I keep thinking about colonial Virginia because the more I read about its early political order, the more familiar the underlying idea feels, even though nearly everything about the material world has changed. Virginia had elections, representative institutions, counties, courts, churches, private property, and all kinds of structures that we would recognize as pieces of representative government, while actual political power remained concentrated among a relatively small group of wealthy white male property owners whose authority extended far beyond the ballot box. The franchise changed over time, although by 1670 Virginia had again restricted voting to freeholders and householders, and by 1736 the colony had established substantial property requirements for voting. Wealthy planters won nearly all elections, while the gentry also dominated the House of Burgesses, county courts, Anglican vestries, credit relationships, landholding, and much of the economic life surrounding ordinary Virginians. The part that stays with me is how little of that power required abolishing representative government, because elections could continue inside a society where wealth, property, household authority, race, gender, debt, employment, and social position determined whose choices actually carried weight. The gentry did not have to stand over every person giving orders all day. They had built a world in which other people routinely had to pass through institutions they controlled.

That is why I think Virginia offers such a useful way of understanding the present moment, because we have gotten accustomed to imagining the loss of democracy as something spectacular, with elections abruptly cancelled and a dictator appearing on television to announce that the old constitutional order is finished, while the more plausible danger is a society that keeps many of the familiar forms of democracy as meaningful power becomes concentrated somewhere else. Elections can continue. State legislatures can continue. Counties can continue. Courts can continue. People can continue owning property, going to church, posting whatever they want online, starting businesses, choosing among consumer products, and experiencing enormous amounts of ordinary personal freedom, while more and more consequential decisions about the conditions of their lives migrate into institutions they cannot meaningfully influence. That is what makes the current mixture of hostility toward the administrative state, enthusiasm for privatization, fascination with local and household authority, celebration of billionaires, enormous corporate power, an increasingly muscular presidency, and a strong carceral state begin to look coherent to me. These ideas weaken different kinds of power and strengthen different kinds of power, and the important question becomes less about whether government is getting “bigger” or “smaller” than about who gains the ability to make decisions when a particular public institution loses it.

This is also where some of the stranger intellectual currents around the contemporary right become relevant, especially because people like Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and Russell Vought do not all believe exactly the same thing, and the differences actually help clarify what is happening. Yarvin is remarkably explicit. He calls himself a monarchist, argues for replacing existing democratic government with a sovereign executive modeled partly on a corporate CEO, and has written that democracy can serve as the vehicle through which voters install a monarchy, after which the new ruler can reconstruct the institutions of government around unified executive authority. In one of his formulations, “democracy is the rocket; monarchy is the satellite,” with the people providing the energy required to transfer sovereignty and then becoming largely unnecessary to the continuous operation of government. Peter Thiel came at the problem from a libertarian direction when he wrote in 2009 that he no longer believed “freedom and democracy are compatible,” and although he later clarified that he was not advocating disenfranchising particular groups, his larger argument remained that political participation offered little hope for achieving the kind of freedom he wanted and that energy should therefore move into spaces beyond conventional democratic politics. There is something deeply revealing in both ideas, because each begins with frustration at the fact that collective political life allows other people to interfere with what an individual wants to do.

Vance and Vought speak in a different register, and I think it is important to be precise about that because neither of them publicly describes his project as abolishing democracy. They argue that they are restoring democratic or constitutional accountability by bringing executive agencies under tighter control of the elected president. In 2021, Vance cited Yarvin while arguing that a future Republican administration should fire midlevel bureaucrats and replace them with people responsive to its agenda, and when ABC confronted him about those comments in 2024, Vance defended the underlying principle as democratic accountability, arguing that administrators should answer to the elected branches. Vought makes a more systematic version of the argument in his Project 2025 chapter on the executive office, where he says the conservative president must “limit, control, and direct” the executive branch and challenges the independence of expert agencies and career civil servants from presidential authority. Vought has elsewhere called for a “radical constitutional” approach to dismantling bureaucratic power centers and rejected the legitimacy of independent executive agencies as a constitutional principle. Their stated theory is therefore quite different from Yarvin’s explicit monarchism, although the ideas converge around a persistent suspicion of institutions that can frustrate executive action, especially institutions whose authority does not come directly from presidential elections.

