The CEO-King Fantasy and the Problem of Power

I am increasingly tired of the right-wing neoreactionary fantasy that democracy is a decadent inconvenience and that America should be run by something like a CEO-monarch. This argument, now laundered through the vocabulary of efficiency, realism, civilizational renewal, and technological competence, is not a serious solution to the problems of liberal democracy. It is an old authoritarian temptation wearing a new Patagonia vest.

The Neoreactionary Ecosystem

The intellectual ecosystem behind this argument is not monolithic, but it has recognizable figures. Curtis Yarvin, who wrote under the name Mencius Moldbug, is the most direct advocate of the neo-monarchist or “CEO-sovereign” model. He argues that democracy is structurally incompetent and that political authority should be centralized under a sovereign executive, often analogized to a corporate CEO. Nick Land, a British philosopher associated with accelerationism, helped give the “Dark Enlightenment” its more abstract and anti-egalitarian vocabulary, treating liberal democracy as a decelerating force against hierarchy, technological selection, and more ruthless forms of order. Patrick Deneen comes from a different tradition: he is a Catholic post-liberal critic who argues that liberalism has failed by dissolving community, tradition, and moral limits. Richard Weaver, writing much earlier in the twentieth century, offered a conservative critique of modernity in Ideas Have Consequences, arguing that the decline of metaphysical and moral order had produced cultural decay.

These men do not all argue for the same regime. Deneen is not Yarvin, Weaver was not a Silicon Valley monarchist, and Land’s accelerationist anti-humanism is not the same thing as Catholic post-liberalism. But together they help form the intellectual atmosphere in which parts of the contemporary right have become increasingly comfortable attacking liberal democracy itself, not merely criticizing its failures. The shared impulse is a suspicion that modern liberalism has exhausted itself and that hierarchy, authority, tradition, or sovereign command must replace democratic pluralism. That is the point at which critique becomes dangerous. Liberal democracy has real failures. But replacing it with executive rule, post-liberal coercion, or neo-monarchical fantasies does not solve the problem of power. It intensifies it.

The Corporate Analogy

The most seductive version of the argument is the corporate analogy. “Run California like Apple.” “Run America like a startup.” “Replace politicians with executives.” To people frustrated by bureaucracy, disorder, corruption, and institutional sclerosis, the pitch has surface appeal. Companies can appear decisive. CEOs can fire incompetents. Firms can reorganize quickly. Markets punish failure. A well-run company can produce beautiful products, maintain coherent internal direction, and move faster than a legislature.

But the analogy fails at the first serious test: nothing guarantees Apple.

If you decide to replace democratic government with corporate sovereignty, you do not get to assume that the sovereign corporation will be Apple under Steve Jobs or Tim Cook. You might get Enron, Theranos, or FTX. You might get a hollowed-out Boeing, where managerial incentives degrade engineering culture until public safety is put at risk. You might get a private-equity extraction machine, optimized not for excellence but for short-term cash flow, debt loading, asset stripping, and executive enrichment. The neoreactionary imagination always pictures the philosopher-CEO. History more often gives us the fraud, the mediocrity, the thug, the courtier, the obsessive, the dynast, or the paranoid narcissist.

Even Apple itself is not a sufficient political model. Apple can make excellent phones, computers, operating systems, and services. It is a productive institution within its domain. But a corporation’s internal logic is not the logic of justice.

Life inside the corporate model is hardly ideal. Look at how many large corporations operate today. To enforce worker productivity, emails are monitored, keystrokes are tracked, output is measured, colleagues are surveyed, and those deemed insufficiently productive are sanctioned or removed. These practices may be tolerated inside a contractual workplace, but they are poisonous as principles of civil society.

To make matters worse, these systems can be gamed. As anyone who has survived corporate life knows, the competent are not always the ones who climb the hierarchy. Corporate advancement often rewards political skill, conformity, patronage, self-promotion, and metric manipulation as much as competence. So, we cannot even say that the corporate model reliably breeds excellence. It may just as easily breed courtiers.

Corporations exist to produce goods and services, maintain market position, generate returns, and survive competition. But they are not models of efficiency or moral rectitude. Large corporations are filled with waste, bureaucracy, and questionable human rights practices.

They do not naturally protect labor rights, privacy, civil liberties, due process, freedom of conscience, human dignity, or political equality unless law, regulation, public scrutiny, market pressure, worker organization, and cultural expectations force them to do so. A corporation may behave decently under constraint. That does not mean corporate power becomes legitimate when unconstrained.

