Conservatism has a human capital problem. This has led some to argue that the Republican Party is doomed. The issue is not simply that Democrats win over college graduates. More importantly, the disparity is much more extreme when you look at those in the idea generation space, namely education, journalism, academia, activism, and the arts. I call these the High-Status, Low Pay (HSLP) professions, where intelligent and hard-working people make less money than they could elsewhere but instead get compensated in status and power. Engineers for ExxonMobil are on average probably smarter than journalists, but matter a lot less when it comes to influencing the culture and shaping political outcomes.
A lot of people, including me, have written about the human capital problem, but few have discussed what can be done about it in practice, other than get an entirely new political base. The most obvious solution is to motivate more intelligent and idealistic people to become conservatives, and often someone will recommend you do that by dropping the kinds of policy positions that repel elite human capital, like pro-life. I definitely wish conservatives would start supporting abortion rights, but I’m not delusional enough to think that all the positions that bind journalists and academics to the left are ones that I agree with. I have to admit that HSLPs like regulation and economic redistribution, and there they should be resisted.
I think that aside from abortion, this is to a large extent a Trump issue. Who the most important figure is in a movement has massive implications for how people see that side of the spectrum. But pointing out the importance of Trump offers no real solutions. If you’re a Republican, he is the face of your party. And we live in a democracy, which means that as long as the base loves him, that is going to continue to be true. People have been hoping that Trump goes away since 2015. I predicted he’d be the nominee after he lost in 2020, and I think if he loses again he’ll be the overwhelming favorite in 2028. The cult appears to only be getting stronger. Trump had an easier path to the nomination this year than in 2016, and he just installed his daughter-in-law as co-chair of the RNC, which was in turn immediately purged of his enemies.
So the Trump cult is going to be central to the GOP for at least another few years, and more realistically for perhaps another decade. I don’t know how long it will last — the guy is very old after all — but the point here is you can’t count on Trump going away anytime soon, and the man is just extremely aesthetically unappealing to educated Americans. That is to their credit. If he disappeared tomorrow, that would solve some of the problem, but Republicans are stuck as the low human capital party, and among their base there is organic demand for conspiracy theories, fake news, and other kinds of stupidity. Other actors would emerge to fill some of the void, even if high human capital will have more of a chance to steer conservatism in the right direction once Trump is gone.
Taking away Power from the HSLPs
The good news is I don’t actually think conservatism is finished just because it’s stupid. The right has to recognize its limitations and adjust to them, but it can still accomplish many of its goals. In some ways, the conservative movement has already made the right adjustments. Here I’ll spell out two things they’ve been doing right, in the process explaining what else can be done to overcome the opposition of the HSLP class.
Getting better at staffing the bureaucracy and judiciary
George HW Bush was able to appoint two justices to the Supreme Court. While Clarence Thomas remains a solid conservative vote over three decades later, the other justice was so bad that “No More Souters” became a rallying cry for the conservative movement. When the second Bush attempted to appoint Harriet Miers to the Court, an unqualified nominee of uncertain ideological conviction, the conservative intelligentsia and activist class revolted, she withdrew her nomination, and we got Samuel Alito instead. When Republicans pick Supreme Court justices now, they’re always solidly conservative, and the same has increasingly become true for the lower courts. Republican appointees to the bench are getting more conservative across the board, even if lawyers as a class are becoming more liberal.
One might worry that conservative judges will still be less intelligent than liberal ones, since Republican presidents are picking from a shallower pool. Competence matters on the bench, because being an effective judge involves trying to convince others of one’s opinion and maneuvering strategically to move towards a desired outcome. The funny thing about this is that Democratic presidents aren’t appointing many white men anymore, which means that they’re probably squandering their elite human capital advantage for the sake of diversity.
The same is true in other areas. Until recently, Republican governors wouldn’t give much thought to who they nominated to university Boards of Regents. Now they’re starting to pay attention and appoint opponents of affirmative action and DEI, which can impact how these institutions are governed. Bryan Caplan told me that there was noticeably less pressure on diversity issues at George Mason University after Glenn Youngkin became governor of Virginia, whereas an electoral change would not have mattered for this sort of thing twenty years ago.
Low human capital is a problem at every level of the power pyramid. Federal judges have their rulings interpreted by lawyers and bureaucrats, and the same is true for university governance. At the same time, it actually matters if those near the top are more conservative, and to a large extent Republicans who have gotten into office are now doing a better job than they did in the past.
Unfortunately, there’s still room to improve when it comes to executive branch appointees, as can be seen in the figure below.
I don’t know what the numbers were like before Clinton, but it’s possible that Bush and Trump actually did better than previous presidents. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were the case, and it seems that their highest-level appointments were much more conservative than those of the Nixon era, when the executive branch was in fact expanding the civil rights regime instead of just keeping it in place or pushing back on it, as Trump appointees did. There seems to be more of a problem at the lower levels, though it may be possible to get to the point where Republican presidents show at least as much partisan bias in hiring as Democrats do.