And that is where the whole thing starts to make more sense to me, because democratic institutions are frustrating precisely because they allow other human beings to interfere with power. A career civil servant can say that something is illegal or technically impossible. A regulator can tell a corporation that it cannot sell a dangerous product. A union can tell an employer that workers will not accept certain conditions. A judge can tell a president that an action violates the law. A scientist can tell political leadership that the evidence does not support what it wants to hear. An inspector general can investigate an agency. Congress can refuse funding. Journalists can expose wrongdoing. Local governments can resist federal priorities. Advocacy organizations can sue. Citizens can organize. All of this produces delay, contradiction, paperwork, negotiation, appeals, meetings, hearings, bargaining, and a tremendous amount of bureaucracy that can be genuinely maddening, while also creating multiple places where somebody without enormous personal power can stand and say no. The inefficiency is partly the consequence of living in a society where millions of people have conflicting interests and where no individual is supposed to possess an unquestionable right to settle those conflicts alone. A government organized like a company can certainly make decisions faster, because employees do not get an equal vote with the CEO. That efficiency is inseparable from the hierarchy producing it.

This is why the language of “less government” drives me a little crazy, because less government does not automatically mean more freedom, and very often it means that ordinary people have less ability to make decisions about their own lives. Government is one source of power in society, alongside employers, landlords, banks, insurers, corporations, churches, universities, families, technology platforms, wealthy individuals, and every other institution capable of controlling something people need. When government stops regulating an employer, the employer gains discretion and the worker may lose it. When tenant protections disappear, the landlord acquires more authority over the housing relationship and the tenant has fewer ways to resist. When accessibility requirements disappear, a property owner gains greater discretion over how a space is designed while a disabled person may lose the practical freedom to enter it. When health care is tied more tightly to employment because public alternatives are unavailable, the worker’s formal freedom to quit becomes much thinner because leaving a job can mean losing access to medical care. When education, transportation, utilities, health care, communication, and other necessities become increasingly dependent on private purchasing power, the amount of freedom a person can actually exercise begins tracking the amount of money they possess. The government has receded from the relationship, while power itself remains right there.

That is the part I want to make almost painfully clear, because American political language has trained us to imagine freedom primarily as the absence of government interference, even though most of us spend an enormous portion of our lives being governed by institutions that are not governments. Your employer can determine your schedule, your income, whether you receive health insurance, what you wear, when you can take a break, whether you can work remotely, and whether you will still have a paycheck next month. Your landlord can determine whether you can keep living where you live. Your insurer can determine whether it will pay for treatment. Your bank can determine whether you receive credit. A technology platform can decide whether you can access the network where much of your social or professional life occurs. None of these institutions becomes politically harmless because we call it private. Freedom has to mean having enough real power over the conditions of your own life that you can say no, leave, appeal, organize, negotiate, or challenge a decision without being destroyed by the consequences. Public institutions can create that capacity by giving ordinary people rights and resources they could never purchase individually, which means dismantling those institutions can leave someone with fewer actual choices even as political leaders tell them that government has finally gotten out of their way.

Once you understand freedom this way, privatization stops looking like the removal of politics and starts looking like the relocation of decision-making. Somebody still has to decide how much electricity costs, who gets health care, which school stays open, whether a bus route exists, what happens when a bank fails, what safety standards a workplace has to meet, how drinking water is protected, which neighborhoods receive investment, and what recourse exists when an institution mistreats someone. Moving those decisions into a corporation does not make them disappear. The corporation will have executives, managers, bureaucracies, algorithms, compliance departments, eligibility rules, paperwork, appeals procedures, surveillance systems, security personnel, and people whose job is to enforce decisions. Privatization therefore does not abolish bureaucracy nearly as often as its rhetoric suggests. It changes who the bureaucracy answers to, and a private bureaucracy generally answers upward to owners, executives, boards, and investors rather than outward to a democratic public. The customer can theoretically leave, the employee can theoretically quit, and the tenant can theoretically move, although those forms of exit mean very little when a person lacks the money required to exercise them or when every realistic alternative is organized around similar concentrations of power.

