Why the Tech Right Failed

The origins of my anti-populist radicalism

It’s easy to get the impression that I’ve been radicalized against populism by watching stupid people on the right. But in the introduction to my book, Kakistocracy, I explain that I had much more of an emotional reaction to what right-wing politics had done to the brains of smart people I’ve known. I elaborate on that point in a new op-ed in The Boston Globe, republished here, with a specific focus on what went wrong with the Tech Right. I add further commentary beneath the article.

---

One of the most important political developments of recent years is the surge of the Tech Right. The conservative-leaning Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is pouring unprecedented sums into the midterm elections, helping to prop up a dangerous Trumpism at a moment when it is weak. The crypto industry is taking regulatory capture to new heights. And Elon Musk’s X is poisoning the public conversation.

I once believed that tech billionaires entering the Republican coalition would take it in a more fact-based and less populist direction. This did not happen. There is a bitter irony in the fact that adding smart people to the coalition did not raise the collective intelligence of the movement, and may have even made it dumber.

But by understanding what went wrong, we may be able to begin working toward a political future that is less acrimonious and more pragmatic once the Trump era is over.

I speak as someone who had a front-row seat to Silicon Valley’s shift toward conservatism, and had a role to play in that change. I was the first writer to popularize the term “Tech Right,” in my newsletter. Having long believed that conservatism had a human capital problem and was infected by paranoia, conspiracy theories, and a belief in fake news, I thought that self-made entrepreneurs with backgrounds in science could only make things better. In my newsletter article, I predicted that they would push the conservative movement toward more pro-market and technocratic approaches. I was told by a major Silicon Valley figure that a former congressional leader had optimistically shared my article in a group chat filled with prominent tech entrepreneurs, encouraging them to help right a Republican Party that had gone in the wrong direction.

I was able to see the rise of the Tech Right early based not only on what I read in the news but on personal connections I had built. Although I have no background in business or software, my conservative writing had caught the eyes of some of the most famous names in the industry. My work was praised by Elon Musk, I had done podcasts with the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and my 2023 book included blurbs from Peter Thiel and David Sacks. In some cases, admiration from afar turned into close personal relationships. At one point, New York magazine even declared me “an intellectual muse of the Silicon Valley right.” Through group chats, I could observe how individuals in these circles thought about current events, sometimes on a minute-by-minute basis.

Before long, I began to feel uneasy about what was happening. I’d thought that conspiracy theories were increasingly popular on the right because they were being pushed by less educated voters in the coalition. But I noticed that many members of the Tech Right, if not embracing the most extreme forms of misinformation, were still confident that there was something suspicious about the 2020 election and the scientific consensus on mRNA vaccines. Talking them out of such views was difficult. They trusted me — at least for a while. But they didn’t seem to trust anyone else offering mainstream perspectives on hot-button issues.

In time, they became passionate conspiracists. And they had little interest in acquiring accurate information. Having decided, due to political disagreements, that journalists and experts could not be trusted, the brilliant minds of the Tech Right were content to do what any ordinary partisan might — go to sources that were much more inaccurate and biased than the media they detested, many of them random social media accounts.

Earlier this year, Andreessen revealed that he gets all his information from old books, podcasts, AI models, and X. Conspicuously missing from the list is any direct text-based consumption of news that goes through normal journalistic procedures — a remarkable state of affairs for someone so influential in American politics. Rather than placing a limit on conspiratorial and demagogic thinking on the right, Silicon Valley has encouraged it.

There was a time when I found taking a similarly oppositional attitude toward established authority justifiable. I agreed with many on the Tech Right that the political class had overreacted to the COVID-19 pandemic and that newly prominent left-wing ideas on topics such as race and sexuality were both misguided and dangerous for society. Yet I was never under the impression that this meant the MAGA movement or popular podcasts were more trustworthy than actual experts on most issues. The ability to maintain such a balanced perspective turned out to be much rarer than I imagined.

DOGE was the culmination of the anti-intellectual atmosphere that conservatives in tech landed in and amplified. Elon Musk’s signature government initiative was horrifying to watch from the perspective of someone who actually believes in the mission of reducing the size and scope of government. Throughout Washington, there are knowledgeable scholars who have thought carefully about how to go about making government smaller and more efficient. But because they spend their days writing detailed policy papers rather than finding ways to go viral on social media, none of them were consulted. Elon Musk, who apparently had his political worldview shaped by what he saw in his X feed, was happy to claim victory anytime he took a chainsaw to a government program, when in fact his willy-nilly cuts managed to decrease state capacity while failing to reduce spending in any meaningful way.

I eventually determined that the lesson of the Tech Right’s sad trajectory is that none of us are all that smart on our own. The only way one can expect to have reasonable opinions on political and social issues is to be embedded in a knowledge-producing ecosystem. That doesn’t mean only journalists and academics can be informed. But it does mean that those who reject educational and media institutions are destined to live in ignorance.

As important as intelligence may be for domain-specific tasks, it can easily be used to engage in motivated reasoning and justify false beliefs. Smart, talented people from outside the institutions are not going to solve the problems society faces simply because of their own unique abilities.

To solve our problems, there is no hope other than rebuilding the political culture so it can incorporate criticism and feedback. As we enter the final years of the Trump era, what remains of our established institutions should reckon with how censoriousness and ideological extremism fueled a backlash, while their critics need to work to reform those institutions rather than become cheerleaders for populist ignorance.

---

It’s not news that stupid people are stupid. But one feature of populist movements is that the attitudes, beliefs, and aesthetics of more excitable and less thoughtful members of the public end up in control.

When I saw anti-vaxx sentiment emerge on the right in 2021, for example, I was expecting smarter conservatives to at most tolerate it as a necessary evil one had to accept as part of engaging in coalitional politics. I never thought that they would come to sympathize with the anti-vaxxers, if not turn into enthusiastic anti-vaxxers themselves. It was the same with the question of denying the 2020 election. Neither of these positions would smart people have come up with on their own. They were either derived from the ignorant masses, in the case of anti-vaxx, or things Trump himself was saying, in the case of election denialism.

I realized at that point how little of a barrier intelligence was against picking up brain worms if you’re in a poisoned intellectual environment. I guess we should’ve known that from watching the left over the years. But I thought smarter conservatives had been selected to at least some extent for their independence of thought, and also that it was easier to be conned by fancy-looking academic journals than MAGA moms, Nick Shirley, and anonymous X accounts with frog avatars. Those who had a background in science and tech in particular might be expected to bring a fresh perspective, rather than assimilate to their new surroundings. Buying into nonsense you read in prestigious newspapers or see promoted by scientific institutions is a lot more understandable than just being influenced by hysterical nobodies on social media. The thought of an intelligent person taking ideas from the latter fills me with revulsion.

For me, adopting a politics of anti-populism means placing less emphasis on individual intelligence than I did before, and more on establishing and maintaining healthy epistemic standards. Less educated and informed voters are bad at thinking, but their greatest danger is in the fact that their ideas infect others.

This is partly a question of attitude and identity. As a thoughtful person, you should have absolute contempt for the populist style of knowledge acquisition. Some on the right came to hate liberals so much that it left little room for any other psychological dynamics to play a role in developing their scientific beliefs and political attitudes. My hatreds were always diversified, so I didn’t fall into the same trap.

This post is sponsored by Mechanize. They are hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Research Engineer ($500K base pay), Recruiter ($200K), Growth Manager ($250K), Interns ($150/hr), and legal counsel ($400K). You can even “build your own role.” Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.