Social media gave us "government by the worst"

Reflections on Hanania's Kakistocracy

I just read Richard Hanania’s new book Kakistocracy, which tries to explain the rise of populism and describe its fatal dangers, alongside some supposed short-run benefits it might have (at least outside the developed world).

I want to use the book as a launching pad for my own take on populism, which aligns closely to how Hanania thinks about the phenomenon. Before doing that, however, I can’t but at least briefly touch on his ideological past first. If you’re a center-left liberal like me, you must think Hanania’s radical-right past is insane and abhorrent. I certainly do. And that’s not for the silly reasons some of my fellow ideological travelers might adduce, like him merely affirming the overall reality of behavioral genetics, IQ, or evolutionary psychology. If you’re not wholly beholden to activism and are in touch with empirical evidence, you don’t deny these in a general sense.

If anything, genuine and level-headed leftist sensitivity to inequality and a concern with egalitarianism and social justice are wholly consistent with accepting the real constraints and push factors associated with biology or intelligence. See The Genetic Lottery by the progressive Kathryn Harden, The Cult of Smart by the communist Fredrik de Boer, The Darwinian Left by the liberal Peter Singer, or Behave and Determined by Robert Sapolsky.

No. What rightly freaks you out is that Hanania’s past is simply a slew of racist and misogynist cringe, outright genetic (group) determinism, and other extremely misguided things that might seem edgy and cool to male adolescents but are actually some combination of wrong, immoral, and outright dangerous. And it’s not just you or me. Perhaps surprisingly, he himself states much the same in the book, noting that he, quote, “hates” and is “ashamed” of his past.

I must also admit from the get-go that though I like how critical he’s become of low-information illiberals of all stripes (but especially MAGA), I also still can’t at all understand his incredibly misguided decision to support Trump over Harris in 2024. If you’re interested, he tries explaining it here.

I think I first came across his name in 2020, when I read his WaPo piece on the likelihood of civil war in America. That was before his terrible past was revealed. In the piece, he said that despite what we might feel in our gut, a civil war in the modern US is virtually unthinkable if we go by the available quantitative evidence. The article was basically a breezy academic literature review. No shock-jock posturing, no caustic rhetoric, and certainly no racism or misogyny. To my mind, it was a delight to read, with a surprisingly high information density for a random column. I wholeheartedly agreed with his evidence-based take and am happy to report that, 6 years later, there’s been no civil war in the US, despite everyone being convinced at the time that the end was nigh. “If only more columnists wrote like that,” I thought to myself at the time.

There are other things I could say, but I’m more interested in whether the influential things he says today about populism are as measured and true as his 2020 WaPo piece was.

Populism writ large

Usually, we define political populism as basing itself on the Manichean division of society into “pure people” and “corrupt elites.” Populists are also illiberal in the sense that they might embrace the electoral part of democracy (this is, after all, how the “pure people” can express their will in the first place) but they absolutely reject and despise the liberal part of democracy. That is, they don’t like the rule of law (allegedly wielded by unaccountable “corrupt elites”) and the separation of powers, which only complicate and stifle a ruler’s immediate will and thus prevent him – it virtually always is a him – from benevolently channeling the will of the “pure people” whom he allegedly represents.

Hanania broadens this somewhat. He wants to go beyond a purely political definition of populism. As he puts it,

Yes, there are populist and nonpopulist political leaders. But there are also populist and nonpopulist media sources, talk-show hosts, sellers of medical and nutritional products, and forms of entertainment.

For him, populism is a more general anti-elitist sentiment, where the “out-of-touch” elites are understood as those (usually higher-educated) people who are embedded in established societal institutions, such as universities, professional boards, mainstream media, and perhaps legacy non-government organizations. Importantly, elites need not be rich or politically powerful on this view. What’s key is that they get their status from the mentioned long-standing institutions and attendant peer recognition. Populists, on the other hand, strive to get their status by rejecting and denigrating mainstream institutions and by constructing a more direct relationship with a (usually not as educated) mass audience.

This is why it makes sense to call not only Trump or Orban populist, but to use the appellation as well for non-politicians like Joe Rogan and RFK, or Tucker Carlson and Gary Stevenson.

Incorrect explanations for the populists’ rise

Pundits, including some scholars, incorrectly believe that Trump, Orban, and other populists rose to power (or at least in prominence) over the past 2 decades primarily because voters correctly perceived the failure of the political establishment to deliver on the goods.

The story goes something like this. Our legacy political elites, who are/were supportive of liberal democracy, neoliberalism, globalization, and less restrictive immigration policies, have thereby enriched themselves immensely while bringing us devastation in the form of collapsing working-class communities, exploding and unstopping income and wealth inequality, decades of stagnating living standards, and the infiltration of untold numbers of immigrants, who are now responsible for a serious increase in crime across societies. Many voters correctly perceived this with their own eyes and responded by punishing the ruling elites. They withdrew their support and turned instead to (mostly right-wing) populists who were telling them the exact same thing: our communities are collapsing, incomes are stagnating, immigrants are corrupting our societies, and economists and other experts know nothing.

