on her wedding night. But what authority would prevent that? To what principle or institution would a person appeal if the new authoritarian CEO ordered you to be a stonemason when you wanted to be a chiropractor? The CEO knows best, after all, and his authority is supreme in Yarvin’s telling. Or maybe it’s not. But Yarvin uses monarch, CEO, and dictator fairly interchangeably. His only concession to the idea that dictators are bad is that the term has taken on a sinister connotation, not that the actual thing itself is sinister. 

When Bernie Sanders said, “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country,” conservatives had a field day with this classically vulgar Marxist whine. He was tapping into a great tradition on the left of whining about how the market allocates resources in ways that central planners would find wasteful. 

Why mock such dirigisme from the left, if you want the same sort of thing from a frick’n king? Or CEO, or monarch? Again, he uses these terms interchangeably as if there is no meaningful difference between them.

One of the nice things about democracy is that people can overrule the rulers. The whole point of a monarchy is that the ruler’s word is final. 

I could go on for hours about the silliness of all this (and I am sorely tempted to do so on The Remnant). After all, Yarvin is just offering an updated version of the hoary idea that government should be run like a business, with more allusions to Aristotle to make it sound cool. 

Apple isn’t proof that monarchy works, it’s proof that liberal democratic capitalism is good at creating firms like Apple. As Alex Tabarrok writes in a post about the Yarvin interview: 

There are many errors here. First, Apple is one firm among countless others most of which do not produce hugely successful products. The big question is not how Apple produces but how Apple is produced. Firms operate as planned entities but they are embedded in and constrained by a broader sea of market competition. It’s the competitive environment that drives innovation, efficiency, and consumer satisfaction.

Part of my objection to Yarvin’s schtick is how much it seems like he read Liberal Fascism and missed the point entirely. He starts with a riff about FDR:

I do a speech sometimes where I’ll just read the last 10 paragraphs of F.D.R.’s first inaugural address, in which he essentially says, Hey, Congress, give me absolute power, or I’ll take it anyway. So did F.D.R. actually take that level of power? Yeah, he did.

After some very annoying interjections from the interviewer, he talks about an anecdote from Harold Ickes’ diary that Yarvin apparently passed on to Marc Andreessen:

It’s an excerpt from the diary of Harold Ickes, who is F.D.R.’s secretary of the interior, describing a cabinet meeting in 1933. What happens in this cabinet meeting is that Frances Perkins, who’s the secretary of labor, is like, Here, I have a list of the projects that we’re going to do. F.D.R. personally takes this list, looks at the projects in New York and is like, This is crap. Then at the end of the thing, everybody agrees that the bill would be fixed and then passed through Congress. This is F.D.R. acting like a C.E.O. So, was F.D.R. a dictator? I don’t know. What I know is that Americans of all stripes basically revere F.D.R., and F.D.R. ran the New Deal like a start-up.

Now, in fairness to Yarvin, he’s trying to convince progressives that dictatorship or “CEOship” is good, so he is trying to get people to see FDR as a dictator who did things progressives think was great. But I don’t think that. I think FDR did some good things and some terrible things. I think he made the Great Depression last a lot longer than it needed to and entrenched all manner of policies that no wise CEO would impose.

The thing is, I know this history very, very, well. I wrote about it at length in Liberal Fascism. And I don’t think it’s outrageous to say that FDR behaved like a dictator at times. But, he wasn’t a dictator. He was a popular president with massive supermajorities in Congress during an economic crisis. When Congress didn’t give him what he wanted or when the Supreme Court overruled him, he didn’t ignore them. Don’t get me wrong, he broke a lot of rules, violated a lot of norms, threatened the Supreme Court with court packing and did all manner of things I find outrageous. So if you want to call him a dictator, I might roll my eyes a bit, but I’m not going to go all “How dare you, sir?”

I mean, one of my favorite bits from Harold Ickes’s diary was when he recorded FDR acknowledging (in Ickes’ words), “What we were doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in [Stalin’s] Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany. But we were doing them in an orderly way.”

Yes, the real problem with Nazism and Stalinism was the lack of “orderliness.” And how was this orderliness imposed? With the force of the state. 

In 1934, a Polish immigrant named Jacob Maged was charging 35 cents to press men’s suits, a nickel less than the government-set price of 40 cents. (His shop was in a bad location, so he competed with better-placed businesses by offering lower prices.) But under New Deal industrial codes, this was a crime, and he was sent to prison for a month. Though the judge let him out after three days, the point was made.

Yarvin looks at this period and says, “We need more of that! But when I get my preferred system, what the monarch wants, the monarch gets.” 

Such outrages were not confined to a few outliers; this was how the system worked. The New Deal rewarded big interests, large corporations, associations, guilds, etc. at the expense of the little guys. When Clarence Darrow—yes, that Clarence Darrow—wrote a final report on how the National Recovery Administration actually worked, he concluded: “one condition has been persistent. … In Industry after Industry, the larger units, sometimes through the agency of … [a trade association], sometimes by other means, have for their own advantage written the codes, and then, in effect and for their own advantage, assumed the administration of the code they have framed.”

I get why some Silicon Valley fatcats might look favorably on a system that allows the big players with access to the monarch to write the rules for the economy. Heck, it seems like we might be seeing some of that right now and for the same reason the politically connected leaders of big business loved Wilson’s war socialism and FDR’s New Deal. It’s the same reason that corporatism has been popular with the incumbent stakeholders—medieval guilds, feudal lords, etc.—throughout the centuries: They get to make the rules that ensure they stay at the top of the food chain. But if you want more Apples or Googles, you need a system where the Apples and Googles can fail at the hands of the market without being bailed out by the government. 

Simply put, you can’t run a free society like a business, because a free society isn’t a frick’n business. 

Again, I am not a democracy fetishist. I think democracy is a hedge against worse outcomes, not a guarantor of best outcomes. I am open to the idea that—at least for a while—a constitutional monarch would govern better than what we’ve had for a while. But the constitution part is hugely important. I care a lot more about the liberalism of the Bill of Rights than I do about the proceduralism of democracy. But any such system has three—at least three—fatal problems. First, legitimacy. In a liberal democratic society, we accept the government because it is democratically legitimate. What is the legitimacy-conferring principle a new monarch would invoke? God? Good luck with that. Second, how do you hold a monarch accountable? CEOs get fired by shareholders or trustees all the time. Once you accept that we’d need some kind of checks and balances to prevent tyrants, you run into problem No. 1 again. How do you pick the board and uphold their legitimacy? If it’s not via democracy, what is it? If it is via democracy, why not just elect the monarch in the first place? Last, even if we had some mix of Lee Kuan Yew and Mitch Daniels running everything, how do we pick his replacement? The first CEO to draw a sword from a stone? 

I’m sorry for droning on like this. I really don’t think these unserious ideas should be taken seriously. But the fact that a lot of serious people do take them seriously demands a rebuttal—many rebuttals—before they catch on further. This bullshit isn’t cool, novel, or edgy. It’s trite, sophomoric, facile, and profoundly unpatriotic.