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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   33439 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...

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.

This is probably true. Does it also correlate with believing Biden was senile, Hunter's laptop was genuine, that COVID was a lab leak, and that the lockdowns and vaccine mandates were a mistake? Their estimate of unarmed black men killed by the police would be much closer to the right end of this graph, and opposition to defunding the police, before such fictions and the policies they spawned caused the largest single-year increase in violent crime ever reported. Does it correlate with being able to define the term "woman", and predict that transitioning children would not be a sustainable practice from a scientific point of view? I imagine we could continue in this way for some time, but let's leave it there.

Hanania's argument here is that Trump supporters are more likely to be disconnected from bedrock reality. Would it be fair to say that his implicit argument is that bedrock reality is congruent with the views of professional academics and journalists?

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.

I do not see a way for either you or the author to argue that it is less of a problem for the previous uniparty regime. Afghanistan in particular and the GWOT generally seem like really good examples; for the Afghan war, we have the documents now and can confirm that the entire two decades of policy was founded entirely on lies, that no one ever actually had a plan, and that the entire procedure was built around concealing this fact to the public as extensively as possible to maintain the flow of resources and human lives. The more one listened to "the most informed about policy and current events, like journalists and academics," the worse one's fundamental understanding of that conflict would be.

More generally, the self-serving nature of the argument here would be appalling if it were not so monotonously common from people of the author's ilk.

Tear down the gates in a system that is working relatively well, and you will get liars, morons, grifters, and cranks of all stripes.

We are in the present situation because the system was not working well, even relatively. Likewise, the previous system was absolutely chockablock with liars, morons, grifters and cranks of all stripes. Hanania's entire method here is to present a parade of horribles from the Trump administration, some of them still hypothetical, and to quietly allow all previous disasters to sink into unmentioned obscurity.

Hanania's entire method here is to present a parade of horribles from the Trump administration, some of them still hypothetical, and to quietly allow all previous disasters to sink into unmentioned obscurity.

The scales here are totally different. There is no policy from the Biden administration that even comes close to the destructive idiocy of these tariffs, and more saliently for Hanania's point, no policy more ill-thought through. He couldn't even be bothered to properly calculate a reciprocal tariff!

Proxy war with Russia in Europe is on a whole other level to tariffs.

You receive:

risk of nuclear war

Russo-Chinese alliance consolidation

Many trillions in realized economic damage to Europe, destabilizing the political consensus there, heightened global inflation

Massive drain on munitions and capabilities

Small number of US special forces dying in combat as 'volunteers' or 'technical support'

Unknown future blowback, almost certainly negative

Many, many dead Ukrainians

A crippling blow to the Rules Based International Order due to...

Near-certain defeat in the stated goals of the war (Ukrainian territorial integrity, 2014 borders)

You gain:

Many dead Russians

All Sullivan had to do was declare that no, Ukraine wouldn't be joining NATO, or at least make some kind of basic diplomatic effort to prevent a Russian invasion.

No diplomatic effort could have prevented a Russian invasion. Nobody is choosing to be in a proxy war with Russia, we are at war with them whether we like it or not. We can either put in the (extremely minimal) effort required to defeat them now, or fight them later after they've seized more territory.

Either way, it's laughable that we're talking about an issue that has literally zero effect on the average American in the same context as tariffs that will raise prices on everything by at least 30%.

Nobody is choosing to be in a proxy war with Russia, we are at war with them whether we like it or not.

That makes no sense whatsoever. A proxy war is always going to be by choice. There is no law of nature that says we have to arm Russia's enemies, even if they were to take more territory. The only point at which we don't have a choice is if they decide to start knocking on our door.

Right, and if we wait for them to reach our doorstep, they will be much more powerful and our soldiers will have to do the fighting, rather than Ukrainians. All we have to do right now is spend a few tens of billions and let Ukrainian heroes on the other side of the world do the dirty work for us. It's a huge bargain.

Right, and if we wait for them to reach our doorstep, they will be much more powerful and our soldiers will have to do the fighting, rather than Ukrainians.

Unless you and that guy above you are both from Moldova or something this is complete fantasy bullshit. Russia has beaten itself half to death taking over 20% of its own personal Canada after we armed it with some secondhand leftovers. The worst nightmare scenario possible is that they force Western Europe to wake up and actually do a thing, and they're never "getting to our doorstep" unless aliens show up to give them phasers and shit.

Seriously, it's some fundamentally unserious stuff to say.

If global warming opens new shipping lanes in the arctic (likely), that is a potential source of conflict. I suspect someone in the Trump administration has this notion, as well. It’s the best case for wanting to acquire Greenland.

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