Part II: Technocrats Call For Dictatorship And Technocracy In 2026

Big Brother Surveillance, Elites,, Government, Technocracy /

(This is part 2 of a two part post. Check out part 1.)

From “technocracy.news”

On my desk are two texts separated by seventy-five years and joined by a single idea. The first is a physical object: Henry A. Porter’s Roosevelt and Technocracy, published by a small Los Angeles house in 1932, in which a self-described “Nationally known Economist and Financial Analyst” urged the incoming president to accept “dictatorial powers in the approaching crisis,” dismiss the machinery of representative government, and install Technocrats from top to bottom.1

The second exists only as archived pixels: Unqualified Reservations, the blog Curtis Yarvin began writing in 2007 under the name Mencius Moldbug, in which a San Francisco software engineer urged Americans to accept that democracy had failed, that the government should be run by a chief executive with the powers of a monarch, and that the officer class of the new regime should be drawn from the people who know how to build things, e.g., Technocrats.2

Who cares about Curtis Yarvin? Well, arch-Technocrat Peter Thiel reveres Yarvin as his “house philosopher.” J.D. Vance, as a protégé of Thiel, has repeatedly quoted Yarvin’s ideas over an extended period. Specific Yarvin policies, like RAGE, have been explicitly enacted during the Trump Administration. Yarvin matters!

I have spent years with the first text, and the more time I spend with the second, the more convinced I become that they are the same essay written twice — once in the vocabulary of the engineer, once in the vocabulary of the startup founder.

Some precision about names is required first, because the genealogy is loose in the popular telling. Yarvin did not coin the phrase “Dark Enlightenment”; the British philosopher Nick Land did, in a 2012 essay of that title that described, systematized, and extended what Yarvin had been writing for five years.3 Yarvin’s own name for his school of thought was “neoreaction.” Nor is there any documented organizational pipeline running from Howard Scott’s Technocracy Inc. to Yarvin’s movement; no membership rolls handed down, no succession of institutions. The connection is of the kind I have traced elsewhere between the Technocracy movement and the Cold War defense intellectuals: a continuity of ideas, incubated in the same elite class and reactivated by the same conditions.

The Dark Enlightenment stands to the 1930s Technocracy movement roughly as the Cold War technostructure did — a descendant that would indignantly deny the ancestry, and whose family resemblance is for that reason all the more instructive. It is the recurring conviction that the deliberative institutions are obsolete machinery, and that the people who demonstrably make complex systems work have a superior claim to run the state.

What makes the comparison exact rather than merely suggestive is that both programs converge on the same man. Porter made his offer prospectively: writing in the middle of the winter of 1932–33, he prophesied collapse in numbered steps, culminating in “FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT — Dictator,” and argued that supreme and emergency power vested in “some one man who has the confidence and respect of a majority” was the necessary passage to Technocracy.4

Yarvin makes the same argument retrospectively. Across his writing, and as recently as his January 2025 interview with the New York Times, he has held up Roosevelt as his central American precedent: the president who, in Yarvin’s telling, governed as an elected monarch; commanding a compliant Congress, ruling through new agencies staffed by his own people, adored rather than resisted.5 Yarvin does not offer this history as a warning. He offers it as proof of concept.

The presidency, he argues, contains a throne. Roosevelt sat in it. The republic loved him for it. Therefore, the next occupant may sit in it too, this time with a better org chart.

Porter is the prophecy, Yarvin is the application.

Set side by side, the two programs share a complete logical skeleton. Both begin by declaring the existing system not merely failing but already fake. For Porter and the Technocrats, the price system and the Congress that served it were obsolete machinery, kept running past their natural death by “political maneuvering and financial chicanery.”6

For Yarvin, electoral democracy is a facade behind which an unelected consortium of universities, media, and permanent bureaucracy actually governs. He calls this “the Cathedral.” 7 Both then conclude that the remedy is formal, concentrated, personal power: better an open executive than a hidden oligarchy. Both are explicit that the strongman is not the destination but the instrument — scaffolding for the installation of a new administrative class of Technocrats.

Porter wanted his dictator to appoint Technocrats from top to bottom; Yarvin wants his chief executive to retire the entire civil service — his old acronym was RAGE, “Retire All Government Employees” — and restaff the state with founders and engineers.8 And both close with the same soothing clause: Porter’s dictator holds “the confidence and respect of a majority of the American people,” while Yarvin’s monarch answers to a board and can be removed like any failing CEO. In each case the reassurance is hollow, and in each case it is the weakest joint in the structure, for reasons the actual history of the 1930s supplies.

Even the legitimating figure is the same figure, updated for a new economy. In 1932 the engineer stood at the peak of his cultural authority: he had electrified the continent, raised the dams and the skyscrapers, and could plausibly claim to be the one man in American life who demonstrably made things work while the politicians talked.

The Technocracy craze and Porter’s book converted that authority into a political claim. In the 2010s and 2020s the startup founder occupies precisely that position: the builder of platforms and rockets, the one figure who visibly ships while institutions deliberate. Yarvin’s innovation was to convert that authority into a political claim, and his prescription — run the government “like a startup,” with a founder-CEO wielding undivided authority — is Porter’s prescription with the slide rule swapped for the term sheet.

Ninety years apart, the same professional class petitions for the same commission on the same grounds: that competence should replace consent.

The differences are as instructive as the parallels. Scott’s Technocracy was, in its economics, radically anti-capitalist. It proposed to abolish the price system outright and to replace money with energy accounting, which is one reason respectable America could flirt with it only briefly.9

Yarvin inverts the economics completely. His “gov-corp” is capitalism absolutized — the state reimagined as a joint-stock corporation, sovereignty as equity, citizens as customers. Private property should be turned over to the gov-corp to manage.

