When Democracy Dies

The Theater of Democracy In Crisis

On a fall evening in New York City, just a mile from where George Washington refused a crown in 1783, two men walked onto a stage to debate whether America needs a king after all. The conversation was marketed as an intellectual battle royale, a pay-per-view heavy weight showdown for the fate of democracy. The converted music venue hummed with anticipation, the soft buzz of an assembly of tech workers, political theorists, and the professionally curious drawn by the spectacle of watching someone seriously argue for American monarchy in 2025.

Hosting a conversation that would have been unimaginable a decade earlier, the black box Manhattan theater offered the perfect stage for the surreal moment we inhabit. American democracy appears more embattled than at any point since the Civil War. Federal troops have deployed into American cities. The Supreme Court has vastly expanded executive power. Trust in democratic institutions has collapsed to historic lows. Meanwhile, the forces that should be defending democracy have devolved into ineffectual protests and Tik Tok influencer campaigns that seem only to strengthen the very movements they oppose.

Into this fraught moment stepped Curtis Yarvin, dressed in sleek futuristic attire with a distinctly Asian aesthetic — somewhere between tech conference keynote speaker and Ayn Randian cyberpunk Bond villain. His carefully cultivated persona as prophet of the “Dark Enlightenment” seemed designed to make monarchy feel not like regression but like radical futurism. Across from him, Glen Weyl entered wearing a navy suit with an American flag pin, the uniform of establishment respectability, while incongruously clutching a pink fuzzy monster notebook that looked borrowed from a middle schooler.

The visual grammar spoke volumes before either man opened his mouth. Here was Yarvin, embracing his role as democracy’s undertaker with an aesthetic that suggested he’d already crossed into a post-democratic future and returned to explain why we should follow. And there was Weyl, his confused semiotics — establishment suit, childish notebook — perfectly embodying an institutionalism so exhausted it could no longer maintain consistent symbolism, much less mount a defense of democratic ideals.

When protesters briefly interrupted the proceedings, Yarvin delivered what would be the evening’s most devastating line: “That’s sort of what’s left of progressivism in America today.” The dismissive accuracy of this observation — that contemporary resistance had been reduced to performative disruption without strategic vision — hung over the remainder of the debate like smoke from a distant fire.

The Seduction of Diagnostic Clarity

What makes Yarvin dangerous isn’t that he’s entirely wrong — it’s that his diagnosis of democratic dysfunction is accurate enough to make his monarchical prescription seem almost reasonable. Like a doctor who correctly identifies cancer but prescribes bloodletting, his clarity about the disease lends false credibility to his cure.

“The people in my vision actually have about the same amount of power that they have now, which is basically none,” Yarvin told the audience with disarming honesty. This wasn’t rhetorical provocation but empirical observation. The Princeton study by Gilens and Page that demonstrated policy outcomes correlate with elite preferences rather than public opinion wasn’t mentioned by name, but its findings haunted every exchange that followed.

Yarvin’s litany of democratic failures hit with the force of suppressed truth finally spoken aloud. Mass immigration proceeding despite consistent public opposition across decades. A 98% incumbency rate in the House of Representatives, supposedly the most democratic federal institution. Unelected bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci making civilization-altering decisions about pandemic response with no meaningful accountability. “Nobody elected Anthony Fauci,” Yarvin noted, “when he basically supervised the program to invent Covid.”

The Covid accusation might be controversial, but the broader point about technocratic unaccountability resonates. The administrative state has metastasized into what political scientist Frank Fukuyama calls a “vetocracy” — a system where countless actors can block action but no one can drive change. The result is what Yarvin accurately describes as governance by “prestige” rather than democracy, where credentials and institutional position matter more than electoral mandates.

His comparison between corporations and governments contains uncomfortable truths that defenders of democracy struggle to address. “If you look at the box that iPhone came in,” Yarvin observed, “it says, ‘Designed by Apple in California, Made in China.’ By my count, that is two monarchies, Apple and China, and two one-party states, China and California.” The provocative framing aside, the observation stands: hierarchical organizations demonstrably govern our society and economy.

Consider the contrast Yarvin draws: “Imagine Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation, being asked to create an electric car. This idea is absurd. It is preposterous.” Yet Tesla, under the decidedly undemocratic leadership of Elon Musk, revolutionized the automotive industry. SpaceX achieved what NASA couldn’t. Apple created products that government research labs could barely imagine. “Capitalism,” Yarvin argues, “is the system of little monarchies, little kingdoms, that solve all these beautiful problems for us.”