This is also why I think describing yourself as “apolitical” deserves much more scrutiny than we usually give it, especially when apolitical identity is presented as a form of moral superiority, maturity, rationality, or freedom from the ugliness of partisan conflict. You cannot actually become apolitical by becoming bored with politics, because decisions about your wages, workplace, housing, health care, schools, transportation, taxes, civil rights, reproductive life, environment, policing, disability access, family, retirement, and ability to organize continue being made whether you participate or not. Withdrawal changes your relationship to those decisions because the people with the most money, property, institutional access, ideological commitment, and organizational capacity do not withdraw with you. Billionaires do not become apolitical because politics is exhausting. Corporations do not become apolitical because elections are divisive. Employers do not stop lobbying. Industries do not stop trying to shape regulation. Wealthy political networks do not stop funding organizations that spend years developing policy, identifying personnel, litigating cases, training lawyers, writing legislation, and preparing to govern. When ordinary people decide that caring about politics is embarrassing or beneath them, politics becomes increasingly dominated by the people who never had any intention of leaving it.

That is why I increasingly see apolitical disengagement as something an elite politics can absorb very comfortably, because a person who has given up on collective political action becomes easier to govern through institutions they experience individually. You deal with the employer alone, negotiate with the landlord alone, fight the insurance company alone, manage medical debt alone, navigate school systems alone, figure out child care alone, try to save for retirement alone, and then interpret all of these problems as personal successes or failures because the political mechanisms through which people might collectively change the underlying rules have come to feel distant, corrupt, vulgar, or pointless. There is a deeply paternal quality to that arrangement. You are encouraged to believe that withdrawing from politics makes you independent while other people remain intensely political on your behalf, designing the rules under which you will supposedly exercise that independence. The message becomes that responsible adults should stop arguing about how society is organized, attend to their families and private lives, make good consumer choices, work hard, and leave larger questions of governance to people who understand how things work. That is very close to the old gentry idea in spirit, because the ordinary person is promised dignity and autonomy within their proper sphere while the people with property, expertise, money, and institutional standing retain disproportionate control over the structure surrounding that sphere.

So when someone tells me they are apolitical because they are above all of this, I do not hear someone who has transcended politics. I hear someone who is still living inside politics and has relinquished some of their ability to contest it. There can be completely understandable reasons for disengagement, including exhaustion, disgust, lack of time, alienation, and a feeling that existing institutions rarely listen, and none of that makes an individual morally deficient. The broader culture that turns disengagement into a virtue is what concerns me. If people are taught that caring about politics is embarrassing while concentrated wealth remains highly organized politically, withdrawal does not produce neutrality. It produces an asymmetry of power. In that sense, apolitical identity can become the endpoint of a paternal politics that tells ordinary people they do not need to govern because wiser, richer, more competent people will take care of the difficult decisions, leaving everyone else free to concentrate on their own lives. The price of that arrangement is that the boundaries of those lives are increasingly set by people above them.

And this is where my mind returns to the carceral state, because private hierarchy still depends on public enforcement. A landlord’s ownership ultimately depends on courts and eviction law. Corporations depend upon contract enforcement. Banks depend upon property law and monetary stability. Employers depend upon legal systems capable of protecting assets and enforcing agreements. Technology companies depend upon intellectual-property law, courts, public infrastructure, educated workers, and communications systems developed through generations of public and private investment. Even the most libertarian billionaire inhabits a world held together by public systems that become almost invisible when they function well. A society can therefore weaken the public institutions that give ordinary people leverage while keeping the parts of government necessary to defend property, enforce contracts, police disorder, operate prisons and detention facilities, secure borders, and compel compliance. That creates the arrangement I keep circling around: public power becomes difficult for ordinary citizens to wield collectively, private power becomes difficult for them to escape individually, and coercive state power remains strong enough to enforce the resulting order.

