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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   33449 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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Richard Hanania: Kakistocracy as a Natural Result of Populism

The mad man has done it. He’s stopped listening to anyone who isn’t a complete sycophant or the market, and enacted a tariff policy more extreme than we would have seen under what most thought was the worst case scenario. The formula of “reciprocity” being used is so stupid I approach the topic with awe, and have an almost superstitious feeling that if I even describe it I’ll somehow become stupider myself, though you can read about it here. I don’t think this ship can correct course. The Trump movement has been selecting for loyalty to Trump above all else, and we’re seeing the results. As Vice President Vance said during his trip to Greenland, “we can’t just ignore the president’s desires.”

...

At its best, democracy works by providing feedback to leaders. Government adopts an irrational policy, the market has a reaction, and officials hopefully take that information into account. If a politician runs on an anti-corruption platform but then ends up being more corrupt than his predecessors, that should be discrediting and cost him support.

Yet this entire process requires voters to be connected to reality. If they’re in a fake news bubble, then even the most obvious failures will go unpunished. There have always been a lot of uninformed people who are reflexively partisan. Yet the most successful populist movements in the West overwhelmingly rely on uneducated voters. With some notable exceptions, the general pattern holds across much of the rest of the world. The reigns of Chavez and Maduro have been characterized by concentrated support for the government among the poor, as was that of Bolivian President Evo Morales, whose program appealed disproportionately to rural indigenous communities.

The problem with a less educated support base is that it simply has a less accurate understanding of the world. In fact, I think the problem is much worse than a simple analysis of voting patterns by educational attainment would suggest. Populists not only often fail to appeal to college graduates as a broad class, but they do particularly poorly among the small slice of the public that is the most informed about policy and current events, like journalists and academics.

One of my favorite fun facts from the 2024 presidential election is reflected in the chart below, which I put together based on numbers from Data for Progress. It shows that even when you control for education level, how much someone followed the race was negatively correlated with support for Trump in 2024. In fact, among college voters in particular, the voting gap between those who paid a lot of attention to the election and those who paid little attention was much larger than that between college and non-college educated voters. This dovetails with completely separate surveys showing that conservatives don’t read serious sources of information. One shouldn’t actually need surveys for this, as we can simply look at the almost total absence of popular right-leaning newspapers and magazines with high journalistic and intellectual standards.

...

You sometimes hear people say that they like Trump because they’ve been lied to by Democrats or the press. Joe Rogan, for example, said he was radicalized by misrepresentations made by Tim Walz about his military background: “You’re telling me you don’t care if someone is a liar?” He ended up endorsing Trump, which is sort of like being fed up with religious intolerance and therefore becoming a fan of bin Laden. If you are someone who hates lies, there should be nobody in public life that you find more unbearable than Trump, except perhaps Elon Musk. I have every reason to believe that Rogan and his fans are sincere when they say they recoil from dishonesty. They’re just not plugged into accurate sources of information, and so are poorly equipped to judge who they should be mad at. Or alternatively, they’re simply engaging in motivated reasoning, but being this biased becomes more difficult the more one knows about the world.

Hanania has written about Hating Modern Conservatism While Voting Republican, in the past, but it appears he's close to buyer's remorse (end section of this article). We've had previous discussions about how reality-based Trump's policies are, and Hanania makes a fairly good argument that - except for political loyalty - reality isn't a concern, and that this isn't just true of Trumpism, it's an inherent flaw of populism, in general:

All of this means you should think very carefully about signing on to an anti-establishment movement just because you disagree with the establishment on some things. If you attack elites and their institutions, it’s very unlikely that this will only mean empowering people who agree with you on where they have gone wrong. Tear down the gates in a system that is working relatively well, and you will get liars, morons, grifters, and cranks of all stripes. If a few sensible voices that would otherwise have been censored benefit, they will be a tiny minority. You might find Joe Rogan to be better than the NYT on the trans question, but Rogan’s status rising at the expense of the mainstream media makes the culture dumber on almost every other topic, and any politician who is more plugged in to podcasts than newspapers is likely to make unforeseen mistakes.

The "Trump's tariff agenda is an attempt to create a new Bretton Woods-like system" theory works well enough for me to think it can be judged against reality (specifically, if negotiations with allies for lower rates occur and the administration lays out a financial mechanism for reconciling export-friendly exchange rates and reserve-currency status, that would be strong evidence of a coherent, reality-responsive plan), but perhaps the Trump administration will just continue to tariff manufacturing inputs while claiming to be protecting manufacturing...

Richard Hanania’s whole schthick is ‘republicans are dumb but I’m stuck on the same side of the aisle’. No matter the news of the day, he has to come up with that take.

You should, accordingly, downgrade the weight of evidence of him coming up with that take.