Even his critique of modern media rings true. When Yarvin notes that “two-thirds of the stories in the New York Times… contain information which is only available to the New York Times” through strategic leaks, he’s identifying how supposedly independent journalism has become entangled with power in ways that subvert democratic accountability. The “Department of Information,” as he mockingly calls it, shapes public opinion not through direct state control but through privileged access to state secrets — a more sophisticated but perhaps more insidious form of propaganda.

The Monarchical Solution as Civilizational Suicide

Yet if Yarvin’s diagnosis contains truth, his prescription represents not medicine but poison — a cure worse than any disease. His proposal for absolute sovereignty reveals not visionary thinking but a catastrophic failure of political imagination, one that mistakes the concentration of power for its proper organization.

The details of Yarvin’s monarchical vision, when examined closely, read less like political philosophy than like sadistic fantasy. His proposal includes “cryptographic locks on every gun” controlled directly by the CEO-dictator, ensuring no possibility of a coup. He envisions a transition where “within a week, every law enforcement officer in America is wearing a red armband to show that he follows the new president’s direct unconditional command” — imagery deliberately evocative of history’s darkest moments.

When pressed by Weyl about what would happen to billionaires under his system, Yarvin’s response was chilling in its casualness: “Sovereignty is absolute.”

More disturbing still is his vision for society’s vulnerable. In his written work, Yarvin has proposed “relocation centers with a high degree of personal discipline” for those receiving government assistance. Using modern technology to achieve “universal solitary confinement” where “adequate social interaction may be delivered electronically,” he envisions a digital gulag for the economically unproductive. When Weyl pressed him on this dystopian vision, Yarvin attempted to contextualize rather than deny it, speaking of “zero marginal product human beings” and asking “what you’re going to do with people who have essentially zero economic value to the rest of humanity.”

This isn’t political philosophy but the logic of disposal — treating human beings as problems to be managed rather than citizens to be empowered. When asked how free elections could occur after eliminating all dissent, abolishing independent media, and placing universities under monarchical control, Yarvin’s response was refreshingly if terrifyingly honest: “I don’t think it’s possible.”

The honesty is almost admirable. Unlike fascists who maintain democratic pretenses, Yarvin openly advocates for ending democracy entirely. “A subject and a sovereign are clean different things,” he quotes Charles I approvingly. The people would become subjects, not citizens — a return to pre-Enlightenment subordination made even more absolute by post-Enlightenment technology.

The Poverty of Democratic Defense

If Yarvin’s cure is poison, his opponents’ medicine is hardly better — homeopathic doses of reform so diluted they contain no active ingredients. Throughout the debate, Weyl’s defenses of democracy rang hollow not because democracy isn’t worth defending but because he couldn’t acknowledge how thoroughly the system he defended had already ceased being democratic.

When Weyl argued that “transitioning to democracy increases income by 20% in the long run,” he was playing Yarvin’s game — defending democracy on efficiency grounds rather than moral ones. Even accepting the empirical claim, it misses the point entirely. Democracy’s value doesn’t lie in GDP growth but in human dignity, in the radical proposition that ordinary people deserve a say in the decisions that shape their lives. By reducing democracy to economic metrics, Weyl had already conceded the moral argument.

His examples of democratic success proved equally problematic. “Places like Japan and India, Estonia and Ireland, Botswana and Mauritius” have indeed seen improvements under democratic governance. But cherry-picking success stories ignores the broader pattern of democratic decay in established democracies. When pressed about American democracy specifically, Weyl could only offer technocratic tweaks: “I’ve devoted my career to radically updating democracies for the digital age,” he said, but the updates he described — quadratic voting, digital participation platforms — amount to killer apps for democracy hosted on privately owned Microsoft or Amazon servers that can be shut off by technocrats as soon as they dislike the outcome.

Most revealing was Weyl’s defense of corporate structures as somehow democratic. When praising Microsoft’s success under Satya Nadella, he attributed it to “multi-stakeholder feedback, transparency, and decentralization of power.” Yet Microsoft remains fundamentally hierarchical, with Nadella holding exactly the kind of concentrated executive authority Yarvin advocates.

