Chris Rufo and Curtis Yarvin have been friends for a long time, but there have been some differences of opinion between them. In this episode, we take a deep dive into the differences between their approaches to the conservative movement.
00:00:38.340then you're probably familiar with both Christopher Rufo and Curtis Yarvin.
00:00:43.960They're two guys who I really respect.
00:00:46.580Both of them are excellent at what they do.
00:00:49.060They've both been guests on this show.
00:00:50.920They're people that I have both had differences and agreements with.
00:00:54.280And I think that they're two of the most important voices out there on the right.
00:00:58.780But as of now, I think that they represent two poles of the political process.
00:01:05.560And both of them are outside, I think, of what most people think of as the conservative mainstream.
00:01:13.280Rufo is obviously far more connected to the establishment conservative operation, but is bringing in tactics and viewpoints that a lot of people in, you know, kind of the National Review type crowd find to be offensive because they're too aggressive and too effective.
00:01:30.500And so these are both guys that in their own way are breaking the mold, though I'd say Yarvin probably a little more outside of that.
00:01:38.260But of course, Rufo is also somebody who is able to operate in the real world in a way that Yarvin never has been.
00:01:44.740So I think they all, they kind of both bring their own merits to this table.
00:01:49.500And in the pages of, or I guess the digits, the online digital page of IEM 1776, there was a debate between these two guys.
00:02:00.660Now, Rufo and Yarvin have traded barbs for a while now.
00:02:04.880They've been back and forth with Yarvin saying that Rufo's approaches will ultimately fail.
00:02:11.660They'll be ineffectual and they might even prolong some of the problems that the right is facing because they lull conservatives into a certain amount of kind of complacency, thinking that Rufo's style could still pull them back from the edge without having to make any radical changes.
00:02:27.720And Rufo has always countered with, I think, what is a pretty effective criticism of Yarvin is that he has no practical application for his ideas.
00:02:36.180His ideas are very disembodied. Many times they seem to be resting on the idea that there'll be some kind of collapse or some kind of sudden revelation or some kind of great cultural sea change where the elites will come and beg people like Curtis Yarvin to teach them how to actually lead the United States.
00:02:55.120And there's no actual practical way that much of this can get implemented as where Rufo is out there taking action.
00:03:03.520He's taking scalps. He's doing things in the real world.
00:03:07.260And so he puts his real world record up against Yarvin's theoretical problems with the way that he is doing things.
00:03:15.020Again, like I said, there have been barbs traded back and forth multiple times.
00:03:18.900Chris Rufo has responded. I even had Yarvin on my show and he critiqued the way that Rufo was doing certain things.
00:03:26.200So this is a longstanding debate between these two men and I think one that is very valuable to look at.
00:03:32.080However, in IM 1776, they kind of had a knockdown drag out.
00:03:36.660This is a far more brisk conversation than they've had before.
00:03:41.340These have always been largely kind of cordial if they would not, you know, they toy with each other a little bit, maybe, you know, a little bit of back and forth between them that is mildly insulting.
00:03:55.900But this one went a little more off the rails.
00:03:58.860Yarvin, I think, particularly was a lot, was very condescending to Rufo in this one.
00:04:05.140And Rufo kind of responded in kind, very dismissive of Yarvin in many ways.
00:04:10.200And so we got a more heated debate between these two.
00:04:14.340But I think it's something that is worth looking at because they're addressing issues about the conservative movement that aren't going away anytime soon.
00:04:23.820The debate between them is one that I think is substantive, even though they didn't go into probably the depth that most people would have preferred in this particular debate.
00:04:33.320I think it does reveal different attitudes and possibly some flaws with both men's approach to certain things.
00:04:41.680I'm not going to give you some lame middle ground thing here.
00:04:45.400I'll tell you who I think ultimately is correct.
00:04:50.160But I think it is worth pointing out that both guys have important things that they're saying.
