In effect, this would then institute a market for governance, in which citizens could exit for a different polity, if an existing one didn’t suit.īut perhaps its most well-known powerhouse is Peter Thiel. Yarvin’s “ patchwork theory” offers a model for what exit might look like: he argues that nation-states should be replaced by proliferating, competing, autocratic city-states, each with its own CEO. Of those who write or speak under their own name, one key thinker is the neo-reactionary writer Curtis Yarvin. Many prominent figures associated with the subculture I’ll call the Exit Right are determinedly anonymous. Those talking about “exit” today in America aren’t the modern-day Puritans but their opponents. And as Hirschman points out, America’s origin story has contributed to an especially robust American political tradition of people voting with their feet when they don’t like how things are going. As he sees it, citizens can choose to remain loyal, to exercise their voice (ie protest) or to “exit”. Hirschman’s influential book Exit, Voice and Loyalty looks at what happens when things start to go wrong in an organisation or polity. More from this author The American Right's civil war The political scientist Albert Hirschman argues that for this historical reason opting-out, or “exit”, has “an extraordinarily privileged position in the American tradition”. And one form this took was the Puritans leaving Europe for America. The shift in mindset it drove was so radical it pushed some to opt out altogether, from a regime they found intolerable.
Thinking of the Reformation as a religious schism driven partly by new information technology isn’t to trivialise it. And what they’re building has the potential to transform not just the internet but our most fundamental political structures - as dramatically as the Reformation and its aftermath. The mainstream Right mostly doesn’t really know what to make of this faction, and largely ignores them. Often fiercely anti-woke, this loosely Right-aligned subculture blends tech futurism with a desire to preserve elements of the past, and sometimes unsettlingly strong views on facets of human nature they see as immutable and hence not amenable to progressive social engineering. And if this coalition increasingly replaces ‘the Right’ in Covid-era politics, its most action-oriented and potentially disruptive faction is also perhaps the least well-understood: the crypto bros. In this story, “wokeness” isn’t the schism it’s the established church.įor schismatics, look to the emerging coalition of dissenters from woke hegemony. It’s the creed of our current elite establishment, with near-hegemonic power, and it’s subject to many of the same critiques as the then-hegemonic Catholic Church was in Luther’s time, down to the selling of indulgences. It’s a secularised, mutant form of the Protestantism that began with Luther.
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