Tyranny of the Nerds

A rejection of Vivek Ramaswamy's call to celebrate people with weak bodies and prideful minds.

The first epic test for the MAGA coalition arrived the day after Christmas, or, alternately, the day Americans learned to dislike Vivek Ramaswamy. The particulars of the H-1B program are important to understand and it is essential that we reform our legal immigration system. But the more important cultural reality we must discuss is the tyranny of the nerds that we’ve been living under for the past 30 years.

A couple of people on X immediately pointed out that the “smart set” from the predominately foreign cultures Vivek seems to favor brought us the COVID lockdown extravaganza, which was everywhere enforced with more rigor in developed countries outside of America, largely owing to our unique Federal system, our individualist culture, and most importantly our county sheriffs, the last man standing between our citizens and government/corporate COVID overreach.

This lockdown mentality foisted a kind of cultural suicide upon America. The COVID virus—but more importantly the pandemic culture of omnipresent masking, and muscular government enforcement of lockstep, top-down conformity—was exported to the West from Asia in late 2019. While the United States escaped the more tortuous lockdowns imposed in the UK and Australia, our culture is still reeling and our people have yet to fully process what happened—both what happened to them and what they did to their own neighbors—during that time.

Unrepentant Nerd

And so Vivek’s seemingly innocuous post on X, calling for a decidedly more Eastern education for our children, caused a massive scandal on the Right. His call for parents to prioritize math clubs and valedictorian nerd pursuits over American cultural touchstones like Prom Queens, “hanging out at the mall,” “sleepovers,” and “Saturday morning cartoons” landed like a nuclear bomb in the middle of MAGA’s otherwise triumphant post-election celebration.

This reaction is rooted in the Right’s post-COVID rejection of nerd culture. The characteristic trait of the nerd is physical weakness. It is of course possible to be intelligent and physically strong, and Western culture celebrates several intelligent characters in our novels and movies who are smart and physically dominant or smart and physically adventurous: James Bond, Indiana Jones, even Tony Stark, the nerd who invented a stronger robotic body for himself. But the unrepentant nerd—the type Ramaswamy specifically identifies with characters like Steve Urkel and Screech in his post—is characterized by physical weakness. The nerd pursues intellectual greatness at the expense of the body, or sometimes he pursues intellectual strength in lieu of the physical strength denied to him by nature.

Younger rightwing culture has rejected the flaccid, pale physique and even the white collar/cubicle lifestyle and has instead culturally embraced physical health and bodily strength aesthetic. Some of this is due to the changing job prospects for white American males in the corporate and academic job market post-Great Recession, and some of it is a necessary cultural backlash to Boomer/lazyboy diabetes/Costco-hot-dog-special culture.

The young Right’s focus on physical strength is parodied in the lifting and bro-fitness online culture but given more serious consideration in cultural shifts towards the muscular trades, outdoor and even cottage or farm-life aesthetic, and a wholesale rejection of cubicle or “pod” living. This cultural shift has been brewing for the past decade or more, easily observable in “cottage core,” facial hair, Hallmark Christmas Movie plots, and the rise of the Carhartt work clothes aesthetic.

Big Fight on the Right

The most fascinating element of the ascendent MAGA coalition is the uneasy alliance between two incompatible cultures: the older, country club or “chamber of commerce” conservative culture of “I Remember Reagan” bow-tied types, who hold most of the think tanks, Fox News, official party organizations and almost all of the money; and the younger, iconoclast Rightwing intellectuals and upstarts of younger gen X and older millennials who despaired of following the Reagan generation into university or cultural positions of power, embraced New Media and developed their own culture by rebelling against the older, more materially successful Right.

This iconoclast wing of intellectuals joined the Tea Party discontents and rural blue-collar American factions that rose up during the Obama era and immediately embraced Trump’s total destruction of the old GOP.

The untold story of MAGA is the union of younger, rightwing New Media intellectuals and the rural/populist currents of American society, fueled by their shared preference for a more muscular, pastoral, “honest work” aesthetic of American life and culture. This faction was in rebellion against the older Reagan globalist wing in 2016, at war with it from 2020 on, and finally managed to drag the remaining Reaganites it didn’t kill—minus the Cheneys, Bushes, Romneys, McCains and Ryans—across the finish line in 2024.

And so, here we are: we approach the second Trump Administration with a shared goal but vastly different concepts of what American life and culture that is “great again” would look like.

