This week’s issue of the New Yorker features a long, fascinating profile of the rightwing blogger and software developer Curtis Yarvin, by the writer Ava Kofman. Yarvin has, for about a decade and a half now, been a highly influential figure on Silicon Valley’s anti-democratic right – a once fringe cohort that has lately become its political centre of gravity. Initially published under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin’s ideas are extreme even by the standards of the American right. His central claim is that democracy is inherently unworkable, because the vast majority of people are simply not smart enough to collectively direct the course of their nations. He himself has labelled his political philosophy – and I can barely type these words without cringing – “the Dark Enlightenment”.

The ideal form of government, for Yarvin, is a kind of neo-feudalism, in which a CEO-monarch, advised and assisted by a “cognitive elite”, rules over a populace who are granted precisely one right: if they don’t like their lives under the rule of that particular CEO-monarch, they can move to another that better suits their idea of the good life. Naturally, Yarvin is also a firm believer in so-called “race science” – the entirely unscientific belief that humans can be divided into races, and that there is a correlation between intelligence and genetic traits such as skin colour.

I first encountered Yarvin eight or nine years ago, when I was writing about the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, whose anti-democratic beliefs were becoming increasingly influential in Silicon Valley. Yarvin’s software company Urbit was funded by Thiel, and he was at that time viewed, as Kofman puts it, as the “court philosopher of the Thiel-verse”, exerting a strong rightward pull on Thiel’s own political views.

Yarvin has become an increasingly mainstream figure in recent years. His centrality........

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