What's Wrong with Rightoids?

In defense of Elite Human Capital.

One thing I’ve begun to notice lately is that rightoids all hate Richard Hanania. I don’t know exactly why this is, because the type of rightoid I interact with the most frequently is the type that always speaks in riddles and calls themselves Nietzscheans and “Moldbuggians” (never “Yarvinistas”) despite the fact that they’ve never read Nietzsche or Yarvin. For some indecipherable reason, it’s always archetypal-hero-this and Eurasianism-that and the same tired arguments they’ve had a million times before about whether the Twelvers or the Zaidis are the more based type of Shiites; and which ethnic whites are the most degenerate, the Polacks or the Eye-talians; and whether the Black Hebrew Israelites are really onto something. It’s occasionally fun to engage with these people over something that they’ve already made up their minds about, since they tend to be smart enough to generate as many bad-faith arguments as they need to justify their position ad hoc, but not smart enough for the arguments to make any sense. This can be over the most banal of points, and the rightoid will turn almost anything into a hill to die on. You don’t think illegals are responsible for the bird flu? Get ready for a six-and-a-half-hour lecture about What It Means To Be A Nation and why something doesn’t literally have to be true for it to be true and how you’re the bad guy if you think it’s anything other than vox populi, vox dei that 40% of the country believes Mexicans have the same DNA as chickens and they spray a poison on all the vegetables they pick that makes your kids gay. How else do you expect a Real American to behave when a Starbucks wagie asks them would you pretty please like to share your gender pronouns, and would you like to round up your receipt to support a Bushwick they/them’s all-hermaphroditical adaptation of The Vagina Monologues, and would you please stop blasting “Facts” by Tom MacDonald (feat. Ben Shapiro) at full volume on your iPhone speaker or I’m going to have to call security and have you removed from the store?

As far as I can tell, this genre of rightoid hates Richard Hanania because he’s made the earth-shattering observation that a lot of them are stupid, and the ones who aren’t stupid are unscrupulous enough to behave like they are so stupid people will give them money and consoom their stupid online content. I, for one, am appalled — appalled, I tell you! — that a poaster like Hanania, who used to write racist things on the internet like me and all my friends, would have the gall to besmirch the good name of my favorite brain geniuses and Good Samaritans: Don Jr. and the hosts of Fox & Friends.

What’s funniest to me about the rightoid sperg-out over Hanania’s Elite Human Capital thesis is if you just tinkered with the argument a little bit, the rightoids would all lap it up like they do everything else that reaffirms their priors about who exerts power and influence over the ideological direction of the West and who’s winning and losing The Culture War. It’s rare that they get something so fundamental so right, but it’s true that liberals dominate all the knowledge-producing institutions of society and in doing so drive our culture and politics perpetually to the left. That’s the gist of Yarvin’s political philosophy, and it’s been the foremost grievance of reactionary politics in the United States and Europe for more than a decade.

Hanania only loses the rightoids when he says that our institutions are liberal because social conservatism is stupid, and conservatives are disproportionately uninterested in ideas and care about making money and owning the libs instead. He supports this conclusion with a great deal of evidence from political psychology and contemporary politics, and it’s basically what you’d have to believe if you think we live in a meritocracy and you understand that all of our knowledge institutions are run by cultural liberals.

The rightoids evidently don’t like this conclusion, however. And although it’s not clear exactly what they think is wrong about it, they’re sure that it must be wrong. You don’t ever hear them say that actually, modern conservatism is smart, and actually, the foremost conservative apologists adhere to a strict upstanding moral code, because that’s not something they really care about. (At least, you don’t hear that and then also hear it followed up with a cogent argument to the same effect.) Usually, they’ll just point to some purported malfeasance or incompetency by the Other Side and conclude that because Trump and the libs do basically the same thing, the libs are therefore wrong and Trump Must Always Be Right.

