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- [00:00]
Coleman Hughes
And we're live from the living room
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Richard Hanania
as Doug eyes up the match.
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Coleman Hughes
Say spread. He's reaching for the buffalo wing. Perfect. Hang on.
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Richard Hanania
What's this?
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Coleman Hughes
Oh, he's gone for a can of Pepsi too. Incredible.
- [00:13]
Richard Hanania
What a finish. Sensational combination.
- [00:16]
Coleman Hughes
Look at the delight on his face. There's no doubt about it. It just tastes better. Match days deserve Pepsi. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a pack of Pepsi. Zero sugar for today's match. It's poetry in motion. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Richard Hanania. Richard is a political scientist, writer, and author of three books. He's also the founder and president of the center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. Richard came to prominence as a critic of woke ideology and the complex legal architecture that has acted as its enforcement mechanism. But Richard's new book has the exact opposite valence. It's an indictment of populism in all its forms, but in particular its right wing version. The book is called Kakistocracy, which literally means rule by the worst. The exact opposite of aristocracy, meaning rule by the best. In this episode, we talk about Richard's past as an alt right white identitarian and his evolution into a fierce critic of right wing populism. We talk about what populism actually is. We talk about what an elite is. Richard explains why it's generally better to trust experts, all of their terrible mistakes in recent years notwithstanding. We talk about why populism is on the rise. We talk about the concept of a military industrial complex. And finally, we talk about Richard's Palestinian heritage and his view of the Israel Palestine conflict. So without further ado, Richard Hanania,
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Richard Hanania
I
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Coleman Hughes
want to tell you about a podcast I think you're going to appreciate. It's called Unpacking Israeli History. If you follow the news about Israel, you're just getting headlines. But headlines are just a tiny slice of a long, complicated, and genuinely fascinating story. One of the things I care about on this show is engaging seriously with complexity rather than flattening it. That's exactly what host Dr. Noam Weissman does on Unpacking Israeli History. He dives deep into the events, the people, and the moments that shaped Israel past and present, with genuine empathy and a willingness to explore multiple perspectives. And when he brings in guests like philosopher Micah Goodman or journalist Haviv Ratigor, they add real depth to the conversation. It's deeply researched storytelling for people who want to understand Israel rather than just confirm what they already think. In today's climate, that's rare and it matters. Find unpacking Israeli history on your favorite podcast app or YouTube and subscribe today. Richard Hanania, thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [02:59]
Richard Hanania
Thanks for having me, Coleman.
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Coleman Hughes
So your new book is called Kakistocracy. Is that how it's pronounced?
- [03:04]
Richard Hanania
Yes.
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Coleman Hughes
Which is, you explain in the book is the old Greek root word for rule by the worst, which is your argument about what is now going on not just in America, but throughout the Western world. I mean, the whole world at least, where populist parties have taken root. Before we get into your whole thesis, I think this book is a really great opportunity for me to have you on the show, because the truth is, the reason I hadn't until this time is because of the stuff you talk about at the very beginning of the book.
- [03:43]
Richard Hanania
Right.
- [03:46]
Coleman Hughes
Maybe it's worth reminding the audience, but you've, you've been on quite the intellectual journey, and especially with respect to, I would say, maturity at some level. Right. And a lot of your earlier immature beliefs and postings under a pseudonym, Richard Hast or Haast or something became public about three years ago, and you were in the position of now having to defend yourself as someone who had come to be respected, including by me and most people I know as a really smart conservative, a critic of the same kind of WOKE policies I've I came up criticizing, but with more of a legal dimension, given your that you've been to law school and you had this great book called the Origins of Woke, which I would often say to people is like a great companion to my book. Because it's like, if you read my book and you agree that, like, colorblindness is the way to go, and then you're like, okay, so what do we actually do? I'd be like, well, this guy, Richard Tanani has a really great book where he's like, here's what we should do. You know, here's the executive orders we should pass, here's the judicial rulings. And a lot of that, I think, to our mutual, to our mutual joy came true immediately at the beginning of Trump's term. He had this flurry of executive orders that really enshrined colorblindness. And regardless of what you think of the rest of his sort of policy package, I think that was a good thing. And I think we both said so at the time. But a couple years ago, you were put in the position by Huffington Post who had unearthed these comments from what, 16, 17 years ago this point.
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Richard Hanania
Yeah, right.
- [05:32]
Coleman Hughes
That were, you know, eugenicist and racist. And you Know, at the time you were a part of the alt right and you had made a journey to be this really smart conservative, which I think made you vulnerable because then people could argue. All your anti DEI stuff, which is the same stuff someone like me has been saying, is really just a Trojan horse for this alt right stuff. Right. And from everything I can tell, you have survived the cancellation and your transformation was an honest one. But it's also an opportunity to reflect on who you were then, what made you change, and what is the psychological profile of a young man that gets super into extremist white identitarian stuff. So I'm sure maybe you're sick of talking it, talking about it, but it's too interesting not to address right up front.
