Why is liberal democracy a barely concealed form of oligarchy, and what happens when techno-trumpians and Marxists agree

I think it’s probably worth establishing exactly what I am accusing. Yes, you would be right to say that the word “liberalism” means so much that it barely means anything anymore. There are so many different types of liberal democracy and when you ask different people about it, there is a high chance they will mean different things, be that classical (Locke, Smith) or modern liberalism (Roosevelt), neoliberalism (Thatcher or Reagan), or the third way (Clinton, Blair). When I talk about liberalism, I mean the model of liberal capitalist democracy from which the modern West developed, rooted in classical liberalism, meaning individualism, personal liberty, minimal government involvement, rather than its later offshoots like modern liberalism and the ones that followed.

I feel like a lot of people today don’t have an authentic understanding of what liberal politics actually implies. Liberal democratic countries are associated with high levels of personal freedoms and strong civil liberties. It is, however, historically rooted in an ideology whose economic principles sit much closer to the political right, something which, I’ve discovered, is not obvious to everyone. This is, I believe, partly because people these days tend to vastly consume primarily American political news, a country where the mainstream political spectrum leaves relatively little space for genuinely leftist economic politics. So, for many Americans, liberalism (specifically modern liberalism) is as left as it can get, sadly. Classical liberalism, however, prioritises free-market capitalism and private property over extensive state intervention, and, while socially it can be quite progressive, its core economic principles align with those of the political right. Liberalism cannot easily be separated from capitalism; capitalism is basically at its core, it’s fundamental to the liberal tradition.

Maybe it is worth introducing two main characters of this essay, one of whom introduced me to another (not in real life though that would be an incredibly intimidating occurrence). In his book Liberal Fascisms, Slavoj mentioned Curtis Yarvin, proclaiming that any “respectful leftist” should take time to read Yarvin and his main pieces of work. Okay, we are actually not on the first name basis with the Slovenian marxist-hegelian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, though I am seeing him live in a few months, so who knows!

Upon a quick look up of Curtis Yarvin, I was surprised that this is who Žižek insists on reading. Curtis is a pro-Trumpian, anti-egalitarian technocrat and Jacobite (a nod to partisans of James II and his descendants, who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, opposed Britain’s parliamentary system and upheld the divine right of kings). Yarvin has become a kind of Machiavelli to his big-tech benefactors: in 2022 he recommended that Trump, if reelected, appoint Elon Musk to run the executive branch, and promoted the eventual transfer of power to a CEO-like monarch, to “Transform the government into an ultra profitable and armed corporation, retire all government employees and discontinue international relationships”. Yarvin also called himself a “geek” and a “nerd”, as well as saying that the US should enter the era of Dark Enlightenment and follow the ideology he invented himself, called formalism, and formalism is, of course, “geeks for geeks” type of ideology. Dark Enlightenment is a neoreactionary movement coined by Nick Land that basically rejects all the values of the Enlightenment era such as democracy, equality and human progress and introduces new core values — authoritarian governance, absolute monarchy, anti-egalitarianism and running countries like corporations, or, put simply, the “revenge of the nerds”. Yarvin, also known by his pen name Mencius Moldbug, wrote extensively about his own ideology — and even built a company around it. That company, Tlon, created Urbit, a decentralised, peer-to-peer personal server platform and clean-slate operating system that gives users complete ownership of their data and digital identity. This is directly inspired by Borges’s fictional world in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (perhaps worth revisiting..). In the story, the fictional world (Tlön) is gradually imposed upon reality through the force of intellectual persuasion, eventually displacing the actual world altogether, a totalising alternative system, built from scratch, that overwrites existing political and digital realities. The Urbit project was heavily backed by none other than Peter Thiel back in 2013. Yarvin believed that the US should be run as a big corporation with its own assets. Any means that will get us there are acceptable, so this should be treated as an “engineering problem”.

To be fair, Slavoj Žižek loves provocations and also opposes dogmatic fidelity and boxing himself into a particular ideology. As Rebecca Mead said in her essay on Žižek, “The Marx Brother” — “Žižek likes to think of himself as deeply politically incorrect, delights in calling himself a male chauvinist, and flamboyantly fails to toe the line on gay-rights issues.” He is a Lacanian-Hegelian Marxist, which basically signifies the combination of his belief in Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectical philosophy, and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis. He utilises the structure of the human unconscious and radical contradictions to explain his views, which he, of course, has an abundance of. Some of them don’t really fit together, but maybe that is actually what I like about him. Žižek believes that the best social order is, undeniably, communism, though he rejects traditional 20th-century communist states and totalitarianism, particularly Stalinism and orthodox Marxist-Leninism (the belief that capitalism’s collapse is scientifically inevitable, but it demands strict centralised vanguard leadership to seize power, crush bourgeois structures and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat). He advocates for a return to a radical, dialectical materialism to challenge global capitalism: real-world material conditions, like economics and resources, shape human ideas and consciousness rapidly, not the other way around.

In the book Liberal Fascisms that I mentioned at the start, Žižek is pushing forward a characteristically contentious claim — the idea that contemporary forms of authoritarianism, such as Trumpism, emerge from liberalism’s own ideological and structural contradictions. As Gábor Szabó summarises the book’s central thesis, “Contemporary authoritarianism is not liberalism’s external adversary but one of its latent internal possibilities”, so Trumpism, or “fascist liberalism”, is an outcome of liberalism, combining market absolutism with intensified state coercion and emerging corporate-feudal forms of power. Žižek believes the hidden power is in capitalism, ideology and class relations, not just bureaucrats. He believes that we need to radically transform the ideological conditions of democracy. For him, the crisis is not just about broken institutions, but about the capitalist mode of production itself and the ideology that sustains it. You cannot reform your way out of a system that is fundamentally exploitative. Yarvin, unsurprisingly, sees things very differently. He locates hidden power in the “Cathedral” — the elite universities, media outlets and bureaucratic networks that shape public opinion and preserve the status quo. He goes as far as to say that the power needs to be centralised further, placing it in the hands of a CEO-like ruler, who can run the country like a corporation, free from all the messiness of democratic accountability.