Once I put it that way, the supposed contradiction between an extremely powerful presidency and hostility toward “big government” starts disappearing. The government can become weaker where it regulates corporations, supplies public goods, maintains institutional expertise, enforces labor standards, administers social protections, or creates alternatives to private dependency, while becoming stronger where the executive controls personnel, policing, detention, immigration enforcement, prosecution, surveillance, or other coercive functions. A labor agency can lose power while the employer gains it. A regulatory agency can lose staff while the corporation it regulates grows larger. A public housing program can disappear while property law remains perfectly enforceable. Career civil servants can lose independence while presidential appointees gain authority. Public programs can be outsourced while private contractors receive government money to perform functions once carried out directly by the state. There is no meaningful contradiction because government has never been a single undifferentiated blob of power. Different parts of it protect different people from different things, and shrinking one part can easily strengthen another institution somewhere else.

This is where the comparison to feudalism begins to make sense to me, although I do not think anyone is planning to turn the United States literally into an eighteenth-century agrarian society. The technology right is obsessed with AI, cryptocurrency, advanced manufacturing, defense technology, data, automation, space travel, and forms of technological development that would have been incomprehensible to Virginia’s planter elite. The resemblance is in the relationship between dependence and authority. A feudal society concentrated control over land, security, and livelihood in a relatively small group of people, which gave those people enormous political authority over everyone dependent upon those resources. A modern version can organize dependence around housing, employment, health insurance, communications platforms, credit, energy, transportation, intellectual property, logistics, or access to digital infrastructure, and the society can look futuristic while the underlying relationship remains ancient. The person who controls something you cannot realistically live without has power over you, especially when there are few public alternatives and few collective institutions capable of helping you challenge that power.

This also helps explain why I keep thinking about places whose public institutions have been destroyed or hollowed out through war, corruption, state collapse, austerity, or privatization, because the disappearance of state capacity never produces the clean libertarian world of autonomous individuals making free agreements with one another. People still need food, water, electricity, medicine, transportation, employment, communication, security, and ways of resolving disputes, and authority flows toward whoever still possesses the resources and organization required to provide those things. Sometimes that is a corporation, sometimes a religious institution, sometimes an oligarch, sometimes a political machine, sometimes organized crime, sometimes a militia, and sometimes simply whoever controls the trucks, fuel, generators, or warehouses. I do not think there is evidence of some literal domestic plan to “bomb America back” into an agrarian economy, and I think making that claim would actually weaken the argument. The more useful connection is that destroying collective capacity increases dependency, and whoever already owns substantial resources is positioned to gain from that dependency.

The shortsightedness of the whole fantasy becomes especially obvious when you imagine the system operating under people its architects hate. Yarvin can imagine a sovereign CEO because he imagines a sovereign CEO whose worldview he broadly approves of. A movement can imagine an extraordinarily powerful president because it imagines its president exercising the power. A billionaire can imagine freedom from democratic interference because he imagines himself as the person finally free to act rather than the person whose life is being reorganized by somebody else’s unconstrained decisions. This is one of the oldest problems in political philosophy, because every power you create for the ruler you like becomes available to the ruler who follows him, and every institution you destroy because it obstructs your agenda is also unavailable when you desperately need someone to obstruct the next agenda. Constitutional government disperses authority partly because human beings have never solved the problem of guaranteeing that the person given enormous power will remain wise, competent, benevolent, psychologically stable, well informed, incorruptible, and aligned with everyone else’s interests forever. Yarvin himself acknowledges the engineering difficulty of making sovereign monarchy reliably accountable, calling aspects of the problem unresolved even while advocating the model.

