A Revealing Clash of Worldviews at Harvard

O n Monday evening, I parachuted into a gathering of sensitive young men to watch a debate between the progressive academic Danielle Allen and the neo-reactionary theorist Curtis Yarvin at the Harvard Faculty Club. Sponsored by Passage Publishing, this event was branded as a conversation “on American democracy,” and the battle lines were clear from the outset. A former conservative (and National Review intern) who then trended left, Allen is one of the most decorated faculty at Harvard and a proponent of egalitarian politics. Starting from a relatively obscure blog, Yarvin has emerged as one of the most prominent critics of the current American constitutional settlement and a defender of rule by an absolute executive.

Yarvin’s ideas have an increasing influence in Silicon Valley and the Trump White House — and among younger Americans on the right. The 80 or so people who gathered at the Harvard Faculty Club were mostly Yarvin’s crowd. I was able to approach Allen quite easily after the debate, but Yarvin was immediately surrounded and spent the rest of the evening holding court.

Allen told me that she participated in the event because her students had asked her to participate, and the audience was very young and very male. After the debate, tyros in tweed and ties clustered around charcuterie. There were even two small children there (to be so “based” so little!) as well as a priest.

The debate (summarized here) had two ostensible topics: whether democracy should be replaced by absolute executive rule and whether the model of elite formation promoted by Harvard and other leading universities was at odds with the broader flourishing of society. Those topics only highlighted the broader asymmetry between the two speakers.

Allen tried to lay claim to the broader trajectory of American history and insisted upon the virtue of democracy as a vehicle of empowerment to protect human freedom and dignity. For her, democratic institutions afford a way of checking the risk of domination. As she put it to me in a later email, “I had the chance to make the case for the value of human freedom, for the necessity of constitutional government with limits on executive power for protecting freedom, and for the need for us to face the current dysfunction of our democratic institutions not by tossing them out in favor of an absolute monarch.”

Conversely, Yarvin positioned himself mostly as a prophet of negation. In line with his voluminous writings, he argued that the real-life United States did not live up to the ideals of democracy Allen laid out. Instead, it was guided by a technocratic expert class — what he terms “the Cathedral” — that had essentially usurped democratic governance in the early 20th century. Especially in the latter portion of the debate, he railed against the failings of the American elite, with the coronavirus pandemic serving as the American parallel to the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl disaster. (Yarvin has long used the pandemic as an example of the need for absolute centralized control — as in the People’s Republic of China — compared with our more decentralized nation.)

The failings and the hypocrisy of the American progressive establishment have no doubt given more radical critics like Yarvin an opening. Tellingly, both Allen and Yarvin agreed that there were serious structural challenges to be addressed. She just held that a monarch was not the right solution to them. Instead, she called for institutional reforms, such as changing the primary system and finding a “new social contract” for the ivory tower.

There were other potential points of implicit agreement, too. Yarvin characterized the Trump presidency as “authoritarian populist,” and he said that it exhibited some of the “failings” of a monarchy. He seemed to suggest that populism needed to be guided by some of the imperatives of prestige institutions in order to be effective. Far from challenging the rule of elite institutions in general, Yarvin’s politics may instead be about consolidating power under a different elite. As he later told the Harvard Crimson, “Harvard matters. Harvard’s ideals matter. . . . The idea of Mar-a-Lago being where America’s best scientists gather, or America’s best poets gather — in the court of Donald Trump — is, I’m afraid, somewhat comical.”

Yarvin’s comments thus allude to the profound tension between a more populist diffusion of power and the project of constructing a neo-reactionary “counter-elite.” There might be other tensions here as well. An avowed atheist, Yarvin indirectly revealed the centrality of atheism to his neo-reactionary theory at one point. He dismissed Allen’s claim on behalf of the moral equality of all human beings by invoking evolution: How are we to distinguish the equality that is supposed to make us uniquely human when we are descended from other primates? Caveat emptor: The price of a ticket on that neo-reactionary train might include a loss of the Imago Dei.

In the progressive cancellation engine that is Bluesky, some are bewailing that Yarvin was platformed at all while slamming Allen for being willing to appear alongside him. But serving as a venue for the trial of ideas is one of the principal charges of an institution of higher learning. Writing for the Wall Street Journal in the aftermath of this debate, Allen highlighted its educational stakes: “When students ask for help thinking about intellectual material, my job is to provide that help.”

Yarvin’s growing prominence is not necessarily a sign that his prescriptions are correct. But it should be a warning light about the growing challenges the American constitutional order faces. (The rise of revolutionary “wokeness” on the left might be a similar warning light.) I think — I hope — our order has the resources to meet those challenges. Doing so will take some intellectual nimbleness and policy innovation. For instance, if younger Americans have grown frustrated with the cost of living, policymakers need to rise to the challenge of reducing costs for housing and other goods while expanding economic opportunity. The intellectual and spiritual hollowness of our contemporary commanding heights demand a broader project of cultural renewal — and part of that renewal is showing how the American regime can respond to radical critiques.

But I fear that investing power in the executive alone would exacerbate political dysfunction. The Constitution has bequeathed to us many vehicles for forging a working consensus and managing disagreement (such as federalism, a bicameral Congress, and foundational liberties). The American Republic might fall short of the Very Online political theories, but it has proven remarkably adept at muddling through.

Many of Allen’s claims on behalf of freedom and the importance of checks on power are both prudent and normatively appealing. Even if he at times overstates the monolithic power of the “Cathedral,” Yarvin is not totally wrong to note that the American elite has failed in some crucial respects.

The real challenge is not throwing out the baby with the dingy bathwater. That is, correcting institutional decadence without surrendering institutional safeguards. It would be a grave error to let dissatisfactions with the present blow up the almost-250-year-old republic we have inherited. I’d much rather renew our republic than return to the Tudors or cringe underneath the watchful eye of new AI overlords.