Saw something yesterday that tempted me to go have a look at something written by enemy of democracy Curtis Yarvin, the artist formerly known as "Mencius Moldbug" (and I really should register a protest against at the use of the Latinized name of the philosopher known as Mengzi (孟子, 372-289 B.C.E.), the most humane and liberal of the early Confucians, a man who sincerely and deeply believed in the innate goodness of the human being and the saving value of education for all, a man as remote intellectually from the Moldbug as it is possible for anyone to be, it actually gets me kind of angry).
It's pretty interesting, though of course perverted, what Yarvin is doing there, which is spelled out at his own substack graymirror.substack.com/p/a-conversa.... He claims FDR exercised an "informal dictatorship-for-life" that was so immensely powerful that he retained power after he died. Or at any rate left behind a zombie presence that governs us still, 80 years later, presumably forcing us against our will to accept Social Security payments and workers' comp and unemployment benefits and the like:
Read FDR’s First Inaugural, specifically the part where he demands the powers of a general resisting an enemy invasion. In 1933! These were the powers FDR needed to create what, during his informal dictatorship-for-life, was more or less his personal executive monarchy, then after his death became the formalized administrative state.
That is to say, no, Roosevelt did not rule from beyond the grave, but the institutions of the New Deal persisted after he died, and, with the advent of civil rights laws and no doubt Obamacare, even got worse, from Yarvin's point of view...