The same shortsightedness appears economically because the people most enthusiastic about escaping public institutions remain profoundly dependent on them. The billionaire who thinks government mostly gets in his way still needs contract law, courts, roads, ports, airports, electrical grids, stable currency, telecommunications systems, intellectual-property protections, disaster response, educated workers, scientific research, public health systems, and a political order stable enough that investments retain value. Technology companies stand on decades of public investment in universities, computing, communications, infrastructure, and basic science. Corporations that demand deregulation still expect the state to enforce their property rights. Wealth makes this infrastructure easy to stop seeing because wealthy people can purchase private substitutes for many failing public services, although even the private school requires roads, the private jet requires air traffic control, the gated community depends upon a functioning legal system, and the private hospital still operates inside national systems of medical research, licensing, pharmaceuticals, communications, finance, and emergency response. A society can hollow out this capacity for a while and allow wealthy people to insulate themselves from the consequences, while eventually the systems underneath everyone become brittle enough that private wealth cannot recreate the coordination that has been lost.

And I think this is ultimately where the fantasy fails politically too, because pluralism is not some annoying obstacle standing between a leader and efficient governance. Pluralism is the social fact that other people exist, want different things, worship different gods, live in different places, possess different bodies, have different families, need different forms of support, belong to different communities, and disagree sincerely about what a good life looks like. Democratic institutions are the cumbersome machinery we have developed for living with that fact without requiring one group to permanently dominate everybody else. Courts, elections, agencies, unions, legislatures, local governments, public hearings, regulations, journalism, protest, civic organizations, professional institutions, and all of the other irritating places where decisions slow down create channels through which conflict can be negotiated. When those channels disappear, the conflict remains. Workers still know when wages are inadequate. Tenants still know when rent is unbearable. Disabled people still know when the built environment excludes them. Communities still know when resources are being taken from them. Citizens still know when decisions affecting their lives are happening somewhere they cannot reach. A political order that reduces the number of peaceful mechanisms available for contesting power eventually has to rely more heavily on coercion when people refuse to accept the decisions made for them.

This is why I keep coming back to Virginia, because early Virginia is a reminder that an oligarchic distribution of power can live quite comfortably beside representative institutions and the language of liberty. Wealthy planters dominated political life while elections continued, and their authority was reinforced by a web of economic dependency, social hierarchy, public office, credit, landownership, household authority, and control over local institutions. Their world eventually changed because hierarchies like that are never as natural or permanent as the people benefiting from them imagine. Economic change, debt, religious dissent, popular demands, revolutionary ideas, conflicts over military service, and challenges from people lower in the social order all placed pressure on the old gentry system. That history matters because powerful people have always been remarkably good at interpreting the arrangements that benefit them as the natural shape of society, and equally good at discovering that maintaining those arrangements requires laws, institutions, cultural stories, political organization, and eventually coercion whenever enough people stop accepting the story.

So when I look at this moment, what worries me is a political project that can teach ordinary people to surrender democratic capacity while experiencing that surrender as freedom. We can be told that government getting out of the way means decisions are returning to us, while those decisions are actually moving into workplaces, corporations, insurance companies, landlords, technology platforms, wealthy foundations, churches, private schools, contractors, and other institutions where most of us possess even less formal authority. We can be taught that bureaucracy itself is the enemy while quietly inheriting new private bureaucracies whose decisions are harder to appeal. We can be taught that collective political action is vulgar, exhausting, divisive, or morally contaminating while wealthy interests remain intensely organized around politics. We can be taught that dependence on public institutions is humiliating while dependence on an employer, insurer, landlord, bank, family patriarch, church authority, billionaire philanthropist, or corporate platform is somehow evidence that we are free.

