Global Right-Wing Watch: Is Going Backward Moving Forward?

Friends, today let's talk about the future of China-US relations. China and the US have many differences, but both sides agree on one point: the China-US relationship will fundamentally shape the twenty-first century. So to find the right way to get along, we must first understand what kind of country America will be in the future. No one knows the answer to this question of our time, but we can look for clues. The first clue is that photo of Trump after surviving the assassination attempt, blood at the corner of his mouth, raising his fist and shouting. What I see is not some highlight moment of journalism, but the death throes of an old system. Imagine this: this unsustainable system, inspired by militarism, sees its elite class constantly expanding outward, exporting the wars they are best at, plundering resources, importing immigrants, suppressing labor costs, driving ordinary citizens into a dead end of internal competition, and polarizing the nation. The upper class can extract rents without producing anything, while the lower class can barely make ends meet despite working desperately. Then, a traitor emerges from among the powerful—he transforms into a spokesman for the common people, becomes a leader through a populist movement, and invites an assassination conspiracy from the elites, blood splattering on the spot. I am not talking about the lucky Trump, but the unlucky Caesar. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes; this moment is exactly like that moment two thousand years ago. After Caesar's death Rome fell into civil war, the republican era ended, and the imperial era began. Now Trump said "Not Today" to the Grim Reaper, proving he has the mandate of heaven—so can we skip the intermediate steps? I am not saying Trump wants to become emperor; that would be too absurd. But do you really think no one has ever entertained that idea? Some have. Let me solemnly introduce the most American of counter-trend walkers: his real name is Curtis Yarvin, his online name Mencius Moldbug, which literally translates as "Mencius Moldbug," and his true identity: a programmer. Yarvin's father was a diplomat, and he grew up following him all over the world, which gave him an insight: why has America never had a revolution? Because America has no American embassy. At 12 he returned to the US and transferred into high school; at 25 he entered Johns Hopkins' gifted program; later he went to UC Berkeley for a computer science PhD, quickly dropped out, and became a coder, making those very early mobile phone browsers. Within a few years the company was acquired and he took the money and left. By Silicon Valley standards it wasn't much, but enough to start a spiritual quest. It happened that the internet was just taking off, and a bunch of old books with expired copyrights were unavailable in stores but readable online, so he plunged into the old paper stacks and taught himself history, politics, and Austrian-school economic philosophy. He most admired these figures: the philosopher David Hume, who used empiricism to question human reason; the writer Thomas Carlyle, originator of the great-man theory of history, because in his view history is nothing but biographies of great men; the historian James Froude, who criticized democracy and believed the masses lack the capacity for self-government and that rule must rely on elites; and the economist Hoppe, who believed that monarchical private ownership of the realm is far better than democratic public ownership. Nourished by all this, Yarvin finally had his enlightenment moment and decided to found his own school—in the internet context of the time, that meant writing a blog. From 2007 to 2016, under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, he wrote millions of words of political commentary, much of it explosive renegade content, such as "Why, When, and How to Abolish America?", arguing that America should split into efficient city-states like Singapore, otherwise it would be as bloated and unwieldy as Microsoft. He also had an innovation you may actually have heard of: turning the "red pill" truth device from The Matrix into an anti-establishment political concept. Nowadays any young brother who wants to be a big shot in right-wing circles has to use the red pill to reverse-engineer the progressive left's grand circulation. In short, Yarvin became a maverick keyboard warrior, and the faction he founded was called the neoreactionaries. Reaction against what? Against the dispersion of power. Aristotle said government has three forms—monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy—each with healthy and degenerate versions, and the difference lies nowhere else but in whether power is concentrated in the hands of one person, a few people, or millions of people. Modern societies that went through the Enlightenment all praise democracy, believing that rule by the people is an inherent good, and democracy has become what Churchill called "the least bad system compared with the others." But Yarvin believes that for most of antiquity the norm was monarchy, that the Enlightenment is only an exception in history, and that the democracy it brought the world is a dead end—because democracy is not a means to good governance but the purpose of politics itself, and so it constantly reinforces itself, encourages mutually checking power games, and breeds more hypocrisy, deception, and inaction. In the neoreactionary view, for America to be great again it must put history in reverse: they strongly oppose the Whig view of history—that the wheels of history roll forward irresistibly—and demand a return to traditional political, economic, and social models. What is