- [06:28]
Richard Hanania
Yeah, I appreciate that History Coleman. And when people read this book, my background is in political science. I also have a legal background, as you mentioned. The book is also somewhat of a personal journey and I do begin with that in the introduction. So I do know what I speak of. I kind of understand these things. I understand kind of what's happened to the American right. I think I have some good understanding of kind of what's happening abroad politically because we can kind of see the same patterns going on at the same time. So I mean, to go back, I was basically part of alt right 1.0. This was like the stuff that you see on Twitter when you go into the timeline now. And it's just all this kind of race posting and all this kind of white identitarianism and kind of right wing identity politics. I was pretty early to that. It was like 2009, 2010. Over time, this stuff became more and more mainstream. It became kind of welcomed into the Republican Party or at least part of the coalition. People, people ended up afraid to kind of offend people who were racist or conspir or conspiratorial misogynist. If not they're not adopting their policies. Sometimes in some cases they are. They are at least considered members of the coalition in good standing. And people are have, I think, responding to the left become anti, anti cancellation. So it's this idea that we can't have any standards at all because if we say this racist is not welcome or this anti Semite is not welcome, well, how are we different from some bureaucrat at Harvard or some mainstream media person who wants to write these pieces canceling people for having the wrong attitudes. So I get it. I get why people go in that direction. It hasn't made me say it wouldn't make me say that there's no kind of personal responsibility involved or there are no individual personality flaws that lead people to overreact in this way. But, you know, I understand kind of the causation here. So I think what I was seeing in 2009, 2010, was kind of a proto wokeness. I was in law school, I was into, you know, normie conservative stuff. But I saw that like a lot of stuff were baked into the law that were frankly discriminatory, things that weren't fair, things that I didn't think were consistent with individual rights or the rights and liberties and the kind of the setup of the American Constitution. And, you know, I was angry, unhappy at the time and I took it in an extremist direction. Now, you know, Fast forward to 2023. As you said, I had built a reputation under my own name and that timing of that piece in the Huffington Post wasn't coincidental. They were sitting on that and they dropped it about a month or two before the book. And, you know, I, I had to say, you guys got me. Yeah, yeah, there was, there's none of this, you know, and I'm not, I'm not, you know, I think journalists are, are doing the job in that case. Like, I wasn't mad at them bringing it to light. It is, it is part of my story now. All I say, a lot of that stuff that, that was bad, I could tell you exactly why I changed my opinions. And some people, you know, people question that, but I don't. I think there's few people who have gone into as painstaking detail kind of what my thought process has been over these last 15, 16 years. A lot of that time I wasn't a public person from like 2010 to 2020, a decade I had spent in law school and in academia. But yeah, this book is, it's, you know, like 10% a product of personal journey and then 90% just kind of analysis of what's going on in the world.
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Coleman Hughes
Yeah. And the, one of the interesting things, when the Huffington Post unearthed all those, all those nasty quotes from the past, I think there were a lot of people who admired you and people in, in both of our circles who told you just don't apologize. Right.
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Richard Hanania
Yeah.
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Coleman Hughes
And, you know, I, I'm of two minds about that because there's a kind of contradiction here where I, I do believe it's really important in interpersonal relationships with your friends, with your spouse, with your family to apologize when you mess up. It's almost the litmus test of, of being a decent person. But when you translate that to public life. Apologies are never reciprocated. Apologies are just treated as admissions of guilt. And so this is why the never. I mean, it's hard to think of a. Of a single apology in public life that has worked, except for maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger's for. For cheating on his wife. Like, that's like, the one example people can cite where, like, people liked his apology and it made everyone think better of him. It's hard to think of a single example with a public intellectual or. Or a politician where. Where it works. And yet it is the mark of maturity to say, hey, I made these comments 15 years ago that were stupid and bigoted, and they. They genuinely don't reflect what I think now. I've been on a journey. So how do you. How do you make that decision?
- [11:35]
Richard Hanania
Yeah, I mean, the question of whether to apologize, it's kind of. I've always found it strange when people apologize for saying offensive things. I think of apologies as in, I've wronged someone as an individual, and I'm trying to make it right. So I apologize to you. This. You know, I was an obscure kind of Internet poster to the extent that I had some influence on the world, and these ideas were. Did end up being influential, like, to the extent that I contributed a little bit to that. Yeah, I'm no problem apologizing to that because I think I helped create kind of this world and the kind of trends that I think we've seen in society that I've spent a lot of time writing against. But I had a, you know, like, yeah, I think the way it was weird because people wanted to show sympathy for me, like, a lot because I was criticizing the right before 2023, before that Huffington Post piece came out, and they were posting on Twitter, like, oh, you know, f these journalists. Like, we all have to stand with him. And it's like.
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Coleman Hughes
But strangely, you weren't like, f these journalists.
- [12:37]
Richard Hanania
You were like, no, I was like, you. You did a good job. I'm impressed with the work you've done. Yes. Because it was like, no, like, what if I actually. Like, it's not about just what the journalists say about me. And, okay, their intentions was they wanted to get my book, like, canceled by the publish, wanted me not to have a career. And I understand that that was the intention behind the journalist of the Huffington Post. Like, I understand that. I understand a lot of leftists didn't like me because I was still right wing on these DEI issues. And so, okay, that's true. But still, me as an individual, like, I have, I have ideas I want to present to the world. And if what I said in 2009, 2010 does not reflect what I believe now, if I find it atrocious, then just to spite journalists, I'm not gonna stand by views that I think are disgusting. That is complete. You know, that's the other side of the coin of just doing whatever they say. Right. I'm doing the exactly opposite of what they want. It's another form of audience capture. And people sometimes will say, oh, well, you became kind of more moderate or left wing after that. Like, no, people on the right, like where I was, did not want me to apologize. We'd gotten to the point in 2023, this was post Elon buying Twitter. Right. This was Trump was about to be elected for the second term. This is when the attitud, the right was like, the hell, to hell with journalists and the media and cancellation. And, you know, we're going to, we're going to stand by our own and we're not going to play this game. Some ways, some ways that's healthy. Right. I'm glad we are not in 2019, 2020, 2021 anymore. At the same time, you can't, you can't be just simply reactive to your enemies because you're just as captured by what they're doing in that case as if you're just kind of going along with whatever they say. It's another kind of like mental prison. And I wasn't to going, you know, I didn't want to be that. I wanted to be somebody with ideas who expressed myself and put out what I actually believed to the world.
