Why Populism Leads to Kakistocracy

It's about a 20 minute read, but I highly recommend Richard Hanania's thought-provoking essay titled "Kakistocracy as a Natural Result of Populism" for its exploration of what populist means, and of what we can learn by looking at the track records of successful populist movements across the globe.

I am impressed with Hanania's successful navigation of both the vagueness of the term populist and the problem of finding concrete data to make his point about the adverse outcomes of populism.

A notable reason populism leads to poor government is that the blanket skepticism of institutions and "elites" that puts a populist into power comes from a kind of poor thinking that will insulate the populist leader from scrutiny:

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.

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Politicians that have a less educated base can make bad decisions and suffer fewer consequences for them. The fact that Trump is personally responsible through his tariffs policy for current economic woes is obvious to any informed observer, but might not be to an uninformed one. Trump's base has lower cognitive ability and less interest in politics anyway, so they are probably less likely to be shaken out of their partisan stupor by empirical reality. No one can deny that leftists are also often partisan in their thinking. But that partisanship is tempered by access to and a willingness to accept accurate sources of information. The New York Times is simply more likely to challenge the biases of its audience than Catturd, Elon Musk, or Fox News, and liberals are more likely to trust and accept real news than conservatives are.

A bit later in the essay, Hanania describes a fundamental error I see MAGA types make all the time:

We often focus on instances where elites reject ideas that turn out to be at least arguably correct. It is common to see discussions of universities or media outlets excluding or disparaging positions like opposition to DEI, skepticism over the claims of trans activists, or belief that covid leaked from a Chinese lab. In those instances, elite institutions can reasonably be criticized for having dismissed ideas they should have taken more seriously. That said, we must not lose sight of the fact that most of the time gatekeepers push people or ideas away, the establishment is right and the rebels are wrong.

Here's a partial list of ideas that are rejected by mainstream academics and journalists, but have been promoted or gotten respectable hearings on the Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast in the country, over the last few years: there is an ancient city beneath the Giza pyramids; HIV does not cause AIDS; there were advanced ancient human civilizations during the Ice Age; 9/11 may have been a government operation; mind reading is real; covid vaccines are more dangerous than the disease itself; and humans became more susceptible to polio due to vaccination. If you are mad at academia because you think it is too woke on issues related to race and gender, note that it also excludes believers in telepathy, ghosts, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, flat Earth theory, reptilian overlords, chemtrails, Bigfoot, astrology as science, Holocaust denial, moon landing hoax theories, homeopathy, and spirit channeling of the dead. Of course, the most common reason institutions reject people is lack of intelligence and work ethic. [bold added]

Hanania's further observation that populists, especially on the right, appeal to identity politics are on point.

Hanania ends by arguing that populism should be seen as another political axis. I'm not sure I agree with him about that, but I do think his term Dale Gribble voter captures something important about the type of voter that supoorts Trump, and has supported similar politicians in the past.

-- CAV