00:04:56.300They do correctly point out issues with each other's approaches.
00:05:00.300And it's worth giving both of them credit about what they're good at before we talk about the things that I think probably are failures or short-sightedness in the way that they made their arguments.
00:05:11.300So I'm going to dive into this debate here in a second, guys.
00:05:14.760But before I do, let me tell you about your absolute moral duty to hire based people through New Founding.
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00:06:22.460So let's start this with the stuff that's probably a little boring.
00:06:25.720It's not as exciting as talking about why everybody's wrong.
00:06:29.200But I think it's worth saying just because it's true and we want to acknowledge these things.
00:06:33.480So first, like I said, I think both of these guys are important to the right.
00:06:37.200I think they both have incredibly essential roles to play.
00:06:40.660One of the things that I think is actually at play here is specializations.
00:06:45.880In our world where everyone spends their entire life getting really good at one thing and investing themselves in one thing, often we feel it necessary to make the one thing we're good at the most important thing and to use that to drive out any other approach.
00:07:00.580I think there really is a little bit of this here where Rufo being a consummate activist, somebody who is the most probably successful activist on the right in my lifetime, he sees everything through that lens.
00:07:15.220And he thinks that the most important thing and these tangible results, you know, I have this guy fired.
00:07:23.820I got this person to, you know, those are the most critical things at every moment.
00:07:28.480And of course, those tangible results are important.
00:07:30.800I'm not saying they aren't, but because that's what Rufo does and what he does effectively, he says that that's the long and the short of it.
00:07:36.800If you don't have these things, if Yarvin can't show the scalps that he's collected, he's not doing anything of value.
00:08:02.380You're maybe the best, the very best conservatives have inside the system, but you're still stuck inside the broken system.
00:08:08.480And because you're not out here theorizing with me and dreaming up kind of these abstract ideas, then you're just not doing anything of value.
00:08:17.260Ultimately, maybe you win a couple battles, a couple skirmishes, but everything is tactical.
00:08:23.140And ultimately, you're going to lose this because you're not focused on the right things.
00:08:27.000And I can see those things because I'm an abstract theorist.
00:08:30.160And so it's unsurprising that both of these men think that the things that they do are the most important things and that they're the primary things that need to get done.
00:08:39.260Again, I promise you, I'm not going to just go ahead and try to cut this baby in half.
00:08:42.840I do think someone won this debate, but I just want to acknowledge that there is a place for both of these guys.
00:08:48.760And I think there's a bias built in because of what they do that leads them to draw some conclusions that are hasty about what's going on here.
00:08:57.340Like I said, I've also had both these guys on my show and I've disagreed with both of these guys.
00:09:07.700I respect both of their work, even if I think that there may be some flaws here and there with the way that things are being approached.
00:09:14.760So the next thing I want to say real quick before we get into the substance of the debate is, like I said, Yarvin was unnecessarily hostile.
00:09:21.140And I think this led to a less productive debate in, you know, kind of the main.
00:09:27.040I still think there are important things to look at in what was said here.
00:09:30.760I think there are things that reveal some of the issues that we're addressing.
00:09:33.760But Yarvin's need to constantly degrade what Rufo is doing was unhelpful.
00:09:41.300He did give Rufo credit saying, OK, he is out there showing people that you can fight and that you can slay dragons.
00:09:48.060I think he probably should have said more of that.
00:09:50.040I think that is actually super important.
00:09:51.800That's not something that you just throw in as an aside.
00:09:54.620The fact that Rufo is on the ground making things work is important.
00:09:58.900And I think it's worth giving him far more credit than Yarvin did before moving on to a lot of insults.
00:10:05.400And he was very dismissive, often described Rufo as practicing Paw Patrol politics or American history.
00:10:37.400I think ultimately, Yarvin is kind of correct about Rufo's understanding of the country and some of its history.
00:10:45.560But the way it was done just so dismissively and just, oh, well, if you haven't rattled off these 12 books, then you're just not worth my time.
