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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   35099 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...

I mean he’s not exactly wrong which is why I’m much less enamored with the idea that final authority should rest with the people and that the legitimacy or rulership should rest on the people.

It creates a lot of really strange results simply because it rests on a flimsy idea. The basic idea is that somehow the sum of several million people who don’t understand a system voting on how to run the system somehow results in a well run system. Or the sum of ignorance is knowledge. This doesn’t work. 300 people who know jack all about city planning simply cannot accidentally figure out how to time traffic lights. 300 million people who can’t even find Ukraine on a map cannot possibly be making a good decision on whether to conduct a war there, how to conduct it, or when to end it. No other place on earth do we do this. Parents generally do not get their four year olds approval on dinner because they’d choose ice cream. Children are not trusted with the family budget. Soldiers are not asked to approve of war strategy. Workers are not given the right to vote on the direction the company will take in the next year. And on it goes — when we need a system that just works, we put competent people in charge and let them run the thing. Except government where anyone over 18 can choose the general direction of almost every function of government by choosing leaders to do as they promised when asking for their votes.

And as Hanania rightly points out, modern democratic governments are highly tuned to avoiding the realities they exist in. Whether or not a policy is a good idea doesn’t matter. What matters is that the public supports it. Giveaway programs of various types are always popular — leading to a famous warning from Alexis de Tocqueville that democracy would only last until people discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public coffers. And so we have. Welfare, student loans guaranteed by the government, a big push for universal healthcare (provided by the government) etc. it doesn’t matter if these things work — it can easily be shown that government guarantees of student loans has ruined not only education (dumbing down college to the point where anyone who graduated high school can go, and lowering standards until literally anyone can pass), but job markets (as lots of jobs that require no higher order skills now require 4-year degrees as a minimum). This is just one reality avoided — we don’t have infinite money, and even if we did, handing out money tends to distort markets and create more problems than it solves. You can add in things like social liberalism where every form of deviant behavior is tolerated if not celebrated. Don’t kink shame adult babies, porn actresses, furries, or drag queens, and don’t keep them away from kids, even if their fetish is only plausibly not pedophilia. And again, a lot of this turns out to be bad for society. But it gets votes, so who cares.

But beyond that, it’s the perfect engine for avoiding responsibility. Who is responsible for the decisions in a democracy? The people. They voted for the guy who did the thing. He was only doing what the people wanted. So 300 million of us are responsible for the results of the tariffs. Or the negotiations with Russia. Or the bombing of the Houthis. Or whatever happens with Iran. Or anything else that happens. It’s even better for elected representatives when it goes through a parliament or congress. They can do nothing, collect a paycheck and come back for reelection and blame everything on those other guys for messing it all up. If you send us back we’ll fix it. And if it doesn’t work or doesn’t pass, blame the other guys and run again. At no point is anyone In government accountable for the results of the votes he casts or tge decisions he made. The people voted for it!

It seems worth noting that avoiding the specific problem of 'the economy produces more college graduates than it knows what to do with' is not something anyone has figured out.

In America the existence of a certificate in following basic directions, using the English language, being able to not make problems when working in groups, etc is the function of a bachelor's in psychology, but what else do you suggest fill that role? I will grant that a bachelor's in psychology or communications or English is a very expensive way to grant this certificate. But America isn't cost conscious about anything else in general- or indeed, any other portion of the education system in particular- and there does have to be some way to tell employers 'look I have no experience but I'm literate, understand white collar norms enough not to violate them too bad, can follow directions, communicate, and won't make problems when working in a group'. My first AAQC was about this. And at least for now the economy needs workers who can follow directions, communicate, read and write, use the English language effectively, and can keep drama to a minimum. Maybe chatgpt will change that, but the majority of people whose employment depends on having a 'literate and not a retard' certificate are women so the government will protect their jobs even if it's pointless and stupid- the end goal of western governance is to maximize female LFPR at all costs, after all. The existence of a complicated, expensive, and baroque process to prove you aren't a retard and can read is an inevitability and other countries are even worse. In East Asia there basically aren't any non-fuckups who don't go to college.

In America the existence of a certificate in following basic directions, using the English language, being able to not make problems when working in groups, etc is the function of a bachelor's in psychology, but what else do you suggest fill that role?

I am not sure if college degree provides that certificate anymore. First, universities now tend to produce culture warriors that can endanger you business if they think your corporation is the best platform to promote their political ideas. Additionally I am not sure if even ability to cooperate in a team or command of English language is something necessary to get a degree anymore. I think what you basically have to do now as a business owner is to do your own testing of potential employees including basic tests such as composing some simple email to customer or related to reading comprehension of some corporate memo.

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