That is why saying you are apolitical does not place you above the struggle over power, and it certainly does not make you morally superior to the people still arguing about how our shared world should be organized. At its most dangerous, apolitical withdrawal can become exactly the kind of political subject an elite paternal order wants: someone who continues obeying rules, paying rent, working, consuming, borrowing, and adapting to decisions made elsewhere while feeling too disgusted with “politics” to participate in changing any of them. You get to experience yourself as independent because nobody asks you to attend the meeting, join the union, study the policy, argue with your neighbors, show up at the hearing, or take responsibility for collective decisions, while people with dramatically more power continue doing all of those things through professional lobbyists, lawyers, foundations, political organizations, policy shops, corporate associations, and government offices. The freedom being offered in that arrangement is the freedom to manage your private life inside boundaries other people have established for you.

And that is why less government can mean less freedom, because freedom is not measured by how few public institutions exist around you. Freedom is measured by how much meaningful control you have over your own life, how many real choices are available to you, how safely you can refuse someone more powerful than you, whether you can leave a bad situation without destroying yourself, whether your rights depend on how much money you possess, whether you can organize with other people when individual bargaining is useless, and whether institutions exist that you can call upon when someone with more wealth or authority decides that your interests do not matter. Sometimes government threatens those freedoms, which is exactly why governments need limits, rights, courts, elections, transparency, and competing centers of power. Sometimes democratic government is also the instrument through which people who possess very little individual power acquire enough collective power to be free in the first place.

That is the basic question underneath all of this for me. It is much larger than whether the federal government employs too many people or whether a particular regulation is annoying or whether bureaucracy can become bloated and self-protective, because of course institutions can fail and democratic governments can abuse power. The deeper question is what kind of society leaves an ordinary person with the greatest capacity to shape the conditions of their own life while also living among millions of other people entitled to do the same. A political system that concentrates power in presidents, owners, executives, landlords, patriarchs, wealthy families, corporations, and local elites may reduce the number of people involved in making decisions and therefore produce something that looks cleaner and more efficient from above. From below, it means living inside decisions made by people you cannot remove, institutions you cannot afford to leave, and hierarchies that become increasingly difficult to challenge.

That is why the fantasy of total power feels simultaneously modern and ancient to me. It can arrive through AI, executive orders, private equity, apps, algorithms, venture capital, privatized infrastructure, massive corporations, presidential personnel policy, detention systems, and social networks while reproducing a very old political relationship in which some people are understood as naturally fit to make decisions and everybody else is expected to live responsibly inside the world they create. Colonial Virginia reminds us that elections alone do not prevent that arrangement, Thiel and Yarvin remind us that there are still influential people willing to question whether democracy itself is desirable, and Vance and Vought show how arguments for democratic accountability can simultaneously produce a much more centralized conception of executive power even when their stated goal remains constitutional self-government. The labels matter, and the differences among them matter, while the question underneath them matters even more: how many people and institutions should be capable of saying no to concentrated power?

I think the answer to that question is also the answer to why this whole project is so shortsighted. A society cannot make itself free by eliminating the places where ordinary people can contest authority, because authority simply migrates into institutions that remain standing. Human beings cannot privatize themselves out of interdependence, and a complex society cannot decentralize itself out of the need for coordination. A population cannot become apolitical in any meaningful sense because somebody will always be deciding how resources are distributed, which behaviors are permitted, whose property claims are protected, which risks are socialized, which needs are recognized, and who bears the costs when systems fail. There is no world beyond politics waiting for us after government has been dismantled. There is only another distribution of power. History keeps teaching us this but we won't listen. 

Public power becomes difficult for ordinary citizens to wield collectively, private power becomes difficult for them to escape individually, and coercive state power remains strong enough to enforce the resulting order. That is the arrangement I am afraid we are moving toward, and early Virginia is useful because it teaches us to recognize the shape of it without waiting for somebody to officially announce that democracy is over. A society can continue holding elections while actual governing power becomes profoundly unequal, and people can continue calling themselves free while possessing less and less ability to make meaningful decisions about their own lives. 

The question worth asking every time someone promises to get government out of the way is therefore incredibly simple: once government gets out of the way, who gets to stand there instead, and what power will I/we have to tell them no and guarantee they will listen?