I'm not sure what your point is. Intellectual consistency is... bad? Uninteresting? Something else?

Equivalent to the Pope claiming Catholicism is the one true way. If he wasn't saying that, he wouldn't be the Pope.

Hannia's brand is basically to present himself as the much neglected wiseman that the right should be listening to. Leveraging this self-styled reputation is how he makes money.

I'm not sure how to distinguish this from Hanania having a consistent view and Hanania believing that he is correct. That seems like a standard that would rule out pretty much everybody.

Show examples of him holding to his principles, whatever you propose them to be, in a way that undermines Dean's view of his 'brand'.

I'm sorry, I don't follow the actual criticism here, or what you think I need to prove.

This tangent began with hydroacetylene writing:

Richard Hanania’s whole schthick is ‘republicans are dumb but I’m stuck on the same side of the aisle’. No matter the news of the day, he has to come up with that take.

You should, accordingly, downgrade the weight of evidence of him coming up with that take.

I read this as stating that it is unsurprising that Hanania states things consistent with things that he has stated previously. Well, yes. But this hardly seems to make sense as a criticism of him. Intellectual consistency is not a vice.

This was followed by Dean stating:

Equivalent to the Pope claiming Catholicism is the one true way. If he wasn't saying that, he wouldn't be the Pope.

Hannia's brand is basically to present himself as the much neglected wiseman that the right should be listening to. Leveraging this self-styled reputation is how he makes money.

Again, it's not clear how this is any kind of valid criticism of Hanania - any more than "you're Catholic!" is a valid criticism of the pope. Hanania's articles tend to be consistent with articles that Hanania has written in the past. The pope's statements tend to be consistent with the pope's previous statements. If there's a difference between the two of them, it's that Catholicism is explicitly formalised as an ideology in a way that Hanania-ism is not.

And, yes, Hanania makes money from people paying to read his writing, but I missed the part where that was a criticism.

My objection is that these criticisms prove too much. It's bad when authors give takes consistent with their previous takes? It's bad when authors make money from their writing? These criticisms, if generalised, exclude almost every writer.

Now, to your comment specifically:

Show examples of him holding to his principles, whatever you propose them to be, in a way that undermines Dean's view of his 'brand'.

Yes, Hanania has a financial interest in catering to his readership. This is true of every author who gets paid for their writing, including every Substacker in the world. We do not automatically dismiss all writing on this basis.

I am aware of no compelling reason to believe that Hanania is insincere in the top article here, and at any rate, even if he were, that wouldn't invalidate any of the observations in the article itself.

So I am left very confused at what seems to me to be a desperate and unproductive groping for an ad hominem. What is the point?

Hanania has a narrative he’s selling and every headlines-dominating story has to fit into that narrative.

That doesn’t make the narrative wrong. But it means that example #9000 from Hanania isn’t something we should just trust.

How can that be distinguished from any pundit who has a consistent worldview, though? Certainly we should take all pundits with a grain of salt, but I can't see anything that makes Hanania worse or less trustworthy than any comparable pundit. Scott Alexander has a bunch of narratives that he's selling - rationalism, effective altruism, AI nonsense. Freddie deBoer has a bunch of narratives he's selling - Marxism, socialism, education reform. Matt Yglesias has a bunch of narratives he's selling - YIMBYism, economic centrism. It feels to me like you're holding Hanania to a higher standard that every other Substack bloviator out there.

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Again, it's not clear how this is any kind of valid criticism of Hanania - any more than "you're Catholic!" is a valid criticism of the pope.

"You're Catholic" is absolutely a valid criticism of someone trying to convince you that some piece of information proves that Catholicism is true. The piece of information truly might prove that Catholicism is true, but an already-believing Catholic can't be trusted to make that judgment call. No more than Trump can be trusted to make a judgment call on how good a president Biden was, given that he's demonstrated a penchant for characterizing everything Biden did as the worst thing any president did ever.

Fitting every new piece of information into a pre-set narrative that one likes is intellectual consistency only in the sense that it's a consistently confirmation bias. That's sort of what it means when some narrative is described as someone's "schtick."

Now, it's possible that it is factually not the case that it's his schtick, but rather that he genuinely takes a skeptical look at each new piece of evidence and is helplessly forced to conclude, despite his best efforts to prove otherwise, that his narrative is shown to be correct yet again.

