"The Gray Areas," an Interview with Nick Allen of the Lower East Side's Sovereign House
Part II: Cities for Everyone and Wishing the Best to an American Caesar
—> click for Part I of the interview
JTP: How do you see privilege fitting into this theory [of Exit] and the practice of it? And I don’t mean privilege in the identity politics sense, necessarily, but I mean, being well off, and able to afford to participate in this community as opposed to someone living paycheck to paycheck who can’t buy a house.
NA: One is that there have to be good stewards for communities. You’re allowed to include people or not. And for me, the way that I’ve handled this, is that events are typically not ticketed. Someone who wants to host an event, it’s typically free. And so there is not a cost barrier.
JTP: There’s a purity to the idea with respect to an arts space, and I’m totally with you on that. But I mean, translating it more to your grander ambitions, with respect to the philosophy of Exit and Prospera and the hope for-
NA: Frontier cities in the US.
JTP: Yes, and so how do you conceive it: Is there a barrier to entry there that’s privilege-based?
NA: Gatekeeping is good. Curation is good. It often times can be nuanced and just fit the mission of the community. But this is why you can have something that lasts a long time, if there’s proper gatekeeping. Think about social clubs that have existed since the 1800s. You have the Masons. There are organizations that gatekeep. And it’s beneficial for the organization. That’s why, if I was thinking about how to make that fair, if gatekeeping is good, how do we have a fair society? Well, you want to increase the odds of success for anybody to be able to go and create their own community, to create their own city. That’s why I think there should be a special economic zone policy that anybody can take, any industry can take, any innovator can take and go apply it the way they should for their industry. The same with cultural spaces. If you go to South Korea, Seoul, you’ll see that there are a lot of 18-25 year olds who own their own stores. They own the coffee-shops, skate-shops, arcades. There’s a lot of social activity that’s happening in real life because of cheap rent there and that lowers the barrier to entry. Also, people see, it’s a trend. Their friend did one, so they’re going to open a space too. That, to me, is the biggest barrier here. If you go to Google Street View and you look in the 1950s, you can look at that decade and see some grainy images along Lexington Avenue and there are social clubs every other block. Why have those disappeared? A lot of it is due to speculation in real estate and a loss of our owned spaces. Rather than trying to get everybody accepted into the same community and have no gatekeeping, that’s a contradiction in terms. It’s no longer a community that’s focused on a single mission. Instead of that, the only way we can have these [vibrant arts scenes] is by allowing a thousand Sovereign Houses to bloom. Or social clubs. Or cities.
JTP: Not necessarily with the same philosophy.
NA: No, not with the same philosophy, no. But that’s why I’m interested in cults. Because there is a need to make sure that… bad things aren’t happening. But you do want to allow for communities to pop up and grow.
JTP: I do 100% agree with you about that. Speaking to my own experience, I spent a lot of time in an unsanctioned social space, which was Brazenhead Books on the Upper East Side. A hub for writers but also all sorts of artists, students. It was a not-exactly-legal bookstore that was around for over a decade. And obviously Beckett’s space was part of this continuum. And I do believe such spaces are vital for the arts in New York City.
NA: Right and there are ways to facilitate this. There’s way to have incentive-design around communities in the US and take away the barriers that exist. Unfortunately, rent is still an issue.
JTP: Economic disparity. To conclude here: again, the name Sovereign House. You’re probably familiar with the James Pogue Vanity Fair piece. Were you on that scene?
NA: Yes. I know James. I met him after he had published that piece. I think it’s a really well-written, long, in-depth piece. I’m definitely familiar with most of the characters in that. And rooting for most of them.
JTP: That’s including… Yarvin, Vance.
NA: Mmm-hmm.
JTP: At the end of the article, the culmination—and it’s interesting, I’m just going to speak again to the vice-presidential debate last night, Vance did this performance of ‘Oh you know, everyone says something terrible will happen if Donald Trump is elected president again, they say he has ill intentions, but no, not at all [faux calming tone].” But famously, that piece culminates with Vance telling Pogue that what we need in the US is, essentially, a king. A way of overthrowing representative democracy.
Vance, quoted by Pogue:
I think Trump is going to run again in 2024. I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country and say the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it. We are in a late republican period. [evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar.] If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.
Obviously you’ve read it, I’ve read it. I think of the article, and what Vance is calling for, of having connotations of sovereign. The suggestion of ‘king.’ Caesar.
