It is difficult to interpret the Trump administration’s wholesale attacks on governmental programs as anything other than accelerationist efforts to destroy basic features of the American political and economic systems. From DOGE’s Artificial Intelligence-rampage through federal bureaus, the destruction of agencies like the Department of Education, or Trump’s expanding ICE as his well-funded private domestic army and occupying Democrat-governed cities; the destruction of old standards of normalcy are clear. While documents like Project 2025 reveal elements of Trump’s game plan, there are serious open questions concerning the administration’s long game and exactly how far the oligarchs influencing Trump want to take this antidemocratic movement.

While the destruction’s end-goal is less than clear, ever since Reagan it has been a safe default assumption that whatever foolish things were done by Republican or Democrat presidents supported neoliberal capitalism’s drive to privatize governmental services, transforming public services into private corporatized commodities. It remains possible that this will be the most significant outcome of Trump’s pillaging of governmental agencies, as businesses owned by crony capitalists fill the gaps lefts by the annihilated governmental services Trump attacks. But there are other, even more worrisome, possibilities.

If we take seriously the writings and statements of several of the powerful crackpot tech oligarchs whose ideas permeate Project 2025 and who played instrumental roles in placing JD Vance one-congestive-heart-failure-heartbeat from the presidency, there are reasons to wonder if more extreme desires fuel this destruction of government and attacks on portions of our economy.

A wealth of books and articles, by authors on the left and right, recently argue that as old forms of capitalism crumble, we are rushing towards some new type of feudalistic-adjacent economy. Some call this neo-feudalism, others, techno-feudalism. Books like Joel Kotkin’s 2020 The Coming of Neo-Feudalism or Curtis Yarvin’s (written under the pseudonym, Mencius Moldbug) Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century, present visions of new anti-democratic political formations where local sovereign polities run by wealthy lords replace the crumbling American system. Peter Thiel’s anti-democracy statements align with these visions. Even Yanis Varoufakis sees some sort of techno-feudalism on the horizon. Yarvin and Thiel’s visions are sometimes called, the NeoReaction (NRx) or Dark Enlightenment movement and they have features familiar to fans of dystopian fiction storylines, where local fiefdoms ruled by all powerful lords emerge after a Great Collapse. The familiar fictional tropes range from The Duke in Escape from New York, to various Road Warrior warlords, outposts in The Parable of the Sower, The Walking Dead, or The Road, with lots of variations—though few fictional visions seem to have benevolent lords. Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century’s thesis longs for a world where after, “the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” These joint-stock corporate mini-countries would function a lot like less-restrained versions of the human rights abusing “company-towns” of American logging or mining history, but without even the pretense of a human rights or a legal system.

The influence of Peter Thiel and other tech-bros in Trump’s second term brings renewed attention to the anti-democracy views of Silicon Valley billionaires and their followers. The recent tragicomedy film Mountainhead, playfully shows these dreams playing out in ways that should make us wonder if some elites are cheering for a great collapse—or in the language of Yarvin (who “jokes” about using the poor as biofuel), a “hard reset” or “rebooting,” to rid the world of progressive notions of equality and provide opportunities for those with surviving wealth to buy up chunks of the world at fire sale prices.

Tech bros’ politics have always been weird. A few decades ago it was easy enough to roll our eyes at the simplistic libertarian screeds some predictably spewed as early online culture developed, especially as their libertarianism used to be committed to induvial freedoms for things like sexual identities, drugs, abortion, demilitarization, and some elements of social issues generally embraced on the American Left (while abandoning the poor to the brutal ravages of market forces). But this desire for capitalism as we know it to collapse and give way to a system of networked feudal enclaves run by billionaire lords is something different. The roots of these dark enlightenment dreams of a resurrected aristocracy have an interesting not-quite-forgotten (because it wasn’t ever really known) prehistory within a larger genealogy of American anti-democracy that is worth considering.

I am referring to Rudolph Carlyle Evans’ strange book, The Resurrection of Aristocracy, published in 1988 by one of my favorite presses, Loompanics Unlimited—now defunct publishers of a wide range of wonderfully wild books, on topics like lockpicking, con artistry primers, living on abandoned islands, or treatises on hiding things in public places. In this lost work Evans envisions replacing our collapsing American capitalist republic with independent feudal regions managed by aristocrats. In doing so he lucidly expressed a crazed vision that now resonates with our present age’s dark enlightenment call for medieval solutions to our postmodern world’s problems.

Sometimes the clearest expressions of a group under increasing public scrutiny and wariness can be found in past writings from a less guarded time, when self-censorship was at a minimum, and the logic of a movement could be nakedly expressed without the trimmings and justifications needed when others are closely watching. Evans’ kooky treatise, The Resurrection of Aristocracy is an unheralded uninhibited, unhinged, classic work hawking the dreams of those who would demolish the American republic and replace it with independent aristocratic fiefdoms. If this sort of world is part of the shared vision of the robber barons of a new gilded age, no matter how insane a vision it is, we ignore it at our parrel.

Limited information about Rudolph Carlyle Evans survives on the web. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1952, moved to England as a child, later graduated with a degree in sociology and anthropology from Hull College in 1976, later moving to the United States. While Evan’s work seems to largely be forgotten, the WayBack Machine records at least one brief, 2015, acknowledgement by an astute reader that his work prefigures much of the insanity of........

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