Danielle Allen, Harvard University professor of political philosophy and former Democratic gubernatorial candidate, sat on one side of the stage. On the other was Curtis Yarvin, a writer and online philosopher who thinks American democracy should be replaced by an absolute monarchy or CEO-style leader. His ideas, once considered fringe, have been embraced by Silicon Valley billionaires and Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance.
The hourlong debate, held before a packed room of about 100 students and members of the public, came as partisans across the aisle agreed the nation’s universities have work to do building an environment where controversial and disfavored ideas can be discussed and debated.
When Harvard students asked Allen to debate Yarvin — who believes the United States should become an absolute monarchy with racial hierarchies — she agreed.
“That’s my job,” Allen said in an interview after the debate. “When students ask for help processing material they’re encountering, that’s my job to help them.”
Remarkably, there were no protests or disruptions throughout the evening, which spilled over to two additional hours of conversation between Yarvin and attendees.
With Harvard police officers nevertheless patrolling outside the Harvard Faculty Club building Monday evening, Allen took aim at Yarvin’s “dark enlightenment” movement, an alt-right philosophy rooted in resentment over perceived mismanagement by democratic leaders. Yarvin criticized professors’ power and influence over the government, which he contended has failed to serve common people.
Scientific research, Yarvin said, is plagued by the wrong incentives, which he claims led virology researchers to create the COVID-19 pandemic. (The origins of the COVID-19 pandemic are not settled.)
“This case of COVID … it actually tells us an enormous amount about the way our society is governed,” Yarvin said.
Allen pushed back strongly against Yarvin’s vision for “absolute” power in the United States, which he imagines could take the shape of a CEO-type figure. Leaders like Hitler and Stalin, Yarvin has argued, have given absolute monarchies a bad reputation. Look further back in history, he said, and it seems clear that societies flourished best under absolute monarchies. Democracy is weak, Yarvin has argued, and a leader with more power to operate like the chief executive of a startup would improve everyday life.
“We want governments that are as efficient as corporations,” Yarvin said after the debate to reporters and Harvard students. “So, for example, in a corporation, accountability is provided by the board of directors. It’s a backup fail-safe mechanism. So how do you reproduce that at the sovereign level?”
Though race didn’t come up directly, Allen offered a defense of equality in her debate with Yarvin, who has been criticized for defending slavery and saying there are “biological roots of intelligence.”
“Let’s talk about democracy specifically, and in order to do that, we have to dig deeper into the meaning of freedom and also the meaning of equality and precisely what it is we’re trying to protect.”
For her part, Allen said reform, including getting rid of party primaries, is needed to strengthen democracy so the government and institutions better serve the people. Democracy and individual freedoms, Allen said, are worth fighting for at all costs.
“Absolute power inevitably corrupts, tramples on, persecutes freedom,” Allen said Monday evening. “So, the question that we have right now is not whether to have democracy and protection of freedom, but only how to have that. The only question is, can we redesign our institutions to achieve that?”
Democracy as Allen describes it, Yarvin said, is an “abstraction” that does not serve the people. He pointed to the fact that many cities and towns across the country are struggling today compared to 50 years earlier.
“It’s very abnormal and strange for there to be the level of breakdown of civic order that we see,” Yarvin said about the nation after the debate. “We’ve developed this almost like slave economy, where we import foreigners to do menial labor, while people who are actually Americans just rot. That’s horrifying.”
Allen stressed the need to strengthen democracy, but Yarvin argued it was beyond repair, and elite universities like Harvard deserve some of the blame for that.
He said the nation’s “prestigious institutions,” including Harvard, have garnered too much influence and are “quite unaccountable.”
Allen, in the interview with the Globe after the event, emphasized the debate was not officially sanctioned by the university. Yarvin’s work, she said, does not meet the school’s academic standards in terms of “historical accuracy and quality of argumentation.” Yarvin is “not the kind of person” who should be invited to lecture at Harvard, Allen said, though there are “plenty of conservatives” at places like the Heritage Foundation and Hillsdale College who could, she said.
Still, she felt it was important to inform the public about Yarvin’s arguments for absolute monarchy.
“Absolute monarchies have consistently eroded human freedoms,” Allen said. “There’s just a huge historical record about that. He just ignores it all.”
David Vega, a recent Harvard graduate who moderated Monday’s debate, said he found the debate to be productive, and he thought it was important for members of Harvard‘s community to hear Yarvin’s arguments given his proximity to the Trump administration.
“I think it’s good for the university to have that discourse; it’s also relevant,” he said.
This story has been updated to add a comment from Allen defending equality.
Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com. Follow her @Hilarysburns.