NA: Omniscient, all-powerful person who is running the government. And I think that that is terrible. It’s a lot of people being confused about Jacques Ellul’s statement of ‘Think globally, act locally.’ At a local level, a CEO is considered a monarch and they are in control of their organization and can hire and fire as they please. Locally, monarchy works. Globally, monarchy does not work. If you were to switch around that statement and say ‘Think locally, act globally’, you’re going to—the world is going to suffer. The world could not look worse when there is a global monarch.
JTP: And do you believe there is a global monarch at the moment?
NA: There are institutions, yeah. There are institutions. Monarchy doesn’t have to be defined as only a single person. But an ideology, for sure, can. And somewhere between that one person and a prevailing global ideology are organizations. Those organizations that make a prevailing ideology “the monarch.” And I’m totally against that.
JTP: OK. And just to speak finally, to the rightwing perceptions of Sovereign House. To what degree do you embrace that? Insofar as what you described earlier as a rejection of what you perceive as orthodoxy—would you embrace a rightwing framing in that sense? How do you feel about these perceptions of association between Sovereign House and the rightwing? And of Thiel, Yarvin, etc.?
NA: One way that I’ve grown to understand people’s mischaracterizations of the space is that when people are mischaracterizing something it’s often because they don’t want to take responsibility for themselves being in a position to effect change. And so anybody else that’s doing it must be doing it with billionaire-backing and for some evil reason. It’s a lot easier for them to sleep at night thinking that those who are supporting the arts and supporting culture are—there must be some evil reason behind that. [That type of thinking is] a cop-out. These are layers of an onion. And so that’s the furthest immature critique of Sovereign House. When people come to events and they see how each event is almost containerized. And we don’t have an email list. We don’t have any online presence where we’re promoting anything or even our events. It’s this container where an artist can come in and they can use the space and they can bring their own people and it starts and stops in that event. There isn’t some duplicitous narrative or acquisition scheme of an audience that we’re trying to program.
JTP: If Curtis Yarvin contacted you tomorrow and said he wanted to announce here at Sovereign House his ascendancy to American monarch, would you host that event?
NA: Absolutely not. I would host the opposite event. One that counters Curtis Yarvin.
***
At the door, as I started up the steps from Sovereign House, I told Allen I would be departing shortly for Philadelphia to door-knock for Harris-Walz. His eyes widened just a bit and he said, as if complimenting a Luddite on his string and two cans, “They need you there. Good luck block-walking.”
I am glad that I went to Philly, the outcome notwithstanding, and for the conversations I had there. It did feel effective in the moment, both in possibly bringing people out of a mediated fog and in opening my eyes to the ground beyond my own silo. Harris did distinctly better in the places where she campaigned, and where Trump campaigned too, the streets where she had people knocking on doors.
When we reconvened at posh bar the Swan Room, there seemed to have been a subtle change in Allen’s outlook. He came off as more openly approving of Trump, or at least less guarded about preserving a shroud over any desired election outcome. Given the Democrats’ need for strength in the youth vote, his stance vis a vis “Exit” had struck me from the beginning as possibly one more mode of pro-Trump silo’ed appeal: for those young people who find the candidate himself too appalling to support, why not just sit the election out, as Allen was proposing? If there were a mass swing in that direction among young people, a demographic on whom the Democrats absolutely depend to win, it stood to reason the beneficiary would be Trump 2024. Of course, there were other factors in play working to depress the youth vote as well, or even swing it Trump’s way.
Following the election, Peter Thiel had reversed his pretense of disinterest in the outcome to sit for a triumphalist two-plus hour interview with faux-centrist, new right propagandist Bari Weiss. In a bald attempt at spin, Thiel who had previously claimed at the Aspen Ideas Festival this past summer that he would vote for Trump only if someone held a gun to his head, now claimed that what he had meant was that even if the mainly liberal audience to whom he’d made the remark had been holding a gun to his head he still would have voted for Trump. “I don’t think,” Thiel claimed, “there’s room for individual thought on the left.” In response to Weiss extolling “the counter-elite,” Thiel made an attempt at appropriating President Obama’s “Hope” messaging by casting himself and Trump’s other billionaire supporters as a “Rebel Alliance” determined to defeat the “Storm Troopers” of the Democrat “machine.” (The primary focal points of this spanking new “Rebel Alliance” were, of course, deficits and the border, the emancipatory obsession of rich National Review subscribers since time immemorial.)