This younger, iconoclast Right has learned to see office culture, corporate life, academic nerds, blue cities and urban culture, and globalization as essential elements of postmodern misery. Sacrificing a social life and much of childhood in a singular determination to become some global corporation’s ideal STEM hire is just about the worst life plan imaginable. They recoil from the late 20th-century vision of American vitality and instead reach back to either the 1950s or even American frontier life for inspiration, picking up the majority of Religious Right conservative voters in the process. There is nothing actually conservative about the iconoclast Right—it wishes to conserve almost nothing actually in existence today—but it LARPs as conservative because its rejection of the 1960s Boomer sexual revolution and also the globalization “End of History” narrative renders it perpetually attracted to the aesthetics and culture of a more muscular, populist, religious and outdoorsy American past.

In 2015, one could easily predict where a given rightwing intellectual, pundit, or party operative stood on the Trump question by the measure of success he had achieved under the party apparatus of the Reagan era. Those who had done well and had achieved a lot of power, influence, and money in the old GOP rightly saw Trump as the destroyer of their honor and, in some cases, their meal tickets.

There were of course a few exceptions of successful people on the Right who saw what Trump had to offer the not-as-successful American rural and blue collar voter, and who were able to value or at least acknowledge that reality, and these people deserve honor and praise. But most of the GOP power structure and nearly all of its intellectuals rejected Trump, then sought to help the Left prosecute him into oblivion, and then finally acquiesced to Trump as a fact of life once they despaired of the Left’s success in removing him.

But this older GOP power structure and governing philosophy is not going to relinquish its vision of American vitality, which is irrevocably tied to a Bush-era understanding of the kinds of jobs “Americans want” and the kinds of jobs we are happy to outsource to others. Roughly, management and white-collar jobs are to be kept in America, and manufacturing, forestry, mining, farming and all physical labor is to be outsourced to countries and cultures “willing to do jobs that Americans won’t do.”

The nerd is, of course, above such work, even as his physical abilities fall short of it.

Despite its rebellious and iconoclast path to political dominance, I think a solid majority of the MAGA movement is truly conservative in this sense: we would like to return to a scrappier American lifestyle where young people can make their own way in the trades, in physical work, and in jobs neither dominated by corporate culture nor easily replaced by immigrants—legal or illegal. When one considers the broader cultural trends post-COVID, it is clear that our young people are lurching towards a more muscular and outdoorsy American ideal, and away from the Matrix-inspired, multicultural indoorsy tech chic aesthetic of the aughts, which morphed seamlessly into the metrosexual and skinny jeans culture of the Great Recession and pre-MAGA era. The Trump campaign’s alliance with both J.D. Vance and RFK are an acknowledgment of this change. Vivek’s celebration of the nerd ideal ran afoul of it.

An End to the Ascendant Nerd

I believe that it is possible for people who come from nothing to earn a lot of money and social status in America, but the “Old Money” and “Generational Wealth” cultural trends I see everywhere on social media clearly reveal a pivot in America’s understanding of itself. We have evolved from a country of obstinate makers and resilient individualists to a more communal understanding of wealth, simply because so many young people see inherited money as their only means of making it.

The disconnect is further represented in our art and film and even our street style and aesthetic trends. The older GOP enjoys wealth and status acquired under a different system with different rules: less student loan debt, greater job prospects and less global competition overall. Much of America’s current cultural discontent arises from our young people’s inability to access or even understand that now-closed pathway to material success. Even if one concedes that many of these same disenfranchised young people will eventually inherit the vast accumulated wealth of their elders, a culture of inherited wealth is very different from a culture of earned, first-generation wealth. It is less confident, less scrappy, and less American.

For 30 years, the ascendent nerd in American work and lifestyle has shaped our culture. The physical work and muscular trades idealized by the young Right, in part because of these industries’ perceived immunity to globalization and outsourcing, are still shunned as low-class and undesirable—even unAmerican—by our older conservative allies. These industries are needlessly disadvantaged by America’s immigration system and strangled by our environmental and regulatory policies.

The dispute over H-1B visas on the Right illustrates the essential fight of this generation: the struggle to determine what kind of country, and specifically what kind of work culture we aspire to as Americans. Ramaswamy’s call to American parents to celebrate the weak-bodied, socially compliant nerd—which other countries produce with assembly-line abundance—at the expense of the popular, strong, yet underemployed and generally ungovernable jock—which they do not—displays each side and its objectives for all to see.