As you allude to, distinguishing between these two things isn't particularly easy. In both situations, it's being intellectually consistent and believing that he is correct. This points to the fact that being intellectually consistent and believing that oneself is correct isn't actually worth anything: the value in such a thing only comes from the belief of oneself as correct having some actual basis in fact. That's something one can make arguments about by looking at the actual behavior of the person. I'd say that, by default, everyone should be presumed to be falling prey to confirmation bias all the time, doubly so if their preferred narrative is self aggrandizing, triply if that person is particularly intelligent and thus better able to fit evidence to narrative. It's only by credibly demonstrating that they are open to other narratives that they can earn any sort of credibility that their arguments have any relationship with reality. That's where showing oneself to be capable of undermining one's preferred narrative comes in, and there's no better way to demonstrate this capability than by doing it.

"You're Catholic" is absolutely a valid criticism of someone trying to convince you that some piece of information proves that Catholicism is true. The piece of information truly might prove that Catholicism is true, but an already-believing Catholic can't be trusted to make that judgment call.

I'm ambivalent on how reasonable this is.

On the one hand, a Catholic would seem to have a natural bias towards the truth of Catholicism. If we are evaluating some novel piece of information that may or may not bear on the truth of Catholicism, we should expect the Catholic to be predisposed to interpreting that evidence in ways that support the truth of Catholicism. In that sense knowing that the person is Catholic should make us more skeptical of any Catholicism-supporting conclusions they draw.

On the other hand... I would expect people who encounter evidence that Catholicism is true to be disproportionately Catholic, because factual beliefs can be motivating. Suppose there's an argument that, if correct, shows that Catholicism is true. Obviously people who think that the argument is correct are going to convert to Catholicism - I'd question anybody who didn't. To say that we can't trust Catholics on the subject of Catholicism is to stack the deck. People who find Catholicism convincing become Catholics. If by doing so they remove themselves from the community of people with whom we can have reasonable discussion about Catholicism, well, then we would seem to have an arbitrary prejudice against Catholicism. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, for any belief or ideology.

For instance - you can't trust evolutionary biologists on the subject of whether evolution is true. They're evolutionary biologists! We should immediately distrust the testimony of people who believe evolution is true on the subject of evolution. That seems absurd. So too with everything else.

The problem is that both these points seem compelling to me, to an extent, especially because for an overarching ideology like Catholicism, people are likely to adopt Catholicism for reasons unrelated to the merits of any given argument. This is less the case for a specific theory like evolution, though ideologies like rationalism, conservatism, socialism, etc., are more like Catholicism than they are like evolution. I think where I end up is that we should not rule partisans of a particular ideology out of discussions of that ideology, though we should be aware of their biases and take them into account. Thus, say, Catholics can and should be consulted on the subject of whether or not Catholicism is true (we can hardly expect anybody else to make the case for Catholicism!), but we should be more critical than usual of their assessments of new information.

On Hanania specifically:

Now, it's possible that it is factually not the case that it's his schtick, but rather that he genuinely takes a skeptical look at each new piece of evidence and is helplessly forced to conclude, despite his best efforts to prove otherwise, that his narrative is shown to be correct yet again.

I guess I don't see a valid criticism of Hanania here relative to other pundits. Yes, I'm sure it's true that his positions are a combination of sincere assessment of new data and his best interpretation thereof and a retrofitting of that new data into his existing conceptual framework. He has an existing view or narrative of the world, he will think that narrative is correct or at least the best, most plausible one available, and when he obtains new information, he starts by trying to fit that information into that narrative.

But the last I checked that was how everybody thinks. Everybody has narratives or interpretative frameworks that they apply to experience, and first interpret new evidence in ways that fit with their existing categories. It's only when new evidence becomes overwhelming, or else so dramatically contradicts the existing framework as to be undeniable, that they are forced to reconsider.

I'd say that, by default, everyone should be presumed to be falling prey to confirmation bias all the time, doubly so if their preferred narrative is self aggrandizing, triply if that person is particularly intelligent and thus better able to fit evidence to narrative. It's only by credibly demonstrating that they are open to other narratives that they can earn any sort of credibility that their arguments have any relationship with reality. That's where showing oneself to be capable of undermining one's preferred narrative comes in, and there's no better way to demonstrate this capability than by doing it.

Can you think of any particular examples of this? The thing is, what this sounds like to me in practice is the idea that everybody should be presumed to be dishonest except for people who have radically changed their belief systems.

That seems like a heuristic that will easily lead one astray - it would imply, for a start, that inconsistent opportunists are more (intellectually) trustworthy than people who stick to their principles. Doesn't that seem bizarre?

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And quadruply if the only way you ever interact with them is online and you never have in person conversations with them, because then you don't have facial tells and they have time to craft a response.

Gattsuru's point is solid though too - arguments providing evidence against the shtick would be counter proof of the shtick - a single article in the opposite direction wouldn't prove much, but it would be some proof that he wasn't just arguing in this direction because he always argues in this direction. I also consider it genuinely noble to argue against self-interest, if not necessarily wise.

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