Sublime

The right and the left share a sense of creeping doom, though for different reasons

The term Alt-Right was not yet a thing, certainly not like it would become within a few short years. The biggest and most innovative name by far in this internet scene was Mencius Moldbug, the pseudonym of programmer Curtis Yarvin. Moldbug’s blog was called “Unqualified Reservations,” and it was as remarkable for its radical ideology as for

Politics seems to offer an arena of moral action. To be moral in this world, you don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow. You just have to be liberal or conservative, you just have to feel properly enraged at the people you find contemptible.

to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of