00:11:01.400I think that that was the wrong way to approach this.
00:11:04.460And so I think that was a shortcoming as well.
00:11:07.740And I want to say one more thing about what I think that Yarvin got wrong, because I'm going to mainly talk about what he got right, because what probably is not going to be surprising to a lot of people is I think ultimately Yarvin did point out some critical problems with the approach that Rufo and the wider conservative movement has, because that's what Yarvin's good at.
00:11:29.540I don't think he provided any answers, to be very clear, and this is something that Rufo hits him on repeatedly, and rightly so.
00:11:36.040I don't think Yarvin provides a lot of better answers in here.
00:11:40.820There's not a lot of ways forward other than, you know, someone will eventually just make an effective CEO king, and that will solve the problem.
00:11:49.440He's right to hit, Rufo's right to hit Yarvin on that.
00:11:52.100But I do think that Yarvin ultimately won this, but there was, I think, a couple of things he did get very wrong.
00:12:00.100So the first thing I think that Yarvin got very wrong was he had a very materialistic and nihilistic view of the United States and the wider kind of assessment of cultures and peoples and histories.
00:12:14.220He just said there's nothing special or spectacular about the United States.
00:14:00.600I think what Curtis Yarvin was trying to say, what would have been better if he would have said, is that the United States Constitution was particular to its people.
00:14:09.820And it's not unique that the people had a constitution particular to them.
00:14:14.320There are constitutions that are particular to the many different peoples of the world.
00:14:19.440And, you know, their ways are encoded in their, the structures of their government, governments very often.
00:14:26.180And that is, that is an effect of, you know, the divine inspiration being, you know, basically carried out through people being gifted with different traditions and ways of being.
00:14:38.480And that's reflected in the United States Constitution, just like it's reflected in other constitutions.
00:14:43.900And so I think it would have been far better for Yarvin to have said, you know, that the United States Constitution is particular to its people.
00:14:50.780And in that way, it is divinely inspired that there is a direction for the people.
00:14:56.120There's a way of being that is correct for the people rather than just saying, oh, well, you know, no, there is none of this is the case.
00:15:03.260And, you know, you could have just swapped it out for anything.
00:15:06.420You know, it's all, there is no direction for the American people.
00:15:09.720There is no specific way of being for the American people.
00:15:35.040But in some ways, he's still, because he's too materialistic, is maybe only caught up in genetics or IQ or something and doesn't recognize the role that I think the divine, the metaphysical, does actually play in the directions of peoples and histories and constitutions.
00:15:52.320And so I think that is a failure on his part.
00:15:54.100And I think it's something that Rufo rightly hits him on several times.
00:15:57.780So I want to make it clear that while I'm going to probably spend the rest of this siding with a lot of what Yarvin said or some of the problems he pointed out more accurately, I did agree with Rufo on several things.
00:16:11.580And this is something he rightly hits Yarvin on on a regular basis.
00:16:51.160Some conservatives are not going to like that.
00:16:53.020But I don't think that the Founding Fathers created some new and really important piece of political technology.
00:17:04.940And the reason I think it's important to recognize that is that a main problem that Rufo has in this debate, and I think a main problem that really hits the wider conservative movement, is the idea that the Founding Fathers solved politics.
00:17:20.320That they figured out something that no one else had figured out.
00:17:24.460And once they figured out this issue, it really solved all politics going forward.
00:17:29.940Now, in the debate, Rufo specifically says that the Founding Fathers revolutionized politics by solving the kind of classical, the core problem that kind of the philosophers of antiquity could not solve when it came to political theory, political science.
00:20:08.960I think there are, again, some problems with that assertion.
00:20:11.800But even if we follow that logic, that doesn't quite make sense.
00:20:15.620Because the idea that the founders created prosperity, they solved the problem of scarcity, just isn't true.
00:20:26.440The United States had a lot of things going for it.
