The Indispensability of Political Faith
On May 5, 2025, the eccentric, curmudgeonly, but endlessly fascinating Curtis Yarvin snuck in the east narthex of Harvard University’s cathedral in order to sow seeds of doubt and corrupt Harvard’s pious youth. Having been invited by the Harvard Faculty Club (not Harvard University, mind you!) to debate Danielle Allen—daughter of esteemed political conservative William B. Allen and the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard—Yarvin wasted little time in showing why he has become a central voice on the Dissident Right. A pessimistic gadfly, and a self-professed “failed child prodigy” who grew up in the belly of America’s bureaucratic deep state, Yarvin demonstrated his wit, his breadth of knowledge, and his keen ability to deconstruct the defenders of Our DemocracyTM.
The debate between Allen and Yarvin was winding and covered many topics. The two resolutions being debated were the following: “Resolved, the long-term stability and flourishing of our society is better secured by concentrated executive authority, than by democratic institutions” (Yarvin argued the affirmative, Allen the negative); and “Resolved, Harvard’s model of elite formation, grounded in a contested balance between merit and equality, undermines the democratic legitimacy of the political and cultural systems its graduates go on to shape” (Yarvin once against argued the affirmative, while Allen the negative). While others have aptly covered the breadth of the debate, here I want to take a deep-dive into a number of issues.
Equality, Freedom, and Democracy
A good part of the debate concerned the nature of democracy and human equality. Allen’s position, outlined most thoroughly in her recent book Justice By Means of Democracy , is that America is a democracy and this is good. The question for her is not whether America will be a democracy (or oligarchy or monarchy), but how to improve democracy to make it work better for everyone. Allen fundamentally believes that American democracy is necessary for social justice, and that Harvard, although imperfect, is still the gold-standard of democratic education, pluralist cooperation, and the formation of tomorrow’s political elite.
Yarvin, of course, threw cold water on this. What does Allen really mean by “democracy” if the regular people of America are excluded from American politics and their votes and voices ignored (as they had been systematically before Trump)? In what way is Harvard educating instead of indoctrinating its students into a liberal orthodoxy, or doing scientific research instead of chasing government grant funds? Yarvin returned time and again to various COVID-19 scandals to demonstrate that America is run by an unaccountable oligarchic elite and that Harvard’s “scientists” have succumbed to a type of financial capture that drives their “research.” Whatever this it is, it doesn’t live up to Harvard’s venerated motto of Veritas.
A major bone of contention between Allen and Yarvin was the question of human equality, the answer to which relates intimately to whether one embraces democracy or not. Allen argued that while humans display a dazzling array of differences, those differences cannot be understood apart from humans first possessing a common species equality. In her book, Allen overviews different kinds of equality: morality equality, political, social, economic, racial, gender equality, and so on. For Allen, however, the essence of human equality is moral: “human moral equality names the existence of the need … to be an author of one’s life, coupled with a capacity, also distinctive of members of the human species, to make evaluative judgments. At the core of the idea of human equality lies our purposiveness and our capacity for autonomy … [and] the need to have that capacity recognized as a necessary element of well-being, worth, and dignity” (Justice by Means of Democracy, p. 32). However, since moral equality requires human freedom in order to be exercised and actualized, all just political societies must protect both negative liberties (right to speech, religion, press, political assembly, etc.) and positive liberties (equal opportunities to participate in political institutions). Since no man is an island but each is necessarily a social creature who needs others for a good and flourishing life, democracy is the only form of government that simultaneously protects both negative and positive liberties while maximizing compossible individual pursuits of human happiness (individually defined according to personal desires) and respecting moral equality and autonomy.
