Why does Curtis Yarvin think he is Sephiroth?
Reaction and the politics of talking like a supervillain.
The story of George W. Bush’s second term, and how his once-soaring popularity plummeted because of his war against Iraq, is fairly uncontroversial among most Americans. What is less appreciated is why his own party turned on him as well. When Bush was re-elected, his approval rating in the GOP stood at a towering 92%. Over the next four years, however, it would plummet by more than 30 points, bottoming out at 61% among Republicans.
One might guess that Republicans simply soured on Bush’s war as well — but while there is some truth to that, the explanation is not so simple. On the right, and particularly on the far right, the narrative became that Bush had failed conservativism. The war against Iraq could have been won by now. The economy would have been fine if he had only slashed taxes further. And if he had really fought back against Democrats, they never would have won back Congress in 2006 and never would have put a black communist Muslim in the White House in 2008.
This was all a dramatic reversal from their rhetoric only a few years before, of course. As recently as 2006, the right’s narrative had been that the media was hiding “all the good news in Iraq” and that Bush need only “stay the course.” That same year Republicans were still bragging about the GDP’s above-average growth. And that same year they Karl Rove was gloating about the country’s “realignment,” handing Republicans a trifecta in Washington and a mandate to “shape history.”
Did Bush’s presidency really change that much during his last two years in office? Of course not. What actually happened was that Republicans, given absolute power for six years, proved to America that their vision for the country sucked. The world of “international leadership” that the GOP had promised was just a world of endless, pointless war. And the Great Recession was not some failure imposed despite their best efforts; it was a direct and obvious result of Bush’s aggressive agenda of financial deregulation. Republicans owned his presidency’s failures, and the rest of America knew it.
But much of the right has never accepted this, because they can’t. For them, reactionary politics is an ideal that can never fail — it can only be failed. For many of the right-wing pundits of that day (and the neocons in particular), their mistake was to articulate a specific vision of reactionary politics that could be judged a success or a failure in the bright light of history. Moldbug is determined to avoid that mistake.
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I have not written much in the past about Moldbug, known to his respectable audience as Curtis Yarvin, because once you get past the purple prose and the cutesy coinage it becomes clear that he has very little to say. His latest post, You can’t handle the truth, illustrates this perfectly. There is absolutely nothing to learn from it. The closest it comes to anything like a substantive claim is where Moldbug regurgitates an old conspiracy about the head of the Ford Foundation admitting that it was working “to alter life in the United States so that it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.” Sadly this is unverifiable, since when asked if he would repeat this publicly, the Foundation’s head replied “we would not think of doing any such thing.”
This is just classic Birch Society stuff of course, the sort of thing that even Silicon Valley billionaires and Dimes Square failed art students would be embarrassed by a decade ago. Back then they just called it “the diabolical Bolshevik conspiracy”; I guess it’s more palatable now that Moldbug has rebranded it The Cathedral ™.
But the real draw of this stuff isn’t about substantive insights into history and politics. What Moldbug is really about, as far as I can tell, is the Politics of Sephiroth.
Sephiroth, in case you are unfamiliar, is the iconic antagonist of the Playstation game Final Fantasy VII, which was released all the way back in 1997. For the most part Sephiroth is just a classic anime supervillain: intent on world domination and possessed with absurd superpowers that make him nearly omnipotent. But what has made Sephiroth such an enduring cultural figure among people of a certain age is that he was a melodramatic badass. Sephiroth is stoic, calm, and temperamentally cool, but he is also prone to making comically grandiose shows of his power and malevolence.
Over the years, Sephiroth has become the namesake for a distinctive style of speech — and especially of posting — that echoes his rhetoric. Clinically we can say that it is characterized by melodramatic, unnatural phrasing; by an exaggerated portrayal of banal conflict as world-historic, even cosmic in magnitude; and occasionally, by self-consciously cryptic referentiality. But this description is an attempt to capture the uneffable; with Sephiroth rhetoric, you know it when you see it.
