Angel Jaramillo Torres
The ideologues of Trumpism, Curtis Yarvin, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, have pushed the libertarian movement into a downward spiral from which there is no return.
Trumpism, as both a practice and an ideology, is full of contradictions. One of these is the conflict between the populism of Steve Bannon and the anarcho-libertarianism of the Silicon Valley oligarchs, the most prominent of whom today is Elon Musk.
For Bannon, Trumpism should be loyal above all to its electoral base, which is made up of poor whites from rural areas, the kind of person that Vice President J. D. Vance praises in his book Hillbilly Elegy, which was later made into a film.
If one is tempted to make a classification, one could say that Bannon represents the left wing of Trumpism if such a thing is imaginable. The supposed policies of reindustrialization of the United States, which would be behind Trump’s tariff fury, would have as their primary beneficiary a large sector forgotten for years by the elites in Washington DC: the workers who stirred in the freezing factories of Pittsburgh and whom, because of the globalizing policies of the “men of Davos,” lost their job and their dignity.
Musk’s rise to power has occurred at the expense of Bannon’s influence in Washington, although the latter’s star waned due to losing bureaucratic battles during Trump’s first year in power in 2016-2017.
In terms of ideology, what does Elon Musk represent? His partner in his PayPal days, Peter Thiel, once commented that he no longer thought democracy was compatible with freedom. To understand the meaning of this idea, one would have to refer to two characters who have taken the super-technological ethos of Silicon Valley to a kind of political theory: Curtis Yarvin and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
Writing under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin became known more or less after the financial crisis of 2007-2008. A computer expert, Yarvin is the son of diplomats with many stamps on their passports. Despite a cosmopolitan childhood, he has concentrated on how to reform his country radically. One of his basic concepts is the idea of what he calls The Cathedral. This media, bureaucracy, and academia network forms an ideological constellation that governs the United States based on what Noam Chomsky calls the manufactured consensus.
If, in a superficial reading of Jacques Derrida, Bannon has called for the deconstruction of the deep state, Yarvin conceives The Cathedral as something more complex: a kind of mechanism that creates an imaginary world. One must think of the movie The Matrix to get closer to what he means. Educated by The Cathedral, we all live believing that we govern ourselves in a liberal democracy when, in fact, we inhabit a world in which a corrupt bureaucracy, together with certain economic and media interests, actually dictates its will to us. The resemblance of Yarvin’s ideas to Marxism should not go unnoticed.
However, one would be wrong to think that Yarvin seeks to open space for a renewed liberal democracy. Quite the opposite: he proposes a kind of postmodern monarchy where the republican spirit that fosters citizen participation gives way to a government of technocrats who use modern algorithms and other technologies to govern while serving a Caesar. His utopia is the high-tech feudal world of the movie Star Wars. The problem with these ideas is that Yarvin is not an isolated and peripheral university professor but an influential voice who has the ear of prominent figures now in Trumpism, such as Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Steve Bannon.
On the other side, Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a strange figure. He obtained his doctorate in Economics from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University and was for a time a pupil of the cultural Marxist Jurgen Habermas. However, he converted to anarcho-libertarianism and obtained a teaching post at the University of Nevada in the city of desert lights in Las Vegas.
As a pupil of Murray Rothbard — one of Javier Milei’s gurus — Hoppe has been a prominent figure in libertarianism. The problem with Hoppe is that he has moved towards positions associated with an anti-democratic new right. The title of one of his books says it all: Democracy: The God That Failed. In it, he criticizes, for example, universal suffrage and proposes a government of “natural elites”. In fact, he recently criticized Milei himself for being a false libertarian.
Thus, with Trump’s arrival in power, the libertarian movement and its main ideas are at a crossroads: maintain their friendship with democracy and classical liberalism or become an ally of the new authoritarian right behind Trump. This decision will define their future.
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