The man mentions Donald Trump and Ben Carson.

Beyond their outsider status and populist appeal, those are very different men. What do they have in common? Besides gaining much of their electoral support with vapid rhetoric, they are both winners in realms more meritocratic than politics––unlike, say, Jeb Bush––and share at least one substantive quality: Both seem like world-weary pragmatists averse to utopianism, at least in comparison to their rivals.

They’d make terrible presidents and a lot of what they say is factually incorrect.

Still, one is a man of business, the other a man of science. Both say the Iraq War was a mistake. And they do so without the ideological priors of Rand Paul, who gives the impression, to supporters and opponents alike, of having his own starry-eyed streak.

To me, Ted Cruz gives off the impression of being an ideologue and fits less easily with this theory. Perhaps Linker had the man in the barbershop pegged correctly after all.

But if writing an essay rather than ranting off-the-cuff, the man might say that what drives him crazy isn’t liberals who want a bigger safety net so much as utopianism. He might say he actually supports Social Security and food stamps, but that the more he considers it, the more he believes that many problems are rooted in fanciful thinking and the string of establishment politicians engaged in it.

I certainly see such an impulse in other rank-and-file conservatives.

They now think that a utopian streak in George W. Bush’s foreign policy, with its wild notions of ending tyranny and installing democracy in Baghdad, wrought disasters, and that any future attempts at “nation-building” would produce similarly dismal results.

They think that the financial crisis would never have happened if the ruling class wouldn’t have pushed this utopian notion that everyone ought to own a house, that this would be possible if only the government created incentives to lend them money, and that “financial innovations” could somehow turn subprime assets into gold, a theory that Wall Street bankers and regulators alike seemed to share at the time.

They think the idea that everyone should go to college is equally naive, especially if young people think that borrowing $200,000 to get a communications degree from a third-tier private college will or should guarantee them entry to the upper-middle class. And they think it’s naive to believe that competing more directly against laborers in China or new immigrants to America won’t harm their chances at success, no matter how many economists from the utopian class tell them otherwise.

No worldview is perfect. And I have my disagreements with this one. I believe, for example, that as counterintuitive as the economics may seem to many, free trade and immigration really do make the United States and the world much better off.