00:20:29.460It was relatively isolated due to many of the historical realities around the founding of the United States.
00:20:37.100Many European powers were unable to probably defend their colonies the way that they wanted to.
00:20:44.320Obviously, this helps the United States in its own revolution.
00:20:47.580Assistance from the French and the fact that the British were busy elsewhere meant that the United States probably got away with fighting a much easier war than it otherwise would have.
00:20:55.600And then because many other European powers were otherwise involved in the United States was useful to them in many ways.
00:21:04.060They sold off different colonies to the United States.
00:21:08.900And many other things that were owned by foreign powers came under the control of the United States.
00:21:15.640And the fact that we had a large untamed wilderness and a large amount of land for people to settle on created an amazing amount of economic opportunity for a lot of people.
00:21:27.100Well, I guess you could grant some of that to the Constitution, you could say maybe the brilliance of federalism allowed these places to rule themselves more efficiently and that allowed expansion at a rate that otherwise wouldn't be the case.
00:21:42.500I guess I'm not sure that that's true, that that's unique to the American Constitution, but if we're going for the sake of argument, okay, I can give you some of this.
00:21:53.380But to be clear, like the true middle class boom, like the one that most people think about today, really comes from the Industrial Revolution and more importantly, the Americas more or less conquest of the world after World War II.
00:22:08.800The fact that we kind of became the world hegemon with only really the Soviet Union as any kind of challenge was really, you know, and the fact that we kind of rebuilt Europe and everything was where a lot of the things that people think of as the middle class came from.
00:22:24.440Maybe Rufo was talking about beforehand, you know, and again, I want to give him as much credit as possible here.
00:22:31.260But I really do think that it's a difficult case to say that the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, their political system solved the issue there of the middle class.
00:22:43.800But I think the problems with that go even deeper because even if we're, we'll look and see that, you know, they created abundance and this solved the problem of scarcity and this created the middle class and that middle class pressure is what created, you know, kind of the...
00:23:02.800So you've always been picky about your produce, but now you find yourself checking every label to make sure it's Canadian.
00:23:22.360We'll say that that's accurate for a second.
00:23:25.660The problem, again, with this is that the beauty of the mixed constitution comes in that different social forces push against each other.
00:23:35.560This is a common misconception when people look at the, you know, Baron de Montesquieu and the separation of powers.
00:23:44.900The idea that we'd have checks and balances and separation of powers.
00:23:48.760They think that, well, because we have three branches of governments and they check and balance each other, that's what actually creates the beauty of mixed government.
00:23:56.260That's what the Federalist papers were talking about in Federalist 51 when Mattis is talking about how power will check power.
00:24:05.520That comes from the, you know, the kind of political tripod of the American constitution.
00:24:14.900But what Montesquieu was trying to say is that different social spheres, different social interests are what create this mixed government.
00:24:25.640What actually limits government, and I think this is correct.
00:24:29.660Bertrand de Juvenal talks a lot about this when he talks about the metaphysics of power in his book on power.
00:24:35.280Is that the different social spheres, the regional spheres, the spheres of the nobility, the church, the merchant, the commoner, you know, the different tribes, the different regions, they all push against each other.
00:24:49.680And this is the actual limitation of government.
00:24:52.180Nothing about words on paper in a constitution actually limit a government.
00:24:56.360What limits government power is that there are different forces in society that demand your loyalty, your money, your time.
00:25:05.880And so there's only so much that the actual central official government can demand from you.
00:25:10.940And as long as there are robust opposing social spheres, the government can't consolidate itself.
00:25:17.840It can't become the total state because you've got all these different competing interests in your society that push against each other.
00:25:25.260I think there's a, and this is a, I think, again, a very American failure is the idea that it's all just about money, right?
00:25:33.000That, well, if you just have a burgeoning middle class, if you have a large middle class, then, you know, because of their economic interests, they'll push against each other.