Yarvin essentially denied that all men are equal, even morally so. Pointing to human evolutionary biology, he queried if Allen thought that chimpanzees could be considered equal to humans? Since we are descended from the apes (in Yarvin’s view), at some point there had to be a mother who was not equally human to the equal humans she begat. Allen never gave an answer to this question. On Yarvin’s view, if men are not equal, then democracy is not required; its use is purely prudential as circumstances require. However, since the sovereign and subject are completely different in Yarvin’s mind—that some are suited to rule while most are fit to be ruled—it makes perfect sense that monarchic authority would produce better political results than the ochlocracy of democracy (i.e., mob rule). For Yarvin, Allen’s understanding of democracy is “tendentious,” ignoring the importance of political elections or responding to the will of the people, in favor of lofty and often inscrutable academic principles (such as “difference without domination,” “empowering economies,” and “polypolitanism”). Yarvin called this the “world’s longest case of no true Scotsman.”
Neither Allen nor Yarvin got human equality or freedom right. Yarvin is a self-professed atheist and clearly believes in evolutionary biology, and Allen admits in her book that she rejects a theory of the good (even while trying to salvage the notions of right and wrong, better and worse) and eschews defining human flourishing or moral judgments by religious or divine standards. Taking inspiration from John Stuart Mill, William James, and John Rawls, Allen admits that she is a pragmatist (a “fallibilist, corrigibilist pragmatist”), and contrasts that to Aristotelian metaphysics. Yet she attempts to rescue Aristotle’s eudaemonic ethics (virtue ethics toward the end of happiness) even while re-grounding it on pragmatic, democratic and liberal “rules for action.” If all of this sounds fantastically impossible, it’s because it is.
In addition, Allen’s contention that we are all morally equal is vacuous. All she can say is that we are morally equal in our capacity for moral awareness or judgment, which she believes leads to the right of autonomy—determining for oneself what is right, what happiness is, and what counts as human flourishing. Yet certainly we are not all equal in moral capacity, as infants and children, the mentally disabled, the insane, and the elderly are often incapable of moral judgment. And even among “mature” adults, moral knowledge, understanding, and proper judgment differs widely. The problem for Allen is that by affirming equality in moral judgment and the autonomy that comes with it, she has sawed off the branch of moral censorship she sits on—something all non-nihilistic humans believe in and practice. Of course, Allen has no problem in violating her own principles of the right to moral judgment, freedom-as-autonomy, and self-determination of happiness and human flourishing when she excludes from political society those individuals like Yarvin who would advocate for the inversion of her principles or monarchic rule. Yarvin believes that human flourishing requires strong authoritarian rule, the suppression of human filth, and acknowledgement of unyielding racial differences. Allen, for all of her talk of pluralism and the pursuit of truth, cannot tolerate the Yarvins of the world in her society.
From the perspective of the American founders, humans are equal in that they are all created by God who has given them the breath of life. Having endowed them with life and liberty in order to pursue truth and worship him aright, men have a divine origin and teleology; they have a moral north star, discernable in nature but also found in the book of revelation. The “unalienable rights” of the Declaration to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” cannot be understood apart from this theological (i.e., Christian) reading. Both Yarvin and Allen have read God out of the world and out of their political philosophy, and both are stumbling in the dark because of it. The founders believed that human equality was difficult to defend, precisely because humans are obviously unequal in almost every way. Only a divine account of men’s origin and end can explain why it would be wrong to rule another politically as a master would rule his slave, or to deny to men the exercise of their natural equal rights (understood properly).
Political Forms and the Best Regime
At multiple points in the debate, Yarvin pointed to what he called “Aristotle’s three forms” of government: monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. (Allen claimed that Yarvin had “made a hash” out of Aristotle since Aristotle has six forms of government, three good (monarchy, aristocracy, polity) and three bad (tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy), with the distinction between good and bad being selfish gain versus ruling for the common advantage. I think Yarvin understands this, but was simplifying for the sake of argument.) Yarvin boiled down these regime forms into three types of governance: authoritarian, prestige (or honor), and populism. He argued that Trump and MAGA are a combination of the first and third—authoritarian populism—but that this is not enough because every regime also needs honor and prestige. His main contention in the debate was that Harvard, as well as American politics in general, is propped up by a sclerotic and crumbling oligarchic prestige that rejects authority and despises populism even while selling itself to the American people as a venerable “democracy.” This is why it is failing.
