The ‘Crank Realignment’ and the Paranoid Center

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.

But if you have undiscovered or underreported truths out there, moving them from the fringe to the center is a challenging undertaking. Even when they’re world-historically important, as with the world’s mounting birthrate crisis, the stink of weirdness can be awfully hard to shake. And it becomes that much more challenging when they’re part of a larger sea of ideologically motivated credulity, such that the same guy who is saying Weird Thing X (which might well turn out to be true) is also saying Weird Things P and Q and R (which are false or just insane).

Unfortunately, it’s a characteristic human tendency to discover that the official narrative is wrong about some important thing and then leap to the conclusion that it must be wrong about absolutely everything. I found this to be true time and again in my journeys on the medical fringe, where I would find a practitioner or author with some key insight or discovery who had become far too credulous about any and all anti-establishment ideas. And now it’s true in right-wing politics, as well, which makes it hard to take the fringe-but-possibly-true ideas that show up on Joe Rogan’s show or in a Tucker Carlson interview and separate them from the ideas that are fringe-and-simply-false.

Now let’s talk about liberalism’s problems in this landscape. I think Yglesias is a little too quick to say that the crank realignment has made liberal politics “less friendly to nut jobs,” full stop. Rather, it’s made liberal politics less friendly to certain fringe ideas that used to have more of a home inside the liberal tent — vaccine skepticism, Michael Moore-style foreign policy analysis, etc. — but arguably more vulnerable to the forms of ideological fanaticism and flimflam that remain.

That is, as crankishness has become more right-coded, it’s become easier for liberals to assume that if some idea isn’t right-coded it can’t be crankish or fanatical or kooky. The rise of various antiracist guru figures during the Great Awokening, the elevation of hucksters like Robin DiAngelo and Tema Okun (about whom Yglesias has written perceptively) to undeserved prominence in progressive thought and institutions, was enabled by some of these assumptions — that the right is inherently extreme and the left is inherently reality-based and serious, so if left-leaning institutions are embracing weird-seeming ideas about “white supremacy culture,” well, they must have some sort of respectable intellectual foundation. (They don’t.)

Likewise, as Megan McArdle writes in a recent Washington Post column, there’s a tendency for Trump-era liberals to simply practice denial about the extremism in their own coalition, to act as if Kamala Harris didn’t take the extreme positions she took in her first presidential run, to dismiss the actual practice of late-term abortion as Republican mythology, and so on. The easy slide from “Republicans say a lot of crankish things” to “If Republicans say it, it must be crankish” doesn’t just make it harder for liberal experts to stress-test their economic or sociological theories. It also makes it harder for them to recognize when liberalism writ large is going off the rails.

Finally, it’s a mistake to assume that institutions of expertise can’t generate their own deep and potent forms of paranoia, that being the party of meritocracy and talent and intelligence means that you’re immune to tinfoil-hat conceits. One of the important phenomena that’s emerged as Western societies have become polarized between meritocrats and populists is a kind of paranoia of the center, a belief that Western liberalism is on the ropes primarily because of malign string-pulling by illiberal actors: that disinformation artists in Eastern European basements are responsible for populism’s appeal, that you can blame Vladimir Putin’s influence rather than the failings of Western leadership for contemporary discontents.

Mostly this strain of tinfoil hattery manifests itself in overheated essays and schemes to regulate free speech. But based on what we know of him so far, the man allegedly responsible for the year’s second assassination attempt on former President Trump appears to be a case study in how the anxieties of the establishment can attract or attach themselves to the genuinely disturbed, how ideas that emphatically belong to the center rather than the fringe — save Ukraine, defend Western democracy — can still inspire paranoid and radical and violent behavior.

That inspiration is not itself a case against those ideas: Good causes no less than bad ones can be taken up by disturbed individuals. But it is a warning to a liberalism that imagines that having crankish enemies supplies some kind of immunity to extremism or folly. There is no such guarantee: You can have Kennedy as your political adversary and still discover, too late, that extremism in the defense of centrism can also be a vice.