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Coleman Hughes
Yeah. And so now that you've written a whole book on populism, in a way to balance out your book on, On Wokeness, I don't think anyone can really call you a partisan. And, and, and, and you've shown that you're willing to go precisely against the audience that you've built, which is a rare trait among, among intellectuals. So we need more of that. Let's get into your new book, which is about populism. First of all, what is populism? This is a, it's, it's like on, you know, many terms in politics like fascist, liberal, conservative are difficult to define. But populism seems to stand apart in its difficulty because I'm not sure it, it contains any specific ideas or specific propositions where all of these others, at least you can isolate, like a substantive political position on an issue that tends to unite fascists. Like they tend to, you know, be a fan of the ethnic majority of the country and really hate everyone else. That's like a core part of it. You know, liberals and conservatives have analog beliefs. What actually is populism?
- [15:40]
Richard Hanania
Yeah. So in the political science literature, it usually that's part of the definition of populism. It's an ideologically thin view that divines divides the world into the pure people and the corrupt or evil elite. So it divides the world into us versus them. That usually means, that usually means some kind of antagonism towards minority groups, sexual minorities, things like that. Now that's not a perfect definition of populism. And there are more definite. I mean, there are as many definitions of populism as there are scholars of populism. Now the interesting thing is when scholars put together like databases and they're trying to figure out who the populists are, there is widespread agreement on who populists are. So Trump counts, Orban counts. It's not just people on the right. Maduro counts. Right. So like there is agreement. So it's kind of one of those things where it's kind of a fuzzy definition, but fuzzy definitions work.
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Coleman Hughes
But it's picking out something real.
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Richard Hanania
It, I think it is picking out.
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Coleman Hughes
I have the same intuition, like I feel I know it when I see it, but it's. I have no idea what specific beliefs are going to come out of a populist's mouth, except for that the people running society are way more corrupt than you think. And I don't want anyone to mistake me for being one of them and presenting myself as a good one of them. I'm the one that notices how terrible they are and I'm going to smash them on the people's behalf.
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Richard Hanania
Yeah. And so the definition I settle on because I'm trying to do something broader than just talk about politics, politicians or political parties. I really focus on kind of what status games people play. So if you think about an intellectual who goes becomes a professor at Harvard or somebody's a journalist or an op ed writer, there's the status game they're playing. They're playing a status game of other elites. This is not just intellectuals, politicians. There are party people. There are people who are picked by the party. In medicine, there's the American Medical Association. These are institutions, established institutions that people are gaining their status and their power and their source of authority from. Now there's another way to. There's another status game you could be playing which is bypassing all those institutions and going directly to A mass audience. So if you think of like a podcaster, like Joe Rogan, right? Joe Rogan is Joe Rogan because he has a massive audience. He didn't publish peer reviewed papers, he didn't get some degree. Right. It's directly to the people. Donald Trump is president now for the second time. Not because anyone in the Republican Party, in the establishment wanted him, they all didn't want him, but because he has a direct relationship with the voters. Someone like rfk, people in medicine, like kind of the COVID skeptics of the mainstream establishment. That's populism too, right? So this is the definition. It's whether the status game you are playing is an elite focused one or you go directly to the people. And once you do that, it's somebody, a populist. Trump is an elite in a sense in that he's the most powerful person in the country. He's controlled a political party for 10 years. But it's not simply about that. It's about the status game that he's playing. And his status, his position of power comes from the direct relationship from the audience. And so I think this is kind of the key thing here. This works in. Once we have that framework, we can start talking about, okay, these people playing the status game within the institutions versus the people playing the status game by just appealing to a mass audience, which is better. What are the plus and minuses of each one of these approaches?
- [19:04]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, that's a really interesting way of putting it because what you're doing is you're defining what an elite is, right? Because we use this word, especially in our line of work, talk about elites all the time. And sometimes when people say elite, they just, they're using a synonym for rich people or they're using a synonym for power, powerful people. But it's really not that. Right? Because as you point out, no one thinks of Joe Rogan when we say elite, though he is rich and he is powerful and he's as powerful as any media figure in the country. We don't think of him as elite. Why? It's because of this other variable you don't think about, which is, is there, is their reach a direct one to the people or are they mediated by elite institutions?
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Richard Hanania
That's right.