The story continues by admitting that perhaps these populists alternatives don’t necessarily have all the solutions and could themselves be terrible (like Trump), but at least they are in lock-step with the people and their preferences, are not lying to the people (like the old political establishment did), and are not supportive of disastrous liberal or neoliberal policies.

I think that’s virtually completely false at every turn. That is:

1. It isn’t true that legacy political elites have presided over societal failure. It isn’t true that neoliberalism and globalization have wrecked Western societies (or countries across the globe).

2. It isn’t true that, within the past 2 decades, income and wealth inequalities have just kept going up and up and up everywhere.

3. Nor have real incomes stagnated for the vast majority of people anywhere in the world.

4. It’s also not true that voters (especially populist voters) are correctly perceiving the broader social reality they are a part of.

5. Nor is it at all clear that those voters who have objectively seen the least progress or witnessed the highest inequality or had been hurt (by losing their jobs, say) or live in countries/regions where the immigrant influx has been the strongest are disproportionately more likely to vote populist.

Hanania more or less agrees with all that. Drawing on a 2025 Ipsos poll, he even says that subjective (as opposed to objective) grievances are not likely behind the rise of populism. I’m not completely sure about that. I think we actually do have some evidence that subjective economic grievances play a role in populism, one Ipsos poll notwithstanding. One key instance about which I’ll write a longer post is inequality. Research shows, and I have myself found, that though objective inequality measures don’t predict populist voting, subjective perceptions of inequality (which are often wrong, by the way, and don’t correlate well with objective measures) are fairly okay predictors of populism.

In any case, here’s a just simple throw-away scatterplot with the “system is broken” variable from the Ipsos report Hanania leans on. This doesn’t really tell us anything, but it is a surface-level corroboration of his idea that even subjective grievance isn’t necessarily linked with populism. Like I said, more, better, and more fine-grained data complicates this picture and suggests subjective grievance plays a role.

At the same time, he notes that in terms of stated values, mass publics and parliamentarians (at least in Europe) actually do diverge when it comes to immigration. So, he intimates, a possible mechanism for defusing some of the attractiveness of populism might be hiding in there. I’m actually not sure how much parliamentarians could do to defuse it simply by toning down their values regarding immigration. That’s because mass publics (and especially populist voters) are ignorant of many relevant facts about immigration or are actively misinformed. So it can’t all just be a discrepancy in values; it’s that voters, especially populist ones, tend to live in an alternate reality as far as immigration is concerned.

A better explanation

Hanania’s preferred explanation is basically communications technology. That might sound too simple, but I think it’s actually right. In fact, I’m convinced that any explanation of populism that doesn’t put changes in the information ecosystem front and center is not really trying to explain the phenomenon.

The old, gate-kept media had one enormous advantage, which is that it imposed a tax on crankery. If you wanted to reach a mass audience, you generally had to pass through institutions that, however flawed, cared at least somewhat about whether you were obviously insane and whether you could be embarrassed by evidence. That’s no longer true. Just think of the Joe Rogan Experience, Bret Weinstein’s The Dark Horse podcast, or Tucker Carlson’s show, or Candace Owens, or any of the other dozens and dozens of incredibly popular but ludicrous political podcasters out there.

Unfortunately, the internet, podcasts, YouTube, X, TikTok, and the rest of the decentralized media ecosystem have made it possible for anyone to reach a mass audience directly. In many ways, this can be cool. For one thing, I wouldn’t have this Substack before the internet. But the democratization of speech came with a serious downside, which is that it allowed people to build status not by being right, or careful, or respected by competent peers, but just by being compelling to a mass audience. And the mass audience does not, on average, reward boring truth. It rewards gossip, moral panicking, and conspiracy theories.

So people are just irrational? No.

Thing is, people in real life don’t typically fall for this bullshit. Though many perhaps indulge in conspiracy theories because they seem fun to them, or whatever, I maintain most people don’t really take them seriously. To understand this, consider Hugo Mercier and Sacha Altay’s distinction between reflective and intuitive beliefs.

Some beliefs are linked to action. If I think the pan is burning hot, I keep my hand away. Perhaps more importantly, if an ordinary person thinks a real child is trapped nearby, they call someone to intervene or even try to help themselves. These are what Mercier and Altay call intuitive beliefs. But other beliefs are more like accepted propositions and stories one is willing to endorse. People say “yes, I believe that” without letting the claim guide their actual perception and costly action. These are reflective beliefs. They are not necessarily consciously dishonest, but they are in important part insulated from the rest of practical cognition.