The incoherence revealed a deeper problem: Weyl couldn’t defend actually existing democracy because actually existing democracies are currently indefensible. Instead, he defended an idealized democracy that exists nowhere outside academic papers and TED talks, and offered mere milquetoast marginal reforms for systematically broken institutions.

The Narrowing of Possibility

The real value of the debate between Yarvin and Weyl lies between the lines. The dialogue revealed something deeper than disagreement about governance structures: a catastrophic narrowing of political imagination on all sides. Yarvin can only imagine concentrated power as the alternative to dysfunction. Weyl can only imagine reforming existing institutions. Neither can envision genuine transformation.

This imaginative poverty isn’t accidental but structural. As Yarvin correctly observes, “There are many, many perspectives that are simply no longer represented in this world” that were commonplace centuries ago. But his conclusion — that we should restore monarchical perspectives — mistakes symptom for cure. The problem isn’t that we’ve excluded monarchism but that we’ve excluded radical alternatives generally, including radical democratic ones.

Consider what’s missing from these debates: any mention of the Paris Commune, the Spanish anarchists, the Zapatistas, Kerala’s democratic planning, Rojava’s democratic confederalism, or thousands of other experiments in radical democracy. These aren’t abstract theories but living practices, yet they might as well not exist for how often they’re referenced in mainstream political discourse.

The narrowing extends beyond historical examples to contemporary possibilities. Yarvin and Weyl fail to imagine:

• Workplace democracy where workers control production

• Neighborhood assemblies with real budgetary power

• Participatory planning replacing both markets and bureaucracy

• Rotating citizen juries replacing professional politicians

• Community land trusts removing land from speculation

• Maximum wealth ratios enforced democratically

• Production for use rather than profit

These aren’t utopian fantasies but practical proposals, many with successful implementations. Yet they remain literally unthinkable within the parameters of debate between monarchists and liberal democrats.

The Material Roots of Democratic Crisis

To understand why democracy is failing, we must look beyond institutional dysfunction to material conditions. Democracy emerged alongside capitalism, and as capitalism enters terminal crisis, it takes democracy with it.

The original bourgeois democracies were always limited, excluding women, the enslaved, the colonized, the propertyless. But they contained a democratic promise that exceeded their practice, a contradiction that fueled centuries of struggle for expansion. The franchise widened, formal equality expanded, social provisions grew. For a brief period mid-20th century, it seemed democracy might fulfill its promise.

But even America’s most widely lauded institutional reformer, Martin Luther King Jr, had his doubts about the possibility of achieving true economic and social democracy in America. Shortly before his death, he remarked “We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know that we will win. But I’ve come to believe we’re integrating into a burning house. I’m afraid that America may be losing what moral vision she may have had… And I’m afraid that even as we integrate, we are walking into a place that does not understand that this nation needs to be deeply concerned with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. Until we commit ourselves to ensuring that the underclass is given justice and opportunity, we will continue to perpetuate the anger and violence that tears at the soul of this nation.”

King’s prescient near-final remarks seem to be bearing strange fruit in the 21st century. The hard-won democratic gains that King and other movement leaders throughout American history advocated for have largely evaporated over the last decade through activist courts and a conservative Supreme Court majority. Since Citizens United, the material conditions required to restore or sustain these democratic rights are less and less present. The labor movements that could extract concessions from monolithic corporate giants have been crushed. Neoliberal Democrats have largely abandoned truly progressive economic policy in favor of global financial elites. Production has automated and globalized. Capital moves faster than democracy can regulate. And with the Soviet collapse, elites no longer fear revolution.

The result is what Wolfgang Streeck calls “buying time” — democracy maintaining legitimacy through debt rather than delivery. Private debt in the 1980s, public debt in the 1990s, central bank expansion in the 2000s, and now direct cash transfers during COVID. Each iteration becomes less sustainable, requiring greater intervention while delivering less legitimacy.

Yarvin grasps this material crisis intuitively even if he misdiagnoses it ideologically. When he points to California’s inability to build infrastructure despite massive wealth, he’s identifying capital’s shift from productive to rentier forms. When he notes the administrative state’s expansion alongside governmental incapacity, he’s observing how bureaucracy metastasizes when it can no longer deliver results. These are critiques we’d sooner expect to hear from Noam Chomsky or David Graeber than from a Silicon Valley technocrat.

