The “Substack Centrists” Don’t Understand Conservatives

Can the Right build its own elite?

Nathan Cofnas has a piece in which he argues that the Right has a “stupidity problem.”  In Cofnas’ view, the reason why the Left controls the institutions is because the Left is generally smarter than the Right.  Cofnas believes that the Right does not have enough smart people to create a counter-elite.  It follows that we on the Right should not try to create our own institutions and the only path forward is to persuade the current, Left-wing elite to embrace Right-wing ideas.

I think that Cofnas is wrong.  The reason the Left is in control is because a specific historical political faction, made up of specific organizations and specific people, conquered the institutions.  Had that faction failed or had a different faction gained power, things would be totally different.  

Cofnas is not the only one who believes that conservatives are low-IQ rubes.  The other Substack Centrists, like Richard Hanania and Claire Lehmann seem to agree.  The Substack Centrists are disturbed by the Left’s recent excesses.  But it is not clear that they can be allies of conservatives, because as Cofnas’ piece demonstrates, they don’t really understand how American Conservatives think.

For example, Cofnas claims that a national divorce would be worse for the red states.  He says that

“The Conservative States of America would most likely be a middle-income country… 

In fact, red states have a GDP per capita of about $70,000/year.  The World Bank defines a middle-income country as having a per capita income between $1,045/year and $12,695/year.

…that squanders its national budget on hunting down abortion doctors…

Does Cofnas actually believe that abortion law enforcement takes up a large share of a country’s national budget?  Is he aware that the Republican position on abortion law is much closer to the global median than the Democrat position is?  Maybe Cofnas’ quip about abortion is a joke.

 ...and erecting Pyramid of Giza-scale Ten Commandments Monuments.”

That is not a reasonable description of conservatives, it is the Democrat’s caricature of conservatives. It is on par with the Fox News caricature of liberals as blue-haired, communist Starbucks baristas with gender studies degrees.  The blue-city-dwelling Democrat (Cofnas grew up in New York) imagines conservatives to be Bible-thumping, evangelical, overweight hicks who love TV.  In reality, only 38% of Republicans are evangelicals.  Among elite conservative circles such as the employees of Republican think tanks, most people focus on higher-brow issues, such as the National Debt, Constitutional Law (the conflict between the rule of law and judicial activism), and foreign policy - not tacky monuments to the ten commandments.

Cofnas contrasts conservatives with

“...the “libtards” who invent vaccines and run academia, big tech, and our major corporations”

This gets to the heart of the issue.  A core ingredient of being a right-wing dissident is realizing that the people who run pharma companies, academia, the Ivy League, and major corporations are actually not that smart.  More intelligent than average, sure.  But they’re not exceptional.  The way you get to be in the top ranks of a corporation - especially in a politically adjacent field like pharma - is similar to the way you get to be a University president.  It’s not by being a highly effective worker, it’s by playing office politics (and having connections in the Federal regulatory bureaucracy).  There’s a certain type of personality, the “networker”, “the “girlboss” etc. which does well in a corporate environment, and that personality type is only slightly correlated with intelligence.

Elites do not get to their positions through merit, they get to their positions by displaying conformity, and the most important way to signal conformity is to loudly profess the same opinions as everyone else. 

“Instead of striking out on our own, the right needs to figure out how to turn smart people away from the left.”

Cofnas claims that the right’s best strategy is to try to win over the elites, a position which I think is extremely naive.  If you’re the kind of person who can be persuaded by reason and evidence - if you’re the kind of person who values truth more than social status - then you don’t get to become an elite in mainstream institutions.  The only way for the Right to make progress is to create our own institutions and build our own elite.

Arguing that Republicans are generally dumber than Democrats, Cofnas writes:

“It was a conservative Senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson, who nicknamed the Republican Party “the stupid party ". National Review writer Noah Rothman notes that the Republican Party is known as “the stupid party” to its critics “both within and outside its ranks.” It’s hard to understand why the party of conservatives should have this reputation if conservatives are just as smart as liberals.”

Actually, the line about “the evil party vs. the stupid party” is usually attributed to Sam Francis.  Francis was not saying that the conservative base was stupid, he was saying that the GOP establishment was too moderate and was not playing to win, while the Democrats were ruthlessly playing to win.  Francis accused the GOP establishment of being “stupid” because it was trying to be respected and accepted by the mainstream left, in the hopes of eventually winning them over.  In other words, the strategy which Francis thought was “stupid” is the one that Cofnas endorses.

“If conservatives are just as smart and intellectual as liberals, why have they failed to create even a single major conservative-friendly university that is remotely competitive with the top liberal universities?”

That’s an easy answer.  The process which determines who gets published in Nature and Science (the metric which is used to determine university prestige) is based at least as much on political conformity as on merit.  Also, liberals didn’t create the major universities.  The major universities were founded centuries ago and liberals took them over.

Cofnas describes himself as an enemy of the Left, but I think I’ve demonstrated that he has a weak understanding of who conservatives are and what they believe.  This misunderstanding is not entirely Cofnas’ fault.  Conservatives have been quite bad at articulating their ideas.  But it does show that Cofnas and other Substack Centrists are not in a great position to work with conservatives to advance right-wing goals.

Like the leftists among whom they were raised, the Substack Centrists seem to believe that believing the scientific truth about race and sex differences is the essence of being a right-winger.  It isn’t.

Moral #1: Smart Republicans need to do a better job at communicating their ideas.

Moral #2: The reason our institutions are controlled by liberals is that liberals as a tribe rule over conservatives as a tribe, not because they’re much smarter.