00:25:42.500That's true to some degree, but it's not just about economic interests.
00:25:46.300That's really critical, and I think, again, I think it's a really big failure of the United States to think of class only as a economic factor.
00:25:55.420So, well, oh, you have a middle class, and because of their income is in a particular, you know, bracket, then they'll push against, you know, the other interests.
00:26:05.040Well, that's kind of true, but it's not a stable solution.
00:26:09.420It doesn't actually create a long-term solution.
00:26:12.380And the problem with this, and this is well outlined by Gitano Mosca in his works, is that what happens is, especially with the rise of the mass man, mass production, mass consumption, and most importantly, mass media, the ability to indoctrinate people, you get a phenomenon where, especially in a society with a democratic mechanism,
00:26:36.380the incentive structure is always to go ahead and increase the ability of people to vote, to expand the franchise.
00:26:46.660And as you expand the franchise, the reason for, you know, for people to participate becomes their ability to basically vote themselves stuff.
00:26:55.780And, you know, this is hardly a new insight.
00:26:57.860You can trace this back to democracy in America, to Tocqueville.
00:27:04.320But the ability to give the vote to people who are then going to support you because you give them stuff is a key weakness to democracy.
00:27:13.060And so even if the mixed government was something that was properly built in by the founders, and it is a unique political technology, which I really don't think it is, but even if it was, the problem is inside their own structure, they put like the seeds of its own destruction.
00:27:34.740There was basically a ticking time bomb at the heart of the American governmental system in that you had an incentive structure that would ultimately destroy the mixed government itself because as the ability of money to influence election rises, the power of oligarchs dominates.
00:27:55.600Oligarchs are the ones that can control the media.
00:27:57.940They're the ones that can provide benefits.
00:27:59.420They're the ones that can control large systems and managerial structures to manipulate voting outcomes.
00:28:05.500And so what we see in America over time is the expansion of the franchise, but also the amount of the government that's moved into the democratic sphere.
00:28:15.780Originally, you only had one half, one third of the government being elected by the people, and the number of people who had the franchise was very small.
00:28:23.580But slowly, we had the direct election of senators, and more and more of the executive branch was moved into the deep state or the unelected bureaucracy, which is largely funded by Congress.
00:28:36.380So the democratic mechanism expands there.
00:28:39.320We see the erosion of kind of senatorial independence.
00:28:43.660We see the erosion of judiciary, the independence of judiciary.
00:28:48.100There's a reason that today Congress is constantly, you know, Democrats are constantly threatening to, you know, pack the court, and they're sending protesters.
00:28:56.940The White House is sending protesters to, you know, stand illegally on the lawns of justices.
00:29:03.460They're trying to use the democratic process to intimidate the branches that are supposed to push back against.
00:29:09.760And so because I don't think America had a robust understanding of kind of different classes and interests and regional interests and these kind of things, or more importantly, that that understanding eroded over time, I think the ability of the mixed government to actually limit the power of the state has dissolved itself.
00:29:29.560And when I brought this up to Rufo, he said, well, yeah, other people have made that argument.
00:29:57.280In fact, if there's one core problem, it might be this, right?
00:30:01.420I agree that mixed government does actually limit the expansion of the state, but it doesn't do that if you have a mechanism built into it, which inevitably, you know, dissolves the very spheres that make mixed government possible.
00:30:16.800And so I think this is a critical flaw in what Rufo was saying.
00:30:20.860And I think Yarvin is correct to point out that, you know, the founders did not solve this problem.
00:30:28.040And pretending that they did is what I think turns the conservative movement into basically this captured, controlled opposition, because they just assume that these problems are fixed in perpetuity and we just need.
00:30:41.320So, you know, it's basically this is the conservative version of the end of history.
00:30:45.480The problem of politics has been solved.
00:30:48.780We already know that there's no problems here.
00:30:50.520And so really, we just we just need to be more vigilant.