But Yarvin’s solution — monarchy — wouldn’t resolve these material contradictions but intensify them. A CEO-dictator would still face capitalism’s terminal crisis: ecological limits, automation’s displacement of labor, rentier capture of wealth, financial system instability. Concentration of political power can’t overcome concentration of economic power; indeed, they’re more likely to fuse into techno-feudalism than solve democracy’s material crisis.

Sovereignty’s Evolution: From Westphalia to the Internet Age

The concept of sovereignty that Yarvin invokes so confidently — “sovereignty is absolute,” he declares, adding that “if the U.S. Supreme Court says that you have to hang upside down by your feet… you’re gonna have to do it” — has a specific history that both he and his opponents largely ignore. Understanding this history reveals why his monarchical solution represents not progress but regression, and why genuine alternatives must reimagine sovereignty itself.

The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 established the modern notion of absolute territorial sovereignty, ending the Thirty Years’ War by granting princes supreme authority within their domains. This wasn’t some natural law but a political compromise born from exhaustion after Europe tore itself apart over religion. The principle of cuius regio, eius religio — whose realm, his religion — became the template for all sovereignty: absolute power within borders, non-interference between states.

This Westphalian order was always a fiction, but a useful one for consolidating power. It allowed European states to impose colonial rule globally while maintaining the pretense of “sovereignty” that applied only to themselves. Indigenous peoples who had practiced consensual governance for millennia — where legitimacy flowed from participation and reciprocity rather than domination — were declared terra nullius, empty land, their sophisticated systems of distributed authority invisible to eyes that could only see sovereignty as domination.

The American experiment represented a partial break from this Westphalian absolutism, though one still conditioned by its monarchical origins. As Tocqueville observed in the 1830s, what made American democracy vital wasn’t its federal structure but its radical subsidiarity: “Decentralization has, not only an administrative value, but also a civic dimension, since it increases the opportunities for citizens to take interest in public affairs; it makes them get accustomed to using freedom. And from the accumulation of these local, active, persnickety freedoms, is born the most efficient counterweight against the claims of the central government, even if it were supported by an impersonal, collective will.”

These “persnickety freedoms” — the thousand small acts of self-governance in townships and wards — were democracy’s true foundation. The New England town halls that preceded the United States, where citizens directly managed their collective affairs, embodied a different notion of sovereignty: not absolute power descending from above but legitimate authority arising from below.

Thomas Jefferson understood this deeply. His proposal for “ward republics” — subdivisions of counties small enough that all inhabitants could know one another and personally perform the functions of government — represented his attempt to institutionalize this participatory sovereignty. “The article nearest my heart,” he wrote to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, “is the division of counties into wards.” These weren’t advisory bodies but genuine governing units, handling everything from education to poor relief to militia organization. Though never fully implemented, the principle survived partially in townships, school districts, and neighborhood associations.

But American democracy contained a fatal contradiction from its inception: it attempted self-governance while maintaining structures of domination — slavery, indigenous genocide, patriarchal authority. This contradiction required resolution, and the resolution came through centralization. The Civil War’s outcome depended on federal supremacy over state sovereignty. Reconstruction’s brief flowering of multiracial democracy required federal force against local tyranny. Each expansion of human freedom seemed to require expanded central authority.

This Faustian bargain accelerated in the 20th century. The New Deal’s economic protections required federal bureaucracy. Civil rights enforcement relied on the interstate commerce clause — a provision about economic regulation stretched to cover human dignity. As Eisenhower warned in 1961, the “military-industrial complex” represented a new form of sovereignty: concentrated power serving its own interests rather than popular will. The administrative state that Yarvin correctly identifies as unaccountable didn’t emerge from democratic excess but from democracy’s failure to resolve its foundational contradictions.

The tragedy is that every progressive victory achieved through federal power created precedents for reaction. The federal authority that broke Jim Crow now militarizes local police. The administrative capacity built to provide social welfare now surveils and controls. In 2025, we watch courts systematically dismantle voting rights and affirmative action, using the very constitutional provisions once used to secure them.

Yet the internet age has created a phase change in power relations that neither Yarvin nor his opponents fully grasp. The Westphalian order assumed territory as the basis of sovereignty — control land, control people. But digital networks operate on different principles. Information flows regardless of borders. Communities form regardless of proximity. Coordination happens regardless of hierarchy.