Allen, now, too, in his own way, was striking a similar tone to Thiel about what lies ahead. If Trump appeared to be fashioning himself as an American Caesar, a sovereign above the law and beyond such small concerns as the will of an overwhelmed and starkly divided people, Allen seemed ready to assign tyrannical intent not to him, but to those within what Yarvin calls “the Cathedral,” and toward whom a Trump administration could be, yes, in his view, a necessary corrective, and a road past all doubt. As he spoke about Jan. 6th, 2021, his language began to sound less rational and, frankly, more cultic.
Sitting at the bar, Allen ordered a White Russian, while I had the Banana Sazerac. It wasn’t bad, but I’d never had a Banana Sazerac before in my life, either.
NA: The Vanity Fair piece that you mentioned before… There wasn’t really a message of hope. [James Pogue presented the New Right movement as] between two different options. One where monarchy is mentioned, and one where we need to go escapist.
JTP: You’re talking about two different pieces: the one about Vance and Yarvin, and the later one about the western—
NA: Yeah. And so I think I find myself in a middle ground between those. Those are sort of extremes, and we might have a shot at not having to choose either of those. That’s what I’m in favor of.
JTP: And how do you see that “shot” taking form?
NA: I guess I would say a domestic exit. And that means being able to not have to leave to some charter city, or bunkers. And to keep democracy intact. But depart from the trajectory that we were on, or still could be. Which is basically like, the Cathedral remains in power.
JTP: So you do—that’s Yarvin’s nomenclature. You do accept that schema for how you view society and institutions and the powers-that-be and that kind of thing?
NA: I’d say it’s less me accepting it than recognizing that it is true. It’s a true diagnosis, I think. If you study the history of philosophy, you may not agree with the philosophers, but you have to understand what their arguments are.
JTP: I certainly agree with that last bit. In response, I mean, obviously some things have happened since we last spoke…
NA: Yeah [laughs].
JTP: There have been some developments. I read The Point piece, this rendering of a night at Sovereign House. Election Night, to be exact. Were you there?
NA: I was there. There were a lot of problems with the piece because I don’t think he was too interested in, I mean, the truth. And he never talked to me. I feel like if you’re going to write about me, or a thing that I created, you should at least know who I am.
JTP: Of course.
NA: I thought the GQ article was a better portrayal. There’s also a lot of—a lot of ‘in-group’ signals that if you don’t quite understand them, you’re very lost in terms of what they mean and they come off as something totally different. For example, with Milady involvement. There’s an entire ironic—a deep ironic tone to everything that’s done by both Remilia and also the followers—and that was completely lost, I believe.
JTP: Given your interests, do you find any hope in the prospect of this coming administration and how things might pan out?
NA: I feel like I’m in a similar spot to 2016, where there is almost a defeat of the defined “Cathedral.” And so, if there’s a group that claims to be the underdog… and they are… and then they win, it’s a radical paradigm shift. And that can happen after an election. To me, that signals that democracy works.
JTP: Does that mean that your outlook going forward—you just said, ‘Democracy works,’ and you didn’t quite say that last time we spoke—do you see a future where you return to voting and party politics? Is that palatable to you now?
NA: I guess you can say ‘Democracy works’ in certain time periods. If there’s extraordinary opposition to how democracy should function, then I would say it wouldn’t be working, again. There’s always that threat. So, sure, wait and see. But it can’t be denied that the Cathedral did suffer a blow. The way those institutions react is something to watch.
JTP: You’re hoping, overall, for the overthrow of these institutions and their perceived dominance? That is what you’re hoping for?
NA: I wouldn’t say “the overthrow.” There’s a synthesis that has to happen where there’s a replacement. I definitely hope for the replacement. That means building parallel institutions, and those win, rather than having to actually destroy the old ones.
JTP: And so you did view Trump and his coterie as the underdogs in this election? You viewed them as the underdogs just given ideas they may harbor about—and of course, Trump would never put it this way, he would never say he’s striking a blow at the quote-unquote Cathedral—
NA: [laughs]
JTP: But people who vote for him and support him and who may have been at your Election Night party would see it that way. You see this as an underdog stature against a dominant paradigm—more of a dominant culture, right?, because it’s not really government, since Republicans have been in power for a good long while these past thirty some years.
NA: Yeah, it’s less about the Republican Party, and more about the people. Look what happened to the Whigs. The Whigs was a dominant party, and now it’s not anymore. There’s an ability to change parties. There’s a moment in time where that can happen. And maybe it will, maybe it won’t.
JTP: And you do hope that we are.
NA: I hope that we’re at something new, yeah. We have a chance to unconsolidate power, especially with what has been theorized as Schedule F, or dismantling the administrative state. I don’t think that that results in a consolidation of power, I think that that goes back to the libertarian roots of limited government.