While locating themselves on two completely opposite sides of a standard 2D political compass, these two do have one thing in common — neither accepts liberal democracy’s account of itself. So really, Žižek recommending Yarvin so seriously is not so insane at all: “Yarvin’s scathing description of our ‘liberal democracies’ as barely concealed forms of oligarchy, including his point that actual democracy would be even worse and more dangerous, should be an obligatory reading for every serious Leftist”? The question for either of them is not whether liberal democracy in the western world is broken, because it is. The question is about what comes next and who gets to build this next.

One of Yarvin’s main works was “The Cathedral”, which is the “intellectual institutions at the center of modern society” or “a short way to say journalism plus academia”. When Yarvin talks about the Cathedral, he means elite institutions such as the BBC, CNN, The New York Times, Harvard (primarily), Yale and others, saying that the cathedral functions as an equivalent to a medieval Church. The cathedral has many institutions, yet it functions as an entity with a unified ideology, as a singular prestigious organisational structure. He says that the danger of that is an oligarchic outcome of selective advantage: dominant ideas will always win, recessive ideas will always lose, thus staying an oligarchy. The cathedral is a metaphor of how liberal democracies work, with its root cause being the bureaucracy that “leaks power”. The only solution, in Yarvin’s view, is a monarchy, and not any monarchy, but a CEO-style corporate monarchy with a single accountable leader at the top, who would be the “most capable and visionary doer”. I bet that sounds like the most deluded thing you have ever heard, but I hope it’s now clear why he has people like J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen as his devoted followers. Curtis Yarvin’s solution to democracy rests on a foundation of technocratic fantasy and self-interest, as well as intellectual convenience, fully rooted in his background as a software engineer. He views governance not as a messy human endeavour but, again, as an engineering problem, where democracy is an old buggy OS that needs a full redesign. This is where his infamous “Apple argument” emerges: calling Apple a “small monarchy”, as proof that if a corporate structure works and if it can produce iPhones, why wouldn’t it be able to run a country? Because yes, actually, that is exactly what we want: a system built on planned obsolescence, corporate secrecy and the extraction of maximum profit from a captive user base.

Žižek sees this issue from a completely different perspective. Unlike Yarvin, who views liberal democracy as a powerful cultural and institutional conspiracy, Žižek sees liberalism as an ideology driven by capitalist economics. Žižek says that the liberal idea of freedom itself is not adequate, liberalism is too narrow of a concept for freedom, since freedom is not simply being free from coercion. He calls it a capitalist “ideological fantasy” that tricks people into thinking they are free while corporate interests actually run the world, while in reality economic apartheid and other crises we face cannot be solved within this capitalist lib-dem framework. But this is precisely where Žižek’s thought reaches its limits, where he falls conspicuously silent. He is brilliant at deconstruction, devastating in his critiques and endlessly entertaining in his provocations, but when it comes to a solution, he only ever shows the vaguest gestures toward “communism” without actually explaining what that would mean in the sense of freedom, mode of production or redistribution of wealth.

This is where I think both of them are simultaneously right and completely wrong. Yarvin is right that democratic power does not reside exclusively in elections: universities, media organisations, corporations and unelected bureaucracies obviously exercise enormous influence over what is politically possible. But his conclusion seems almost comically backwards. If liberal democracy already conceals oligarchic power, openly handing political power to a tiny group of corporate elites does not solve the oligarchy problem, it simply stops concealing it. Žižek’s diagnosis seems more convincing here because it asks why power becomes so concentrated in the first place. If wealth, ownership and political influence are inseparable, then replacing politicians with CEOs leaves the underlying problem completely untouched, if not massively intensified. The disagreement, then, is not really over whether oligarchic power exists, but over what makes it illegitimate. For Žižek, the concentration of power itself is the problem because it emerges from unequal relations of ownership and class. For Yarvin, the problem is almost the opposite: power already exists, but it is dispersed, obscured and insufficiently accountable. His solution is therefore not to democratise power, but to identify its owners and formalise their rule. In a strange way, Yarvin takes the Marxist accusation that liberal democracy is bourgeois rule and responds not by denying it, but by asking: why not make it official?

What unites these two thinkers, then, is not their solutions but their shared conviction that liberal democracy cannot simply be repaired on its own terms. For Yarvin, it is an institutional failure, a “Cathedral” of elite consensus that must be swept away by a corporate monarch. For Žižek, it is an ideological failure, a capitalist fantasy that masks exploitation behind the language of freedom. Both diagnoses demand radical change, but one points toward a future of technocratic authoritarianism, the other toward an undefined, almost utopian communism. The terrifying truth is that Yarvin’s vision, however repellent, is at least imaginable, while Žižek’s is not. And in that asymmetry lies the crisis of the contemporary left: it knows what it opposes but cannot articulate what it wants. Perhaps this is why Žižek so readily recommends reading Yarvin: he knows that even a horrifying vision is, in its own way, more satisfying than no vision at all. Yarvin offers the former; Žižek offers the latter. The question is whether we can build something better than either.

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