Hanania On Populism

I liked Richard Hanania’s two prior books, but less like his new third one, Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster. (“Kakistocracy” means rule by the worst, least qualified, or most unprincipled.)

I accept Hanania’s core claim, which is that, all else equal, political factions whose supporters are less elite tend to govern less well. Robustly, elites tend to be smarter, better informed, better organized, and to more follow local norms and laws. Yes, there are exceptions, and Hanania tries hard to list many of them. Even so, beware populists.

All of which I would have easily accepted based on a few pages of argument and data. Not that I would have then agreed with all his political stances. We can generate many other plausible “all else equal” political presumptions, like prefer smarter more honest more experienced candidates, and prefer bigger parties, those of your associates, and those with clearer track records. We can also identify many particular cases where elites seem to induce worse outcomes.

So what then is the point of a whole book on this one claim? Maybe Hanania wants to recruit readers to share his particular political stance. Except he doesn’t offer a party, a wing of a party, or even particular candidates, for them to support. So I guess a more plausible theory is that he wants to justify his stance, which he sees as unusual and thus vulnerable to criticism:

Right-­wing concerns about issues like DEI and the handling of Covid were completely justified. Yet I could not ignore that the Trump movement over time came to be dominated by epistemological nihilism, open bigotry, authoritarianism, and an embrace of conspiracy theories. Some of my values stayed the same, while others changed. I realized that being obsessed with race and gender issues is the other side of the coin of wokeness, and leads to a zero-­sum view of the world and policy ideas that make society as a whole worse off. I came to see my embrace of white identitarianism in my early years as a kind of mental derangement, yet it was one that had largely taken over the American right.

In which case, fine, I’ll count him has having justified his unusual political stance to the world, at least as much as most such stances are ever justified. But as much as I like Hanania, and found his other books insightful, I am just not that interested in which particular political candidates and parties I should have supported in each particular time and place. I guess I’m not that political.

More interesting to me is the key question of his Chapter 3:

Why does populism seem to have been gaining a foothold in one country after another over the past two decades?

Hanania largely rejects as explanations objective elite failure and increasing salience of immigration. He’s more sympathetic to tech change stories. He mentions Gurri’s theory that new tech let people see more elite details, which looked worse than they had expected. But he prefers the idea that tech let people explore and develop ideas that elites had blocked.

Hanania is most sympathetic to:

Revolutions and transformative political movements tend to occur in waves, driven by the contagious power of ideas and the examples of prior or contemporary upheavals.

But this just predicts correlated changes, not a recent trend toward populism per se. Re predicting that trend, I still put substantial weight on a toward-forager trend due to cultural drift.