Now give that corporation police powers. Give it courts, prisons, intelligence services, tax authority, border control, and an army. Give it the power to decide who may speak, publish, assemble, sue, own property, educate children, investigate corruption, or challenge authority. Then remove meaningful elections. Remove public accountability. Remove constitutional limits or make them dependent on the sovereign’s good will. At that point, the analogy is no longer “California run like Apple.” It is a state with corporate aesthetics and monarchical power.

The corporate model also misunderstands incentives. Corporate hierarchy can be efficient when goals are narrow, metrics are meaningful, and exit is available. Government has broader and more conflicting obligations. It must protect liberty and order, permit dissent, administer justice, provide public goods, maintain national defense, regulate markets, manage externalities, preserve legitimacy, and prevent private power from becoming sovereign. These goals cannot be reduced to shareholder value or executive command. In a plural society with diverse viewpoints, citizens must preserve the right to contest both the ends and the means used to achieve these obligations through nonviolent methods.

The British East India Company is the canonical example of corporation-as-state, and it demonstrates the model’s limitations and failures. It had its own army, territory, and legal powers. It pursued profit above all and produced both immense wealth and catastrophic human costs: the Bengal famine, the opium trade, imperial coercion, and war. Eventually, the British state had to rein it in because it was too dangerous to leave unchecked.

Ultimately, corporation-as-state is a Pollyanna utopian model that fails even a surface-level analysis. It assumes the best possible corporation, the best possible sovereign, the best possible incentives, and the best possible exit conditions, then calls the fantasy realism.

Democracy & Civil Rights

Yarvin’s admirers often present democracy as a messy, inefficient mechanism that empowers mediocrity and short-termism. There is truth in the premise. Democracy is messy. Voters can be ignorant. Politicians can be cowardly. Interest groups can capture policy. Bureaucracies can become self-protective. Public debate can become stupid, theatrical, and dishonest. Elections do not automatically produce wisdom. Majorities can be wrong. Institutions can decay.

But these criticisms are not the devastating indictment of democracy that neoreactionaries imagine. They are the starting point for any serious theory of constitutional government. The question is not whether democracy is flawed. Of course it is. The question is whether any alternative better solves the fundamental problem of politics: how to select, constrain, legitimize, and remove those who wield coercive power.

Democracy’s central virtue is not that voters are always wise. They are not. Its central virtue is that rulers hold office conditionally. They may govern for a term, but they do not own the state. They can be criticized, investigated, opposed, voted out, impeached, sued, and replaced. That is the institutional difference between a citizen and a subject.

Every political order must deal with bad rulers. The neoreactionary fantasy assumes the problem away. It imagines that hierarchy will elevate competence, that sovereignty will clarify responsibility, and that a CEO-ruler will govern with long-term rationality. But what happens when the sovereign is corrupt, stupid, captured by cronies, or when he mistakes loyalty for competence? What happens when his heir is weak, cruel, unstable, or vain?

And if he decides that criticism is sabotage?  Imagine what would happen if the police, army, courts, and administrative apparatus answer to him personally.

The democratic answer is imperfect but clear: organize opposition, expose wrongdoing, contest elections, use law, and remove the government.

The authoritarian answer is also clear: submit, flee, conspire, or fight.

This is the part Yarvin and his admirers never answer convincingly. They may invoke “exit,” as if citizens can simply leave a bad regime the way customers can switch phone brands. But exit is not a serious substitute for political rights. Most people cannot casually abandon their homes, jobs, families, languages, savings, credentials, legal identities, and communities because their sovereign has become abusive. There is a stickiness to existing that makes switching brands difficult, to use their language.

Exit is expensive, selective, and favors the mobile, rich, young, skilled, and lucky. For everyone else, “you can leave” is rhetorical coercion.

Even in markets, exit is insufficient without law. Consumers need fraud protection. Workers need enforceable contracts. Investors need disclosure rules. Competitors need antitrust law. Residents need environmental protections. People need courts.

The market works because it is embedded in a legal and political order. Yarvinism fantasizes about replacing the institutional foundations that make markets possible and then fantasizes about replacing political accountability with proprietary rule. It is like playing a game where one player makes up the rules as they go along. Guess who wins the game in the end?

The deeper problem is that politics is not product management. Citizens are not customers. Rights are not subscription benefits. Yarvin talks about the state as a startup. This is a poor metaphor. The state is not a startup because a firm can choose its market segment.