I am not a radical disciple of Yarvin, only having read some of his Mencius Moldbug Unqualified Reservations blog and Gray Mirror substack (although I appreciate his creative thinking and critiques), so my comments below are predicated mostly upon what he said in the debate (Yarvin can clarify in response if I’ve misunderstood him). It is unclear if Yarvin believes there is a “best political regime” for humans or not. On the one hand, he clearly believes that each of Aristotle’s three basic forms of government ought to play a role in political society, as a polity of authoritarianism without popular input or prestige won’t work, nor will the current system of oligarchic honor and wealth without authority or democratic participation. In other words, Yarvin seems to champion the idea of mixed government as the best regime—exactly what the American founders’ believed in and were attempting to achieve with the structure of the U.S. Constitution (the House is popular, the Senate is aristocratic, and the President is monarchic).
On the other hand, Yarvin pointed to Thomas Carlyle’s “condition-of-England” question in his Chartism (1839) during the Industrial Revolution in the Victorian era. The question pertained to the material and spiritual condition and well-being of the people of England at this time, especially the age-old social tension between the rich and the poor. That same tension drove much of Aristotle’s assessment of regime types, leading to the conclusion (by both Aristotle and Carlyle) that there is no single best regime. Political forms of governance must be properly suited to the people—their collective ways of life, capacities and limitations, material conditions, wants and needs, propensities for virtue or vice, and so forth—if that government hopes to rule for the benefit of all. A good regime or constitution in theory poorly matched to its subject matter not only won’t work, but will do more harm than good (i.e., form and matter must cohere).
This was not merely an insight or preoccupation of the ancients: Montesquieu, in his Spirit of the Laws (1750), argued extensively that constitutions and laws must fit the spirit of a people. The American founders’ followed Montesquieu on this, although they made one revision, which incidentally also relates to Yarvin’s invocation of Alexander Pope. Yarvin quoted Pope’s famous line that “For forms of government let fools contest; Whate’er is best administer’d is best.” In other words, for Pope, debates over monarchy versus oligarchy versus democracy are futile; what matters instead, is efficiency and proper management and administration regardless of government form. Yarvin called this his “standard of government,” which would lead the listener to think he is ambivalent about constitutional forms (this is unclear to me). This is ironic given the fact that Yarvin is deeply critical of the Progressive advance of technocratic expertise within the administrative state, and yet FDR—one of the main political architects of the deep state—literally followed Pope’s vision of “enlightened administration.”
The view of say, John Adams—who explicitly rejected Pope’s embrace of administrative sufficiency—was that while the ends of government are fixed (the common good, happiness, moral virtue), legitimate government comes in a variety of types—that is, as long as each government is “republican.” What Adams meant by “republican,” however was not democracy or mobocracy or a plebiscitary; what he meant was “an empire of laws, and not of men.” While men must run government, the founders’ as a whole utterly rejected the arbitrary, capricious, and unaccountable rule of men (this did not nullify their understanding of magisterial prerogative, states of exception, or even Caesarism). Within the republican framework, Adams admitted that there was an “inexhaustible variety” of regime types or constitutional forms that were permissible, and this is why Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist no. 77, claimed that the U.S. Constitution combines elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy “as far as republican principles will admit” (each has an electoral foundation at some point and is accountable to fundamental, constitutional law).
So, does Yarvin believe one form of government is best for all people, or maybe just for Americans (a mixed government, with an emphasis upon the monarchic element)? Does he believe that government forms must evolve to fit the needs of the people in order to govern for their well-being? Or does he think that forms are irrelevant and all that is needed is proper bureaucratic administration? From the debate, at least, his answers to these questions are unclear.
Allen, for her part, was more direct in answering the question of the best regime. A democracy that presupposes and protects human moral equality, participation, and freedom-as-autonomy is the best regime, not just for America but for all peoples. To the extent that American government as a whole, or Harvard’s organization and administration in particular, falls short of this ideal, both can be reformed to more closely cohere to her standards of justice and human flourishing.
