Opinion | The Dubious History of America’s Most Famous Monarchist

Never mind that the actual substance of his ideas leaves much to be desired. Take his illuminating interview with The Times, in which he gives readers a crash course in his overall political vision. He makes a studied effort to appear as learned and erudite as possible. But linger just a little on his answers and you’ll see the extent to which they’re underproofed and overbaked.

Consider his claim that “effective government” requires a strongman. He uses consumer goods as evidence:

When I ask people to answer that question, I ask them to look around the room and point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy, because these things that we call companies are actually little monarchies. You’re looking around, and you see, for example, a laptop, and that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy.

If Yarvin believes that Apple is a monarchy, he may not actually understand what a monarchy is. Tim Cook is not the sovereign of the Apple computing company; he serves at the pleasure of its board. Moreover, to say the laptop was “made by Apple” is to elide the extent to which product development, like any other form of high-level industrial production, is a collective and collaborative process. Your MacBook is not forged by a singular will. The idea that you can “thank monarchy” for an iPhone is ridiculous, and the idea that this could be a political prognosis is absurd.

More egregious in the interview are the moments when Yarvin gets basic history wrong in an attempt to demonstrate the sophistication of his views. He answers the first question of the exchange — “Why is democracy so bad?” — with what he thinks is a pointed rejoinder:

You’ve probably heard of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I do a speech sometimes where I’ll just read the last 10 paragraphs of F.D.R.’s first Inaugural Address, in which he essentially says, hey, Congress, give me absolute power, or I’ll take it anyway. So did F.D.R. actually take that level of power? Yeah, he did.

This is flatly untrue. You can read Roosevelt’s first Inaugural Address to see for yourself. There is no threat to seize power. “I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require,” Roosevelt said. “These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.”

If Congress failed to act, Roosevelt did not say that he would do it himself and seize absolute power. He said that he would ask Congress to grant him “broad executive power” to “wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” But even this, Roosevelt emphasized, would be done within the bounds of the Constitution and in fidelity to the principles of American democracy.

One of Roosevelt’s most essential qualities, in fact, was his belief in the superiority of representative government. It was part of the engine of his ambition and motivated him to try everything under the sun to arrest the crisis of the Depression and restore the public’s faith in a system that was teetering on the edge of collapse and facing pressure from authoritarians at home and abroad. To read Roosevelt as anything other than a small-d democrat is to demonstrate a fundamental ignorance of his life and career.