One of the many projects I’m working on now that I have some time on my hands is a dive into Curtis Yarvin, who cosplays as a political theorist and has argued that the American democratic experiment failed and should be replaced by an “accountable monarchy,” whatever that means. 

I’ll dig into his ideas more soon, but while looking into Yarvin I found a right-wing podcaster named Auron MacIntyre who also wrote a book called “The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies.” I have not read this book, but it seems to boil down to a whine about eroding civil liberties in the name of public health.

MacIntyre hosted Yarvin on his podcast back in May (you can find this on other platforms if you don’t like Pandora). After listening to the Yarvin episode I dug into MacIntyre a bit more and found this: a discussion with a pastor named Douglas Wilson about restoring what Wilson calls the “American Ethnos,” – the idea that America once was, or could again be, a singular people bound by blood, belief, and heritage. 

This is a problematic notion, if only because the terminology wants to direct us to an ethnic view of what they mean by singular people. Wilson builds his thesis around a definition borrowed from theologian Stephen Bryan: that an ethnos is a people with a shared name, land, memory, kinship, values, and decision-making structure. Fair enough as a cultural descriptor. The trouble starts when Wilson strays from this by criticizing what he calls a “propositional” concept of national identity based on shared norms and understanding around a pluralism based on liberty and popular sovereignty. It’s not enough to center American identity on these values.

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