Allen’s answer to the question of the best regime was shallow and rigid compared to Yarvin’s more nuanced and expansive perspective, yet at the same time, her position was more compelling. She gave a straight-forward answer for an audience looking for answers. Her vision—as academically stultifying and bland as it was—sought to inspire hope, “empowerment,” and a picture of a better life for all, and not just for the strongest or smartest or wiliest. The point is that the quest for the best regime is a uniquely human quest that cannot be stomped out or ignored. This is so because politics is a reflection of human nature, and human nature is inextricably tied to a universal moral and divine teleology. This leads to the last point.
Whither God?
The question of the “best regime,” and the fact that Allen provides a hopeful and positive (although ultimately false) answer to this ancient quest while Yarvin casts doubt upon the whole enterprise, points to the most important aspect of the debate—and also why, ironically, I think Allen won even though she argued poorly. The politics of both is deficient, because neither properly understands what the Declaration of Independence makes clear: “All men are created…” If men are created—and not merely evolved as Yarvin believes or pragmatically groping to actualize a non-transcendent eudaemonistic democracy as Allen believes—then there is a God who has created man and endowed him with purpose and eternal meaning. Politics must reflect this and address the sensus divinitatis (“sense of divinity” per John Calvin)within the breast of all men, if it to be successful.
Yarvin is fully Machiavellian (he praised the Italian school of elite theory and James Burnham’s The Machiavellians) in that with him there is a ‘return to the people’ (or at least the awareness that any princely rule must take the people’s needs and opinions seriously), yet at the same time, like Machiavelli, the transcendent (i.e., divine) ideal has been lost. Machiavelli, of course, was a strong critic of the late medieval Catholic Church, but there was more than just an anti-clerical and anti-providential impulse in his writings. In chapter 15 of The Prince, Machiavelli inverted Aristotle’s long list of virtues, and instead elevated the vices of greed, pride, cruelty, religious skepticism, and so forth as being necessary for effective rule. This is why the Florentine philosopher concluded that “a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good.” Because Aristotle claimed that the highest good for humans was happiness, and happiness was moral virtue (and the highest virtues are intellectual virtues that lead us to God), Machiavelli’s inversion of the virtues signaled the rejection of divine happiness as man’s final end. The horizon of politics had been stunted, and like Lucretius before him, Machiavelli’s atheism and Epicureanism fundamentally reduced politics to a concern only with men’s security, material needs, and prosperity in this life.
Machiavelli’s attack on the virtues followed immediately on the heels of his critique of idealistic or abstract political philosophizing: “A great many men have imagined states and princedoms such as nobody ever saw or knew in the real world, and there’s such a difference between the way we really live and the way we ought to live that the man who neglects the real to study the ideal will learn how to accomplish his ruin, not his salvation.” This, in a nutshell, is Yarvin’s case, and he rode it hard against Allen’s idealism, often criticizing her for her “abstractions, very beautiful abstractions.” Yet in his unrelenting and pessimistic focus upon the actual political and social state of affairs in America, Yarvin risks losing the ideal. There is no Creator, no unique human meaning, and no afterlife in his politics (although oddly, Yarvin does believe humans have souls), and so while he is incredibly lucid at discerning and dissecting how the real world works and what has gone wrong, Yarvin ultimately has no satisfying answer as to what should be done.
Yarvin might answer that a fifth-generation hereditary monarchy is the answer to ‘what should be done,’ precisely because—going back to Pope—monarchy is the easiest and most efficient form of government to administer. But administer for what?The unorthodox philosopher believes that the end of government, the salus populi of the people, requires more than just the quantitative rule over men’s bodies, but the qualitative and aesthetic rule over men’s souls as well. And what is the salus populi? “The healthy human being must flower in every possible way to the limit of their capacities. Some capacities are intellectual; some are professional; some are artistic; some are artisanal; and some are military. Are not some men born soldiers? If they cannot become soldiers, their genius is wasted. But if they cannot be slain, they are not soldiers.”While this doesn’t necessitate monarchy, it certainly points in that direction, requiring that men be conquered and ruled by an absolute, unconditional sovereign government. Why? Because, for Yarvin, human health requires pain and death, or what amounts to “essential difficulty” (i.e., disutility)—and pain and death must be properly managed by authority, otherwise it will spiral out of control. Here, again, Yarvin is Machiavellian in his view that conflict is essential to human vitality; but also in the belief that a strong Prince is needed to smelt order out of chaos.
