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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   33441 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...

So, MSM consumers? Were they really 'more informed'? I dunno...

The typical Gell-Mann amnesia take is that the consuming mainstream media about a topic is significantly less informing than engaging with a topic in a personal capacity. This is almost certainly true. But it can also be true that reading the New York Times buisiness section makes one more informed about the state of the national economy than not doing that.

But it can also be true that reading the New York Times buisiness section makes one more informed about the state of the national economy than not doing that.

Yes and when people say that reading the MSM makes you less informed I don't think they realise how badly informed some voters are. Obviously ok you could do better than the MSM if you started pouring time into critically reading academic, industry or legal sources, but most Americans don't even understand how marginal tax rates work. You would probably be in the top 5% (or better) of well-informed voters if you read the NYT (or indeed, so as not to appear partisan, the WSJ) and nothing else cover to cover every day.

Yes and when people say that reading the MSM makes you less informed I don't think they realise how badly informed some voters are.

You would probably be in the top 5% (or better) of well-informed voters if you read the NYT (or indeed, so as not to appear partisan, the WSJ) and nothing else cover to cover every day.

The argument is that you can model people as having three axes:

  • accuracy of information against objective reality*
  • proportion of relevant information known / concepts understood
  • confidence in their knowledge.

The question is: how does reading a mainstream serious newspaper (NYT/WSJ, etc.) affect each axis?

My personal answer is that I agree that proportion of known information is going to go up for newspaper readers. The accuracy, I don't know. Information directly stated by a newspaper is still usually accurate, but their bias leads them to communicate lots more information through implication that is inaccurate, e.g. reporting accurately on a given murder implies that such murders are common, or accurately reporting the words of an academic on Yasuke the black samurai (see below) may lead people to believe them even though the base research is fraudulent. Finally, confidence. I don't know whether 'low-information voters' are more or less epistemically confidence than the self-professed 'well-informed'; I'd say maybe slightly less?

*to the extent this is philosophically possible for different types of information

Good post overall, but low information voters are waaaaay more confident generally, that's why they don't need more information.

I'm not confident in that! Haha. In either direction. I suspect you have multiple groups of different kinds of non-news-reading voter, and that their confidence varies wildly depending on the topics, and even potentially on how it's brought up. People feel a lot less confident when they're comfortable than when they're under attack, for example. But I think that having an institutional backing telling you that you're a Very Serious Person gives you a bit more arrogance than you might otherwise have.

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