# CEO Monarchy **CEO monarchy** is [[Curtis Yarvin]]'s proposal to run a country the way a company is run. One executive holds full power, and that executive answers to a board of owners, not to voters. It is the central prescription of [[Neoreaction]], the anti-democratic movement Yarvin started on his blog *[[Unqualified Reservations]]* (2007–2013) under the pen name [[Mencius Moldbug]]. He is blunt about the goal. "I don't believe in voting at all," he told the *New York Times* in January 2025. Four months later he told CNN: "You need to concentrate that power in a single individual." The idea has two halves. [[Patchwork]] describes the world Yarvin imagines once nation-states break up into hundreds of small sovereign companies. This page covers the other half: the ruler at the top. It also traces how, since 2021, the pitch has moved from small breakaway states to the American presidency itself. ## The idea in brief Yarvin's argument runs in three steps. 1. **Democracy is not really in charge.** In his account, real power in the United States sits with an unelected network of universities, newspapers and the civil service, which he calls [[The Cathedral]]. Elections change the faces but not the system. At a 2025 debate at Harvard he called the House of Representatives "a buffer against democracy," pointing to incumbents' roughly 98 percent reelection rate. 2. **Divided power is unaccountable power.** When authority is spread across Congress, courts, agencies and voters, no one can be blamed for results. "The focus of authority is absolutely necessary to run any integrated system efficiently," he told CNN. 3. **So run the state like a corporation.** Under what Yarvin calls *neo-cameralism*, named for the state-management tradition of Frederick the Great's Prussia, government becomes a sovereign joint-stock company. Its owners choose a chief executive with total power: in effect, a CEO-monarch. Residents are customers. If they dislike the service, they leave. They do not vote. The board is what makes this a *CEO* monarchy rather than an old-fashioned one. The ruler can be fired, but by owners, not by the public. ## How the pitch has changed The early version was a thought experiment about new, small states. The later version is about who should hold power in Washington. | When | What happened | |---|---| | **2007–2013** | On *Unqualified Reservations*, Yarvin lays out neo-cameralism and the sovereign corporation, the theory behind both CEO monarchy and [[Patchwork]]. | | **2012** | At the [[BIL Conference]] he proposes "RAGE," for Retire All Government Employees (see [[Curtis Yarvin - RAGE plan]]). "If Americans want to change their government," he says, as quoted by journalist Corey Pein, "they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia." | | **May 2021** | On the [[Claremont Institute]]'s *American Mind* podcast, in an episode titled "The Stakes: The American Monarchy?", Yarvin argues to host [[Michael Anton]] for a monarch drawn from the big-tech CEO class. When Anton describes the plan as winning power lawfully and then using it unlawfully, Yarvin objects, as reported by *The Guardian* in 2024: "It wouldn't be unlawful. You'd simply declare a state of emergency in your inaugural address." Anton's defenders say *The Guardian* misread the conversation. | | **2021** | [[JD Vance]], then running for the Senate, cites Yarvin on a podcast and says Trump should "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state." | | **2022** | Yarvin writes that teams loyal to a new executive should "drop into all the agencies in the executive branch" and "seize all points of power, without respect for paper protections." | | **January 2025** | In a *New York Times* interview he holds up [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] as a model. In Yarvin's telling, FDR "essentially says, Hey, Congress, give me absolute power, or I'll take it anyway." | | **May 2025** | Debates [[Danielle Allen]] at the Harvard Faculty Club, in an event organized by his publisher, [[Passage Press]]. Tells CNN a Fortune 500 CEO could run the executive branch ("They wouldn't be Hitler or Stalin") and that the new administration is "barely scratching the surface." | | **September 2025** | Argues *for* the motion "Should the U.S. Be Ruled by a CEO Dictator?" against economist E. Glen Weyl on the debate program *Open to Debate*. | | **October 2025** | Yale student groups book him for two debates: one at the Yale Political Union on a resolution to "end the democratic experiment," against law professor Jed Rubenfeld, and one on "for-profit governance" with economist Garett Jones at the Yale Federalist Society. | The shift matters. [[Patchwork]] asked people to leave the United States for something new. The newer pitch asks the United States to hand its existing executive branch to one person. That puts CEO monarchy close to [[Caesarism]], the old idea of a strongman rescuing a decadent republic, and beyond even the strongest readings of [[Unitary Executive Theory]]. ## The case its supporters make - **Companies deliver, governments stall.** A firm with one accountable leader ships products; a government run by committee produces gridlock and blame-shifting. - **Concentrated power has worked before.** In his 2025 *Times* interview Yarvin pointed to Roosevelt's presidency as proof that one person with sweeping power can get things done. - **The democracy you'd be giving up is already thin.