Dangerous Minds
If ideas matter, we should know which ones are steering the state.
The Gist
For decades, Americans have been told to fear “dangerous ideas”—anarchism, communism, radical Islam—because ideas shape policy, and policy shapes the world. People who held these ideas were deemed far too dangerous to be left to their own devices. We surveilled them, deported them, infiltrated them, and in some cases killed them. The premise was always the same: ideas matter, and if you have the wrong ones, watch out.
So what happens when the ideas circulating near power are the ones openly questioning democracy itself?
I’m making an attempt to map six intellectual currents shaping today’s right-wing governing project—from CEO-style executive rule to moralized constitutionalism, from nationalist sovereignty to narrative warfare. Not the loudest influencers. The architects.
You don’t have to panic. But you do need to understand.
If ideas are dangerous, literacy is self-defense.
Starting with this long-ass essay. Sorry.
The Big Idea
Do you remember 9/11? When I ask that, I don’t mean where you were when the planes hit the towers. I mean: do you remember what happened next?
After the initial days of shock, once we became familiar with the words “Al-Qaeda,” “Osama Bin Laden,” “Afghanistan,” and “Taliban1,” the discussion turned to the dangers of “Radical Islamic Terrorism,” then “Radical Islam,” and eventually just “Islam.”
A dangerous idea that had promulgated violence across the globe now had the temerity to show up on our shores. And so we were told that the agents of this idea—religious leaders, or just regular people going to their place of worship—were immediately suspect. Surveillance was prudent. Constitutional protections were flexible. After all, “the Constitution wasn’t a suicide pact2.”
Consider that: a set of ideas so dangerous that citizens who adhered to them were treated as exceptions to the Bill of Rights. Anyone, anywhere, who held those ideas became suspect—a threat to National Security.
This was not the first time Americans were warned about dangerous ideas threatening the Republic:
After William McKinley was assassinated in 1901 by Leon Czolgosz, Congress passed the 1903 Anarchist Exclusion Act, barring anarchists from entering the United States and allowing their deportation.
During the first Red Scare (1919–1920), Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer authorized mass arrests in the Palmer Raids, detaining thousands of suspected radicals and deporting hundreds without meaningful due process. That era gave way to The House Un-American Activities Committee in 1938, and later Senator Joe McCarthy’s televised hearings in the 1950’s.
Then came the ideas behind the Civil Rights Movement. Ideas so destabilizing that the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover launched COINTELPRO to infiltrate and disrupt civil rights organizations—including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
COINTELPRO didn’t just surveil and disrupt. In the case of Fred Hampton and others, it facilitated lethal, extrajudicial action.
If we agree that ideas have the power to challenge and change the world, then we should look at the ideas shaping the people currently in power.
Something is motivating the actions of the current regime. Something is informing the voices defending it—on television, in print, online. What are those ideas? Who is generating them? What future do they imply?
Remember the 2008 election, when Barack Obama was pressed to distance himself from Rev. Jeremiah Wright? The assumption was clear: ideas matter. The people who teach them matter. Their influence matters.
Alright then. Intellectual consistency demands we examine the ideas influencing our current leaders—and the thinkers putting them forward.
Goose, meet Gander.
Before we meet our heroes of the right and their ideas, let’s establish a few boundaries.
We’re not talking about cable news personalities, TikTok influencers, Twitch screamers, or the ocean of rightwing provocateurs3 “just asking questions.” That ecosystem matters, but that’s not what this is about.
We’re also not talking about voters—including the one who told you you were being “too emotional.” We’ll get to them another time.
You’ve heard the phrase “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” Do you remember where you heard it? Probably not. But it stuck.
Judge Richard Posner popularized it in modern discourse, quoting Justice Robert Jackson’s 1949 dissent in Terminiello v. City of Chicago4. The underlying idea—that constitutional protections bend when national survival is at stake—reaches back to Thomas Jefferson.
See how that works? Ideas migrate. They morph. They reappear when needed.
You’ve heard the phrase. Maybe you’ve used it. Whether you knew its lineage or not, it entered the bloodstream.
That’s what I’m talking about.
The capital-I Influencers. The big-ticket thinkers with big ideas shaping the world we’re living in—and the world they want for us.