00:30:54.140So, you know, you know, adjust some things here and there.
00:30:56.140And that problem, you know, will be resolved ultimately.
00:30:58.900And this leads conservatives to never look outside of kind of this this explanation for solutions or problems, because all their political thought is contained inside this assumption that the founders have already decided on the best system of government.
00:31:14.140And there's some other flaws here, too.
00:31:17.180For instance, you know, the idea that the government was solved.
00:31:21.960And we all we have to do is kind of look at the history of the United States and pretend like pretending like there's some kind of system that that has fixed, you know, how we resolve conflict in the political arena inside the United States.
00:31:36.120It's just it's just wrong on its face.
00:31:38.760If you look what happened, you know, the United States had a revolution, broke away from England, instituted the Articles of Confederation.
00:31:46.560It only took a couple of years before the Articles of Confederation didn't seem to really work.
00:31:51.720And most importantly, the elites of the country decided to go ahead and dissolve the Articles without doing what the Articles said you needed to do to dissolve them is basically a coup against the Articles of Confederation and without going through the process of getting rid of the Articles.
00:32:07.320And they just went ahead and created a new government and came up with new rules as to how that was going to work.
00:32:12.460And when it came to resolving conflicts inside the United States, you had a number of crises, including things like the, you know, the the well now I'm going to escape me, but where, you know, states didn't have to approve different parts of the Constitution or they didn't have to pay attention to different parts of the Constitution.
00:32:37.760There were many different questions as to whether the states had to follow different, the annulment crisis, I believe.
00:32:44.820But there were many different questions as to whether the United States, the different states were actually going to have to follow the Constitution that way.
00:32:59.580There are multiple times where the United States, you know, the question was, do the states, do the citizens get to make decisions?
00:33:05.860And the answer was, no, actually, the central government is going to decide for you.
00:33:10.940And, you know, even if we say that those, you know, like 75 years went went relatively fine when it came to conflict resolution, there was still one big conflict that we couldn't resolve.
00:33:24.380And the way we had a civil war about it is Abraham Lincoln imported a large amount of foreigners, especially from Ireland, to go shoot at his countrymen, shutting down newspapers, throwing journalists in jail, shutting down state legislatures, you know.
00:33:40.600A lot of things that would violate the very conflict resolution mechanism outlined inside the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
00:33:50.660And then there was a, you know, military occupation of the South for a long time.
00:33:55.320And I guess what I'm saying is we just got really good at explaining why we basically have a large shift, a revolutionary shift in government every 50 to 75 years in the United States, FDR, the Civil Rights Act.
00:34:10.380And these are, you know, devastating changes to the basic system that the founders put in place.
00:34:19.520And we just pretend that they aren't and pretend like there's this continuity of government that, you know, was solved by, like, the system of the founders.
00:34:28.380When just kind of a very brief and honest look at the American history shows that's not the case.
00:34:34.180Now, again, this is not a problem with the United States.
00:34:37.260This is what happens to every country.
00:34:41.320But Yarvin is right to point out that the United States does not solve the problem of conflict resolution inside, you know, political systems.
00:35:04.140Yarvin correctly points out, you know, some of the tactics that Rufo is suggesting.
00:35:11.140Yarvin says, you know, well, what do you want to do to make it, you know, your plan is to make it illegal to be racist to white people, to, you know, treat them badly.
00:36:13.480And it expanded out to a continent-wide empire.
00:36:18.200Sorry, if you conquer an entire continent, taking multiple things from multiple countries, you're an empire.
00:36:23.440And then it went beyond the continent and expanded into a global empire.
00:36:30.700And we certainly continue to operate a global empire today.
00:36:34.900And the problem is assuming that the same system that works for 13 colonies of people who are largely from similar places and speak a similar language and have a similar culture and traditions,
00:36:49.700though there was still a lot of diversity in the United States starting out to some degree.
00:36:55.240Not what people mean by diversity today, but there was.