This doesn’t automatically democratize power — as we’ve seen, digital platforms can concentrate control beyond what any monarch imagined. But it does make possible new forms of sovereignty based on consent and participation rather than territory and domination. Blockchain enables transparency without central authority. Encryption protects organizing from state surveillance. Mesh networks bypass corporate control. These aren’t just tools but infrastructures for reimagining sovereignty itself.

Indigenous models of governance, long suppressed, offer templates for this reimagining. Rather than sovereignty as domination over territory, indigenous practices often embodied sovereignty as relationship with territory — reciprocal obligations between human and more-than-human communities. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s Great Law of Peace, influencing the American founders while being excluded from their republic, demonstrated how sovereignty could be distributed across multiple levels while maintaining unity. Decision-making considered seven generations into the future, making sovereignty temporal as well as spatial.

Bioregionalism, emerging from both indigenous wisdom and ecological science, suggests another model: sovereignty aligned with watersheds rather than arbitrary borders, governance following natural systems rather than imposing artificial ones. Communities would govern themselves as a commons within ecological limits, coordinating across bioregions for larger challenges.

This isn’t a romantic fetishization of indigeneity but a practical necessity to return to and restore ecological models of power. Climate change makes the Westphalian order obsolete and necessarily re-centers indigenous ways of knowing and being. Atmospheric carbon doesn’t respect borders, ecosystem collapse doesn’t honor state sovereignty. We need governance structures that match the scale and scope of our challenges, which means both radically local (where people can directly participate) and genuinely global (where coordination is necessary).

The sovereignty we need isn’t Yarvin’s absolute monarch or the administrative state’s bureaucratic control, but what might be called “recursive sovereignty” — legitimate authority flowing from participation at every scale. Individuals sovereign over themselves, communities over their common affairs, bioregions over their ecosystems, humanity over global challenges, each level accountable to those below rather than above.

This sounds utopian only because we’ve internalized Westphalian assumptions so deeply we can’t imagine alternatives. But every indigenous nation that practiced consensual governance, every New England town meeting that managed common affairs, every ward republic Jefferson envisioned, every bioregional council emerging today, demonstrates that sovereignty without domination is possible.

The internet age makes this more feasible than ever before. We can coordinate without hierarchy, decide without domination, govern via cybernetic feedback, all of which make sovereignty in its Westphalian sense functionally obsolete. But this requires abandoning both Yarvin’s monarchical fantasy and liberal democracy’s failed compromises. It requires reimagining sovereignty not as power over but as power with, not as domination but as participation, not as absolute but as accountable.

The choice isn’t between the sovereignty of one (monarchy) or the sovereignty of none (bureaucracy) but the sovereignty of all — every person participating in the decisions that affect them, at the scale where participation is meaningful, through structures that enable rather than prevent self-governance. This is the only sovereignty compatible with human dignity, ecological survival, and genuine democracy. Everything else is just different forms of domination competing for control.

Technology’s Dual Potential

Yarvin and Weyl both cite technology as an enabler of their very different visions of government and authority. But the radical difference between their use of digital tools clearly reveals just how much technology’s political impact depends on the social relations within which it’s embedded.

Yarvin’s technological vision is explicitly authoritarian: cryptographic locks on weapons, universal surveillance, algorithmic management of “zero marginal product” populations. He sees in technology the solution to classical monarchy’s weakness — the ability to maintain absolute control without relying on human intermediaries who might defect. Digital monarchy would be more total than anything historical kings imagined.

Weyl’s technological vision is naively optimistic: digital platforms enabling participation, blockchain ensuring transparency, AI improving decision-making. But these tools, developed by and for capital, carry capitalist logic in their very architecture. Facebook’s engagement algorithms don’t become democratic just because government uses them. Blockchain’s radical transparency serves surveillance as easily as accountability. Misaligned AI accelerates the worst of us, not the best.

Yet technology also contains genuine democratic potential, largely unexplored in these debates:

• Peer-to-peer networks enabling coordination without hierarchy

• Encryption protecting organizing from state surveillance

• Automated production reducing necessary labor time

• Open source models challenging intellectual property

• Mesh networks bypassing corporate internet control

• Distributed computing breaking computational monopolies

The question isn’t whether technology will transform politics but who will control that transformation. If left to capital and its monarchist advocates, technology will enable unprecedented domination. If appropriated democratically, it could enable unprecedented liberation. But this requires more than better apps — it requires fundamentally different social relations.