This happens practically every day. Say that there’s a widespread stupid or bad phenomenon on the right that’s sanctioned by the leading institutions of modern conservatism. (It might take suspending your disbelief a moment, I know.) For a purely illustrative example, imagine if half the country believed missing pets in a random town in Ohio were proof that The Elites are shipping in immigrants to bring down Western Civilization just because they have a grudge against the 78-year-old former host of Celebrity Apprentice. Maybe you’d think it’s a bad thing that the Republican Party and its leadership enabled this. Or maybe you’d just doubt the veracity of the claim that they are, in fact, eating the pets of the people that live there. A typical rightoid would send you a blurry screenshot from a six-second Facebook video that’s inexplicably in black-and-white and tell you that it proves everything @PatriotEagle1776 ever said is true. A more intelligent rightoid would bring up Russiagate and wokeness and Sam Brinton and Rachel Levine and maybe a fifth-grade teacher in Bumfuck, Idaho, that Libs of TikTok said had a pride flag in their classroom, and declare that the left has gone insane! And besides, that sounds like something the Haitians would do anyway…

Or imagine if you thought this Donald Trump fellow wasn’t the most trustworthy person to put in charge of the federal prosecutors. Have you considered: But what about Killary? What about Joe Brandon? What about the child-sacrificing demonic pedophiles that stole the 2020 election?

Any diligent review of the facts would suggest that these things aren’t remotely comparable. When the Russiagate investigation turned up nothing, the Democrats stopped talking about it. When the courts threw out every single one of Trump’s 2020 election challenges, he made believing the stolen election narrative a litmus test for anyone who wants to succeed in Republican politics. When it became clear to Democratic elites that Joe Biden isn’t fit to run for office, they forced him out of the race. When Trump tried to do a self-coup and seriously contemplated starting a war with Iran so he could remain president, the Republicans nominated him again and made his daughter-in-law the co-chair of the RNC.

Whether the more intelligent rightoids genuinely believe these things are the same is a mystery to me. It seems implausible, but it also seems implausible that you could make something a core element of your persona as a commentator without actually coming to believe it shortly thereafter. I don’t know, but it probably doesn’t matter anyway because all the Republican institutions are either so populist that any elite who doesn’t say stupid things will soon lose their audience and income stream, or so hierarchical that anyone who doesn’t tow the party line will be excommunicated by the Orange Man himself.

This is the problem with modern conservatism in a nutshell. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. For the time being, there are still enough intelligent right-wingers who take ideas seriously and have substantial enough political and policy expertise that you can staff a semi-competent administration, but they’re becoming fewer and further between as the Gribble-ification of the Republican Party proceeds apace, and more and more educated people are being alienated from the right, and more and more policy domains are being ceded to people like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who used to be a liberal Democrat as recently as a year ago.

The base likes this, because they don’t have serious convictions about politics and they’re prone to liking stupid things. They might not notice — they might even celebrate — the fact that their coalition is losing smart people, and I doubt that many of them have thought seriously about what it means for their tribe’s long-term prospects. Having a shortage of intelligent elites makes it basically impossible for conservative ideas to make headway in the zeitgeist, since virtually all ideological and political phenomena are elite-driven. It’s no coincidence that the one area where conservatives have won the most despite their position being the least popular with the public, gun rights, is also one of the shrinking number of policy domains where the party line is mostly driven by special interest groups like the Federalist Society and the NRA.

It’s common for rightoids to think that this sort of distinction is the same as judging people’s social and moral value, and Elite Human Capital is just a designator for things that are “good” and low human capital “bad,” since most of them don’t grasp nuance. But the point is much more subtle than that. You can be a person with complicated ideas whose ideas are bad and cause lots of ill effects. (In fact, this describes most of the worst people throughout human history.) And thanks to capitalism, you can also be someone with an utterly unremarkable intellect who’s totally driven by self-interest who does a tremendous amount of good — although you’re more likely to accomplish this if you’re also a smart person.

The point of the human capital concept is to identify what sort of people drive ideological and cultural change, whether that change is good or bad, and in turn determine what a political movement needs to do to win the long march through the institutions. Conservatives have been losing ground for a long time — centuries, if you ask Yarvin — and you’d think if they were rational, they’d want to figure out why. Not so, however. The conceit of modern conservatism is that the base is too stupid to know that they’re stupid, and the grifters have an interest in keeping it that way.