David Heinemeier Hansson has published again; this time it’s his movement’s public face. The decoder for his “creed” post comes from his other writing.
The Omarchy Doctrine, posted for his Linux distribution, runs ten lines: three equations, six imperatives, one promise. Heritage is duty. Hold the line. You’re somebody now. The creed leaves its referents unnamed. His essays of the past year name them: a London mourned for its lost “native” population and a march branded Unite the Kingdom, a call for remigration, a post that sets Romani people in Copenhagen parks beside a wolf population and prescribes shooting for one and deportation for the other, and a July essay announcing the return of the will to power through a hero generation that rejects managed decline.
Roger Griffin defines exactly this as the fascist core of palingenetic populist ultranationalism: rebirth from decay, against a corrupt establishment, for an ethnically defined people.
The July essay meets each term.
The new creed supplies the mobilization.
Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism tells us to watch five stages. The first is the creation of a movement with a creed, a leader and followers. The second is rooting in the political system through alliance with elites who believe they can use it.
Stage one is complete by definition: a creed, a leader, followers.
The next stage requires a foothold in the state. The money for it is already being boasted about, $18.5 million pledged to a foundation with no jurisdiction, legal form or filing on record. Here’s how it runs:
| Paxton stage | Test | Omarchy record | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Creation of a movement | A creed, a leader, followers | The Omarchy Doctrine; DHH as founder and foundation president; followers who call themselves Omarchs, at meetups on five continents this week | Reached. We are here. |
| 2. Rooting in the political system | Alliance with elites who believe they can use the movement; a foothold in parties or institutions | $18.5 million, of which $18 million comes from twelve individual patrons at $1 million each, among them Tobi Lütke, Patrick Collison, Michael Dell, Jack Dorsey, Matthew Prince and Brian Armstrong, and nine corporations, among them Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, DigitalOcean and 1Password | Financing present. Political foothold absent. |
| 3. Seizure of power | Entry into government, historically by invitation of conservatives | None | Absent |
| 4. Exercise of power | Governing in tension with the state and the elites who opened the door | None | Absent |
| 5. Radicalization or entropy | Escalation toward war and purge, or decline into routine | None | Absent |
This of course reads different for Thiel and Musk, who are at stage four or even five.