Ten years ago, I saw some people blogging about an exciting new political philosophy called neoreaction. I looked into it, decided it was bad, and wrote a 30,000 word rebuttal.

This was one of the more fateful decisions in my life. All the movement’s supporters decided that if I was engaging with neoreaction at all, I must like it, and commented on my blog for the next few years. And all the movement’s enemies made the same inference, and harassed me and tried to get me cancelled for the next few years. Honestly a bad time, 0/5, do not recommend.

Now it’s ten years later, I look back and decide if it was worth it, and I tentatively conclude no.

Neoreaction fascinated a lot of people. Lots of people really hate tech, and the easiest way to hate something these days is to accuse it to being right wing. But this is an uphill battle when tech company employees lean 10-to-1 Democrat, and a quick walk through any Silicon Valley office will find it festooned with Trans Pride flags and BLM posters. The most popular solution was to talk about Peter Thiel a lot (now it’s Elon Musk). But you can only publish so many thinkpieces about the same guy before the public reaches semantic satiation on his name. Luckily for everyone, Curtis Yarvin was in tech and seemed to be inventing a new way of being far-right, so people were able to replace Thiel Article #26018 with something on neoreaction, and then people got excited enough about hating it that they started harassing random bloggers who were (I can’t stress this enough) technically against it.

With ten years of hindsight, I think this fascination was a mistake. Neoreaction was stillborn. It went nowhere. It was a few hundred very online people LARPing about monarchy. Here are some theses on what happened (or didn’t happen) and why it mattered (or didn’t matter):

Neoreaction was about elitism. Modern society was too left-wing. Maybe that was because ordinary people were dumb sheep, and easy prey for left-wing demagogues. They needed competent elites to rule over them. Then those competent elites could be right-wing.

This was a plausible conservative perspective in 2013, when Mitt Romney had just finished challenging Barack Obama for the presidency. Romney seemed like a competent elite, and Barack Obama had ridden into office on a wave of populist fervor. Maybe the true essence of conservatism was supporting competent elites, and the new conservative movement - the one that would sweep away the failures of neoconservatism - would assert that essence proudly.

What really happened was the opposite. In 2016, we got Trump, a populist demagogue. All of a sudden, the essence of conservatism seemed to be about supporting ordinary working-class people against the elites and so-called experts. Neoreaction, which was trying to found a new conservative movement based on the opposite premise, was left flat-footed - and disintegrated.

The problem in 2013 was that conservatism was a movement for maximally uncool old people - the Mitch McConnells of the world. Lots of young people were tired of wokeness and looking for somewhere to run, but they needed some sub-form of conservatism that could credibly claim to be younger and edgier than McConnell-ism.

Neoreaction hoped to become that sub-form. It asserted weird crazy things that Mitch McConnell would never go along with, like that we should be ruled by a king. Sometimes it flirted with racism or theocracy, which were scandalous. Nobody knew what to make of it.

The alt-right was originally a bunch of Stormfront type people who were not cool at all. But in 2016, Hillary Clinton gave a speech against them that sort of made them sound cool, and lumped them together with 4Chan in order to inflate their numbers. 4Chan was kind of cool, so the alt-right went from a handful of weirdos in jackboots to an umbrella term for any kind of weird edgy conservatism full of exciting young people. Also, they had the funny frogs.

Some individual neoreactionaries saw which way the wind was blowing and re-identified as alt-right in time to maintain some influence, but the two movements were philosophically and culturally incompatible. The alt-right was ironic, populist, communicated in tweets and greentexts, and - when it had any intellectual aspirations at all - leaned towards a grandiose Continental style. Neoreaction was dead serious, communicated in 10,000 word essays with lots of statistics, and thought Mark Zuckerberg was cool. Instead of any kind of merger, the alt-right just won, and neoreaction just lost.

You can read it at Gray Mirror. It focuses on the dichotomy between democracy (good) and oligarchy (bad). Democracy is good because the people can elect an FDR-style powerful leader, who can keep the oligarchs under control and yoked to the needs of the people.

In some sense Yarvin has the same ideas as always and just dresses them up differently. Instead of talking about how much he hates democracy (because there should be monarchy instead), he talks about how much he loves democracy (because it can install a de facto monarchy, then go away).

But the dressing is different! It’s how you would dress up Yarvinism if you were trying to sell it in the Age of Trump, after the hour for real neoreaction had passed. I’m not sure it deserves the same name, and Yarvin no longer (AFAIK) uses the NRx branding.

There’s also the dark elves stuff (if you haven’t gone down this rabbit hole, I don’t recommend it). I interpret this as saying “You know how we correctly hate elites, the worst people in the world? Well what if there was some surprising case totally unlike anything going on now where some elites were good?” Again, this is how you desperately try to rebrand Yarvinism after the original branding became toxic.

(also, it’s not working; the people on Twitter hated the dark elves stuff)

Neoreaction was a collection of a few interesting ideas and many terrible ideas, all laundered together under maximally toxic branding. It appealed to some decent people because it was the first time they’d heard the interesting ideas, and they didn’t know how to separate it from the rest of the package. Happily, most of the interesting ideas have gotten picked up by better flagbearers.

E/acc. For social reasons, neoreaction mixed freely with Nick Land’s accelerationism, even though these weren’t naturally compatible philosophies. Land mixed his points in with an extra dose of race realism, and was never shy about how excited he was for robots to kill all humans.

