The Dark Enlightenment Lens: Understanding the Slow Strangulation of Democracy

Curtis Yarvin, the blogger behind the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ concept.

Decoding the Threat: Democracy Under Covert Assault

Here in March 2025, the foundations of democratic governance feel increasingly precarious, not necessarily under siege from tanks in the streets, but from something perhaps more insidious: a 'slow strangulation' conducted from within. Across the democratic world, norms erode, institutions buckle, and trust evaporates, yet the precise nature of the threat often remains elusive, obscured by the noise of conventional political analysis focused on surface-level populism or polarization. To truly grasp the danger, we must look deeper, into the radical, often deliberately obscured philosophies that provide blueprints and justifications for dismantling the liberal democratic order itself. Ignoring these undercurrents risks fundamentally misunderstanding the forces at play.

One such crucial, though frequently dismissed, ideological current is the Dark Enlightenment (DE), also known as Neoreaction (NRx). Forged largely in the anonymous depths of online forums and blogs from the late 2000s onwards and associated prominently with thinkers like philosopher Nick Land and blogger Curtis Yarvin (writing as Mencius Moldbug), DE represents a stark, uncompromising rejection of democracy, equality, and the entire legacy of the Enlightenment. It envisions replacing our current system not with reformed democracy, but with explicitly hierarchical, techno-authoritarian regimes - governance modelled, chillingly, on the absolute control of a CEO or the fixed order of a pre-modern monarchy, amplified by 21st-century technology. Once confined to the digital fringe, these ideas have demonstrably gained traction within powerful Silicon Valley circles and, more alarmingly, are showing clear signs of influencing political actors and potentially shaping policy in the highest corridors of power. As Ed Simon warned in Time, drawing parallels to Futurism's dark romance with technology and violence paving the way for Mussolini's fascism (Simon, 2025), dismissing such radical ideologies as mere intellectual curiosities repeats a dangerous historical mistake.

This article, therefore, employs the Dark Enlightenment not just as background context, but as an essential analytical lens to re-examine and decode the slow strangulation process threatening democracies today. By dissecting the core tenets of DE/NRx - its vitriolic critique of the ‘Cathedral,' it’s justifications for hierarchy and elite rule, its specific, tactical proposals for institutional disruption like 'RAGE' - we can illuminate the coherent, though deeply disturbing, logic behind actions that might otherwise seem merely chaotic or opportunistic. Understanding this specific anti-democratic blueprint, and recognizing its potential influence, is critical if we hope to effectively diagnose the danger and mount a meaningful resistance.

J.D. Vance is an apprentice of the Dark Enlightenment.

Sowing Division: The “Cathedral” Critique and the War on Reality

The DE framework provides a powerful lens for understanding how societal grievances are weaponized. While economic hardship and cultural anxieties are real (Hochschild, 2016), DE interprets them not as problems within democracy, but as proof of democracy's failure. Central to this is Yarvin's concept of "The Cathedral": the perceived interconnected network of universities, media outlets, NGOs, and civil servants that allegedly enforces a dominant progressive ideology, stifles dissent, and maintains the status quo (Stanley, 2018; Yarvin's writings). From the DE perspective, figures railing against "elites," "fake news," and "wokeism" aren't just employing populist rhetoric; they are attacking components of this "Cathedral." Scapegoating immigrants, intellectuals, or "globalists" becomes a tactic not merely for diversion, but for identifying perceived enemies of the supposedly suppressed 'true' order. DE’s inherent anti-egalitarianism provides justification for amplifying cultural backlash (Norris and Inglehart, 2019), framing struggles over values not as legitimate debates, but as conflicts against a decadent, illegitimate system. Furthermore, originating online, DE intrinsically understands the power of digital information warfare (Benkler, Faris and Roberts, 2018). The goal of creating an "epistemic fog" through disinformation isn't just chaos; from a DE viewpoint, it's about undermining the "Cathedral's" control over information and narrative, offering followers a "red pill" (as Yarvin termed it) to escape the perceived liberal matrix (Applebaum, 2020; Snyder, 2017).