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Coleman Hughes
So like if, you know, there's, if you have the kind of profession where you're at a cocktail party and you say what you do and people go, oh, wow, that's really. But they've never heard of you, right? They've never heard of you. They would never Encounter your work organically, probably. But you say, oh well, I'm a journalist at the New York Times. Well, isn't that, that, wow, that's really impressive. Or I've, I'm an Academy Award winning cinematographer. Like that's instant prestige, the status game. And this is not to denigrate it, but simply to describe it. Neutral vocabulary. The status game you're playing is one where your prestige is earned through your affiliation. And the fact that you've embedded yourself in certain institutions that, that have prestige. And you point out in the, in the book what distinguishes an institution that accords elite status with one from one that doesn't. Like, what's the variable? Right, yeah, you talk about, I think how institutions which are long standing have
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Richard Hanania
a. Yeah, yeah, there's, there's a, yeah, there's a core kind of, you know, if you're going to critique this theory, there's a circularity to it. You could say, right? So you could imagine somebody could say, well, Trump is elite because you know, Fox News like likes him, right? There's institutions and like he starts, you know, some MAGA thing, right? There are MAGA institutions Now in Washington D.C. right. And you could say, well, you know, these are kind of institutions. What makes that, what like why is the AMA an elitist decision and whatever, our, whatever group RFK starts to fight against vaccines or is involved with or whatever, why isn't that elite? And you know, at that point, I think you have to kind of, you know, there's a, there's a Burkean logic here. There's these, the fact that these institutions have lasted for very long time, Harvard, Stanford, the New York Times, cbs, the major networks and then there's groups, there's up and comers, there's new media outlets like the Free Press that are kind of in dialogue and share attract the same kind of person that are in dialogue with these established institutions. And I think that the difference, I mean, I think that there's something to this because if Trump is not president, it depends on the next. If Trump loses in 2024, if he loses the Republican primary, if he's reject by the voter, those MAGA institutions, they go away, right? Fox News is still there, but they're going to love whoever the leader of the Republican Party is at that point. The New York Times, Harvard, the American Medical association, they've been here, they've been for tens of years or even hundreds of years in some cases. They'll be here in 10, 20, 30 years. No matter who the next president is or what Happens politically. And yeah, I mean, I think one way to look at it, there's a burkianism here in that these institutions have built up kind of practices and ways of being that make them resilient over time. Right. And so like, you know, if, if.
- [22:46]
Coleman Hughes
And they're very resilient to brand damage as well. Like no matter how many questionable articles in New York Times publishes, it's still going to be the New York Times.
- [22:54]
Richard Hanania
Well yes, that's true, but I think that like, you know, if you. But the way I put it is these institutions attract the kind of people where it's self correcting over time. Like if the New York Times really gets facts wrong, they will correct it. Most of the big podcasters out there now, you know, they're not going to correct anything if the New York Times tomorrow starts posting like infow, it's not like it's impossible that they couldn't lose their status, right. I think other people in the elites would not take them seriously. And so yeah, it's true, they could survive a lot. Some of it's just prestige and sometimes those institutions, you know, unquestionably can become corrupted. We've seen that, you know, in academia and some of these departments, you know, we all are familiar with these, you know, kind of these fields of these scholars who we think are doing serious work but still are treated as prestigious people by the New York Times, by Harvard, by all the grantors of a prestige at our culture. In the general scheme of things though, like on the long scale, like forget they go crazy for two, three, four years. They still, you know, they're still New York Times is still fundamentally doing journalism. Harvard is still fundamentally doing peer reviewed research and producing knowledge. The medical establishment is still producing drugs and still learning about, you know, how to treat disease. It's easy to get like very cynical and just want to, you know, just want to get away from these things and want to just kind of denounce them and move in the direction of, you know, whatever. I mean, the thing is like when I try to describe what the alternative is to these institutions, it sounds like I'm straw manning it, right? Because I say what's the alternative? Well, the alternative in real life is what people are talking about on Twitter, what's on podcasts, right? There is like no alternative source of information, source of sifting through what's true or false that is ready out there once we reject those institutions. So it's kind of like, like we're stuck with them. Because the knowledge problem is actually Very, very hard.
- [24:51]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, this is a quote from the book. If your doctor makes a mistake, it doesn't mean you should replace him with an energy healer. Similarly, the New York Times reporting a story inaccurately does not mean that believing podcasts or Facebook rumors that confirms one's biases is the way to get the truth. True. Unless your podcast is conversations with Coleman,
- [25:10]
Richard Hanania
in which case there are high quality podcasts on question mark.
- [25:14]
Coleman Hughes
So now that you've sketched for us what a populist is, what an elite is as a concept, as distinguished from merely a rich person or a powerful person, what is the case for elites being a good thing in society? What is the case that elites have made the world a better place?
- [25:38]
Richard Hanania
Yeah. So there are two ways to approach the question. You could approach it theoretically or empirically. Empirically, once we've seen who the populists are, once we've decided we can just look at things like economic growth. There's a 2023 paper in American Economic Review shows populists tend to do worse on economic growth. The left wing populists worse than right wing populists, because left wing populists tend to have craziest ideas on economics, while right wing populists sometimes believe in markets. But both kinds of populists tend to have worse economic growth than what you would predict. If you look at things like, like breakdown of democratic institutions, populists much, much higher, much higher odds than other forms of governments. Things like civil liberties, like we have, like case after case of this being something that is not just doesn't work at a societal level. If you look at the countries that have performed worse economically in the world over the last 60 years or so, they're basically like African and Middle Eastern countries that have fought wars like Libya and Syria and countries like that. And then there are Argentina and Venezuela, two countries where populism has gone further than just about anywhere else and been long lasting, especially Argentina, they have decades and decades of populist rule. And so that's the empirical case. And then you could ask like, why would we think this would be true? And I think there are good reasons to think so. For one, populists tend to rely on less informed voters. Okay, so if you have this ideal of democracy where nothing is gonna real is never going to approach that ideal, but you get closer to the ideal to the extent that people are informed and willing to consider issues on their own merits and thinking carefully about public issues. The populist base doesn't do that. If you look at people who read the people who are the base of populist, they're people who don't tend not to follow the news that much. And if they do follow the news, they're following podcasts, lower quality podcasts, of course, not like this one. They're not reading serious newspapers, they're not reading serious magazines. Means. And I think this is one key reason why populism is so often leads to corruption. Because there's just. People are just. The populist base is kind of just ill informed. They just don't know exactly what's going on. They're not observing kind of what their political leaders are doing. And it's famous. You know, famously, they can just promise one thing and do another or kind of switch what they're doing at any particular time. And the populist voter is more likely to go along with that, that just because he's less educated, he's less informed. Another, another thing is gatekeepers are almost always, and this is like a very
- [28:19]
Coleman Hughes
kind of before, before you get to the second one. So to push on the first one. What happens when you get these domains in, in of knowledge where like the more educated you get the wronger you are about stuff? Right? Like my probably the average relatively uneducated proverbial uncle or grandpa is more right about, about certain important issues, Right? Like if you're, if you're at the height of 2020, who's more likely to be right about the connection between getting rid of the police and crime going up? Your random uneducated uncle with a high school degree or your friend that has a Ph.D. at Columbia? Right. And there's, as you know, I don't have to tell you, there's a whole bunch of subjects like this where the more educated you educate yourself into stupidity. Is that too small an effect to affect your populism? Your point about populism here.
