When discussing Trump-2.0, too often we don’t put the fundamentals of American democracy first. Donald Trump himself, devoid of any coherent ideology and bereft of any clear end-goal beside the most base self-gratification, is anything but the problem. The real threats are those select few actually responsible for his election.
Vice President JD Vance admitted he is “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures.” He is rare among Republicans: a source of insight into the stately, institutional side of the New Right. It is composed of some central intellectuals, and more worryingly, their followers in the tech industry. Should the Trump regime ever truly reach the new lows of illiberalism and autocracy which the media fears, these men will be its actual leaders.
Let’s start with one theorist for whom Vance has openly declared his admiration in a 2021 podcast. Curtis Yarvin is the founder of the Neo-Reactionary (NRx) movement, which rejects the liberal and democratic ideals formed in the Enlightenment from a modern perspective. Yarvin is, simply put, an absolutist-monarchist with a Silicon Valley background. He figures democracy promotes wasteful spending and corruption; that the state would fare better if it was privately owned by a sovereign “national CEO” financially invested in the valuation of his property. Yarvin compares the basic structure of monarchy to that of the privately-owned firm, praising the efficiency of the imperial executive in streamlining the state itself as a corporate exec would their company. Eventually, he claims, such a mode of government would mean a return to feudalism under the lordship of large, for-profit corporations with private police-state equipment. After all, there are no checks and balances in Silicon Valley: private firms operate essentially by dictate of the CEO.
Yarvin’s first step to privatize the US government was “RAGE”: Retire All Government Employees. By purging the established civil service, he aimed to allow the president to install a new class of ideological bureaucrats willing to take real action against the constitutional order. The Republican think-tank class has since quietly co-opted and rebranded neoreactionary policies as the “America First” platform, from Kevin Roberts’ Heritage Foundation to figures like the Trump administration’s Stephen Miller, Michael Anton and Russel Vought. Needless to say, a proposal extremely similar to RAGE appears in the pages of Project 2025. Now it seems the plan is being implemented.
To corporate leaders obsessed with maximizing profit, the temptation to revisit monarchy must be similarly alluring: if only the directive of the state could be administered with the efficiency of the capitalist producer at its helm, without the poor, witless masses getting in the way. It shouldn’t be shocking, then, to learn that Yarvin has many followers in his beloved tech industry. The tech “broligarch” most infamous for his dissatisfaction with democracy is Peter Thiel, one of the Republican Party’s biggest donors. Marc Andreessen, a tech mogul involved with the Trump transition, is also a friend of Yarvin. Elon Musk seems to have similar ideas about reshaping government in pursuit of private interests, albeit under the more mild facade of cutting waste and streamlining the fed.
As Musk’s primary threats to Republican dissenters prove, those with enough wealth can influence all levels of government. And now they’ve attained powerful positions, the forces of tech-bro feudalism are better poised than ever. For as long as campaign finance law remains as-is, the Broligarchy is real. Their hand-picked choice is already the vice president. They already own the media platforms on which you might wish to criticize them — and that technology of such potential for surveillance and control seems only to increase in sophistication.
As Trump’s distracting antics flood headlines, the underlying institutional issue is increasingly clear: America is entering another Gilded Age. Fortunately, we’ve defeated the robber-barons once before. The question to ask is how to do it again.
This story was originally published on Tower on March 7, 2025.