The Real Crisis in America: Who’s Running the Country While the Smartest Americans Check Out

Walk through any startup hub in Austin, San Francisco, or Miami, and you’ll meet some of the brightest people on the planet. Twenty-something engineers building billion-dollar AI companies. Scientists pushing the edge of biotech. Finance wizards pulling in hedge fund returns most Americans can’t fathom. The modern elite in America isn’t in Washington—they’re in labs, venture studios, and trading floors.

And that’s the problem.

Because while the best minds of a generation are working on how to make the next ChatGPT or how to shave milliseconds off financial trades, guess who’s running Congress? Not them. Not the builders. Not the scientists. Not the inventors. It’s the professional political class—mostly liberal lawyers, career activists, and consultants who’ve never built a single business in their lives.

That asymmetry is the single most important political fact of our era. The U.S. isn’t short on talent—we’re short on political talent. Our smartest people avoid politics like the plague. They dedicate their lives to money, science, or tech, not to governing. And so we’re left with a Congress run by people who, quite frankly, lack the intellectual horsepower and practical experience to manage the most powerful country on Earth.

The Incentive Problem

Why is this happening? Incentives. If you’re a top graduate from MIT or Stanford, you can walk into a startup and make millions. If you’re a brilliant quantitative mind, Wall Street will shower you in bonuses. If you’re a researcher at the cutting edge of AI or biotech, venture capitalists will line up to fund your ideas.

Compare that to politics. You grind through years of law school or campaign work, raise endless money, and then—if you’re “lucky”—end up as a backbench Congressman making $174,000 a year. Worse, your life is on display, every tweet is a scandal, and you spend half your time dialing donors. For a high-IQ, ambitious person, that’s not a rational career choice.

So they opt out. They chase markets, not public office. And who fills the vacuum? The ideological left. The liberal machine has a monopoly on politics because they’re the only ones who still want the job.

The Monopoly of Mediocrity

This is why Congress feels so mediocre. It’s not just partisanship or corruption. It’s a talent drain. Imagine if half of our best engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs actually ran for office. Imagine if Elon Musk or Patrick Collison or Jensen Huang had decided to build public institutions instead of companies. Do you think we’d still be running trillion-dollar deficits? Do you think our immigration system would be this broken? Do you think America would be stumbling into every foreign war like a drunk sailor?

No. We’d have people who understand systems, who know how to optimize, who can think in decades not days. Instead, we get lawyers arguing over soundbites, lobbyists writing the bills, and a permanent ruling class whose main qualification is “knowing how to win elections.”

And make no mistake: this isn’t just about ideology. Conservatives complain, rightly, that liberals dominate the bureaucracy. But even if we had more conservatives in office, the problem would remain: they’re just not the best and brightest. They’re not our A-team. The A-team is in Silicon Valley or Wall Street, not in Washington.

Why Liberals Win

Liberals thrive in this environment because their worldview fits the structure. Progressives don’t care if government is bloated—they feed on it. They don’t care if politics is full of career hacks—that’s their farm system. For them, the game is power, not progress.

Meanwhile, conservatives and independent thinkers—the people more likely to build, innovate, and think outside the box—go into business, not politics. They’d rather start a company than join a committee. And so, structurally, the left has a monopoly on the levers of government.

This is why policy debates feel so skewed. It’s not just media bias. It’s not just deep-state inertia. It’s that liberals literally have the people. They have the human capital in government. Conservatives have the human capital in markets. And in politics, personnel is policy.

The Stakes

Why does this matter? Because politics decides the rules. You can build the best tech company in the world, but if Congress writes regulations that cripple you, you’re finished. You can invent the best energy technology, but if the EPA kneecaps you, it’s worthless. You can build a trillion-dollar crypto ecosystem, but if Treasury bans it, game over.

Right now, the builders are letting the talkers set the rules. And the talkers don’t understand the systems they’re regulating. They don’t even care. They care about ideology, not outcomes.

That’s dangerous. It’s how civilizations decline. Smart people check out of governance, mediocre people fill the vacuum, and the system decays from within. Rome had this problem. So did Venice. We’re repeating it.

What Needs to Change

So how do we fix this? First, we have to make politics attractive to talented people again. That doesn’t mean just higher salaries. It means reducing the endless fundraising treadmill. It means building a culture that respects political service instead of ridiculing it. It means showing builders that politics isn’t just for lawyers and activists—that it’s a legitimate arena for serious problem-solvers.

Second, conservatives need to recruit talent directly from the tech and business world. Stop waiting for the “natural leaders” to appear. Go find the 35-year-old AI engineer or the biotech founder and convince them to run for office. Make it as prestigious to be a Senator as it is to be a startup CEO.

Finally, we need to strip power from the permanent bureaucracy. If smart people won’t run for office, at least decentralize. Push more power back to states, to local communities, to markets. Don’t let Washington be the only game in town.

Conclusion

America doesn’t lack intelligence. We lack political intelligence. We’ve built a system where the smart people build apps and the mediocre people write laws. Liberals dominate not because their ideas are better, but because they’re the only ones who still want the jobs.

That can’t last. If conservatives want to save the country, if independents want sanity, they must solve the talent drain in politics. Otherwise, the laws will keep getting dumber, the deficits bigger, the wars longer—and the country weaker.

It’s time to ask: what would happen if our best engineers, scientists, and innovators decided to spend a decade in public service? The answer is obvious. We’d have a government worthy of the American people. Until then, we’ll keep living under a Congress that is, quite literally, the C-team.