00:36:59.000People were not all from the same part of Europe and they had different, mainly Protestant, but often even differences in Protestant beliefs and folkways in that way.
00:37:10.760But there's a big difference between trying to make those 13 colonies work and trying to make a continental or then global empire work.
00:37:19.700And the same system of governments that works for those 13 colonies, by definition, cannot work for a global empire.
00:37:54.200And you can't just scale that infinitely.
00:37:57.060And this is, I think, a huge danger in the idea that the founders solved politics or even that they solved a single core problem of politics because it leads us to this idea that, well, the system is solved, so we can just go on forever.
00:38:13.000It can just go every single country can be brought under liberal democracy and they can all be part of the American empire.
00:38:21.360And you can't keep the same system from a set of 13 colonies on the east coast of the United States all the way to a globe-spanning empire.
00:39:07.300And so pretending that you do and pretending the dynamics stay the same is, I think, a critical failure.
00:39:13.520There probably is a version of the American constitutional republic that works for the people it's intended to work for and for the scale at which it was intended to work.
00:39:24.620But it cannot work infinitely, and it cannot work for all people, and it cannot work for a global empire.
00:39:32.440And so if your only plan is to go back to the founding, but you don't plan to scale down the empire, you don't plan to go back – I mean, and let's be honest.
00:39:44.580We're not going back to the founding anyway.
00:39:46.760Like, most Americans, most conservatives would not go back to the founding fathers America.
00:39:55.020They would find many restrictions and many things about the founders America very difficult for them to square with their current understanding of America.
00:40:08.160And so I think Yarvin is right to point out that, unfortunately, Rufo is ultimately investing in a very modern conservative narrative about a history that simply does not exist and about a political system that simply does not exist and cannot be applied to America as it stands.
00:40:30.720I think there is a problem of scale in the United States.
00:40:33.500I don't know that the global American empire is going to continue.
00:40:36.840I don't think that it's sustainable, and I don't think that we're going to make it sustainable by just going back to the founding.
00:40:44.900I don't think that the founders created the system to govern the kind of country we have now, and I think that they were very explicit about that.
00:40:55.960I mean, look, if you want to read the Federalist Papers, it's all there.
00:40:59.580Again, you don't need some kind of edgy, crazy, right-wing political theory to see the problems here.
00:41:05.060The founders were talking about the dangers of a standing army.
00:41:08.480You can read in the Federalist Papers where Madison, in multiple Federalist Papers, is trying to calm people's fears because there were multiple states, multiple colonies that had in their individual constitutions warnings against standing armies.
00:41:23.380And he said, look, I understand your concern about standing armies, and so that's why you need to grant the power of the militia to the federal government so that they don't need a standing army.
00:41:33.400See, we can avoid having standing armies by creating a reliable federal access to militia, and then you don't have to worry about that.
00:41:59.920And again, if you look at many of Rufo's responses to the fact that the Constitution was admittedly written for a specific people or morally religious people, founded on a Christian idea, sharing a culture and tradition, he admits this, but he never addresses that fact when he then talks about going back to the founding.
00:42:21.560Oh, we'll just use the same tools that the founders did.
00:42:24.080Well, why would you think that would work?
00:42:25.620Because they explicitly told you it won't work.
00:42:30.100Now, that doesn't mean that Yarvin's solutions are universally great or even, unfortunately, that Yarvin's solutions are even present in many cases.
00:42:38.480There is very clearly a lack of we can't currently get to where Yarvin would want to be from here at the moment anyway.
00:42:46.220There's no practical resolution there, even if Yarvin's solutions are the best, which I think they aren't.
00:42:51.900I think that, again, there are critical failures in Yarvin's analysis as well.
00:42:56.540The fact that he's hyper-materialistic, the fact that he is too invested in the eternal dominance of the managerial state, the fact that he himself doesn't seem to factor in scale as a problem.
00:43:09.800So these problems are not unique to Rufo's argument.