traditional? Hunter-gatherer society, the caste system, male superiority and female inferiority, absolute monarchy, laissez-faire capitalism—all can count; in any case, it means resetting the parameters and returning to the imperial era when the Western powers were at their zenith. So in Yarvin's eyes the returning king absolutely cannot be a constitutional-monarchy figurehead like Elizabeth II; it must be an Elizabeth I, or a Napoleon, an Atatürk, a Roosevelt. In name he need not be called king or emperor, but he must absolutely control the state apparatus, and must no longer be dispersed and diluted by the church as in the Middle Ages. Where is the contemporary priestly class? Yarvin points to the news media, higher education, and the bureaucracy, collectively calling them "The Cathedral." After the Cathedral made liberal-democratic progress the state religion, it became rigid and complacent, causing society to rot and decay; now it is time to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. The state needs a Caesar just as a company needs a CEO: whether an enterprise can grow big and strong has nothing to do with democracy—it does not rely on employee votes or board interference; it requires the CEO to be unbound by immediate interests, to responsibly dictate from the long-term interests of the enterprise, and then everyone learns to let go and trust that the boss will surely act in the company's interest. What America needs most today is a heaven-sent strongman, a chosen one born from the democratic myth of Black Myth: Wukong, who will revolutionize himself, personally dismantle the administrative bureaucracy that disperses power, abolish the apocrypha of democracy, and return to the true scripture of kingship. Rock fans with a bit of revolutionary spirit may know that California has a band called Rage Against The Machine—a very good name. But Yarvin thinks they are weak: in his view, RAGE should really mean Retire All Government Employees. Fast-forward to now. The American conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation has proposed "Project 2025," full name "Presidential Transition Project 2025." Who is the conservative president? Trump, of course. And what does transition mean? Firing all federal employees and replacing them with MAGA-loyal Trump loyalists, ultimately evolving the separation-of-powers structure toward executive supremacy—that is, the contemporary monarchy Yarvin longs for. Because the idea is too radical, Trump can only keep his distance from it. But don't forget, there is a person by his side named J.D. Vance. Vance, born in the 1980s, is Trump's running mate, from a typical poor Rust Belt family surrounded by alcohol, drugs, and violence; his closest grandmother once in a rage poured oil all over his grandfather and nearly set him on fire. From being as low as dirt to now being second only to one man and above all others, Vance's rise is a miracle. And the California keyboard warrior Yarvin is precisely this phoenix man's guide in political philosophy. How did these two come together? Let me keep you in suspense and start another narrative. In 2010 the Shanghai World Expo proposed that "Better City, Better Life." A British scholar living in seclusion in Shanghai shuttled through the alleys of the magic city and eventually wrote a strange book, The 2010 Shanghai Expo Guide. It contains not only expo information but more cultural studies and reflections on modernity: on one hand it mourns the past and laments the present, believing that expo legacies like London's Crystal Palace and Paris's Eiffel Tower symbolize that the West has already bid farewell to its age of passion; on the other hand it highly praises China's development speed, believing China is most likely to lead humanity to bid farewell to the 1.0 version of modernity brought by the Western Enlightenment and create a 2.0 version of modernity, because it has become the world's greatest engine. This praise ultimately does not come from affirming China's improvement of people's livelihoods, but from an abstract worship of speed and motion: humanity's future belongs to technology and hardcore tech. To borrow the famous line from The Three-Body Problem, his position can be summed up as—accelerate, accelerate, accelerate by any means necessary. This man is the accelerationist philosopher Nick Land. To understand Land, one must return to the first accelerationist, Karl Marx. Marx sharply criticized free trade yet supported free trade: because free trade can bring the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to its peak and accelerate social revolution. That is, he discovered that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction; rather than tinkering, it is better to catalyze the contradictions, let it accelerate its own grave-digging, and use its own spear against its own shield. After World War II capitalism weathered the crisis, world revolution entered a low tide, and the European left had to find another path: Deleuze and Guattari replaced dialectics with psychoanalysis and wrote Capitalism and Schizophrenia, identifying that destructive factor Marx found in free trade and naming it "deterritorialization"—letting desire flow freely and escape discipline, causing social hierarchies to lose stability. They regarded this as a primordial revolutionary force far older than capitalism: with it, humanity would not simply negate capitalism but use capitalism's schizophrenia to cross the "body without organs," smash capitalism's wall, and enter a highly creative stage of production. In plain terms: to make it perish, first make it mad. Back to Land. In the 1990s he taught continental philosophy at the University of Warwick in Britain and, with a group of young