Elon Musk is America’s dumbest smart person
Roger Kimball
Anyone who has perambulated through the groves of academe has encountered dumb smart people. They are clever, intellectually nimble, but they lack what Aristotle called φρόνησις and what the rest of us call “street smarts” or “practical wisdom.”
In academia, dumb smart people often appear to be merely quaint or eccentric. In the realm of politics, they appear first as an exciting novelty, then as a destructive if naive force, cynically manipulated by the very people they hoped to replace.
In 1992, the billionaire Ross Perot epitomized the dumb smart political actor when he ran as an Independent candidate against George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He pretended to provide an alternative to both Bush and Clinton. In reality, Perot guaranteed Clinton’s victory. That eventuality was something any canny observer could have predicted at the time. But a combination of starry-eyed Perot supporters and Machiavellian Democrats, who understood that supporting Perot was a vote for Clinton, concealed that harsh calculation beneath a patina of pseudo-idealism.
The summer of 2025 has witnessed the advent of a new dumb smart political actor in the person of my favorite African American, Elon Musk. Over the last couple of months, Musk has metamorphosed from an avid supporter of Donald Trump into a petulant and irascible opponent. At first, the break seemed like a temporary spat, as both Musk and Trump lunged and parried, smote and then retreated.
But now Musk is on the verge, or past the verge, of attempting to create a third political party, the America party, to challenge the long-running pas de deux of Democrats and Republicans.
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