[atreestump]

By the end of the 20th century, something strange had happened. The dream of freedom had curdled into a demand for control. The idea that politics should serve the people gave way to the idea that the people must be shaped by the state. And in the decaying echo chambers of power, a new kind of technocrat emerged—haunted by the ghosts of empire, and armed with a dream of software.

This is a story about that dream—and the men who sold it. It is about mercantilism, a centuries-old economic doctrine resurrected in the digital age; about Curtis Yarvin, a software engineer who wants to reboot the world like bad code; and about Donald Trump, a television character who became president by instinctively channeling the anger of a collapsing middle class. It is a story about the fantasy of running a nation like a firm. But beneath it all, it is about the deep fear that lies at the heart of our modern age: the fear that nothing is in control.

In 2006, Warren Buffett made a modest proposal. He suggested “import certificates”—a mechanism to balance trade by limiting how much a country could import unless it also exported. It was a policy that sounded clever, even technocratic. Buffett was no radical. He was the safe, avuncular billionaire. Yet this idea had all the hallmarks of an older logic: mercantilism.

Mercantilism had once ruled the world. It was the economic operating system of empire. Its rules were simple: accumulate gold, protect domestic industry, fear the foreigner. Trade was not an exchange—it was a war. And the economy was not a web of relationships—it was a ledger of loyalty and power. It died, supposedly, with Adam Smith and the rise of liberal capitalism. Smith argued that trade should be free, that markets would regulate themselves, and that the invisible hand of self-interest would produce collective prosperity.

But in the 21st century, as the promises of globalization failed and the elites stopped pretending to care, mercantilism crept back in—first as policy, then as mood, and finally as myth.

Curtis Yarvin was once a programmer. He worked on compilers and small software companies. But online, he became something else: a political philosopher of a new right. Under the name “Mencius Moldbug,” he proposed that democracy was a failed system—a legacy operating system corrupted by parasites. What America needed, he said, was a CEO. A monarch. A software update.

His vision was clean, digital, and cold. Democracy was inefficient. Bureaucracy was broken. What was needed was something simple: a sovereign corporation. A nation-state stripped of ritual and tradition, reduced to a stack of code and a chain of command. His influences ranged from Thomas Carlyle to obscure 19th-century economists, but his real inspiration was aesthetic. He wanted politics to feel like Apple packaging: elegant, inevitable, untouchable.

He found a kindred spirit in Friedrich List, the 19th-century German economist who believed the state should guide development. List had seen Britain’s free-trade doctrine as a trap: an ideology of the strong disguised as neutrality. He believed nations must first protect themselves before they could compete. For Yarvin, List was a prophet—one who understood that the world is not flat, but hierarchical. Not cooperative, but Darwinian.

But Yarvin’s vision had a problem. It required an enlightened despot—someone outside of history. A perfect king. What he got instead was Donald Trump.

Donald Trump did not read Friedrich List. He did not write blog posts about trade balances. But he had something else: instinct. His worldview was shaped by tabloids, real estate fraud, and the rituals of American celebrity. He understood branding, resentment, and television. He knew how to say what others only dared to feel. And he understood, deep down, that America was a place where power had collapsed into performance.

To his followers, Trump seemed to understand trade. He talked about China “winning,” about America “losing,” about bad deals. His language was crude, but his meaning was clear: the elites had betrayed the people. The foreigners were taking everything. The system was rigged. Trump did not believe in free trade. He believed in vengeance.

He slapped tariffs on steel. He bullied companies on Twitter. He promised factories would return, and the past would come back with them. It was not policy—it was a kind of theater. But it worked, because it made people feel something. Not hope. Not clarity. But revenge.

Curtis Yarvin, watching from the wings, applauded. He said Trump “understood trade better than all the economics professors.” It was, in its own way, a compliment—and a confession. Trump was not the philosopher-king Yarvin dreamed of. He was a chaos muppet, an animal spirit in a cheap suit. But he shared the instinct: that the nation should be a firm, and the world a marketplace of conquest.

But Trump’s presidency revealed something deeper. Despite the noise, nothing really changed. The trade deficit grew. The supply chains stayed offshore. The swamp, as he called it, was never drained. It turned out the CEO-president could not fire reality. And when COVID came, the emperor had no spreadsheet.

Yarvin continued to write, but his tone shifted. He began to rail not just against liberalism, but against measurement itself. GDP, unemployment, inflation—he dismissed them as lies. Constructs. Illusions of a decaying order. He proposed an alternative vision: to build a state not of numbers, but of beauty and hierarchy. To govern not through metrics, but through myth.

This is not as original as it sounds. The technocrats of the 1930s said the same thing. The planners of the Soviet Union tried to measure steel and smiles. The fascists of Europe built monuments and highways. The idea that the state must re-enchant the world, that it must discipline the population through labor and spectacle, is not new. It is very old. And it is always, in the end, a lie.

Because what Yarvin and Trump both sell is not power, but the performance of power. They offer the image of control. A CEO in the palace. A wall at the border. A tariff on the spreadsheet. But underneath it all, the machine grinds on. Capital flows where it pleases. Corporations offshore their taxes and their labor. The algorithm shapes the vote. The system eats its children.

And still, the dream persists. Because it is a comforting one. The idea that the nation is a firm, and the leader a manager, offers the illusion of clarity. It turns politics into accounting. It transforms democracy into a product. It lets us believe that failure is just bad management—and that salvation is a rebrand away.

But the truth is more disturbing. The truth is that the world is complex. That power is dispersed. That history cannot be rebooted. That no one is in control.

Adam Smith once warned that when businessmen gather, it ends in conspiracy against the public. But even he could not have imagined a future in which the conspiracy was so banal, so seamless, so automated. Or a future in which men like Yarvin would dream not of liberty, but of order. Not of citizens, but of subjects. Not of politics, but of firmware.

In the end, mercantilism is not a policy. It is a coping mechanism. It offers the illusion that by adjusting the dials of trade and production, the sickness in the body politic can be cured. But the sickness is not external. It is in the dream itself.

And so we remain, trapped between nostalgia and simulation. Between the yearning for a strong hand, and the spectacle of strength without substance. Between the spreadsheet and the crown.

And still, no one is in control.

[Whisper]

There exists a Right Wing Accelerationists reactionary “destroy impulse”. You are absolutely correct in pointing out it is no longer ideology. Rather than the Christian Right, it is esoteric fascism.

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