E/acc keeps the coolness cred of “accelerationism”, ditches the race realism, and tiptoes around the “kill all humans” part. Having shed the politically-toxic neoreaction brand, it’s spread much further than the Landian version ever could.

I do think it’s funny that of “Asians might have IQs 5 points higher than whites” and “I want robots to kill all humans”, the accelerationists had to jettison the former belief in order to make the latter palatable. Just one of the many things our future AI overlords will mock us for.

Progress Studies: Part of the appeal of neoreaction was that the past seemed better at a lot of practical and important things than the present. The 1950s gave us moon missions, the interstate highway system, cheap housing, amazing public infrastructure, and ambitious government programs to end poverty. Nowadays NASA struggles to launch anything without help from SpaceX, the government is too gridlocked for Congress to pass even small tweaks, and the tiniest amount of new infrastructure costs billions and suffers decades-long delays.

Neoreaction noticed these things and concluded that the past was better than the present in full generality, and so we needed to return to the moral sense of the 1700s. I don’t think we should do this. Still, the original observations were sound. I think of Progress Studies as doing some of the hard work of figuring out whether these fields have actually regressed, and if so how we can try to improve them.

But it also pushes a certain aesthetic/psychological package of optimism and pride in human accomplishment, which I really do associate with the past and really do think was one of its best qualities. You can see this in the Progress Studies posts on World’s Fairs and ticker tape parades. Progress Studies does a better job than neoreaction ever did of mourning the loss of this attitude and plotting to get it back. But it correctly identifies it (despite its past-ness) as fundamentally liberal and progressive.

YIMBYism: An obvious extension of the above. The past was able to build things, and provided its citizens with cheap housing and beautiful cities. The present doesn’t. Why not? It’s easy and not entirely wrong to blame liberal democracy for this - if you ask the current citizens of a city to vote on new construction, they’ll usually say no, and the grandest construction was implemented by authoritarian central planners like Robert Moses who ignored them. Neoreaction ably leveraged this into an argument for general authoritarianism - and if it was that or endless NIMBYism, the authoritarianism started seeming attractive.

But YIMBYs have proven that there can be a constituency for building things even in a democratic system, and won enough victories to demonstrate that methods can work.

I’m lumping more general Marc Andreassen style “It’s Time To Build”-ism into this section too.

Charter Cities: This is maybe closest to the original spirit of neoreaction. Reactionaries noticed that many developing countries, when given a democratic choice, picked warlords who promised revenge on their ethnic enemies, or socialists eager to expropriate the property of anyone trying to start a useful industry. Meanwhile, benevolent dictators like Lee Kuan Yew and Park Chung-hee led their countries to peace and prosperity.

In one of his few clear and serious posts, Yarvin suggested that the world be split up into small parcels, each with its own dictator, and hopefully competition among dictators would force them to make their parcel a nice place to live, Lee Kuan Yew style. He never explained how this interacted with his King of America plan, or what happened if the dictators were evil, or how this related to the real world (where we will not do this).

Charter cities embed this basic idea in a liberal framework. They allow basically democratic countries that notice they’re failing to develop to give a small portion of their land to a non-genocidal and non-socialist company tasked with developing it according to international best practices, and everyone can choice whether to live in the small portion or the rest of the country. The larger country takes responsibility for making sure the company respects human rights, and we get there from here because a lot of countries have shown interest in doing this (and if it’s proven to work, hopefully more countries will later).

Whether or not you support charter cities, they’re an upgrade in ethicalness and practicality from the original neoreactionary plan, and a better standardbearer for this idea.

Anti-Wokeness. Whatever, you all know this one. In 2013, a lot of people thought they hated modernity, when they really just hated (as we called them then) “the SJWs”. Now there’s a broader anti-wokeness coalition that doesn’t require you to be a monarchist, and some recent conservative victories have cast doubt on the thesis that democracy automatically means more and more wokeness forever.

Again, I think neoreaction seduced some people because it was the first place they’d ever come across any of these ideas, and they thought they needed to accept the entire bundle to continue exploring them. Now that they have better standard-bearers, the rest of the bundle doesn’t look as attractive.

The early 2010s were good for autocracy. China, recently led by capable yet restrained leaders like Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, looked poised to overtake the West. Putin’s Russia had overcome its post-Soviet chaos and was winning victories abroad. And Dubai had just finished building the world’s tallest skyscraper, right next to the world’s biggest mall, world’s biggest artificial island community, etc.

This was a good climate for neoreaction. Where other people praised dictators for being tall manly people who would make [ancestral enemy] pay, neoreactionaries told a fresh new story about how they were more competent at exactly the things liberals held most dear. For a while, this story sounded compelling.

But Putin’s invasion of Ukraine shattered the story of his competence, showed that western democratic countries can make hard choices and stand up for themselves when they have to, and reminded everyone that sometimes dictators do random stupid things that kill hundreds of thousands of people. Xi Jinping did the same in China, both with the Uighur genocide and his (relative) mismanagement of the economy. Dubai hasn’t built anything else Burj Khalifa-sized recently, the mistreatment of Indian laborers there has become more salient, and MbS next door is another anti-advertisement for the totalitarian project.

All of this is premature triumphalism over a few-year reversal in fortunes. Maybe in 2030 America will collapse, China will do something amazing, and we’ll be back to wondering if autocracy is the way to go after all.

Still, for now it seems like it isn’t, and neoreaction is a welcome casualty.