Six Big Ideas Circulating Near Power
Democracy is an Outdated Technology — Curtis Yarvin
“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.” — Gray Mirror interview, 2021
Yarvin’s core argument is simple: democracy is a broken operating system. Voting produces chaos, compromise produces decay, and the whole idea of “citizen self-governance” is an antique myth we cling to because it feels virtuous. His alternative is not subtle—replace democratic legitimacy with executive legitimacy. A country run like a company, led by a CEO-sovereign, insulated from the mess of public consent.
This isn’t just internet cosplay. Yarvin’s ideas circulate in billionaire-funded tech and political donor worlds because they provide a tidy justification for what a certain class of people already want: power without the nuisance of accountability.
The Constitution is a Moral Instrument — Adrian Vermeule
“The central aim of constitutionalism is not to maximize individual autonomy or to minimize the abuse of power, but to ensure that the ruler has the power needed to rule well.” — The Atlantic, 2020
Most Americans were taught that the Constitution exists to limit government power. Checks and balances. Separation of powers. Guardrails against tyranny. That’s Civics 101.
Vermeule argues that this is backwards. In his view, the Constitution should not primarily restrain power—it should enable it. The real question is not “How do we prevent abuse?” but “How do we empower rulers to pursue the common good?”
That shift is enormous. If limiting state power is not the priority, then expanding executive authority in service of a defined moral vision is not a betrayal of constitutionalism—it becomes its fulfillment.
In plain English: the Constitution is not a shield against power. It’s a tool for using it.
National Conservatism — Yoram Hazony
“The alternative to a world of independent nations is a world government… and this world government will inevitably be imperial in character.” — The Virtue of Nationalism (2018)
Hazony argues that the modern liberal order—international institutions, universal human rights frameworks, multinational trade agreements—is not neutral cooperation. It is, in his telling, soft empire.
His alternative is a world made up of strong, sovereign nations rooted in shared religion, tradition, language, and historical identity. Political legitimacy flows from cultural cohesion, not universal principles.
The key break here is with Enlightenment universalism—the idea that certain rights and norms apply to all people everywhere. Hazony rejects that premise. Different nations, he argues, should be free to enforce different moral orders without outside interference.
Translated: global liberal norms are a threat. National tradition should win. In other words, the holocaust was none of our business.
Emergency Constitutionalism — Michael Anton
“2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die.” — “The Flight 93 Election” (2016)
Anton’s entire move is to declare politics an existential emergency. If the plane is about to crash, you don’t debate procedure—you rush the cockpit. That framing does two things at once: it turns opponents into existential threats, and it turns “extraordinary measures” into common sense.
And that’s the point. If you can convince people the country is on the verge of collapse—regardless of what the measurable indicators say—then anything done to seize and hold power can be presented not as a power grab, but as rescue.
The Network State / Exit Sovereignty — Balaji Srinivasan
“The network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition.” — The Network State (2022)
Srinivasan is proposing a future where political legitimacy doesn’t come from citizens in a shared geography. It comes from aligned communities online that build real-world power—money, land, institutions—and eventually demand recognition as sovereign. Think “startup nation,” crowdfunded and privately governed.
The key shift is this: democracy becomes optional. Government becomes a product. If you don’t like the old state, you don’t reform it—you build a competing one and route around the public altogether. Yes, it’s got S.P.E.C.T.R.E. vibes. That’s because it’s sovereignty imagined as a tech platform—as unaccountable as Facebook.
Narrative Capture — Christopher Rufo
“We have successfully frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions.” — a tweet
Rufo’s project is the tactical side of the machine: take complicated, often graduate-level ideas (critical race theory is a complex legal framework, not a kindergarten curriculum), strip them down to a hot label, and then make that label radioactive. Once you control the label, you control the battlefield: school boards, elections, legislation, institutional purges.
This isn’t accidental misunderstanding. It’s rhetorical engineering. And it works—because once a concept is widely hated, you can attach it to anything you want to destroy.
Together, these ideas share a family resemblance: liberal procedural democracy is weak or obsolete; neutrality is a myth; and power should be used decisively—through executive authority, moral mandate, technological exit, or narrative control.
