Book | Les Lumières sombres 

FRANCE — In Paris, Arnaud Miranda’s Les Lumières sombres (Gallimard/Le Grand Continent, 2026), a book about the most radical challenge to liberal democracy since Communism, is getting a lot of attention.

Arnaud Miranda is a researcher at Sciences Po. Not yet thirty years old — he completed his PhD only a year ago — his Les Lumières sombres is a taxonomy of the extreme right ideologies in the US that are hugely influential in the second Trump administration. Modest and clearly written, it’s an easy read. No wonder copies are piled high in every bookstore, and French radio and TV stations are competing to interview him.

For Europeans shocked by JD Vance’s Munich speech in 2025, Elon Musk taking a chainsaw to the US government, or Trump’s plan to turn Gaza into a Levantine Riviera, Miranda traces the origins of all three to ideologies backed by the immense financial power of Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley oligarchs.

What’s novel is that these ideologies are not the work of a single person or even of a small group. Instead, they were formed, like open-source software, in the hive mind of the internet which allowed otherwise isolated like-minded people to find each other and where no idea was too vile to find a following. Over the last two decades, countless, mostly anonymous bloggers — among whom Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land have become widely known — contributed to their development. The result is a bizarre constellation of ideologies, some conventionally racist and authoritarian, some techno-futurist.

What these thinkers have in common is an avowed intent to destroy liberal democracy by converting elites to their way of thinking.How to respond? A recent article in Le Monde warned that Yarvin’s invitation to a conference in the Bavarian Alps on the future of democracy risked encouraging the spread of his ideas into European politics. Thanks to Trump and Vance, Europeans have no choice but to learn how to fight back.