- [29:19]
Richard Hanania
So I agree with you that those cases exist. You've written and talked about it. I have too. I think these are, though, these are the man bites dog stories. Okay, so we all love these stories, right? The elite said there's no way Covid escaped for a lab. And then they say, oh, maybe it did escape for a lab. Or they say trans women have no advantage over biological women in sports. Any person, it's just the easiest case. And if you go on Twitter, you know, people will, you know, they, they, they love this example kind of right wing people, like no matter what, they don't understand, they understand men and women are different and they feel like they can just own you, you know, they, they think I'm like some kind of libelitist and they, they could own me with that. Those cases unquestionably exist. A lot of my writing, a lot of my career has been spent talking about these cases. As you brought up, defund the police, things like that. Now we remember, we remember these cases and they stick in the mind and we talk about them all the time. But if you actually look at things that elites are right about, and it's kind of boring to do this, it seems trite, but we have to do it to maintain some perspective. So I use the example and I don't want to pick on him. He seems like a nice guy. Joe Rogan podcast, okay? I'm using it because it's the top podcast in the country, right? I'm not using it to like find some random person who's irrelevant. I'm using Joe Rogan as the alternative. You know, the kind of people who don't listen to elites. This is who they go to for their information. And so if you think, if you think about, you know, just don't think of your common sense, uncle. Think about Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan's audience or somebody like Tucker Carlson's audience. The list of things they believe that are false, that the media believes something else. And the media is right on, right? So I made a list of this in the book. Either Rogan thinks that Rogan either endorsed or brought guests on, which basically, basically he gave a respectful hearing to and treated as like reasonable opinions, right? So things like vaccines are worse than the diseases they're meant to treat. A big one. Like if we accept that, like we're gonna have more death across the world than all the defunding the police you can imagine, right? Things like ancient lost civilizations that no archaeologists have found, but some random guy says that they had advanced technology that we haven't even recreated to this day, or something. Something that's just completely Anacc, Right? Just ancient civilizations like that. Other mainstream archaeologists don't think there's actual evidence for things like, you know, like esp, like mind reading, aliens like you, you, The UFO thing, which I know some people, some smarter people are now believing in, but I don't think there's much there, right? So this, the, you know, the list goes on. You can get beyond Rogan. You can go on Twitter and the things that have popular support, you know, anti Semitic Conspiracy Theories, Series 9, 11, Trutherism. Right? That's another one promoted by Tucker Carlson, another one of the top podcasters in the country very popular. You can look at polls. You know, a third of the people will, or 40% of the people will endorse something like 9, 11. Trutherism. And so like, yes, like, you know, there are, you can list five or ten things where really, like, elites are just wrong. And you can go to any random guy in the street and he's going to have a better, more, you know, more defensible opinion. Opinion than your New York Times journalist or even your, like, professor at some, you know, medical professor at some major university. I just don't think those are the majority of the cases. I think that's maybe 5, 10% of cases. And I think 90% of the cases the elites are right and the people who are criticizing elites are wrong.
- [32:44]
Coleman Hughes
Okay, so then you were, you were getting back to your model of why populists tend to govern badly.
- [32:50]
Richard Hanania
Yeah, and that's. And so that was the second point. You know, we just, we just went over it. Gatekeepers are almost always correct. You know, the way I put it in the book is, is if someone goes, applies to Harvard Medical School to be a professor and they're rejected, and they say, I was rejected because I had the wrong politics, maybe that's true. Like maybe one out of a hundred times that's true. But 99 out of 100 times the person did not have the work ethic or the brains or the record of accomplishment to be a Harvard medical. Harvard professor at Harvard Medical School. Most of us don't. Right. And so that's like the assumption you have to start with, like these institutions, Institutions are actually doing something when they're selecting people. And so, yeah, we talk about, like affirmative action, you know, we talk about these things that are unfair. Absolutely. But still they're doing something. They're not doing nothing when they are selecting people. And then the, you know, the final reason why we would probably, we would think that populism is probably not a great thing is it's just another form of identity politics. I mean, the right thinks that they're against identity politics, but when people talk about, about, you know, 90% of the time, and, you know, I'm an example here, I'm an exception here, but if people are talking about what elites believe and what the people believe, the ass. The assumption or the implication is elites are wrong and the regular people are correct. And just like if you do that for race, just like if you do that for sex, you know, my identity is what, is what determines whether something is true or false or how seriously, my opinion should be taken. That's a road to hell. And so like liberalism, at least in theory, although every one of us is of course biased, liberalism, in theory at least tries to get away. Away from that populism, completely embraces it. And when it, when it gets into ethnonationalism, when it gets to this, you know, identity politics for majorities, it's the same thing. It's doing the, it's doing the race thing. It's kind of mirroring the left in that way when they do it for minorities, but then also just attacking elites on the basis of class or like partisanship. You know, it's not exactly class, but basically the, you know, whoever's closer to the people is correct. And that's just, that's just a terrible way to determine what is true.