Another way of saying this is that the people in charge have bought in to a collective idea that the greatest experiment in citizen self-governance has run its course. They are attempting to end it, and do not care what happens to you once they succeed.
The Convergence
Let’s focus.
This is not a conspiracy. These individuals are not meeting in candlelit rooms plotting the fall of the Republic. They disagree on plenty, including priorities. Some want stronger executives. Some want culturally sovereign nation-states. Some want parallel digital sovereignties. Some want to dominate the narrative battlefield.
But their ideas converge in three critical ways.
First: Liberal, procedural democracy is weak, exhausted, or obsolete.
Whether framed as inefficiency (Yarvin), moral emptiness (Vermeule), imperial universalism (Hazony), or civilizational emergency (Anton), the through-line is skepticism toward the Enlightenment model of citizen self-governance governed by neutral rules.
Second: Neutrality is a myth.
The idea that the state should referee rather than rule—that it should preserve pluralism rather than enforce a moral vision—is treated as naïve at best, corrosive at worst. In its place is the conviction that power must serve a defined good, a defined nation, or a defined community. Who gets to define that? Not you, baby.
Third: Power must be used decisively.
If democracy is failing, if neutrality is fiction, if crisis is permanent—then hesitation becomes weakness. Executive expansion, institutional capture, technological exit, narrative weaponization—these are not excesses. They are tools. You can see them being deployed currently, every single day.
This isn’t fringe Twitter5 discourse; These ideas circulate in law reviews, conference halls, donor networks, and policy shops. They are read by staffers, cited by candidates, and translated into administrative frameworks.
The media ecosystem may sound chaotic, but beneath the noise is coherence. These ideas bind a coalition united—at minimum—by deep skepticism of liberal democracy and, at maximum, by open hostility toward it.
The seeming chaos of the current administration does, in fact, have a pattern behind it. It’s not a conspiracy if you can read the playbook and figure out how things work6.
Wrap it up, Ham
Ideas matter.
They always have. They shape how we understand power, what we believe is possible, and what we’re willing to accept. To their credit, conservatives take ideas seriously. They read them, fund them, circulate them, build institutions around them. As well they should. Ideas move history.
For generations, we were told to fear certain ideas because of what they would replace.
We were told to fear Communists because Communists would replace democracy with Communism.
We were told to fear Anarchists, because Anarchists would replace Democracy with Anarchism7.
We were told to fear Muslims, because Muslims would replace Democracy with Sharia Law.
The premise is simple: ideas shape policy. Policy shapes the world.
So what does it mean when the ideas now circulating near power openly question democracy itself? When they argue that liberal neutrality is naïve, that executive authority should be expanded, that sovereignty can be detached from public accountability, that crisis justifies consolidation?
You’re seeing the practical effects of these ideas in the streets right now.
Democracy doesn’t disappear because someone yells on television. It erodes when the intellectual ground beneath it shifts—when enough people come to believe that its guardrails are optional, its procedures outdated, its restraints unnecessary.
That shift begins with ideas.
No one expects you to have read Yarvin or Vermeule or Hazony. Most people haven’t. That’s the point. The people who read them are not the ones arguing on social media. They are the ones drafting policy, funding think tanks, staffing administrations, and shaping judicial philosophy.
You don’t have to panic. But you do have to understand.
If ideas are dangerous, then the responsible response isn’t fear. It’s literacy.
Read them. Know what they argue. Understand how the pieces fit together. And then decide—eyes open—what kind of political order you want to defend.
—Ham
Go Talk About It
Oof. Tough stuff to discuss over cocktails, I know. I was writing this, thinking to myself: “Does anyone give a shit about this?” I can understand that when the house is on fire, you need to put it out, not look for the person who sold the arsonist the gasoline. That said, having now read this, you know something important that you might want to share.
What I think is that you could share this essay with your friends who are fellow travelers, but if you want to start persuading people who aren’t where you are, here are some things to say and who to say them to:
1. For People Who Consider Themselves Moderates or Centrists
I’m not arguing for one party over the other. I’m saying it’s worth knowing that there are serious thinkers openly questioning whether the U.S. should be a democracy.
Some of those ideas are influencing people who are writing policy and shaping the philosophy of the judges being appointed for life.
