Tech Capitalism and the Neoreactionary Movement Behind DOGE

Although liberals and Democratic Party leaders often frame resistance to Trump as a struggle to defend democracy, the U.S. government has always been an oligarchy in which a tiny capitalist elite holds most political power, co-opting mass support and wielding systemic violence to serve its own ends, from genocide against the indigenous peoples of North America to genocide against Palestinians. At the same time, generations of social movements in the U.S. have fought and won real political space and social reforms that have mitigated some of the system’s worst effects. The Trump regime’s dictatorial power grab threatens these gains. Left unchecked, its actions will have massive human costs, disproportionately hurt oppressed communities, and sharply constrict the space for political activity, especially radical organizing.

The Democratic Party’s resistance to Trump is also deeply compromised because Democrats, along with Republicans, laid the groundwork for the current regime’s actions by expanding both state repression and tech capitalists’ power. The neoreactionary ideology animating DOGE departs from that legacy but also builds on it.

Neoreaction’s RAGEful Vision

Neoreaction (abbreviated as NRx and also called Dark Enlightenment) is a political ideology that “rejects egalitarianism in principle, argues that differences in human intelligence and ability are mainly genetic, and believes that cultural and political elites wrongfully limit the range of acceptable discourse.” Neoreactionaries advocate authoritarian systems of rule based on monarchy or corporations, and they glorify both pre-French Revolution social hierarchy and futuristic visions of radically transforming human beings through technology.^[4] Computer scientist Curtis Yarvin first voiced neoreactionary ideology in 2007, and it spread largely though the tech startup subculture, assisted by Silicon Valley venture capitalists including Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, and Peter Thiel. By 2022, a Vanity Fair article described Yarvin’s ideas as “foundational to a whole political and cultural scene.” Vice President JD Vance, a former Thiel employee whose 2022 U.S. Senate run was heavily funded by Thiel, has cited Yarvin as a political influence, and the two are or have been friends.^[5]

Many of Yarvin’s pronouncements closely foreshadowed what the Trump regime, and DOGE specifically, have been doing. In 2012, Yarvin proposed a “reboot” of government that centered on appointing a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator,” who would oversee an operation to “Retire All Government Employees” (RAGE) and replace civil servants with political loyalists. In 2022, Yarvin envisioned a “butterfly revolution” under a second Trump administration that would give “absolute sovereignty to a single organization” treating the federal government as a conquered enemy. “Trump himself will not be the brain …He will not be the CEO. He will be the chairman of the board—he will select the CEO (an experienced executive),” who would operate “without any interference from the Congress or courts.” The CEO would shut down “most existing important institutions, public and private” and replace them with “new and efficient systems.” The only check on the CEO would be Trump himself, who “can fire him if need be.”^[6]

While other Trump supporters have also proposed a systematic purge and dismantling of the federal bureaucracy, the similarities between Yarvin’s proposal and DOGE’s role within the Trump regime are too striking to ignore. While I’m not aware of any direct links between Musk and Yarvin, several of the young men staffing DOGE have either worked for Thiel or expressed neoreactionary views.^[7]

Despite its impact on the current Trump regime, neoreactionary politics is not MAGA politics. The movement to Make America Great Again, Trump’s political base, is a classic example of right-wing populism, i.e., a movement that combines calls to intensify oppression with twisted forms of anti-elitism.^[8] MAGA politics is about defending privilege and attacking those who are seen as threatening it from below, but it also feeds on people’s sense of being beaten down by a few people on top, a belief that those in power have betrayed “we the people” and must be stripped of their positions.

Neoreactionaries, by contrast, believe firmly that elites should rule and “the people” should not. (Neoreactionary Nick Land has written that “fleeing [democracy] approaches an ultimate imperative.”)  Since Trump first entered the 2016 presidential race, MAGA aimed to mobilize a mass movement to overturn the political establishment, liberal and conservative alike. This initiative included not just electoral campaigns but also broad-based organizing and physical protests that culminated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol in hopes of overturning the 2020 election results by force. But neoreactionaries dismiss the whole idea of a popular uprising. As Yarvin wrote in June 2024, “Charlottesville [the 2017 Unite the Right rally] and January 6 were the last lame breaths of what John Adams called ‘mobocracy’ in America.” What Yarvin envisioned wasn’t a popular uprising, but rather a top-down plan to “hack” the system in order to break it.^[9]

Tech Capitalists Turn Toward Trump

The neoreactionary movement is rooted in the computer technology sector, and its growing influence has been closely tied with tech capitalists’ shift toward the political Right. These developments have altered the Trump administration’s relationship with the business community.

