Richard Hanania writes that he at first hoped the rise of the "Tech Right", conservative tech founders and investors like Elon Musk and Mark Andreesen, would make the conservative movement smarter. Instead it has only fed the appetite for conspiracy theories and sweepingly simplistic notions like DOGE. Why?
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.
Amen to that. The sort of intelligence that makes someone the founder of a successful company can only take you so far in politics. The political world is mostly a vast gray area where everything is more or less, not 0 or 1, so drawing your opinions from an array of informed actors and writers is essential for forming balanced views.
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