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Richard Hanania is a man whom I do not always agree with but do appreciate for successfully pissing off people both on the left and the right. The ability to piss off people from both of those groups is, in my opinion, generally correlated with being right about things.
Well, Hanania has allegedly been linked to a pseudonym. The allegation is that about 10 years ago, he was routinely saying taboo things about race and gender issues under the name "Richard Hoste".
Some quotes:
It's nothing very shocking for those of us who read dissident right stuff, and it's not even really that far away from Hanania's typical under-his-birth-name writing. But it may be a bridge too far for much of the more mainstream audience.
What I wonder is, which way shall Hanania go?
Own it, say "yes I am Richard Hoste and I did write those things"? He would gain praise from some people for honesty, but he would also stand probably a pretty good chance of losing book deals, interviews with some mainstream figures, and so on.
Deny deny deny?
Ignore it?
I think that it is an interesting case study, the attempted take down of one of the more famous examples of what is now a pretty common sort of political writer: the Substacker whose views are just controversial and taboo enough to have a lot of appeal for non-mainstream audiences but are not so far into tabooness, in content and/or tone, to get the author branded a full-on thought-criminal.
He wrote about it.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-i-used-to-suck-and-hopefully
Me: Have favored classical liberalism since I was a teenager, no matter what personal issues I was dealing with, because the soul-crushing authoritarianism, collectivist-driven unfairness, and relative economic ineffectiveness of alternatives to classical liberalism has always been apparent to me. My audience: a handful of people on various scattered political forums.
Hanania: Was too stupid to realize the superiority of classical liberalism until at some point in his 20s. Hanania's audience: Huge SubStack audience, book deal, mingles with influential political figures.
I mean none of this is surprising of course. Think about how some of today's famous and well-compensated neo-conservative writers, for example, were Marxists in their youth.
I do of course think that being intelligent enough to change your mind is a good thing, but I think that it is an even better thing to have been right from the beginning.
Overall, this all encourages me to maybe write more long-form and actually try to become a famous political writer.
To be fair, while my commitment to classical liberalism has never wavered much, in my more emotional moments I have often longed to, and still long to, purge the world with authoritarian murder. But these are heated moments. Like Hanania, I have written some things in the past that would certainly not make me look like a classical liberal were I to be judged only by them.
Indeed one of the things that surprised me about reading Hanania's article is that he did not say that he had written those previous things in the heat of emotion while actually being a classical liberal. He instead said that he actually was not a classical liberal back then. That makes it harder for him, which increases the degree to which I think it is likely to be true.
However, like @Quantumfreakonomics, I find it very hard to believe that he is honest when he writes this:
However, relevant discussion thread where Hanania responds: https://twitter.com/NoahCarl90/status/1688214708094996485.
(Not sure why TheMotte auto-changes nitter to twitter)
Overall, I think that this article is a pretty good bit of writing, but I find it to be just a bit too polished, it has the feel of having been produced as much by tactics as by honesty. The careful reader will come away with a lack of faith in Hanania's willingness to ever write his true thoughts, but then the careful reader will not have had that faith about Hanania to begin with.
It is also possible that the whole essay is bullshit and that he actually is not and never has been a classical liberal. Which would actually maybe make me have more respect for him, since it would imply not only a truly fine commitment to and skill at the art of fakery, but also such a profound love of trolling that he willingly took on a greater burden of necessary fakery in order to be able to continue successfully annoying both sides.
One way or another, if Hanania's response helps him to sail through these stormy waters while keeping his book deal and his mainstream cachet, I will congratulate him and will look forward to hopefully seeing him tear the HuffPost a new one at some point in the future.
I’m not sure how an “intellectual” could be right from the beginning. It takes reading a lot and just because of timelines you work thru one piece of works before others.
I also don’t think classical liberalism works everywhere. It hasn’t worked in Africa or a lot of the ME. Probably wouldn’t have worked until fairly recent in Russia (too much war risks required authoritarian/military politics). Just because classical liberalism roughly works in America doesn’t mean it’s the correct government. But it was for this place and time.
That is fair, I should say that I favor classical liberalism if and when it is possible.
I don't think that one needs to be an intellectual or to read even one book to figure out that classical liberalism is the way to go. Actually I distrust political theories that require one to be grounded in some entire corpus of writing in order to understand them.
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