Like Machiavelli, Yarvin’s “ideal” is no ideal at all, for no one desires pain and death. Instead, Yarvin is relentless in his pessimistic description of real life, both today and in our possible radical monarchic future. Ironically, Yarvin’s vision of the salus populi dovetails with Allen’s: self-actualization according to personal and natural uniqueness. The difference between them is not just form of government—democracy versus monarchy—but that Allen has preserved and articulated an ideal of “human flourishing” that appeals to the longings of the human heart, even if Allen’s understanding of this flourishing is depressingly deficient.
This is where Allen’s idealism trumps Yarvin’s realism. The Harvard professor seemed incapable of truly grasping the decrepit state of American politics and how Harvard has been utterly corrupted from the inside-out. Yet despite these lapses, Allen’s Pollyannaism makes up for it. She is indefatigable in her belief in that democracy is the best way to protect human freedom, and that democratic participation, pluralism, competition, and cooperation will undoubtedly lead to the truth and to human flourishing for all. Allen’s tenacious and unrelenting belief in a political, social, and moral ideal that we must never stop striving for answers the desires of the human heart—its longing for meaning, purpose, and a better life, whether here or in the hereafter.
Allen’s answer of a “fallibilist, corrigibilist, democratic, eudaemonistic pragmatism”—simplified as “power-sharing liberalism”—is of course as risible as it is puzzling and unworkable, for, in the end, Allen’s political vision shares the same defect as Yarvin’s: she has expunged religious and divine elements from politics and eschewed any “sources external to human judgment.” In her world, man is alone with his libido dominandi, selfishly turned inward in a desperate but doomed attempt to rescue himself through “freedom,” “empowerment,” “participation,” and pragmatic scheming. (These quotes come from Allen’s 2023 book Justice By Means of Democracy.)
At the beginning of the debate Yarvin had criticized Allen and her book as reading like a Muslim history of the Islamic faith, but instead of opening each chapter with “there is no God but Allah and Muhammed is his prophet” (the Islamic Shahada), Allen metaphorically began each chapter with “there is no politics but democracy and freedom is its virtue” (or something to that effect). Yarvin’s point was that Allen’s work was more akin to an expression of faith than a rigorous empirical analysis or serious study in political science. Allen shot back that she was proud that her work was suffused with conviction, yet conviction is not the same thing as faith. Yarvin was surely right that Allen’s work is a piece of democratic faith—eerily similar to Herbert Croly’s insistence that faith is indispensable for progressive democracy—for faith (as the Bible tells us) places a future hope in things that are unseen yet assured.
This sums up Allen’s vision of American democracy, and it is why her position will triumph over the pessimistic realist every day. She speaks to the human need for faith that things can be better in this life, and that humans are not merely hopeless biomasses adrift in a sea of accident, fate, and the advantage of the stronger. That she speaks and thinks and writes like this in the cathedral (Yarvin’s term for the intellectual institutions that police modern, liberal orthodoxy) is not coincidental. While Allen may believe she is engaged in the rational pursuit of truth with interlocutors of all stripes, she is involved in a form of catechismal paideia, and is simply parroting and aggressively policing a democratic faith handed down to her from her intellectual forbears (such as John Stuart Mill, William James, and John Rawls).
The problem with both debaters, however, is that while Allen has a political faith, she has the wrong faith; and for his part, Yarvin lacks any political faith at all. Political faith is necessary for any vital regime and civilization, but it must be grounded in a true faith of an existing God and the reality of human glory, corruption, salvation, and future redemption. Until America’s leading political intellectuals take this kind of political knowledge and tradition seriously—as Protestant political thinkers and leaders did in America for hundreds of years—we will merely spin our wheels as we descend into a slow but sure oblivion.
Image: Frontispiece of Leviathan by Abraham Bosse (1651). Wikimedia Commons.
