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.
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While I strongly endorse your conclusion, I am less sure that the populist right is currently more dangerous than the populist left. Many of the opinions of the populist left are endorsed by academics and mainstream journalist.
Because of this they probably seem less like conspiracy theories to you and more like respectable evidence based views.
These ideas include
(1) belief that current gender affirming medical care benefits children.
(2) belief that we can rapidly replace fossil fuels with mainly intermittant renewable energy and still have high quality lives.
(3) belief that Israel is a settler colonial apartheid state committing genocide.
Most people are conformists that think how their social group thinks. The impulse to fit into one's social group is likely deeply evolutionary in nature. I feel this impulse all of the time: when I read enough people say that something is true, I just begin to emotionally assume that it has to be true. Going against the group is deeply petrifying to me. I am also autistic, so if bucking the group is difficult for me, I can't imagine how difficult it feels for conventionally successful and socially integrated people. To counter this tendency in any political movement, you probably need to get people to socially disengage from their broader groups and form smaller ones: group chats, blogs with an abundance of contributors, a distinct name for the niche social subgroup being formed. The 'tech right' never did this: they just migrated to MAGA spaces and then got captured by the group norms and beliefs of MAGA.