A state, on the other hand, governs everyone within its jurisdiction, including dissenters, minorities, children, the elderly, the poor, the unpopular, and the inconvenient. A firm can discontinue an unprofitable product. A state cannot ethically discontinue unprofitable people. That is generally frowned upon.

Pluralism and Liberalism

The post-liberal and neoreactionary right often speaks as if pluralism is decay. In reality, pluralism is the normal condition of a free society. People differ in religion, philosophy, class, region, ethnicity, profession, temperament, and moral priority. Liberal democracy does not solve those differences by pretending they do not exist. It creates procedures through which people can coexist without requiring metaphysical unanimity. That is not weakness. It is one of the great achievements of modern politics.

Deneen’s critique of liberalism has force where it identifies loneliness, consumerism, civic thinning, family stress, and the hollowing out of local communities. Liberal societies do produce pathologies. Market society can corrode nonmarket goods. Bureaucratic states can flatten local forms of life. Autonomy can become isolation. But the post-liberal move from “liberalism has problems” to “therefore we need a more coercive moral order” is not a conclusion. It is a leap. The fact that liberal democracy needs repair does not prove that citizens should be subordinated to priests, patriarchs, executives, monarchs, or ideological guardians.

Land’s darker contribution is different. His accelerationist and neoreactionary tendencies treat egalitarian democracy as a brake on more ruthless forms of order, intelligence, selection, and technological transformation. This is less a political philosophy than a metaphysical sneer at human equality. It is useful mainly as a warning. When politics becomes fascinated by domination, speed, hierarchy, and exit from moral restraint, the human being becomes raw material. That road does not lead to ordered liberty. It leads to experiments conducted on unwilling subjects. Also, generally frowned upon.

Weaver’s older critique of modernity is more serious in tone and less crude in implication. He worried about the loss of metaphysical order, cultural inheritance, and moral seriousness. Those concerns should not be dismissed out of hand. Modern liberal societies do sometimes produce shallow people and degraded culture. But nostalgia for hierarchy cannot solve the problem of legitimacy. A social order may need virtue, memory, and restraint, but it cannot justify coercive power without the conditional assent of those subject to it: that is contextual, limited in scope, and capable of being withdrawn. Otherwise, it becomes domination.

Legitimacy and Accountability

“Dark Enlightenment” is not dark because it sees hard truths. It is dark because it abandons the central political lesson of modernity: power must be accountable because rulers are human. They are not philosopher-kings. They are not gods. They are not reliable guardians. They are ambitious, fearful, vain, self-interested, tribal, and often deluded. Institutions must be designed with that fact in mind.

The American founders understood this better than the CEO-monarchists do. They were not naive democrats. They feared faction, demagoguery, mob passion, executive tyranny, legislative overreach, and judicial arrogance. Their answer was not to hand the country to a sovereign executive and hope for competence. Their answer was separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, elections, rights, courts, impeachment, civilian control of the military, and a constitutional order premised on distrust of concentrated power.

That system is under stress. It has defects. It has been hypocritical, exclusionary, and often unjust. But its answer to political failure remains superior to the neoreactionary alternative. Reform democracy. Strengthen Congress. Protect courts. Reduce corruption. Rebuild state capacity. Reform campaign finance. Improve civic education. Punish criminality by elites. Defend free speech and the rule of law. Make institutions more competent. But do not confuse frustration with democracy for an argument against self-government.

Because once the mechanism of accountability disappears, politics changes character. The ruler no longer needs persuasion. He needs control. The citizen no longer has standing. She has permission. Opposition no longer functions as a legitimate alternative government. It becomes sedition. Law no longer binds power. It expresses power. Public reason gives way to court politics. Citizens become subjects, clients, employees, or enemies.

That is the endpoint of the CEO-state fantasy. It begins with impatience about bureaucracy and ends with armed men explaining that the sovereign has made his decision.

Conclusion

So when neoreactionaries say America should be run like a company, the correct answer is simple: which company, governed by whom, accountable to whom, removable by what process, and constrained by what rights?

Until they can answer that, they are not offering a political philosophy. They are selling the oldest authoritarian fantasy in PowerPoint slides, Slack channels, and better fonts. Its genealogy places it as a slicker, corporatist cousin of communism: different class aesthetics, same contempt for pluralism, same fantasy of managed society, same belief that coercive power can be purified by theory.

Democracy addresses the most fundamental problem in politics: leadership selection under conditions of disagreement. It provides legitimacy and accountability. We choose our leaders, and we can remove them.

Without that, sharpen your swords.