- [34:54]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, you can see it quite often in political rhetoric. People, Politicians will say things like, the people know that this or the people understand. And then on the other, on the other hand, you'll have people say things like, most experts agree that blank. And that's the other side of the coin. Yeah, but your point is that the most experts agree points are more often correct than the people know points.
- [35:19]
Richard Hanania
Most often, yeah. I mean, like me and you, we're smart, sophisticated guys. We can think of places where maybe we've done our own research into the topic and we think the elites, experts are wrong. I'm not going to defer to experts in every case, but even us, like, you know, my opinion on quantum mechanics or what the interest rate should be, what interest rate the Federal Reserve should set, or know chemistry or medicine, like, Even us, like 95% of the time, there really is no choice other than trust the experts or, or just believe what you want to believe or believe whatever you heard on a podcast. Right. There aren't a lot of options out there. Even us who are in the ideas business for a living cannot go out there and research every question. If I'm going to write an article on something, then I'm going to really, really dig deep. But most of the time, I'm like anyone else. I have to defer to authority. So appeal to authority is generally a bad argument. I say, yes, it is, is when you have time to actually look into something. But most of the time we don't have time to actually look into every single topic that we might be interested in. We don't have the training to do so. And trusting the experts is probably the best we can do on average on this show.
- [36:28]
Coleman Hughes
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- [37:17]
Richard Hanania
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- [37:48]
Coleman Hughes
so I have two points to make. One is that trusting the experts is excellent on topics that aren't politicized.
- [37:57]
Richard Hanania
Yes.
- [37:57]
Coleman Hughes
So you brought up quantum mechanics, not a political issue. You, you could just blindly copy paste mostly what a physicist is telling you about quantum mechanics and trust that it's the best state of human knowledge. And you should do that in, in those cases when you get to politic, politicized topics, whether it's gender, race, certain areas of economics, although economics less so, the quality of research goes down by orders of magnitude, like instantly. Like I think, think just like a lot of. And, and I'll, I'll, I'll speak on it because it's what I've looked into the most. But a, a lot of research by experts on racism can be dismissed, Right? And the reason is because racism is among the most politicized subjects in America and, and other societies in the West. So isn't there a like a big distinction to be made there? Like you should just blindly trust the experts on non political, non politicized subjects, but blindingly trusting the experts is not really a good strategy.
- [39:04]
Richard Hanania
Yeah. Outside of that, I would never say blindly. You still have to have like a common sense kind of antenna up. Right. I agree with most of that. Some things are obviously politicized. You know, race, gender. Like we like the things where they're censoring people. People seem to be canceled for their opinions. Probably a good indication that there's heavy politicization going on. You know, part of the, part of the problem though is, is there will often be disputes about what actually is politicized. So anti vaxxers, if you talk to them, will tell you this is all politicized. They want you to believe that vaccines, maybe there's a conspiracy.
- [39:41]
Coleman Hughes
They'll say it's more like pharma. Yeah, pharma manipulation.
- [39:45]
Richard Hanania
Yeah.
- [39:45]
Coleman Hughes
This is kind of industrial complexes.
- [39:47]
Richard Hanania
There's a kind of conspiracy theory. But with the COVID vaccine, sometimes they think it's ideological. And so like, you know, that's. If you say, well, trust the experts when things are not politicized. Well, how do you know what is politicized? It's a step backwards where you have to actually, you know, you have to make that decision at some point.
- [40:04]
Coleman Hughes
Well, I mean, you can look at what people fight about. People don't fight about nuclear physics. They fight about anything that's fought about vaccines.
- [40:12]
Richard Hanania
Again, people do fight about that.
- [40:13]
Coleman Hughes
It's now politicized. It wasn't ten years ago, but yeah, it is now politicized.
- [40:17]
Richard Hanania
Yeah, I think it is. But I still think vaccines.
- [40:19]
Coleman Hughes
I see what you mean.
- [40:20]
Richard Hanania
Yeah.
- [40:20]
Coleman Hughes
I still think you should still trust the experts, is your point.
- [40:22]
Richard Hanania
Yeah. And the only way, you know, in that case, like, you have to cut. I did spend a lot of time looking into the COVID vaccines and, you know, know anti vaxxer. So I, I feel confident in saying this, but yeah, I mean, it doesn't. It's in. You're right. I mean, I think you're right. I think there are a category of things where we know they're politicized like nobody on Earth, nobody was just the most, with the most passing familiar familiarity with American culture or elite culture will deny racism is a very, very political, political issue. Right. Sex, LGBT issues, we got that. I think, though, be careful when people, you know, because people are going to use that. They're going to say all these other issues. Xyz, oh, why aren't they, you know, why are they hiding the aliens? Because this is politicized. Right. Or why are they lying to us about vaccines? So you have to be careful not to apply that too broadly.
- [41:12]
Coleman Hughes
I would argue those things are just obviously less politicized in my view. But my second point is, you know, how does someone come to be a fan of a Richard Hanania or a Coleman Hughes? It seems to enter that door, you have to be Willing to not trust the experts on certain issues. So for instance, you know, if, if you're discovering someone like me making critiques of wokeness, Black Lives Matter and Defund the police circa 2019 or 2020 when I'm coming up, you have to be someone that does not trust what the experts are telling you on all of these subjects. Because I was mostly contra the expert consensus on whether those were good movements for black people, good movements for the country. Right. And so by definition the audience that reaches me has a certain willingness to buck expertise and does not have a trust the experts mentality.