00:43:13.500However, I do think the core problem that Yarvin brought up against Rufo is legitimate.
00:43:21.620And that problem is that his history and understanding about the United States is one that is a relatively modern creation.
00:43:32.300And I think that the founders did create something that is unique and important, but it is particularly unique and important by the universal realization about political power.
00:43:46.600I think Demetra is right that the Constitution is written down to the hearts of the people.
00:43:52.020And they wrote something that worked for the people of the time and the size and the scope and the traditions and the folkways of the people of the time of the United States.
00:44:45.520I think both of them are doing good work.
00:44:47.040I think they both have valuable roles to play.
00:44:49.660And whatever criticisms I might have, and I'm sure they'll have criticisms of me, I think that ultimately it's important for us to continue to have these discussions and work together, push in the same direction as much as possible.
00:45:05.500Because there is ultimately, I think, a necessity for the United States to realize the position that it's in.
00:45:16.160And Rufo is taking a very active role in that.
00:45:19.140Yarvin is taking a very kind of theoretical, abstract role in that.
00:45:25.720But both of them are probably going to be essential to get people to understand kind of what time it is and how important it is to resolve many of these issues.
00:45:33.820Because if you don't, things are only going to continue to become more difficult for people in the United States.
00:47:10.760They understood that the Republic was a fragile thing.
00:47:13.500They understood that it had very particular limits and could easily fall apart.
00:47:18.440They did not think that they had created some, you know, solution to the political problem of the ages that would endure through everything and would never need to be altered or changed.
00:47:31.900Again, to refer to Joseph de Maestra, he says, look, the Constitution will change as the people change.
00:47:39.460And there is no eternal Constitution for the same reason that there is no fixed state of people.
00:47:45.120Now, to be fair, Rufo, you know, in some of the exchanges on Twitter acknowledge that, yeah, of course, you know, things are not completely solved and there will always be, you know, certain things that we have to be vigilant about and we have to, you know, we have to adapt to.
00:48:00.520But there does seem to be a core belief that, you know, you simply cannot look at the structure of the government of the United States and understand that there may be issues there with our current situation.
00:48:13.300And I think that is a failure, ultimately.
00:48:16.320I think the founding fathers knew this in a way that for some reason, modern conservatives don't.
00:48:22.100Tiny Stupid Demon says, I don't care what anyone says.
00:48:25.060Your wall albums and covers and good morning tweets are the main place for my aging boomer metal head self discovers new metal bands.
00:48:53.960So, uh, I wouldn't say that Rufo is being a lion.
00:48:57.400A lion is, uh, to be very clear, a specific, uh, one of, and, and actually we're still, but we're borrowing language from Machiavelli to explain Pareto because Pareto uses, uh, residues, uh,
00:49:10.800and derivations, which are not as catchy a term.
00:49:39.580Uh, if Rufo was putting tanks in Harvard yard, uh, then we could talk about how Rufo was deploying lion strategies, but, uh, I don't think that's the case.
00:49:48.140However, I also found Yarvin's tactics distasteful in this debate and it's easy to sympathize with Rufo simply on that.
00:49:56.640Uh, so, uh, Cooper Weird also says not to be cross, but if Rufo were to go to Yarvin in that way, Yarvin went to Rufo, it would have been, you're a part of the tribe.
00:50:07.000Yeah, no, there, there could have been, uh, a lot of insults to be sure.
00:50:11.700Um, and wouldn't that have been cringe?
00:50:25.140Like I said, his, his behavior was, was unnecessary.
00:50:27.840Uh, but, uh, you know, that's not really material to the points made in the debate ultimately, even though it's very off-putting and, and certainly doesn't speak well.
00:50:38.940I think of, of Curtis's approach there.
00:50:41.720Paladin YYZ says the founding is a progressive folk band based in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
00:50:47.460I thought Rufo and Yarvin used to play this, uh, for Saxon.