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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   33444 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...

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.

Thinking that the electorate MUST regain the confidence of the elite is a notion reserved only for the most biting of satires and Hanania's midwittery.

See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Lösung

News flash: the people have ALWAYS been stupid, always been short-sighted, provincial and backwater in sensibility and lacking in education. And in a democratic system, their votes are equal to your well-educated and informed one. So you better have a convincing argument to sway them to your side! Use what they say, rhetoric? The classic politician's art?

What is presented here is not even an argument. It is simply a fact. Most people are uninformed. You can't govern a country as if it consisted entirely of reporters from the New York Times. Any argument against populism is inherently a argument against democracy. The masses chose their own elites in defiance of reality or whatever standard you might impose on them. There is no argument against this that does not end in 'some animals are more equal than others'.

Hanania is merely restating what the Greeks have always known, which puts into doubt the depth and quality of his education. If democracy requires the electorate to be highly educated elite human capital like himself, perhaps democracy is a BAD IDEA because such a thing will never happen. If he would just flat out state that he wants democracy but only for himself and his pals, it'd be more honest but he is not in the business of honesty, is he?

Voters have always broadly been braindead morons, but something happened around 2014-2016 to make both sides dovetail into their worst excesses despite things generally being good, at least better than the Great Recession which did not immediately provoke such foolishness.

That was the advent of social media: elites could no longer gatekeep the masses. In previous eras media elites controlled both context and expression so that the political elite could pretend to have a popular mandate (because that is the basis of legitimacy in a democracy). Even in the so called golden era of democratic norms it could only exist because it was tightly controlled.

The masses were never wise, temperate, or well-informed. The current failsons of the western world came into power naively believing in their own liberal rhetoric: and thus, they have no defense against the crudity of the people they ostensibly lead. They can't even muster a defense without twisting themselves into knots as Hanania does, trying to bring forth the nanoangstrom of difference between bad populism and good democracy.

The truth is cold and unforgiven. There never was such a thing.

This is correct, but going further, social media rewired the masses. Low-information voters in the era of analog media possessed incumbency bias. Low-information voters in the era of digital media now have anti-incumbency bias.

In the 20th Century, the list of incumbent presidents that lost the White House is: Taft (faced a third-party run from Roosevelt that split the Republican vote), Hoover (the Great Depression), Carter (stagflation and the Iran Hostage Crisis), Bush the Elder (significant third-party run from Perot). Now we've gone back-to-back in incumbent losses while third-party candidates garnered nowhere near Roosevelt or Perot's support.

Social media stumbled into boosting negative content. They weren't optimizing for it, but rage bait travels faster and farther than other kinds of content, and as they were opting for engagement above all else, their algorithms boosted rage bait. There are certainly echo chambers, but still that rage gets directed at whomever is in power.

Martin Gurri's 2018 book The Revolt of the Public tracked this through events like the Arab Spring, arguing that the center can't hold, and whomever replaces an incumbent becomes the new center, which still can't hold. The Financial Times picked up on the gist in looking at how most incumbent parties in Europe, regardless of if they were right or left, lost in 2024.

I can think of another reason besides social media that Trump 45 lost. (And I don't mean electoral chicanery either)

It's certainly not mono-causal. The point is the low-information voter, and not just in America, now has anti-incumbency bias.

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