- [42:17]
Richard Hanania
So going back, Sorry to interrupt, but going back to BLM and defunding the police, like I don't think if you polled criminologists at any point a majority would have said defund the police and you will have less crime. I don't think even most journalists, you know, would have said that. I don't think there was like a New York Times op ed or something. It was a prestigious, There was one
- [42:35]
Coleman Hughes
called Defund the police. There was a New York Times op ed literally said titled Defund the police.
- [42:40]
Richard Hanania
Okay, in that case. Yeah, yeah, I'll defer to you on that. Yeah, I mean the expert, you know, but even that the New York Times is not experts in criminology necessarily. It was a prestige. Prestige. It was a prestige thing. But yeah, I mean, continue. I think you're, I think you're on to something.
- [42:55]
Coleman Hughes
So whether it's experts. So there's a slight confusion which is that like true experts are almost by definition it's like a no true Scotsman thing. Like if, if you're a Marxist, then you're not really an expert on economics. Right. Because like Marxism is so clearly refuted. So at some level, circularly the experts always have like the truly right opinion. But yeah, the people that are viewed as elites on and, and experts in quotation marks on any given issue based on the prestige economy. Like they are the people that all my fans were comfortable ignoring in order to say I actually, I actually read an article by this 25 year old kid who said something really smart and you know, know, it kind of refuted everything Jamelle Bouie or whatever actually prestigious person was saying on the issue. And then there becomes a paradox because once you have that audience cultivated and then you turn to that audience and you say, well on this other issue you should just trust the experts. There's an inevitable rub there because of the selection effect of who they are. And to be clear, I'm not actually disagreeing that trust the experts is the right. Right point of view on many issues. I think you and I would probably agree 80, 90% on what those issues are. But there is a. There is a contradiction in terms of how the audience for people like us gets created. And it's true also of someone like Sam Harris or whatever. It's like people came to Sam Harris because they were like, the experts on jihadism are telling me it has nothing to do with religious doctrine. But I found this really smart guy that was pointing to the link between religious doctrine and jihadist violence. Silence. And he makes more sense to me than the experts. So you cultivate an audience that specifically is okay, not trusting experts. And then later, when you tell them to trust the experts on something, they revolt. It doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong to tell them, but it explains a kind of paradox at the heart of what we do. Right?
- [45:01]
Richard Hanania
Yeah. I mean, we have to be able to strike this balance and do a few different things at one time. I think you're right. I think what you've described, described is kind of the process of how people, you know, how people become skeptical of mainstream institutions and in many cases go and go insane. And this is why, like, you know, we've seen it. We've seen people who started out maybe as reasonable critics of wokeness just really go off the deep end. And it's kind of hard. It's like a train where you need to have enough skepticism and independence of thought to say they're, you know, the experts, or what the prestige media or what the establishment is telling me is wrong. But then you have to, like, kind of stop there and not overgeneralize from what you've learned about, you know, trans women in sports or something, which just drives you crazy because they are so obviously wrong and what they believe is so obviously crazy. Right. And so, yeah, I mean, that's. That's why. That's why life is hard. Like, you know, I'm not advocate. You know, I wouldn't advocate for. Although it's better than the ultimate. Like, if you're gonna. If I'm gonna have to choose between a person just being a person who trusts everything they read in the newspaper or their doctor tells them, or somebody who believes nothing they read in the newspaper or their doctor tells them, I'll say believe everything is better than believe nothing. You'll be right more often than the person who believes nothing. But, you know, if we're trying to cultivate a more sophisticated citizenry or a more sophisticated audience, there has to be a way to say yes. There are things where common sense and, you know, kind of red flags of politicization and some, you know, smart people you trust doing their own research, coming to different conclusion. You have to be open to that at the same time, not overgeneralize where you think the way to achieve knowledge is to just listen to random people who sound convincing and don't have any connection to institutions. You and I started out with no connection to institutions. You know, why should anyone listen to us? Well, we produce work and people can read it and it seems reasonable. And, you know, we're legitimized by other smart people. That's part of it. Smart people have us as podcast guests or cite our work. You need these signals. These signals are useful and just striking the balance between being skeptical enough and not just kind of losing your mind. That's the challenge. That's why. That's the difference between me and 2021. And now I'm wanting, telling people in 2026. I think to a large extent, the wokeness stuff, a lot of these things, these trans issues, a lot of the stuff on policing, at least intellectually, those battles have been won, or we're winning those battles. Right. I think at this particular point in history, we're suffering from too much cynicism and too much doubt and too much kind of listening to anti establishment voices.
- [47:42]
Coleman Hughes
Right. Okay, So I want to ask you a little more about populism because you have a, I think a chapter devoted to what explains the rise of populism all around the world. So we've established what an elite is. What, what populism is. You've made, You've given three or four reasons why populism tends to lead to bad governance. There is now the further question of what has led to the rise in populism all around the world in the past 15 years or so. There are various different theories. Maybe you can give me the theories that you think are wrong and the theory you ultimately think is right.
- [48:22]
Richard Hanania
Okay. Yeah. So from like, if you listen to populists themselves, the most popular theory is that it's some kind of reasonable reaction to things elites have gotten wrong wrong. Now, without question, elites do get some things wrong. The question is, are our elites at this point of his. Can it explain the last, I don't know, 20, 30 years of when we see populism really on the rise from like, I think, any objective perspective? I think in America in particular, we live pretty well. I mean, our economy has done very well. We're Beating every other advanced nation in the world. Americans have civil liberties compared to any other point in history. Right. We had slavery, we had Jim Crow, we had restrictions on women. People, you know, like people talk about forever wars. The number of people dying in wars in America, very low by historical perspective. I think if an alien were coming to Earth and they were studying America and Europe the last 20, 30 years, they would say these are the best run societies in human history. Lot of problems. But I mean look at everything else that's happened, right. And so I don't think some kind of objective elite failure can explain it. I don't think even like subjective, like what people think goes that far because there's some polling data I cite where you can ask people like how much they agree with various populist sounding ideas like the, you know, the elites or the rich hold people back. There are too many immigrants in this country. The things that kind of populists say. And there's a very, there's like, seems to be no correlation between the populist attitudes in a population and how successful populists are in the political sphere.