Dark MAGA/Dark Enlightenment through DOGE

The Trojan Horse: Authoritarian Means via Democratic Façades

How does a movement fundamentally opposed to democracy gain power within one? The DE lens suggests seeing electoral politics not as an end, but as a means - a vulnerability to be exploited. Populist leaders who challenge the "Cathedral" (media, established norms), even if not pure NRx adherents themselves, can become useful vehicles. The El País article notes how Donald Trump's 2016 victory, with its authoritarian style and challenge to norms, resonated with NRx tenets (Fanjul, 2024). The cult of personality (Ben-Ghiat, 2020) built around such leaders aligns with DE's preference for strong, hierarchical leadership - Carlyle's "heroes" or Hegel's "great men" cited by Yarvin - over messy democratic consensus. Furthermore, DE ideas have found favour with influential figures in the tech world, representing a key pathway from fringe theory to potential political power. Notably, Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder, serves as a prime example: he not only provided early funding and support for Curtis Yarvin but also famously declared his scepticism about democracy's compatibility with freedom (Simon, 2025). Furthermore, Thiel has acted as a mentor and key backer for politicians like J.D. Vance. Significantly, Vance himself has reportedly acknowledged Yarvin's influence, highlighting a potential chain through which DE ideas, filtered through elite patronage, can reach the corridors of power (Simon, 2025; Fanjul, 2024). The backing of such DE-sympathetic elites for particular candidates or movements illustrates a strategic infiltration of mainstream politics, using the existing system to place personnel potentially hostile to its core principles.

Hollowing Out the State: Implementing the DE Blueprint

Once a significant position of power is secured - control of the executive, a legislative majority, or key regional governments - the truly corrosive work begins: the systematic undermining of democratic institutions from within. This ‘hollowing out’ process is often incremental, presented as necessary reform or efficiency measures, making it harder to recognize as a concerted attack until significant damage is done. Viewed through the DE/NRx lens, these are not random acts but calculated moves targeting the perceived pillars of the "Cathedral" and the checks on executive power deemed illegitimate. The assault on the neutral state apparatus - the professional civil service, the diplomatic corps, intelligence agencies - follows a logic of loyalty over expertise. Career professionals are systematically sidelined or purged, replaced by political appointees whose main credential is allegiance to the leader, undermining institutional knowledge and impartiality (Bauer and Becker, 2020). Yarvin's explicit "RAGE" ("Retire All Government Employees") strategy (Simon, 2025) provides a direct blueprint for this, aiming to dismantle the administrative state seen as part of the "Cathedral." Initiatives like the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) pursuing mass firings under the guise of a "hard reboot" (Simon, 2025) can be interpreted as attempts to implement this vision, aligning government purely with the executive's will, akin to a CEO restructuring a company - a core NRx analogy.

Simultaneously, the judiciary, designed as a crucial check, faces subversion. The DE disdain for democratic constraints manifests in Yarvin's advice to simply "ignore courts" when they obstruct the executive agenda (Simon, 2025), coupled with his belief that the sovereign is "above the law." This perspective rationalizes attacks on judicial independence, the intimidation of judges, or court-packing schemes as necessary steps towards asserting the absolute authority DE favors over constitutional or legal limits (Ginsburg and Huq, 2018). Furthermore, the core ideological nodes of the "Cathedral" - the free press and academia - face neutralization efforts. Branding journalists "enemies of the people" and pursuing efforts to "liquidate universities" (Yarvin's term, cited by Simon, 2025) are direct assaults intended to silence critical inquiry and control the narrative. Delegitimizing independent media through various pressures (Repucci and Slipowitz, 2021) allows the regime's propaganda to dominate. Even the electoral process itself is targeted; from a DE perspective, democratic elections are merely a feature of the flawed system. Undermining their legitimacy through tactics like voter suppression, gerrymandering, or casting pre-emptive doubt on results (Norris, 2014) serves the larger goal of discrediting democracy itself.

The Iron Fist: Securing the New Order

As these institutional pillars weaken, the regime's grip tightens, moving towards the consolidation of power and the silencing of effective opposition. From a DE perspective, this is the necessary phase of securing the new, hierarchical order against remnants of the democratic "old regime." The use of "lawfare" (Ginsburg and Huq, 2018), turning the legal system against opponents, becomes a tool for purging ideological enemies. Extra-legal intimidation and the chilling of free speech create the fearful conformity conducive to authoritarian rule. Restricting freedoms of assembly and association dismantles potential sources of organized resistance. Economic coercion - rewarding loyalists and punishing dissenters - aligns the economy with the centralized power structure, echoing the NRx idea of the state run like a corporation. The tech industry ethos to "Move fast and break things," as Time notes (Simon, 2025), finds a disturbing political parallel here. Rewriting constitutions becomes the final step in formalizing the anti-democratic reality.

Towards the Abyss: The DE Vision as Endgame

The potential endpoint envisioned through the Dark Enlightenment lens transcends generic totalitarianism (Arendt, 1973), taking on specific, technologically-infused authoritarian characteristics. One prominent NRx model is neocameralism, conceptualizing the state explicitly as a business enterprise - a 'gov-corp' - run by a CEO-ruler accountable only to 'shareholders' (whose influence might correlate with wealth or loyalty) rather than to citizens endowed with rights. Efficiency, order, and profitability, rather than public good or individual liberty, become the paramount goals. Governance becomes a service provided under strict hierarchical control, mirroring corporate structures.