** If incumbents almost never lose and the permanent bureaucracy sets policy, the argument goes, voters are not losing much. Many people who find Yarvin interesting stop short of the conclusion. [[Marc Andreessen]] has posted that one can read Yarvin "without becoming a monarchist." [[Peter Thiel]] told *The Atlantic* in 2023 that Yarvin is an "interesting and powerful" historian but that he did not think the program would "work." At Yale, Garett Jones described his own position as "10% less democracy" against Yarvin's "100% less." ## The case against - **Absolute power answers to no one.** "No absolute power is ever accountable," Allen told CNN. "Absolute power inevitably corrupts, tramples on, persecutes freedom." At Harvard she added that "it is not the case that autocracies, over the course of history, have delivered good for human beings." - **A board of owners is an oligarchy.** If the ruler answers to shareholders, the people with the most shares hold the real power, and everyone else has none. Critics see this as [[Tech Oligarchy]] made formal. - **The CEO comparison borrows what it would abolish.** A real CEO answers to courts, regulators, contract law and bankruptcy judges, all supplied by a state. A sovereign CEO has nothing above him. - **Strongmen tighten their grip.** UCLA political scientist Daniel Treisman told CNN that "the dangers inherent in his position drive him towards tougher controls." A ruler who can be removed only by force has every reason to make removal impossible. - **The American system was built to prevent exactly this.** The framers divided power on purpose ([[Separation of Powers]], [[Federalist No. 51]]) and rested it on the [[Consent of the Governed]], the principle [[John Locke]] set against rule by any one person. ## Theory and practice: what is documented Many commentators see CEO monarchy in the second Trump administration's moves to strip civil-service protections ([[Schedule F]]), shrink agencies through the [[DOGE Ecosystem]], and govern through [[Emergency Powers]]. The resemblance is real. A direct line from Yarvin's writing to those policies has not been documented. Yarvin describes his influence as indirect, working "more through the kids in the administration, who read my kind of stuff," he told CNN. A Vance adviser told CNN the two had met "like once." Yarvin says he is closer to Anton, whom CNN identified in May 2025 as the State Department's director of policy planning, and says he made a staffing recommendation. Neither the State Department nor the White House answered CNN's questions about that. ## Related ideas | Idea | How it relates | |---|---| | [[Patchwork]] | The world of many small CEO-run states; CEO monarchy is the ruler inside each one | | [[Caesarism]] | The older strongman-saves-the-republic idea; CEO monarchy is its Silicon Valley translation | | [[Unitary Executive Theory]] | A legal theory that the president controls the whole executive branch; CEO monarchy removes Congress and the courts as checks altogether | | [[Hans-Hermann Hoppe]] | Argued in *[[Democracy - The God That Failed]]* (2001) that a monarch who owns the realm governs more carefully than elected caretakers | | [[Plato]] and [[Thomas Carlyle]] | Older arguments that the capable few should rule: the philosopher-king and the "captains of industry" | | [[Patrick Deneen]] | "Aristopopulism," a Catholic post-liberal cousin that also puts virtuous elites in charge | | [[The Network State]] | [[Balaji Srinivasan]]'s crypto-era version of leaving old states for new, founder-run ones | ## Why it's on the map **1. It names the destination.** Much tech-right talk about "the regime" or "the deep state" is diagnosis. CEO monarchy is the cure, stated plainly by the movement's own theorist. **2. It has moved from a blog to the mainstream.** In fifteen years the idea went from a pseudonymous blog to a podcast with a future State Department official, a Senate candidate's echo of RAGE, a *New York Times* interview, and debate stages at Harvard and Yale. **3. It is the business-runs-government slogan with nothing left out.** "Run the government like a business" is a familiar line. CEO monarchy asks what happens if you take it literally: who the shareholders are, and what happens to everyone who isn't one. See [[Peter Thiel - freedom and democracy compatible]] and [[Post-Democratic Tech-Right]]. ## Connections - [[Curtis Yarvin]] · [[Mencius Moldbug]] — the theorist and his pen name - [[Unqualified Reservations]] — where the idea was first worked out - [[Neoreaction]] · [[Dark Enlightenment]] — the movement it anchors - [[The Cathedral]] — the diagnosis CEO monarchy is meant to cure - [[Patchwork]] — the many-small-states version - [[Curtis Yarvin - RAGE plan]] — the plan to replace the civil service - [[Michael Anton]] · [[Claremont Institute]] — the 2021 "American Monarchy" conversation - [[JD Vance]] — the 2021 "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat" remarks - [[Danielle Allen]] — Yarvin's Harvard debate opponent - [[Caesarism]] · [[Monarchy]] · [[Authoritarianism]] — related forms of one-person rule - [[Techno-Authoritarianism]] · [[Tech Oligarchy]] — the wider tech-right politics - [[Separation of Powers]] · [[Consent of the Governed]] · [[Democracy]] — what it would replace