Even if you’re in the middle, it’s useful to understand what intellectual direction the political right is moving in, and how it will affect you.
2. For Politically Disengaged Friends
You don’t have to follow politics every day, but ideas about power eventually affect real life — schools, courts, speech, rights.
There are influential voices arguing that democracy is inefficient and strong executive (autocratic) rule is better.
You don’t need to panic — but knowing what’s being proposed helps you decide what kind of country you want to live in.
3. For “Both Sides Are the Same” People
Every political movement has loud personalities. What’s different right now is that there are well-developed intellectual arguments questioning democracy itself.
This isn’t about tone or culture war noise — it’s about whether neutral, procedural democracy should continue as the governing model for this country.
Even if you’re skeptical of both parties, it’s worth noticing when one side’s thinkers are openly debating ending democracy.
…and a bonus, all-purpose thing to bring up at your next trivia night
“Random question: did you know there are serious conservative thinkers openly arguing that democracy might be obsolete? Not like Twitter hot takes — actual books and conferences about replacing democracy in the U.S. with an autocrat. People actually think this. Crazy, right?”
Your mileage may vary.
Go Deeper
If you’ve read this far, you must be captured somewhere with nothing else to do. I hope you’re ok. Chewy TUMS always works for me.
I think it’s good to read ideas that you disagree with. Not the latest nonsense that you see in airport bookstores from the hosts on Newsmax or whatever, but people who are actually smart and really challenge your beliefs. How else are you going to know what you believe and how strongly you hold those beliefs?
That said, I think if you wanted to go deeper, you should read people who present a muscular counter-argument to the viceroys of modern fascist thought I’ve catalogued above. Ideas are important and it is more than ok for you to collect them from other people who spend their lives in the stock and trade of ideas.
So here are a few things to help you better understand why liberal democracy is a good thing, actually and help you to have some things in your pocket if ever you meet someone who wants to convince you otherwise.
How Democracies Die — Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt
A clear, empirical look at how democracies erode — not through coups, but through elected leaders gradually weakening norms and guardrails.
Use it when someone says: “This is just normal politics.”
The Constitution of Knowledge — Jonathan Rauch
A defense of liberal pluralism and institutional neutrality as the engine of truth-finding in modern societies. If you only have time to read one thing, make it this one.
Use it when someone says: “Neutrality is a myth — the state should enforce the good.” Rauch argues that procedural rules aren’t weakness; they’re what allow disagreement without coercion. Either we figure out how to live together, or we kill each other and yes, it’s really that stark, and yes, this is what U.S. politics is supposed to be about.
On Tyranny — Timothy Snyder
Short, readable, historically grounded. A field guide to recognizing authoritarian patterns early.
Use it when someone says: “This is alarmist.” It provides historical parallels without hysteria. By the way, Prof. Snyder and his family fled the country not long ago because based on his lifetime of scholarship, he felt that he should leave while he still could.
Fun fact: A driver of reforestation is squirrels forgetting where they buried their nuts.
The lack of discussion around Saudi Arabia and the Emeriti states should probably be something we return to, but not in this essay. We continue.
An interesting thing happened when I looked for the originator of this phrase, which I’ll get to, but what I was thinking of was this reference: Posner, R. A. (2006). Not a suicide pact: The Constitution in a time of national emergency. (Oxford University Press)
Including the ones funded by the Russian government. Pepperidge Farm remembers.
This is, ironically, a very important case for us to know about. SCOTUS held in this case that speech that "stirs the public to anger, invites dispute, brings about a condition of unrest, or creates a disturbance" cannot be banned by any government (local, state, or federal) under the first amendment.
I will not use the current name for this site. Further, I will not venture there, as Elon Musk has turned it in to an AI-porn-generator and it should be burned to the ground.
It’s tempting to use an analogy from The Matrix, save for an important distinction. The architects of the world WANT CREDIT FOR THEIR WORK. They publish, for crying out loud! They’re telling you what they want to see and influencing the people who are making it happen. There is no red pill or blue pill or any other sort of pill.
I know a few anarchists, and I can’t tell you how boring this would be. Anarchists have a lot of meetings where they argue about the finer points of anarchism.