An Evidence-Based Critique of "The Dark Enlightenment"

By 2026, the Dark Enlightenment no longer appears as fringe internet theory but as a quiet operating logic in parts of the New Right and Silicon Valley: anti-democratic, accelerationist, and CEOist. Its practical thrust is to weaken mediating institutions, attack the administrative state, and recast governance as executive control rather than public accountability. What was once marginal: post-democratic hierarchy, reactionary modernism, and selective biological essentialism, now circulates more openly through elite tech and political discourse.