Technocracy dreamed of rule by a faceless technical committee; Yarvin, whose intellectual debts run to Carlyle rather than Veblen, insists on a person, a sovereign, a name. The temperaments differ accordingly: Technocracy was scientistic and positivist, all charts, surveys, and thermodynamics, while the Dark Enlightenment is literary.

The movements’ social forms differ too — Technocracy was a genuine mass movement, with lecture halls, membership sections, and gray uniforms, where neoreaction was born on a blog and traveled through elite patronage, most prominently Peter Thiel’s.10 And the surrounding weather differs most of all. Porter wrote amid twenty-five percent unemployment and a banking system in genuine collapse; the emergency was not rhetorical. Yarvin writes amid prosperity and polarization, and must therefore manufacture the sense of terminal crisis that 1932 supplied free of charge.

Yet the reception histories rhyme in the way I have come to expect from this material. Porter’s book sank without a review worth finding; within months its title had yoked Roosevelt to a word that had passed from front page to vaudeville punchline, and the book became a fossil.

But the technocratic type was absorbed into the New Deal almost immediately — Tugwell in the Brain Trust, Arthur Morgan on the Tennessee Authority, the planners in a dozen new agencies — so that the idea lost as a constitutional proposition in the very season it won as a personnel policy.

Yarvin’s trajectory inverts the tempo but repeats the shape. His blog was a fringe curiosity for fifteen years, and then the absorption began: a sitting vice president has cited him by name,11 his RAGE proposal was widely recognized as a template for the mass federal workforce removals of 2025,12 and mainstream interviewers now travel to ask him whether democracy is finished.

There remains the historical question on which the whole comparison turns, and here I part company with both of my subjects. Yarvin’s proof-of-concept, like Porter’s prophecy, requires that March 1933 be read as the moment America accepted a monarch. It was not, and the distinction is not trivial — it is the entire point. Offered exactly the crown Porter described, in exactly the crisis he prescribed, Roosevelt took extraordinary powers through Congress rather than over it: statutory, revocable, and litigated.

The stock exchanges closed and reopened; the banking act passed in hours;13 and two years later the Supreme Court struck down the centerpiece of the recovery program in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, and the president — adored, unprecedented, at the height of his mandate — complied.14 The forms held.

I keep returning to the pencil bracket in my copy — the mark some reader of 1933 set around the sentence offering Franklin D. Roosevelt a dictatorship. I once assumed the bracket belonged to a closed chapter, a curiosity from the era my research covers. I no longer believe that. The technocratic temptation is not a chapter but a recurring season: it arrives whenever a confident technical class meets a discouraged democracy, in 1932 wearing the engineer’s gray flannel, in 2012 posting under a pseudonym, and in our own decade briefing statesmen.

Porter and Yarvin, the obscure analyst and the celebrated blogger, mark two visitations of the same scenario, and the question the bracket asks has not changed in ninety years: whether a frightened or merely frustrated republic can borrow the competence of its builders without handing them the government.

Twice now, America’s answer has been to take the builders and refuse the crown. The Dark Enlightenment is, at the bottom line, a wager that the third time will be different.

Porter was an obscure figure rising out of the financial industry in 1932. Yarvin is a pedestrian philosopher who rose from Silicon Valley in the 2010s. It’s the same playbook to create a coup to implement Technocracy. Reject it all.

References

  1. Henry A. Porter, Roosevelt and Technocracy (Los Angeles: Wetzel Publishing Co., 1932), 72 and title page. Capitalization as in the original.
  2. Curtis Yarvin, writing as Mencius Moldbug, Unqualified Reservations (blog, 2007–2014), archived at unqualified-reservations.org.
  3. Nick Land, “The Dark Enlightenment” (essay serialized online, 2012).
  4. Porter, Roosevelt and Technocracy, 62–63 (“Postponing the Inevitable”).
  5. David Marchese, “Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.” New York Times, The Interview, January 18, 2025 — also the source for the run-the-government-”like a startup” and FDR-as-monarch discussions.
  6. Porter, Roosevelt and Technocracy, 72.
  7. Mencius Moldbug, “A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations” (2009), where “the Cathedral” receives its fullest exposition.
  8. The RAGE proposal (“Retire All Government Employees”) dates to Yarvin’s 2012 lecture “How to Reboot the US Government”; he revisits it in the Marchese interview, note 5.
  9. William E. Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900–1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), on the abolition of the price system, energy accounting, and the movement’s organizational forms.
  10. James Pogue, “Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets,” Vanity Fair, April 2022.
  11. JD Vance’s on-the-record citations of Yarvin, beginning with 2021 podcast remarks on mass replacement of the civil service, are documented in, e.g., Ian Ward, “The Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview,” Politico Magazine, July 2024.
  12. For contemporaneous reporting connecting Yarvin’s program to the incoming administration and the 2025 federal workforce reductions, see Jason Wilson, “He’s Anti-Democracy and Pro-Trump: The Obscure ’Dark Enlightenment’ Blogger Influencing the Next US Administration,” The Guardian, December 21, 2024, and subsequent 2025 coverage.
  13. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), on the bank holiday, the Emergency Banking Act, and the Hundred Days.
  14. A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935).
  15. See, e.g., the syndicated commentary “The Dubious History of America’s Most Famous Monarchist,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 25, 2025, among the historians’ responses to Yarvin’s readings of FDR and Lincoln.