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April 2022, the Bay Area, California. Some readers — depending on how chemically experimental their high school years were — may recall a mid-century American novel from freshman English class entitled The Butterfly Revolution. Usually assigned as a comparative analytical supplement to the much more popular (and less scandalous) Lord of the Flies, the book is about a summer camp whose teenage attendees successfully stage a violent mutiny and subsequently establish a semi-competent governing authoritarian state.
Even if you haven’t read William Butler’s 1961 classic, you might still recognize the now-infamous political theory with which the book shares a name — a political theory which singlehandedly molded the contemporary landscape of the American political right, served as the foundation for Project 2025, inspired the neofascist radicalization of prominent figures in business and politics like J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk, and influenced the second Trump administration to consolidate dictatorial authority over government.
And it’s actually much worse than it sounds.
Like the novel, Curtis Yarvin’s homonymous think piece focuses on the underlying motivations behind, and the consequences of, a carefully planned seizure of political power — but the two authors come to markedly different conclusions. Butler’s story is a cautionary tale about the dangers of authoritarianism, the corruptive nature of blind ideology, and the importance of safeguards on power. His subject revolution ends in abject tragedy: sexual assault, murder, and loss of innocence abound.
Meanwhile, Yarvin, a neo-feudalist, white supremacist, power fetishist who bears more than a passing resemblance to Grima Wormtongue from The Lord of the Rings, sees nothing the matter with autocracy.
He heralds a future in which a dictatorial Trump, acting with unchecked authority as “America’s chairman of the board,” succeeds in “truly mak[ing] America great again.” American representative democracy, he argues, is an inefficient form of government and a failed state; it should be replaced instead by a quasi-corporate monarchy, wherein the largest shareholders (“lords”) elect a sovereign dictator whose power is encumbered solely by his accountability to such lords.
Aside from being laughably asinine and comically evil, such a political system would be notably anti-liberalism, anti-democracy, pro-tyranny, and pro-suffering. Though Yarvin imagines a society in which such totalitarianism extends only to the political world (i.e., one in which social freedoms such as religious tolerance, same-sex marriage, and protection from discrimination are upheld), it seems naive to think that such a system — one which places all available power in the hands of a select few at the top of the economic system — would not result in the complete and timely erosion of all personal liberties, to the immediate benefit of oligarchs.
“[Yarvin’s] unique style of prose and unorthodox thinking — in concert with the intellectualized justifications he offered for technocapitalism — contributed in large part to [his] growing popularity”
Yarvin’s Butterfly Revolution is a description of the process by which his neo-monarchy would be implemented. The Trump regime — at the time, still nursing its wounds from the 2020 election — would present itself as a “harmless caterpillar,” playing along with the expected behavior of a normative American political party.
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