In 2016, Trump’s support from big business was limited and shaky. As one team of analysts argued, his capitalist supporters drew from “several layers of investor blocs with little in common other than their intense dislike of existing forms of American government.” Partly for this reason, Trump’s administration pushed conflicting policies that appealed to both supporters and opponents of neoliberalism. They rolled back environmental regulations and taxes for corporations and the wealthy on one hand, but restricted immigration and trade on the other, while oscillating between interventionist and anti-interventionist approaches to foreign and military policy.^[10]

This situation changed in 2024 when a bloc of high-tech business leaders swung toward Trump. Former Democrat Elon Musk donated almost $200 million toward Trump’s reelection and became one of his closest advisors, while billionaire investors in cryptocurrency and TikTok became campaign supporters, leading Trump to switch from opposition to support on their issues. Tech CEOs held seats of honor at Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, symbolizing their sector’s leadership of the pro-Trump business faction.^[11]

Right-wing politics have deep roots in Silicon Valley, but the tech billionaires’ wholesale shift toward Trump reflects their hopes that a second Trump administration would protect their massive investments in artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, boost fossil fuel production to support AI and crypto’s vast energy demands, and build higher walls against Chinese tech competition.^[12] In addition, newer tech firms such as Anduril Industries and Palantir Technologies (both bankrolled by Peter Thiel) and Musk’s SpaceX are increasingly challenging traditional military manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing for lucrative Pentagon and Homeland Security contracts. Analyst Michael Klare argues that while most Republican members of Congress rely on the traditional military suppliers for campaign contributions, Musk and Vance could push Trump to favor the newer firms.^[13]

Points of Weakness

DOGE’s operations help us identify several potential points of weakness within the Trump regime. Although Musk’s recently announced plans to reduce his DOGE involvement may not change DOGE’s role or indicate any tension between him and Trump, a falling out between the two is always possible. (Ed note: Musk has since left and has been publicly feuding with Trump.)  DOGE may overreach through recklessness, incompetence, and hubris, alienating supporters and provoking stronger push-back from the courts, Democrats, Republicans, or other sections of the regime itself. Occasionally we’ve seen Republican congressmembers criticizing DOGE and Trump-appointed heads of key agencies countermanding instructions from the DOGE-controlled Office of Personnel Management.^[14] Tech capitalists’ new status as Trump favorites may foster greater cohesiveness within the regime on economic policy and geostrategy, but it could also alienate other powerful sections of the business community, and Trump’s aggressive and volatile promotion of tariffs does not reflect tech capitalist interests.^[15]

Neoreactionary elitism may also collide with MAGA populism, especially as the real-world impact of dismantling federal agencies and withholding funding is increasingly felt. Even before the inauguration, Musk clashed publicly with MAGA stalwarts Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer over the H-1B visa program.^[16] Some antifascists assume that tech capitalists will win any such fight. But there are sections of the MAGA movement, particularly the vast New Apostolic Reformation network, whose ideological commitment runs deeper than loyalty to Trump, and who have extensive financial and media resources wholly independent of Silicon Valley.^[17]

Such fault lines within the Trump coalition deserve close attention. They bely the regime’s projection of unity and omnipotence, and may create opportunities we can exploit, such as pointing out how DOGE’s actions hurt many of Trump’s own followers.

Yet in looking for ways to combat the Trump regime, rallying to the Democratic Party would be a serious mistake. As I wrote recently,

“Since the late 1970s, Democrats have been complicit with Republicans in making neoliberalism the dominant form of capitalist rule, expanding the repressive state apparatus, and strengthening military interventionism—policies that in some ways laid the groundwork for Trumpism and in others fueled a right-wing populist backlash from which Trump has benefited.”^[18]

While the Republican Party’s leadership in expanding state repression (such as passing the Patriot Act and authorizing the use of torture) has received more attention, the Democrats, too, have played an active role—from Bill Clinton’s Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (which weakened defendants’ rights and restrictions on wiretapping) to the Biden administration’s dangerous use of “seditious conspiracy” charges against Far Rightists (a tactic that inevitably fuels repression against the Left).^[19] In between, Barack Obama oversaw the $100 billion construction of “the most powerful surveillance state the world has ever seen.” State- and local-level Democrats have actively promoted measures to suppress Palestine solidarity protests against the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza. Unlike the Trump administration and DOGE, none of these initiatives represented a systemic shift or targeted the administrative state—they mostly targeted radicals, foreigners, poor people, and other subversives.^[20]

Similarly, while tech capitalists’ collective embrace of Trump is a new and dangerous development, Democrats helped build their influence in Washington. The shift to unmanned weapons systems that helped tech companies win more military contracts has its roots in the Obama administration, which vastly expanded the use of drones to carry out assassinations, at a cost of hundreds of civilian lives.^[21] And given the Obama administration’s massive construction of surveillance infrastructure, it’s no surprise that web, telecommunications, software, and other computer-related companies favored Obama over his Republican opponent.^[22]

Democrats’ past coziness with tech companies doesn’t mean we should treat all examples of capitalist political influence as the same, or ignore the immediate, overriding threat the Trump administration presents. Rather, it underscores the pressing need to build a broad-based resistance movement independent of the Democratic Party, where radical and anti-capitalist voices are not silenced.

This article is adapted from an analysis that was first published in “The DOGE and the Neoreactionaries,” Three Way Fight, March 2, 2025, https://threewayfight.org/the-doge-and-the-neoreactionaries/.