The Exhaustion of Progressive Resistance

When protesters briefly disrupted the Yarvin-Weyl debate, they performed a perfect metaphor for contemporary left politics: capable of interruption but not construction, of critique but not vision, of opposition but not proposition. Yarvin’s cutting observation — “that’s sort of what’s left of progressivism in America today” — stings because it’s accurate.

The contemporary left has retreated from material politics to cultural politics, from changing systems to changing language, from seizing power to performing resistance. Cancel culture and privilege discourse have become substitutes for rather than supplements to economic justice. Identity politics, severed from class politics, has become a way for professional-class progressives to maintain moral authority while abandoning material transformation.

This retreat has created the vacuum Yarvin fills. When progressives can’t acknowledge that mass immigration hurts working-class wages, that lockdowns devastated small businesses while enriching corporations, that the “expert consensus” often serves elite interests, they cede ground to reactionaries who will acknowledge these truths while offering monstrous solutions.

The failure runs deeper than strategy to worldview. Contemporary progressivism has abandoned the idea that ordinary people can govern themselves, embracing instead a technocratic paternalism barely distinguishable from Yarvin’s monarchism except in its rhetoric. When progressive solutions always involve more expert management, more bureaucratic oversight, more professional intervention, they’ve already conceded that democracy is impossible.

This becomes clear in progressive responses to Trump. Rather than mobilizing democratic opposition — strikes, occupations, assemblies — progressives turned to institutions: courts, intelligence agencies, legacy media. They fought populism with elitism, democracy’s crisis with anti-democracy. In doing so, they validated Yarvin’s critique while having no response to his alternative.

Toward Genuine Alternatives

Against monarchist regression and reformist delusion, we need to recover democracy’s radical potential — not as an institution to defend but as practice to undertake, not as achievement to preserve but as a possibility to create continuously.

This starts with honest diagnosis. Our current system isn’t democracy but oligarchy with democratic characteristics. Acknowledging this isn’t cynical but necessary for genuine transformation. We can’t reform what we won’t name, can’t transform what we won’t acknowledge has already failed.

The alternative isn’t choosing better elites or improving existing institutions but building parallel democratic structures that can eventually replace them. History shows that transformative change rarely comes through reform but through the construction of alternative institutions that demonstrate superior capacity. The feudal order wasn’t reformed into capitalism; capitalist institutions emerged alongside and eventually displaced feudal ones.

What would such parallel institutions look like today?

Neighborhood assemblies with real power over local resources — not advisory bodies but decision-making organs controlling budgets, land use, and service provision. Beginning with mutual aid and community defense, expanding to economic coordination and political power.

Workplace democracy spreading from cooperatives to entire sectors, demonstrating that workers can manage production better than bosses. Starting with alternative enterprises, expanding through conversion of existing firms, ultimately challenging the very principle of private ownership of social production.

Participatory planning replacing both market chaos and bureaucratic command with democratic coordination. Communities deciding what to produce based on need rather than profit, coordinating through negotiated agreements rather than price signals or administrative fiat.

Community land trusts removing territory from speculation, enabling long-term democratic planning over space. Beginning with abandoned properties, expanding to include working land, ultimately challenging the commodity status of land itself.

Rotating citizen assemblies replacing professional politicians with ordinary people temporarily exercising power. Starting with advisory roles, expanding to oversight functions, ultimately replacing legislatures with constantly rotating bodies of citizens.

These aren’t blueprints but directions, not programs but principles. Different communities would implement them differently, learning from successes and failures, adapting to local conditions and cultures. The diversity would be strength — unlike monarchism’s uniformity or liberalism’s false universalism, genuine democracy thrives on experimentation and pluralism.

The Objective Conditions for Transformation

Such alternatives might seem impossible, but objective conditions increasingly favor radical transformation over both monarchist reaction and liberal reform.

Capitalism faces insurmountable contradictions. Ecological limits make infinite growth impossible. Automation eliminates jobs faster than it creates them. Financialization creates instability while producing nothing. Inequality reaches levels incompatible with social cohesion. These aren’t problems to be solved but contradictions to be transcended.