scholars, founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), sitting around theorizing all day like characters in a cyberpunk novel, exploring the intersection of technology, capital, and desire. Their behavior was rather outrageous—too many drugs, unable to distinguish reality from hallucination, and even, due to excessive obsession with Cthulhu mythos, actually going to Sumatra in Indonesia to summon ancient sea beasts. Ultimately Land stitched cybernetics' feedback mechanism together with deterritorialization to form accelerationism: its core is a process that constantly self-excites through positive feedback, and this process leads to ultimate freedom and liberation. You may ask, what does this have to do with me? To put it bluntly—nothing at all; not only with you and me, but with anyone. Thinking it should have something to do with us is anthropocentrism at work, a delusion that heaven and earth belong to us. Land explicitly states he has no interest in human liberation; the only thing he cares about is the liberation of the means of production: to hell with Kant—man is not an end, man is insignificant, technology has its own purpose. He is exactly the opposite of the Luddites of Rage Against the Machine—not to unbind people from machines, but to let machines completely break free of human shackles and roar to their heart's content. Around the turn of the millennium, Land bade farewell to the past and headed for the future, choosing seclusion in the magic city, and described what he had written before as ancient dark speech with too strong a drug flavor. Finally in 2013, two high-intensity internet creatures met and regretted not meeting sooner: the hermit Land read Mencius Moldbug and felt immensely exhilarated, giving neoreactionism a cool name—the Dark Enlightenment, specifically to reverse the damage caused by the Enlightenment, namely democratic politics. Yarvin believes democracy is the cancer of humanity, and Land goes further, writing: democracy has not only met its end, it is the end itself—because democracy's fundamental driving force is degeneration, the systematic consolidation of private ugliness, resentment, and deceit, until it reaches the level of collective crime and comprehensively corrupts society. Therefore, escaping democracy is the ultimate necessity. At this point, acceleration and reaction finally converge, and next someone must be arranged to sit in the driver's seat so the car can accelerate in reverse. But neither faction is interested in humanity or the people, so whom to put in the driver's seat? Autonomous driving, my friend! Yes, this force is artificial intelligence. According to Land's thesis, capitalism and artificial intelligence are two sides of the same coin: only capitalism can create artificial intelligence, and only artificial intelligence can purify capitalism—let this Cthulhu self-generate and self-propel. Since we've reached the tech world, let's branch out again. The tech world has an alternative idol named Elon Musk, seen by many outsiders as Iron Man; but for many tech bigwigs, the true representative of Silicon Valley spirit, that obsessive pursuit of creative destruction, comes from Peter Thiel. Musk of course disagrees, saying Thiel has an antisocial personality, while Thiel says Musk is a big con man. The love-hate relationship between these two dates back to the end of the last century: Windows 98 opened the door to the new century, the internet made people imagine how cool the future would be, and Palo Alto, California attracted top students to embark on entrepreneurial paths, becoming the center of Silicon Valley's universe. At 394 University Avenue, two small companies were then renting space: Company A was Musk's X.com, Company B was Thiel's Confinity. Both Musk and Thiel are immigrants—Musk from South Africa, Thiel from Germany—and both attended Stanford: Thiel completed a philosophy bachelor's and a law doctorate, while Musk dropped out of his physics PhD after just two days. To avoid becoming competitors, Musk, who had just made his first pot of gold, proposed acquiring Thiel's company; the new company was later renamed PayPal. Soon Thiel stabbed Musk in the back: legal experts manipulated the board vote to force Musk to give up the CEO position. Musk learned the lesson of being too trusting from this experience, while Thiel distilled the truth that the board must be sidelined—something he later used on Zuckerberg: as the first outside investor, he ensured the Facebook empire would be ruled by Zuckerberg alone. Many of the PayPal Mafia who helped Thiel take down Musk were his Stanford alumni. Actually this is because Thiel had deep connections at Stanford: in 1987 he founded the campus newspaper The Stanford Review, attacking the left's biggest political correctness, "equality," and insisting on an elitist libertarianism that believes the law of the jungle is the natural order and government should not defy heaven. Many of the brothers who later followed Thiel around the world fighting battles came out of that editorial board. PayPal also carried forward the virtue of libertarianism; as the American version of Alipay, it was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. Alright, the clues are laid out. The old system is in its death throes, and Caesar's story may be rhyming once again; the neoreactionaries want to reverse history, the accelerationists want to step on the gas, the two factions converge, and all that remains is a strongman to sit in the driver's seat. What Silicon Valley's billionaires are fighting over is exactly this steering wheel. As for how Vance, sitting in the passenger seat, actually colluded with the reclusive Land in Shanghai and the blogging Yarvin—that is the next story. Let us wait and see.