Here’s a good example:

Consider the belief in the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy theory, according to which high-level Democrats were sexually abusing children in the basement of a restaurant from the suburbs of Washington D.C. Although, according to polls, millions of Americans endorsed this conspiracy, for the overwhelming majority of them holding this horrendous misbelief appeared to have little or no consequence.

The exceptions are notable. One individual--who might have held the belief intuitively--stormed the restaurant and demanded at gunpoint that the children be freed. By contrast, all other behavioral responses consisted in expressive behaviors, such as posting negative reviews of the restaurant. Such behavior would be completely incongruous if the belief were held intuitively (imagine having seen pictures of children being abused in a restaurant, and reacting by posting a one star review of the place).

We have thus, for everyone but maybe the lone individual who tried to free the supposed victims, either no consequences from the belief, or consequences that would not follow if the belief were held intuitively. This suggests that the vast majority of those who endorsed Pizzagate did so reflectively. Note that doing so shielded these individuals from nearly all costly consequences from holding that belief, by contrast with the single individual who might have held it intuitively, and who served a multi-year jail sentence.

Like I said, in an important sense, most people don’t really believe the bullshit they spew or enjoy listening to on a podcast – they “believe” in it like they believe in WWE (wrestling). It’s fun make-believe. Unfortunately, when it comes to voting, where you’re shielded from the costly consequences of your beliefs (on account of your own vote not counting for much), conspiracy theories and misbeliefs can flourish. And when lots of voters act on them in this “safe” environment, crazy people get elected despite the fact that from your own individual perspective, voting on the basis of such belief was not dangerous and costly. And then you get insanity the likes of Brexit or Trump.

So, the general theory I’m imagining goes something like the following.

1. Though most people are not detached from reality in their ordinary lives, and can’t easily be duped where and when it counts, there are always a few in any population who are either grifters or just a bit crazy-leaning.

2. Nowadays (but not in the past), the voices of some of these outliers are able to get out to the public via podcasting and social media, namely, the fall of the gate-keepers.

3. Many ordinary people hear these salacious, inane ideas and conspiracies, and quite a few adopt them reflectively (though not intuitively). They tend to be entertaining, after all. As a result, these listeners go on with their lives normally and don’t reap the costly consequences of holding the aforementioned crazy beliefs. (They’re too rational for that. It’s mostly just bar-room talk and entertainment. Just think of the following examples: despite so much misinformation, most Americans absolutely did get the Covid vaccine, and they happily use 5G technology every day!)

4. However, when it comes time to vote, many act on these very same misbeliefs, which they might discount in everyday life, where they’d carry costly consequences with them (like, again, not being able to use your 5G phone). From an individual voter’s perspective, nothing bad will happen when you are “owning the libs” at the voting booth - which is true, individually speaking!

5. But because millions of people act this way, something bad does happen in the end; something bad that couldn’t have been prevented by an individual voter who valiantly resisted his podcaster-bro opinions. So why not indulge them? It’s a classic social dilemma. As long as people have the ability to listen to crazies online, and there’s a healthy supply of politicians willing to capitalize on this, weird things will happen at the voting booth.

The above sketch is how I square my acceptance of a broad version of rational choice theory with the irrationality of so many (populist) voters, while also working in the fact that the internet, and especially social media and the decline of legacy media, are key in unleashing populism.

One skeptical reply might be that, though theoretically elegant, this “rational irrationality” explanation for populist voters doesn’t work in the real world. That is, even if it’s true that an individual voter’s vote has an infinitesimal chance of affecting anything, the majority of voters probably don’t know it’s true but instead wrongly (but causally efficaciously) think that their vote matters immensely. If so, the whole explanatory edifice collapses.

I take the objection seriously in principle, but I don’t think I wholly buy it, primarily because we have studies which indicate that, actually, only a small minority of voters wrongly believe their vote is likely to be decisive, while half or more than half correctly know it’s very unlikely they’re going to count for much. Here are the results from one:

Respondents were asked what the chances were that the outcome would be decided by a single vote, and four response categories were offered: ‘very high’, ‘somewhat high’, ‘somewhat low’ or ‘very low’.

The modal response in both provinces was ‘very low’, this was chosen by 48% of respondents in Quebec and 59% in BC. However, another 22% of Quebeckers and 15% of British Columbians said the chances were ‘very high’ or ‘somewhat high’.

The scourge of populism

There’s other stuff in the book, like whether populism might work better in the developing world, where Hanania brings in El Salvador’s Bukele and Argentina’s Milei. Here, I wholeheartedly agree with what Scott Sumner laid out in his review. I have nothing to add.

I think we really do need an expansive definition of populism that goes beyond the standard poli-sci term. In that vein, if you’re interested in how populism fails when it comes to its critique of mainstream economics, check out this post of mine. And click the one below if you want a takedown of populist ideas as applied to anti-capitalism: