A few weeks ago, just after Robert Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of Donald Trump, Matt Yglesias wrote an essay on what he called “the crank realignment” — the recent migration of a lot of conspiratorial, tinfoil-hatted and outsider-knowledge-oriented elements in American politics toward the populist right, and the consolidation of most educated professionals and academics within the Democratic coalition.
This trend is one of the most important developments of the Trump era, and I appreciated Yglesias’s attempt to distill the problems that it creates for both coalitions. For the right, there’s a basic competence and human capital problem, because a paranoid populism repels a lot of intelligent people whom you would need to actually create or sustain a conservative establishment, which in turn makes it hard, as Yglesias writes, “to actually marshal knowledge and govern the country.” (The party that nominates someone like Mark Robinson for governor of North Carolina is not exactly advertising its seriousness or competence.) For the left, there’s a problem that “turning fields like journalism, social science and public health into partisan monocultures makes it harder for them to perform their epistemic functions,” because without any conservative leaven they fall prey much too easily to groupthink and confirmation bias.
I want to go a bit further into both sides’ struggles. First, on the right, the problem isn’t just that talented people are marginalized under these conditions; it’s that even when talented people do rise to positions of influence and power, they’re often still caught up in the right-wing coalition’s vortex of conspiratorial impulses, Manichaean thinking and dubious ideas.
When JD Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate, I wrote about how the pick was connected to the rightward migration of an important segment of the American elite: people in tech and finance, especially, reacting against wokeness and other forces on the left. But in migrating rightward, some — not all — of these figures have become way too credulous about their new allies’ more half-baked ideas, or else they find themselves performing credulity for the sake of coalition politics.
Thus a character like Elon Musk, for instance, is one of the most dynamic and creative figures in the world, no matter what his haters say, but you wouldn’t know it from a lot of his right-leaning social media engagement. And Vance himself, who is as capable at arguing about public policy as any Republican candidate in my lifetime, has staff members who were out trying to validate rumors about cat-eating migrants because those are the stories that Trump and the right-wing hive mind want to tell.
Second, the power of crankishness on the right is a problem even when the cranks are correct. Overall, I tend to have more sympathy for fringe ideas than some mainstream newspaper columnists. I think that some conspiracy theories are connected to overlooked realities. I’m confident that the paranormal and supernatural are more important aspects of reality than most secular observers recognize. My experience with chronic illness persuaded me that some forms of strange outsider knowledge in medicine have a lot to offer.
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