The modern right is absolutely overrun with Sephiroth rhetoric. Just a few weeks ago, for example, Stephen Miller said to a gathering of officials in Memphis:
The gangbangers you deal with — the think they’re ruthless? They have no idea how ruthless we are. They think they’re tough? They have no idea how tough we are. They think they’re hardcore? We are so much more hardcore than they are.
This is almost closer to a pro-wrestling promo, particularly in some of its colloquial language; but the repetition of the formula “no idea how [X] we are” places this speech firmly in Sephiroth territory. It is impossible to hear this and not imagine Miller declaring, “you cannot comprehend the full extent of my powers.”
Moldbug’s writing revolves almost entirely around Sephiroth rhetoric:
All of these quotes are from this one article. But what is he actually talking about? Consider that last one. As far as I can talk about, the “cancer” and “horrid black blotch” that is “growing” so that “everyone can see it” appears to be…NGOs that give some of their funds to scientists and artists with left-wing sympathies. But of course, no one would care about any of this is Moldbug called a spade a spade and an article about government requirements for private sector grant allocation ideological screening an article about government requirements for private sector grant allocation ideological screening. So instead, Moldbug tells us that this boutique technocratic concern that Republican busybodies have been whining about since the mid-twentieth century is instead the Dark Phantom of Ancient Malevolence that until recently only he hath the wisdom to perceive.
I hesitate to make this connection because Moldbug should not be understood as more radical or heterodox than he actually is; these are banal Republican politics, not some profound venture into the Dark Enlightenment of Monarchofascism™ or whatever name he’s using at this point. Still, Theodor Adorno has some useful insight into this kind of sophist:
All these demagogues substitute means for ends. They prate about…a general American revival they hope to bring about, but they very rarely say anything about what such a movement is supposed to lead to, what the organization is good for or what the mysterious revival is intended positively to achive…The glorification of action, of something going on, simultaneously obliterates and replaces the purpose of the so-called movement. The end is “that we might demonstrate to the world that there are patriots, God-fearing Christian men and women who are yet willing to give their lives to the cause of God, home and native land.”
This is the ultimate function of Sephiroth Politics: to substitute for a substantial political vision the emotional catharsis of melodramatic rhetoric. Moldbug is not going to make the same mistake the neocons made: he is not going to stake the credibility of his politics on the success and failure of any real venture as they did with the war in Iraq and the War on Terror. Even in victory those ambitions can never provide the satisfaction that reactionaries really want, because what they long for ultimately is a past that never was.
Thus we get paragraphs like this:
Getting rid of all the liberal judges is easier than getting rid of all one liberal judge. Getting rid of all the judges is easier than getting rid of all the liberal judges. Getting rid of the whole legal system is easier than getting rid of all the judges. Getting rid of the whole machine of government is easier than getting rid of the whole legal system. Getting rid of the whole philosophy of government is easier than getting rid of the whole machine of government.
This is not Moldbug setting out a real political agenda and dealing with the actual earthly problems that one is confronted with in the course of politics; this is him fleeing into ever greater levels of abstraction until his readers can no longer connect his fight against “the whole machine of government” to any particular victory or defeat. In place of those real fights, Sephiroth Politics relocates politics into a sensational fantasy setting where “the most advanced atheists and the most advanced Christians” have weirdly teamed up against Satan1 , and where their galactic-scale battle always has to be narrated in the most grandiloquent terms possible.
In that world, Moldbug may very well convince his readers that the powerful elites who control the country are forcing him into exile — him, as opposed to the leftists and immigrants he despises. In this world, however, all Moldbug is really running away from is embarrassment. His banal Republican politics are being given the best opportunity they’ve had to succeed in the modern era, and they are not going to improve the lives of workers, they are not going to improve the lives of families, and they are not going to restore a golden era of virtue and order. Trump’s inevitable failure is Moldbug’s failure; he will be the Bill Kristol to Trump’s George W. Bush, and no amount of Sephiroth posting can hide that forever.
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I can’t decide what’s funnier — that the court philosopher of Silicon Valley billionaires can one moment invite his readers to see him speaking at Yale, and the next position himself as an enemy of liberalism who has been locked out of the institutions — or that an avowed atheist somehow sees himself as an ally of Christians (sorry, “advanced Christians”) against Satan.