Against Moral Equivalence
Yarvin’s Distortions on Emancipation and Resistance
Against Moral Equivalence: Yarvin’s Distortions on Emancipation and Resistance
By E. A. Mercer
Curtis Yarvin’s work has long trafficked in a kind of revisionism that cloaks provocation in historical analogy. But his recent comments on the legacy of the Civil War and on the ethics of resistance—specifically in his comparison of Nelson Mandela to Anders Breivik—cross from revisionism into what can only be described as a collapse of moral distinction. The aim is not merely to challenge orthodoxies; it is to erase the ethical categories upon which any republican order depends.
Yarvin claims that “it is very difficult to argue that the Civil War made anyone’s life more pleasant, including that of freed slaves,” and further suggests that conditions for African Americans were “absolutely worse” in the decade following emancipation. This is a deeply flawed claim on multiple levels. First and foremost, it commits a categorical error by reducing the value of emancipation to material conditions, as though liberation from bondage were merely a question of economic outcomes rather than a fundamental transformation in legal, moral, and human status. The distinction between enslavement and personhood is not reducible to comfort or suffering; it is a threshold between subjugation and agency.
To bolster his point, Yarvin focuses narrowly on the years between 1865 and 1875—the most precarious phase of Reconstruction, when the promise of freedom was continually undermined by economic instability, racist violence, and federal retreat. But by isolating this period, he occludes the long arc of emancipation. Even amid hardship, formerly enslaved people gained access to legal personhood, U.S. citizenship, the right to marry, to travel freely, to form families without fear of separation, and to pursue education—opportunities previously denied under law. These developments were not abstract ideals but lived transformations, as attested in the WPA Slave Narratives and countless postbellum testimonies from the freed themselves, who overwhelmingly understood their freedom as a moral and spiritual good even when its material fruits were unevenly realized.¹
Yarvin attempts to further relativize the American abolition of slavery by contrasting it with Brazil’s nonviolent, gradual abolition. This is misleading in both substance and spirit. Brazil abolished slavery over a much longer timeline, and under fundamentally different political conditions. Its approach was incremental, elite-led, and relatively bloodless because it never faced an entrenched planter class willing to dismember the state in defense of bondage. The American South had already shown, through secession and civil war, that it would not tolerate peaceful abolition. To present Brazil as a preferable model ignores both its limited enfranchisement of the formerly enslaved and the unwillingness of American slaveholders to accept any similar path.
More troubling still is Yarvin’s comparison between Nelson Mandela and Anders Breivik. He claims that both men used violence, and therefore merit equal condemnation. This is not an argument—it is a moral flattening that renders history unintelligible. Mandela fought against an apartheid regime internationally recognized as illegitimate and violent. He was imprisoned not for killing civilians, but for acts of sabotage directed at infrastructure, and his leadership was ultimately essential to the peaceful transition to democracy in South Africa. Breivik, by contrast, was a white nationalist who deliberately murdered seventy-seven people, most of them teenagers, in a terroristic act designed to provoke a race war. To equate the two is to erase both context and outcome.
The distinction here is not difficult to grasp: Mandela resisted systemic racial tyranny; Breivik enacted racialized mass murder. Mandela emerged from prison to lead a nation toward reconciliation; Breivik remains unrepentant, emblematic of nihilistic grievance politics. What Yarvin calls consistency is in fact indifference to motive, method, and moral outcome.
This collapse of moral distinction runs through much of Yarvin’s political thought. It treats violence as ideologically neutral, conflating acts of resistance with acts of domination. If one adopts this standard, then the Allied bombing of Germany is morally equivalent to the Nazi invasion of Poland; the American Revolution is no different from the suppression of Haitian independence; and every liberator is indistinguishable from every tyrant. This is not intellectual rigor—it is a refusal to judge.
Indeed, this rhetorical leveling mirrors Yarvin’s earlier claim that FDR governed as a monarch—an argument I have addressed elsewhere. The consistent theme is a deliberate blurring of moral, institutional, and historical distinctions, in service of a seductive but profoundly anti-democratic thesis.
Yarvin’s rhetorical strategy, however provocative, ultimately advances a politics of cynicism. It invites us to discard inherited moral frameworks under the guise of realism, but in doing so, it undermines the very possibility of principled government. For a republic to endure, it must distinguish between liberty and coercion, between justified resistance and naked aggression, between those who fight to expand freedom and those who would extinguish it.
It is not merely that Yarvin’s conclusions are wrong. It is that his entire approach—this deliberate undoing of ethical clarity through historical distortion—seeks to render the struggle for freedom unintelligible. To accept that frame is not to think dangerously; it is to stop thinking at all.
¹ See the Library of Congress WPA slave narratives collection. For a comprehensive account of the post-Emancipation experience, see Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979).
For further reading, see my companion essay: The Illusion of the Crown: Why FDR Was No Monarch—and Why Yarvin Is Wrong About Everything.
Published in The American Respondent