This vision often overlaps with or evolves into what some analysts, including in El País, term techno-feudalism (Fanjul, 2024). Here, power concentrates not just in a state-CEO but also in vast, unaccountable technology platforms and corporations that mediate essential aspects of life. Citizens become dependent subjects, their data harvested, and their choices managed by algorithms, creating new forms of rent extraction and social control reminiscent of feudal dependency, but enacted through digital means. DE's inherent anti-egalitarianism finds its ultimate expression here, as technology - AI, mass surveillance, potentially even genetic data - could enable unprecedented levels of social sorting, enforcing rigid hierarchies based on perceived merit, intelligence, or ideological compliance. Nick Land's chilling vision of "cybernetic authoritarianism" speaks to rule by algorithms or AI-guided elites, potentially indifferent to human concerns altogether.

This desired endgame often incorporates the NRx concept of "Exit." For the elite sympathetic to or empowered by this ideology, "Exit" signifies not just political disengagement but potentially physical or virtual secession - creating technologically advanced enclaves, charter cities, seasteading platforms, or even pursuing off-world colonization - leaving behind the perceived chaos and mediocrity of democratic society. Whether realized as neocameralism, techno-feudalism, or some hybrid, the DE endgame represents a conscious and wholesale inversion of Enlightenment ideals: liberty replaced by stratified control, equality by explicit hierarchy, and universal rights by differential status within a corporate or technologically managed order.

Seeds of Defiance: Resisting the Dark Enlightenment

Yet, this narrative of inexorable decline is not a prophecy; it is a warning. Understanding the threat through the DE/NRx lens also clarifies the nature of resistance. If the assault is fundamentally anti-Enlightenment and anti-democratic, then resistance must involve a conscious defence of Enlightenment values: reason, liberty, equality, solidarity, free inquiry. This defence necessitates, first and foremost, protecting the very institutions under attack. Recognizing that assaults on the press, universities, courts, and impartial expertise are fundamentally attacks on democratic deliberation and accountability - targeting the perceived 'Cathedral' - makes their robust defence crucial. Equally vital is the commitment to upholding truth in the face of deliberate epistemic warfare; this means actively countering disinformation and the 'epistemic fog' by supporting independent media, prioritizing fact-checking, and fostering widespread critical thinking skills (Snyder, 2017). Furthermore, resistance involves strengthening civil society - the NGOs, unions, religious congregations, and community groups that provide alternative power centres and spaces for dissent (Kaldor, 2003), pushing back against the social atomization potentially favoured by DE visions. Finally, it demands a resolute affirmation of democratic norms: consistently insisting on the legitimacy of democratic processes, the inviolability of the rule of law, the protection of minority rights, and the imperative of peaceful transfers of power, directly confronting ideologies like DE/NRx that explicitly reject these foundational principles (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018).

Vigilance and Fortitude: Recognizing the Ideological Battleground

Viewing the slow strangulation of democracy through the lens of the Dark Enlightenment reveals more than just cynical power grabs; it exposes a coherent, radical ideology fundamentally opposed to the principles of modern democracy. It helps explain the seemingly irrational intensity of attacks on institutions like universities or the press - they are seen as core components of the despised "Cathedral." It illuminates the logic behind plans like "RAGE" or the desire for an "imperial presidency," linking them to NRx's preference for authoritarian efficiency and hierarchy (Simon, 2025). Recognizing that influential figures in tech and politics (Thiel, Vance, Musk and Andreessen) find resonance in these ideas (Simon, 2025; Fanjul, 2024) underscores the urgency.

Understanding this specific ideological current, however niche, sharpens our vigilance. It moves beyond decrying populism or polarization in general terms to identifying a specific, intellectually articulated hostility towards democracy itself, one that provides justification for the tactics of institutional erosion and power consolidation. Across the United Kingdom and the wider democratic world, the challenges are interconnected, and the defence requires recognizing not just the symptoms but also the underlying philosophical assaults. The mundane work of resistance - upholding ethics, challenging lies, supporting independent institutions, participating civically - becomes a direct counter-action against the DE vision. Democracy, this perspective reminds us, is not merely a set of procedures but a commitment to values actively contested by ideologies that seek its demise. Protecting it demands not just participation, but a clear-eyed defence of its foundational principles against those, like the proponents of the Dark Enlightenment, who explicitly wish to extinguish them. Ultimately, the narrative of the slow strangulation serves as a stark reminder: democracy is not an endpoint achieved, but a continuous, demanding practice, and liberty, once lost, is extraordinarily difficult to regain. The price of freedom remains eternal vigilance.

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References

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