JTP: If I understand, and I don’t know if you’re following this or how closely, but if the goal of most of those people Trump wants to appoint is to, essentially, tear out the wiring of these governmental institutions to, in effect, reduce their power, you would view that as a good thing, all in all?
NA: I am in favor of the reduction in power of federal agencies. And I think that’s something in line with the Supreme Court in Chevron Deference.
JTP: I’m going to change gears a little here, but it is somewhat related with respect to perceptions of the abuse of power. And we’ve talked about this a little bit in person at one of your events. You were present at January 6th.
NA: I was in town for a wedding. And I heard about this Stop the Steal rally.
JTP: And did you believe that there was a “Steal?”
NA: I view myself as an anthropologist in these sorts of environments, and so I’ve been to a lot of these things… I guess you could say sub-cultural extreme events. And that’s where you’re getting the source of truth, by actually attending, and not by watching what’s online or commentators or reading think pieces. It’s about seeing what’s happening on the ground in real life. And so I like to do that. I was already in town and I decided to go to this. I didn’t go into the Capitol.
JTP: Were you on your own? Or with a group?
NA: I was on my own, yes. I was wearing all black. No paraphernalia. I was just there to observe. And I brought a Go-Pro and I strapped that to my backpack, I walked around for three hours, talked to people, filmed some stuff.
JTP: You were not live-streaming but you do have a video record.
NA: Right.
JTP: Is this available?
NA: No.
JTP: Did you understand what was happening while you were there? That the Capitol was being invaded and everything.
NA: Oh, yeah. I saw all that happen in front of me. And I thought that this could possibly turn into some sort of a Waco situation where you have people inside and government officials who want them out. I saw a lot of danger.
JTP: For the people invading the Capitol.
NA: For everybody. Yeah.
JTP: And you said you’re inclined to refrain from think pieces, or journalistic spin, when it comes to events like this. You prefer to be there in person and experience it for yourself. You’ve described generally what you did, but as it was starting to unfold—you didn’t, correct me if I’m wrong, did you go there expecting that to happen?
NA: No, definitely not. As many reports will tell you, Trump was speaking. Then I think he said, ‘OK, we’re going to march down to the Capitol.’ That’s when I obviously knew that people were going to go down to the Capitol. So I went down there in anticipation that people were going to come there.
JTP: So you were ahead of the crowd?
NA: I was there ahead of the crowd.
JTP: Where were you positioned?
NA: There were barricades up. I stayed behind the barricades. In front of the Capitol.
JTP: And you see the crowd starting to arrive…
NA: I saw the barricades. I saw the two groups forming. One was the Capitol police. The other were the rally attendees. And, well, behind the barricades there was press, and they were taking pictures. And so there just became more and more and more people. And they were just agitated with the Capitol police. There was this flimsy little barricade there that was set as the dividing line. Some people were saying, ‘Let’s take apart these barricades and go farther.’ This was very far away from the Capitol steps. And so there was still more area there they wanted to go into. The crowd really didn’t know what it wanted. Until I saw the Capitol police—there was one guy who tried to get through, and he was pushed back by the police. And another group tried to get through. And all of a sudden there was no movement from Capitol police—they stood around while the barricades were broken, and people rushed up the stairs of the Capitol. That’s like a second phase where the crowd got farther but still didn’t really know what it wanted. The barricades disintegrated, and I was still watching. Then the whole Capitol got overrun.
JTP: And how did you feel at that point?
NA: I thought there was an irreversible conflict that was happening. And it’s not going to end well. Both psychologically and physically, I think the idea was to confront some sort of counting that was happening, the process where they had to submit the official electors’ votes.
JTP: How conscious were you of what was supposed to be happening inside?
NA: I knew that that was the premise of—I don’t think it was the whole crowd… It’s hazy, but I know there was a psychological element of [what was driving the movement forward]—maybe to submit some alternative electors. But there was a discussion of what, procedurally, was going to happen.
JTP: People were talking about it in the crowd?
NA: Yeah. And so I just saw this irreversible conflict.
JTP: Did you see a right or wrong in that?
NA: No, that’s why—and maybe I’ve become less of an anthropologist, but still, that’s how I like to view myself. It’s less of a ‘right or wrong’ and more of trying to understand what’s happening, and what beliefs are held by the people.
JTP: You were evaluating the police behavior—
NA: No, not the police. Not the police, at all. It was the people who thought there was going to be a different result. What was happening then was there was a rapid understanding of the procedure inside of how democracy works. And so people rapidly had to learn, and rapidly had to try and figure it out, and I guess counteract, or amplify, how they thought it should work.
