Donald Trump and the Decivilizing of the Right

American conservatism is increasingly becoming a third world movement

Below is a draft of the first chapter of my book on Elite Human Capital. See here for the announcement of the book and a draft of the introduction. (UPDATE: See also Chapter 2, Chapter 3).

Chapter 1 relies heavily on two previous pieces of writing: “Elite Human Capital Is Not Just IQ,” and “Why MAGA Enables Corruption.” It has been updated to take into account recent events and the outcome of the 2024 election, and also spiced up with new anecdotes that demonstrate its main arguments. The process of the Republicans descending deeper into a Low Human Capital culture under Trump continues unabated, so every couple of months provides new fodder.

The main suggestion I got after posting the introduction was that the term “Elite Human Capital” is confusing. But nobody gave me a good alternative. I don’t think the point of a phrase is to convey all the nuances of an idea, but rather to be catchy. The reason one writes about a topic in the first place is to explain it. Causing a bit of confusion can actually be good for encouraging debate. Here I’m thinking about Fukuyama’s “End of History” and how the fact that the phrase is so easily misunderstood stimulates a great deal of discussion. A war happens, and someone goes I guess history isn’t over after all. Then someone who actually read the book sees an opportunity to show off their knowledge by going actually, he didn’t say that there wouldn’t be any more wars, what he actually meant was…

Elite Human Capital doesn’t mean superior in every way. It means “elite” in the sense of those who matter most for maintaining institutions, while also referencing the ways in which they are ethically superior to other people. It’s actually good to encourage people to think about how a high IQ person can be Low Human Capital, or a dumb person, or at least a midwit, can in a sense be Elite Human Capital.

As always, leave any comments or suggestions, including pointing out spelling and grammatical mistakes.

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Sometimes, people ask whether a certain Democratic politician or public figure who doesn’t seem that smart is Elite Human Capital. The nature and tone of the question are based on the assumption that the concepts of Elite Human Capital and intelligence are interchangeable. It’s nobody’s fault, as I think that my friend Anatoly Karlin and I, the two people who rely most on the concept, hadn’t really spelled out what it means until recently. I can’t speak for Karlin, but the goal of this book is to develop the idea, and the first step here is to clear up the most common misunderstanding, which is that the term EHC is in effect synonymous with high IQ.

Karlin was once a Russian nationalist, but saw the error of his ways after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and embraced a more liberal worldview as he began to clearly see the moral, intellectual, and spiritual rot at the heart of Putinism. As an American who has usually identified with the right, my motivations have been similar, as I’ve been shocked by the dishonesty and stupidity of the Trump movement, even as I continue to in most cases support the Republican Party as a bulwark against economic statism.

Often, we can gain insight into a phenomenon by studying extreme cases. For example, a volcanic eruption can serve as a natural experiment to understand how colder temperatures affect a biome, as the eruption temporarily reduces the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface, creating abnormally low temperatures over a short time scale. If things like decent character, a concern for truth, and adherence to liberal democratic norms matter, then we should see important differences between the characteristics of a movement that forms a cult of personality around a man who embodies the opposite of these virtues and one that has an immune reaction to him. The flaws of Trump are obvious to all observers capable of dispassionate analysis, so much so that an inability to see them can only indicate that one is misinformed or seeing the world through a tribal lens.