Deinstitutionalization
I suspect that institutions, especially when large, naturally tend towards leftism, and this isn’t anything unique to the current American political landscape. Or more precisely, they tend towards moralism over tradeoffs and market logic, and leftism is simply the dominant moral outlook of the West. Whether or not this is a universal rule, we see it everywhere in our society, where major corporations are more left wing than small businesses; academics more than independent writers; labor unions more than independent workers; the American Medical Association more than individual doctors; and public schools are more left wing than private schools, which are in turn more left wing than homeschooling. There are probably two main reasons for this. First, leftism thrives in more bureaucratic environments, where there are more opportunities for activists inside or outside an organization to have an influence. There’s also a personnel selection effect. If leftism is the ideology of the risk-avoidant and intellectually conformist, such people are more likely to want to become say a corporate drone than found their own business, or go work for an established media outlet than start their own Substack.
Medical organizations seem particularly crazy these days, but one has to wonder what kind of person seeks out a high level position in a medical organization? Doctors who are interested in science or treating the sick conduct research or actually practice medicine, while the power-seeking spend their time trying to govern others in their profession. The same thing happens in universities, where the professors may be left-wing, but are not nearly as bad as the administration or people who sit on committees. In graduate school, I noticed that it was always the most left-wing students who sought to LARP as organized labor leaders.
Institutions aren’t bad for conservatism simply due to its low human capital problem at this particular historical moment. Part of the issue is that institutions are in many ways inherently left wing, or at least trend that way in the post-World War II era. With that in mind, the conservative agenda should seek a great “deinstitutionalization” of society.
We will always have institutions, obviously, but the question is the degree to which the most influential ones will be big, heavily bureaucratized, and government controlled, as opposed to smaller, more local, and private, meaning more responsive to the preferences of all individuals they interact with rather than activist pressure. The deinstitutionalization movement tries to tilt the balance in favor of the latter kind, and, when possible, supports the efforts of individuals and families to free themselves of institutions completely.
This is part of the reason why the school choice movement having so many successes over the last few years is important. Banning Critical Race Theory, etc. is like playing a game of Whac-A-Mole. You stop bad people from doing one crazy thing, and the problem is your children are still spending a massive chunk of their waking hours under the supervision of those who thought it was a good idea to do that crazy thing in the first place. Public schools are at one end of the institutionalization spectrum, while the family is at the other. Giving parents money so they can decide how to spend it, instead of having funds go to public school bureaucrats, is therefore a clear win. When I talk about this, people always interject that private schools are sometimes woke, which is true, but when you are the party of low human capital you take what you can get. Those who believe there’s no difference in how bad public schools are versus private schools have probably been reading too many stories about Harvard-Westlake, which is nowhere near representative. If you have any doubt that private schools are at least better, the patterns of school closures and mask mandates during covid should have settled that question once and for all. There will be other unexpected shocks to the system in the future, and as with everything else, private institutions will handle them better than public ones, since they respond to the logic of markets rather than dumb moralism.
None of this is to say that banning CRT isn’t useful. It’s a positive development, as is states starting to defund DEI on university campuses. The good thing about playing Whac-A-Mole is that you occasionally hit the moles, and force them to spend time trying not to get hit, which is better than leaving them alone to do as they please. A Republican Party that is lower on human capital but actually willing to ban or defund left-wing institutions and ideas might end up being more effective in accomplishing its goals.
On a different but related topic, the right until a few years ago faced a dilemma when it came to internet speech restrictions. Major tech companies were controlled by leftists and, under government and media pressure, tended to take a heavy hand in censoring conservatives. The right therefore debated whether the government needed to take an active role in getting private institutions to be more fair-minded, an effort that I pointed out at the time would not work and probably just end up giving leftists more power. Attempts to solve the censorship problem through law ran into practical and constitutional issues.
Then Substack was founded, Elon Musk got mad about trans stuff, and the rest is history. The war on censorship might have worked too well. Right-wingers are becoming weirder and less connected to reality, as fringe voices and conspiracy theorists come to dominate the conversation on X. The DeSantis campaign was probably doomed from the start, but being super online certainly didn’t do it any favors. All that said, this is a good problem to have. You’d rather your side have too much freedom than the opposite!
In the end, markets solved the issue. But this wasn’t a historical accident. As it turns out, self-made entrepreneurs are less left-wing than established media companies. In our society, guys with money provide a check on the HSLPs. There are hordes of young people right now who are willing to scrape by with a stipend of $40K a year to be a graduate student in anthropology so they can do stuff like organize letter campaigns against heretical professors. Or spend years in a cramped Manhattan apartment in order to see their name occasionally appear in Slate or Jezebel. Conservatives can never win a kind of war of attrition with these types; they’ll always have more bodies. What you can do is create a society where men who are unusually brilliant and independent minded can make gobs of money, in the hopes that some of them might do stuff like fund a lawsuit that bankrupts Jezebel, buy Twitter, or support public intellectuals that end up having more influence on policy debates than hundreds of professors who make their living off government subsidies combined. All of this implies that income inequality is a good thing, because it creates deinstitutionalized centers of power that can provide a check on leftism. The more rich individuals there are and the more money they have, the more they are able to potentially fund intellectuals, artists, and political movements that can influence the culture and public policy debates. Leftists get their funding directly through government; many academic departments are little more than activism disguised as scholarship. A robust private sector provides some balance.