JTP: How do you think they thought it should work? As “an anthropologist,” what was your understanding of what they were trying to accomplish?
NA: Well, the second you have a physical response—physical is the least intellectual [mode of response]. It’s sort of a last resort. And so the second it goes physical, there’s no longer an accepted action.
JTP: And you don’t see what happened as having been instrumentalized, or guided in any way, by Trump, or maybe other elements in the crowd who were driving it forward, or folks who showed up with the zip-ties?
NA: I think they found—I was seeing those zip-ties carried by the Capitol police.
JTP: You’re saying that the people who broke into the Capitol got the zip-ties from the police and didn’t show up with their own?
NA: Yeah, I think so, I think so.
JTP: Are you open to being mistaken about that?
NA: Oh, yeah, for sure. I just remember those being delivered in boxes. This was actually at the exit where the paramedic tried to save Ashli… and he had all of this white dust all over him, and there were boxes outside. With all these zip-ties. And I saw people go in there and take them. And so, yeah. I was seeing all of this weird stuff.
JTP: You saw it as an irreversible conflict. And you were worried for everybody inside.
NA: If I was to sum it all up, what was unfolding in front of me was—the thing about both capitalism, and democracy, is that they internalize violence in different ways. With capitalism, you internalize the violence through arbitrage: there’s a violent aspect of not revealing to the other party a true cost of something. And so that’s the violence inherent to capitalism. And in democracy, it’s… I guess you could just say it’s propaganda… and being able to be secretive about your vote.
JTP: Being able to be secret about your vote?
NA: That, and propaganda. It’s internalized violence. There’s something wrong, but it doesn’t materialize outwardly as physical violence.
JTP: The secrecy of the vote is, for you, a form of violence?
NA: Just like arbitrage in capitalism, the secrecy of your vote—and propaganda, those things go together—are similar to capitalism where there’s marketing, and advertising, and costs that are hidden, which I’m calling ‘arbitrage.’ And so there’s the advertising and the secrecy, and both are internalizing violence.
JTP: Are there thinkers here who you’re alluding to?
NA: No, I’ve just thought this for a long time. As a system evolves throughout human history, it seems like there’s been a reduction of violence. And it’s not that humans have changed. It’s that the systems we’ve created have just hidden the violence better. Restraining the violence. And maybe that’s a good thing. So, yeah, this is just something I’ve thought about. When in a system like capitalism, or democracy, when something has gone wrong—it means there’s a novel thing happening here, where the system has not constrained the violence well enough. It’s a revelation. A revealing of sorts. And so I’m glad I was there to witness that. And you ask why. The system did result in violence. And so, why is this happening?
JTP: Did you see Donald Trump as having been responsible in some way for that violence?
NA: No, I think that it’s a systemic issue. It can’t be a candidate. Because a candidate is the result of a system. The system of the counting of the secret votes were what people lost trust in—when there’s a revelation like that… the violence that’s kept within the system, that’s when the violence escapes. And so I think it was anger of that system failing—whether it failed, or whether it didn’t fail, people felt that it failed. People felt that the one thing that is sacred was taken from them.
JTP: You think the secrecy of the vote is a form of violence?
NA: Just like arbitrage in capitalism, I think the secrecy of your vote—and propaganda, those things go together—are similar to capitalism where there’s marketing, and advertising, and costs that are hidden.
JTP: Do you accept that the vote counts were accurate? They were there to “Stop the Steal.” Under a belief—they had been told, what I would call propaganda and you might not, the Steve Bannons of the world had told them that all these irregularities had happened, and the vote wasn’t accurately counted. Do you believe that, or is your stance ‘maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t’?
NA: If I was to take this to a metaphor of capitalism, you’re not allowed to price-fix and you can’t have monopolies. Let’s say that oil is very abundant and it’s a conspiracy that gas prices are kept at a certain artificial level: if that was revealed, or if people thought it was revealed to them, then there would be chaos. We’re talking if there was this abundant energy potential and it was being kept and there was a group profiting from that—that would be a much bigger problem. And that’s what escaped… A loss of trust in a system they are supposed to believe in.
JTP: One more time, though. Do you believe that the vote was accurately counted?
NA: I have no idea. And that’s part of the problem of global systems. It’s that you can’t actually see what’s happening. You’re so far removed. Everything is so scaled out. There’s too much of a removal between what you want and who’s representing you. That’s why I say, Your vote doesn’t matter. The fact that there is even a question mark is the problem itself.