Climate change particularly forecloses moderate options. Either we transform production and consumption fundamentally — impossible under capitalism — or we face civilizational collapse. Neither monarchy nor reformed democracy can address this. Only radical democracy, able to prioritize survival over profit, can mobilize the necessary transformation.

The pandemic revealed both system fragility and alternative possibility. Governments utilized quantitative easing to pay for emergency relief. Workers recognized their essentiality. Mutual aid networks emerged spontaneously. The “impossible” became necessary overnight. These experiences can’t be forgotten, creating what Antonio Gramsci called “organic crisis” — when the old world is dying and the new struggles to be born.

Technology, despite its current use for domination, creates objective potential for liberation. Automation could reduce necessary work to a few hours weekly. Internet enables coordination without hierarchy. Renewable energy allows decentralized production. These material possibilities contradict social relations that require scarcity, hierarchy, and centralization.

Most importantly, human consciousness is changing. Young people increasingly reject capitalism even without clear alternatives. Traditional legitimacy structures — religion, nationalism, consumerism — lose their hold. The old stories no longer convince, but new ones haven’t yet emerged. This ideological interregnum creates space for radical imagination.

Learning from Global Experiments

While American discourse remains trapped between monarchism and liberalism, experiments worldwide point toward different possibilities.

In Rojava, northern Syria, communities practice democratic confederalism — direct democracy through nested councils, women’s liberation as revolutionary principle, ecological sustainability as survival necessity. Despite war, embargo, and betrayal, they’ve built radical democracy under impossible conditions.

In Kerala, India, decades of participatory planning have produced the highest quality of life indicators in India despite relatively low GDP. Literacy approaches 100%, infant mortality matches developed nations, life expectancy exceeds the American average. Democratic planning delivers what markets and monarchs cannot.

In Jackson, Mississippi, despite state hostility and capital flight, Cooperation Jackson builds dual power through people’s assemblies and cooperative economics. They’re demonstrating that even in the heart of American racial capitalism, alternatives can emerge.

In Barcelona, municipal socialism has reclaimed public services from private corporations, expanded cooperative housing, and created neighborhood assemblies with real power. They’re showing that cities can be laboratories for democratic transformation.

The Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, have maintained autonomous self-governance for three decades, creating their own education, healthcare, and justice systems outside state control. They prove that indigenous democracy can function at scale in modern conditions.

These aren’t models to copy but experiments to learn from. Each emerged from specific conditions, cultures, and struggles. But together they demonstrate that radical democracy isn’t utopian fantasy but practical possibility.

The Cultural Revolution We Need

Transforming institutions requires transforming consciousness. We need not Mao’s cultural revolution — imposed from above through violence — but Gramsci’s — emerging from below through practice.

This means abandoning the defensive crouch of protecting “democracy” and instead going on offense for radical democracy. Not defending existing institutions but demonstrating their obsolescence. Not appealing to elites but building popular power. Not seeking inclusion but creating alternatives.

It means recovering suppressed democratic traditions. The Diggers and Levellers of the English Revolution. The Paris Commune. The Industrial Workers of the World. The Spanish anarchists. The Hungarian workers’ councils. The Black Panthers’ survival programs. These aren’t dusty history but living inheritance, examples of ordinary people attempting extraordinary self-governance.

It means creating new democratic culture through practice. People learn democracy by doing democracy, not by reading about it. Every neighborhood assembly, every workplace occupation, every community garden is a school for democratic consciousness. Through collective action, people discover collective capacity.

It means challenging the entire symbolic order that makes monarchy thinkable and radical democracy unthinkable. Why does a CEO seem natural but a workers’ council seems utopian? Why does private property seem sacred but commons seems naive? These aren’t natural facts but ideological constructions that can be deconstructed through counter-narrative and reconstructed through counter-practice.

Strategic Considerations

Building radical democracy requires strategy, not just vision. We must be simultaneously pragmatic about immediate steps and ambitious about ultimate goals.

Start where people are, not where we wish they were. Most Americans don’t want monarchy, but they also don’t trust existing democracy. This creates an opening for alternatives that are genuinely democratic rather than performative. Focus on concrete improvements in daily life rather than abstract political principles.

Build parallel power before institutional power. The left’s repeated mistake is seeking state power before building popular power. Without organized communities, workplace organizations, and democratic culture, taking state power leads only to bureaucracy or defeat. Build the foundation first.