Power moving from the MSM to Twitter is a kind of deinstitutionalization. But so is what’s happened within Twitter, with Elon firing much of the staff and the company becoming less subject to pressure coming from government or the disinformation-industrial complex. It would be good to support markets over heavy handed government regulation no matter what, but understanding this as part of a larger project of deinstitutionalization might convince conservatives who just want to own the libs or aren’t smart enough to have read Hayek to be in favor of capitalism.
A Problem to Be Managed, Not Solved
There is no immediate solution to the problem of people on your side selecting out of HSLP professions, and in many cases not having the cognitive capacity to be influential in them anyway. When these jobs are in the hands of those hostile to its worldview, a movement is going to be constantly facing an uphill battle. In the long run, you must try to bring more high human capital over to your side. While I believe that HSLPs are probably inherently leftist, things don’t have to be as bad as they’ve been over the last decade. The existence of Trump puts big business and HSLPs in the same coalition, making natural differences between them less likely to come to the forefront. Unfortunately, there isn’t much that right wing elites and intellectuals could do to get rid of Trump even if they wanted to, and there isn’t really any mechanism to purge the pro-lifers either. Fixing the right’s human capital problem is going to be a generational struggle, though the process could speed up considerably if Trump had a heart attack tomorrow.
That doesn’t mean all is lost, even in the short run. Institutions change, and their powers wax and wane. One bright spot is that public school attendance appears to be down, while homeschooling and private schooling are on the rise.
This doesn’t even capture the effect of states passing universal school choice and voucher programs, which only took off in 2022. These provide quite substantial subsidies to participating parents, often around $7,000 to $8,000 per child per year, and will be sure to change the incentive structure they face when deciding how to educate their children. There’s a possibility that in some of these states checking out of the public school system starts to become normalized, through a process that began during the pandemic but then was turbocharged by new subsidies, sending government schools into a death spiral. One can dream.
Taking the right’s human capital problem seriously also sheds light on which causes not to take up. Some Republican politicians have praised FTC commissioner Lina Khan for her position on big tech. Strong antitrust enforcement means putting a lot of power into the hands of government bureaucrats and lawyers to determine how major businesses will be run. Predictably, when they have that power, they use it to do things like pressure Elon Musk over his anti-censorship stance and seek to regulate AI for bias. Maybe conservatives can one day debate the merits of a robust antitrust regime, but now is probably not the time. Programs that require a lot of regulators doing complicated things and giving them power over the private sector are going to tend to benefit the side that dominates the HSLP professions.
All of this is to say that having smart and talented people matters, but so do strategy and priorities. The pro-life movement is a good example of how one can accomplish political goals even when both elite and mass opinion are against you. It does not matter how much elite human capital doesn’t like it, wide swaths of the country no longer have abortion clinics, which means that women who aren’t responsible enough to use birth control and who don’t have the means to go to other states are being forced to give birth. Why anyone would want this as a policy goal, I have no idea, but it nonetheless serves as an instructive example of how politics can overcome all else even in situations where HSLPs and the mass public are united. One can similarly see progress on other conservative goals, on everything from tax cuts to dismantling DEI bureaucracies and making sure we never see covid-era tyranny again, but it will take careful thought regarding what to do about hostile institutions.
Good article. "I suspect that institutions, especially when large, naturally tend towards leftism, and this isn’t anything unique to the current American political landscape."
Robert Conquest’s second law: "Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing."
I have sometimes thought about incorporating UBI, or some other welfarism, as part as the conservative agenda in response to this. Hear me out.
Modern liberal democracies create rent. The government can tax and regulate a significant amount of the economy, before everything starts crumbling. The left has a myriad of ideas on where to spend this rent on, which is partially handouts to all kind of groups, and partially themselves, their jobs and hobbies. Libertarians say "Well, don't". The people however, are typically not smart enough to understand pro-market arguments, and are happy to be bribed with their own money.
Well then, why not acknowledge the "power of the people" that exists in a democracy, and actually bribe the people with their own money in a straightforward way. "Tear down the administrative state and handout the money to the people" might be more of a popular platform then "Mostly cut benefits, and lower corporate tax". The latter might be more true and efficient from an economic perspective, the first might be more effective from a political perspective. Give the poor a tangible and visible slice of the dividends created by making the state more libertarian.
This is essentially no different than a private equity firm convincing it's fellow shareholders to let them take charge of the corporation, to cut waste and boost dividends. A vote in that sense is just a piece of stock, that for archaic reasons cannot be sold.