Walker Percy once said: “A good title should be like a good metaphor; it should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.” Assuming this is true, Too Dumb to Fail might just be the perfect title for my forthcoming book about overcoming the problems facing conservatism.

On one level, it’s an allusion to Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail, about the financial crisis of 2008. (Both stories involve moral hazards and perverse incentives leading individuals to make decisions that are rational for their own short-term self-interest, but toxic in terms of the long-term health of the nation.)

But if critics were to try to poke holes in the Too Dumb to Fail premise (and let’s assume they will), they would point out that the individuals most responsible for our current plight (Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and—to a lesser extent—[crscore]Ted Cruz[/crscore]) are all highly intelligent and credentialed.

I don’t think I need to relate the academic accomplishments of Trump, Carson, or Cruz to establish that these are incredibly bright men. But while it might seem ironic that the candidates pushing a form of dumbed-down populism are Ivy leaguers, it’s really nothing new. As Richard Hofstadter observed in his 1963 classic Anti-intellectualism in American Life, “[T]he leading anti-intellectuals are usually men deeply engaged with ideas.”

And so, a confession is in order: The word “dumb” is but a shortcut.

What we really need in a leader isn’t merely someone who is smart —we need someone who possesses attributes like wisdom, discipline, humility, and prudence.

In Intellectuals and Society, Thomas Sowell put it thus: “The opposite of intellect is dullness or slowness, but the opposite of wisdom is foolishness, which is far more dangerous.”

Too Foolish to Fail just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

So how might a deficiency in these virtues lead intelligent people to say and do dumb things in the political realm? A recent post on ScienceBlogs sought to explain the disparity between Dr. Ben Carson’s brilliance as a neurosurgeon and his lack of brilliance on the campaign trail.

One hypothesis involves the Dunning-Kruger effect:

This is a phenomenon in which humans with low expertise in a subject tend to overestimate their expertise in the subject and exhibit undue confidence in that expertise—in marked contrast to real experts, who tend to underestimate their expertise on the subject and acknowledge a lot more uncertainty because, well, they know the limits of their knowledge. Physicians tend to be very prone to the Dunning-Kruger  effect.

The theory here is that doctors are susceptible to a sort of “God” complex, whereby they wrongly assume their brilliance is transferable to other domains. If this is true of some doctors, then it might be especially true of a world-class surgeon.

The ScienceBlogs post cites another possible phenomenon known as motivated reasoning, “in which attacks on people’s beliefs result in their clinging to them more tightly and where facts and evidence are used not to find the truth but to protect pre-existing views…it is often very intelligent people who are the most vocal proponents of pseudoscience.” (Earlier, I noted that one of the virtues we should look for in a leader is humility. That’s partly because a little introspection and self-skepticism can help you avoid this phenomenon.)

The other day, I noted that Bobby Jindal failed at “playing dumb.” My theory is that the highly intelligent Jindal’s pandering felt inauthentic because it was inauthentic. He feared he was too smart to win, and so, he was playing a game. Conversely, the current populists who are prospering on the Right are either a) better at playing the game with no sense of shame (Donald Trump?), or b) people who truly believe their own rhetoric—possibly due to psychological phenomena such as the Dunning-Kruger effect (Ben Carson?) or motivated reasoning (Ted Cruz?).

The “best and brightest” don’t always make the best leaders. Voters who are looking for a wise leader who supports prudent policies would do well to remember that the best president of my lifetime, Ronald Reagan, graduated with a “C” average from Eureka College.

* * *
Pre-order Matt’s book ‘Too Dumb to Fail,’ follow him on Twitter and Facebook, and download his podcast on iTunes.