Expect repression and prepare for it. Every genuine democratic movement faces state violence, economic sabotage, and ideological attack. Building resilient networks, alternative communications, and cultures of solidarity is essential for surviving inevitable counterattack.

Unite the broadest possible coalition against oligarchy while maintaining radical democratic principles. This means temporary alliances with liberals, libertarians, socialists, communists, anarchists, workers, rural farmers, environmentalists, and anyone else who will stand together against fascism while not abandoning transformation for reform. It means supporting immediate improvements while building long-term alternatives.

Use electoral politics tactically without illusions. Running candidates can build organization, spread ideas, and sometimes win real improvements. But electoralism can’t bring fundamental change. Use it as one tactic among many, not as strategy itself.

Conclusion: Refuse The False Choice

The debate between Curtis Yarvin and Glen Weyl reveals more than ideological disagreement — it exposes a civilizational crossroads. The conversation offered two possible futures:

The first is continued oligarchic decay. Existing institutions muddle through, becoming progressively less democratic and less capable. Inequality deepens, state capacity withers, social cohesion dissolves. This path leads nowhere good — either collapse or transformation, but transformation delayed is transformation made more difficult.

The second is monarchical regression. Whether through Trump, Musk, or some future strongman, democracy is formally abolished in favor of executive dictatorship. This might provide temporary stability, even certain improvements, but at the cost of human dignity and ultimate catastrophe. Monarchy can’t solve capitalism’s contradictions, only intensify them through violence.

But the third unspoken yet existentially necessary future is democratic revolution, a civic uprising. Not violent overthrow but radical transformation through building parallel institutions that demonstrate superior capacity. Not seizing the state but transcending it. Not reform but replacement. This path is difficult, uncertain, requiring generations of struggle. But it’s the only path toward human flourishing rather than mere survival.

The aesthetic contrast in the Yarvin-Weyl debate — the would-be dark emperor versus the confused institutionalist — captures our moment perfectly. We’re offered false choices between those who would burn everything down to rule the ashes and those desperately trying to preserve institutions already aflame.

But beneath the surface, in communities worldwide, people are building alternatives. They’re discovering that ordinary people can govern themselves better than any monarch, oligarchy, or technocracy. They’re learning that democracy isn’t something you have but something you do. They’re creating the future in the shell of the present.

The technology exists for unprecedented democratic participation. The material conditions exist for universal prosperity. The ecological crisis demands fundamental transformation. The old legitimacy structures have collapsed. Everything is possible, everything is at stake, everything depends on what we do now.

Yarvin is right that our current system is failing catastrophically. Weyl is right that monarchy is regression, not progress. But both are wrong about what’s possible. We don’t need better rulers or better rules — we need to become capable of ruling ourselves.

This isn’t utopian but necessary. As the old union song says, “We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.” The ashes are all around us. The question is what we’ll build from them. The monarchists have their vision — dark, hierarchical, ultimately suicidal. The liberals have theirs — exhausted, defensive, ultimately rooted in contradictions.

We need our own vision — radical, democratic, ultimately the only hope for human survival and flourishing. Not because it’s easy but because it’s necessary. Not because it’s certain but because it’s possible. Not because we’ll live to see it completed but because the work itself is the point — the slow, patient, necessary work of learning to be free.

Against Yarvin’s dark enlightenment and Weyl’s dim liberalism, we assert the oldest and newest truth: we don’t need rulers. We need each other. The future belongs neither to CEO-dictators nor technocratic managers but to communities discovering their own capacity for self-governance, their own power to create the world they want to inhabit.

In this dark moment, seeds of genuine democracy are being planted everywhere — in community assemblies, cooperative enterprises, mutual aid networks, and countless experiments in self-determination. They’re growing in the cracks of the collapsing order, waiting for their moment to bloom. That moment may be sooner than anyone thinks. The only question is whether we’ll be ready to nurture what grows.

The choice isn’t between the false democracy we have and the tyranny Yarvin proposes. It’s between accepting these false choices or having the courage — and patience, and determination, and solidarity — to build the genuine democracy we deserve. That work doesn’t begin in debates between intellectuals but in communities organizing themselves, demonstrating through practice what intellectuals declare impossible: that ordinary people, given the chance, will choose freedom over domination, cooperation over competition, democracy over monarchy, every single time.