Americans are beginning to truly panic about AI — but not President Donald Trump. “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” he wrote this week on Truth Social. The same day, he called into a technology summit and dismissed concerns about AI as a “hoax.”
Trump’s emergence as a vocal champion of data centers and AI is, at some level, a weird development. In his untroubled stance, he sounds like the type of pro-business, laissez-faire Republican he vanquished a decade ago. It’s a grievous moral mistake and maybe — given the rising fear and anger about AI among rank-and-rile voters — a political one, too.
Not so long ago, the GOP was dominated by the pro-technology, pro-business version of conservatism that was a logical byproduct of Ronald Reagan’s sunny disposition. That general optimism about the future followed in the tradition of the conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter, who, in 1942, proposed his theory of “creative destruction.” The basic idea was that when an industry (think the horse-and-buggy maker) disappears, it results in more jobs in some newly created line of work.
But there was a dueling strain in mid-20th-century conservatism — one that was pessimistic about technology and innovation, based on concerns that it would radically alter traditional culture. The modern father of this line of thinking was arguably the conservative philosopher Russell Kirk. Among his many eccentricities, Kirk refused to drive an automobile, calling it a “mechanical Jacobin.” The car, he thought, would fracture walkable communities, tear apart the traditional social order and separate people from their ancestral lands.
The irony is that cars eventually became symbols and engines of freedom, independence and individualism — values that are core components of modern conservatism. Today, when you hear Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro disagree over whether a person should leave their struggling town in search of a new job and a better life, you know that the tension between these different versions of conservatism remains alive and well.
Over the years, I generally cast my lot with the sunnier strain of conservatism. I was optimistic about, among other things, “the end of history,” Chinese democracy and race relations. Many of Kirk’s philosophical descendants — with their fear-mongering about a NAFTA superhighway or the proposed-but-never-built Trans-Texas Corridor — struck me as paranoid and conspiracy-minded.
A general faith in technology was a core part of my optimistic outlook. Tech, I thought, was philosophically neutral, and could even have a conservative impact. Case in point: The ultrasound (people seeing pictures of their “baby” and then sharing it on Facebook) was more responsible for changing hearts and minds on abortion than any speech given by an activist or law written by a politician.
More broadly, I liked how, say, the iPhone empowered rugged individuals to take control of their own fate — and reject big government. The guy who uses his smartphone to summon an Uber, purchase baseball or concert tickets on StubHub, and manage his stock portfolio is probably not likely to support Washington managing his Social Security account. Not for long, anyway.
I also liked how the early incarnations of the blogosphere and social media were democratizing our politics, helping normal citizens to play a greater role in the virtual town square, empowering journalists to circumvent those pesky (usually liberal) gatekeepers in big media, and allowing politicians to crowdsource their funding, thereby bypassing lobbyists and oligarchs. To be fair, my naivete didn’t last all that long; I figured out about a decade ago that Twitter wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. But in the early, heady days (circa 2008), I was nothing short of a Twitter evangelist.
Why were so many conservatives my age so susceptible to tech utopianism? Was it a product of our youth? Or maybe just wishful thinking? I think the answer actually has a lot to do with recency bias. I grew up during an era when free markets and liberal democracy were becoming the world’s default operating system. We won the Cold War, after all, by outproducing and out-innovating the enemy.
For much of my life, libertarian-rooted optimism about technology and progress appeared to serve America well. It didn’t seem crazy to assume that this would continue. Think of the famous 1980 wager between economist and optimist Julian Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich (author of “The Population Bomb”), which was effectively about whether overpopulation would lead to more innovation or more scarcity around the world. Simon won the bet.
Now, however, a lot of us are inching back toward a more Kirkian view of progress and technology. We’re not necessarily pessimists and we’re perhaps not fully dystopian, but we’re certainly skeptics. And with good reason. As conservative economist Oren Cass put it recently in The New York Times, “Americans no longer trust that technological progress will make life better.” Why? Because “the American people afforded the technologists wide latitude to pursue disruptive innovation, trusting that we would share in the resulting gains. We instead found ourselves exploited.”
In defense of those of us who’ve shifted views: It’s not exactly inconsistent for someone to be bullish on previous innovations yet to simultaneously worry about AI, which is qualitatively different and more troubling than earlier digital technology.
At this point, I’m just not willing to trust Big Tech with my career, my bank account, or my children’s lives, and there are millions of Americans who feel the same. But they also feel disempowered. It’s so hard to stop these developments because nobody is really asking permission to unleash the latest self-training version of AI on your world. And anyone who raises objections — about Flock cameras, about AI, about data centers — is quickly hit with strong pushback. Do you want China to get this technology first? Do you want to stay “backwards and poor”?
This is the exact line of argument being employed by the president of the United States. Instead of validating the very reasonable concerns of Americans — many of whom are conservatives — across the country, he says to just trust him, which implicitly means we have to trust his tech bro pals. We’re being asked, essentially, to ignore what our eyes or ears tell us — and to disregard what one powerful strain of conservative philosophy has to teach in this perilous moment.
We conservative ex-tech utopians have learned a few things in the last decade or so. We’ve learned that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. We’ve learned not to trust the kinds of folks who tell you they want to “make the world a better place” and that their motto is “don’t be evil.” I’d like to think the last few years have made us a bit more cautious, more prudent and, dare I say, more conservative. If only the same could be said for Trump.
Matt K. Lewis is a Washington Sun Perspectives columnist.
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