Writing about the totalitarian tendencies of modernism a few weeks ago, Donald Pittenger observed:

...it might be almost a given that bright people with well-articulated worldviews and idea systems have a greater than average tendency to want to see to it that the rest of the world buys into their positions. I have to conclude that it's one more aspect of human nature...

I think there's more to it than that. A lot of highly intelligent people with big ideas want the world follow those ideas only because they are wrong. Take a guy with high intelligence and good reasoning ability but poor social skills. He thinks he's smarter than most other people and therefore understands the world better than them. He's right about the first part but dead wrong about the second - he's terrible at observing what happens in the interactions between other people and so he has little clue about how society actually works. He takes his crappy observational data and processes it in his mighty brain. The result is, of course, garbage in and garbage out.

Now we have an intelligent guy with a set of completely wrong ideas about the world. Regular folk - both those of lower intelligence and the intelligent people who spend their time doing more useful things - don't much care for what he has to say. The nerd gets more and more frustrated and eventually "discovers" that the problem with the world is that it's run by people who aren't lacking in social skills and don't much care for the opinions of nerds. Some of these people are every bit as smart as him, but luckily for our nerd he can still declare them "shallow", "soulless", "superficial" or perhaps even "sinister" and feel he is better than them. This belief that the world should be ruled by intelligent people with poor social skills doesn't have an official name, but we can call it nerdocracy.

This is the process and spirit behind all sorts of idiocy from rightist dorks who like to dress up like medieval warriors and hit each other with swords while complaining about how the modern world isn't violent enough and doesn't allow them to "settle scores like men" to left-wing modernist architects who still haven't given up on the idea of enlightening and improving humanity by avoiding decoration.