- [49:59]
Coleman Hughes
Wow, that's really surprising.
- [50:00]
Richard Hanania
Yeah. So if you ask like these questions to like, you know, the rich don't care about us, you know, the, the, you know, the people in media are, you know, out for themselves. They don't care about truth. Ask people those questions like America, Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, they'll kind of, they look similar. There's like a few percentage points between each of them. And the countries that dislike immigration the most aren't necessarily the ones who have the mo. The strongest anti immigration parties. And so there's you know, something else going on. I think the thing that's, you know, it's, it's kind of like the, the fertility rate when something is kind of universal. It's happening everywhere regardless of the society you're looking at. And it's happening across the world. You look for some kind of technological change. And I think that basically the big one here is communications technology. The rise of, first of all, there was the era of 24 hour cable news and then the Internet and social media. And so there's a lot of data on the rise of 24 hour cable news. There's some papers I cite in the book where, where like people watching, you know, they get, they start getting Fox News in the 1990s and the other stations, CNN and MSNBC, they'd been around but they, CNN in particular, but they became more culturally focused over time. And the number of people basically saying that A culture war issue was the top issue. Just went up. Just went up. And you could trace it to, like how easy it was to watch Fox News in a particular area because where, you know, it's a very. It's kind of a complicated thing, but it's very clear, clever. Where some cable stations will have it like lower on the channel order and some of them will have it higher and people watch it more when it's lower on the channel. And so, like places where it's lower, you know, they have, they have. People care more about cultural issues.
- [51:39]
Coleman Hughes
So it starts so funny because they're just, they're just going up back in the day, just going 2, 3, 4, 5, 7.
- [51:45]
Richard Hanania
Yeah, exact. Exactly.
- [51:46]
Coleman Hughes
And then they stop on a story about how M M's have this. You know, they're no longer stilettos now because libs are trying to destroy it
- [51:52]
Richard Hanania
and they're too sexy or not sexy enough. You can be adding. You could be mad either way. Way. It could be that either way. And it kind of, it kind of changes over time. And so you do see that. I mean, you do see like culture wars, like I think 2000-2000-2000-2004 in particular, where gay marriage was rising up as an issue and Bush ran against it. That was something new. Was at first it was, you know, these social issues. Abortion, gay marriage, and then becomes immigration, you know, the next, you know, 10 years, 15 years. Great awokening. Right. Wokeness becomes cultural issues come to dominate on the left. So you have 24 hour cable news. Then Twitter comes along. It seems to just put it into overdrive. Great awokening begins around 2011, 2010, according to Zach Goldberg and his work. Same time Twitter really starts to take off. So the kind of timing matches up very well and I think just kind of like a common sense understanding of these things and just kind of like looking at what's going on. It's interesting that if you go back, back, you know, 20 years ago, and you pull and you look at polls from the time, like, was 9, 11 an inside job? Did the government have something to do with it? If you ask people, do vaccines cause autism? These were always popular views. You would always get 20, 30, 40% of the public saying, yes, okay, but these views had zero representation. Not a single member of Congress, not a single governor, not a single presidential candidate would say, vaccines cause autism. Or that 9, 11 was an insight job and you would be canceled from respectable society if you took those positions now, those positions. It's becoming more democratic in a sense, because now, those people that 20, 30, 40% of the population, whatever it is, in a particular case, they have representation and we see maybe 20% of. We're getting to the point where maybe 25% of Congress is some form of anti vaxxers, probably still underrepresented compared to the general public.
- [53:43]
Coleman Hughes
But can you explain how that mechanism works?
- [53:46]
Richard Hanania
How.
- [53:47]
Coleman Hughes
How does social media, Twitter, Facebook, presumably create like change the institution or the feedback mechanisms between politicians and the public so that a politician can win on that view that has always held purchase? Like, why couldn't they win on that view in 2002?
- [54:08]
Richard Hanania
Yeah.
- [54:09]
Coleman Hughes
And why can they now?
- [54:10]
Richard Hanania
Yeah. I mean, how does it work? Yeah. If you look at the history, like you look at someone like Pat Buchanan who tried to kind of run a Trumpist campaign in the 1990s and early 2000s, the point is you couldn't really get your message out. Like there was a legitimization, there was gatekeepers. They call them gatekeepers for a reason. You wanted to get your message out in 1990 or 2000. You had to be covered on the evening news. Maybe you wrote a book or something which had to go through a mainstream publisher. Maybe you were written about in magazines. Talk radio starts to break that firewall and you see kind of this populism rising on the right. But now you really do have an actual marketplace of ideas. So if Trump comes along and he's more anti immigration and more conspiratorial and more hostile to the libs and kind of more entertaining than all other Republicans, you can just go straight to Trump's Twitter. Back in 2016, you can go to the podcast you like, that's gonna give you the opinion of that person. Person, I think in like, you know, in 2005, like, I think about kind of what's changed politically. 1995, you know, 2005, when I was growing up and now I think that it's been, it's become, you know, the. You can be into politics now no matter what. You're kind of like, if, no matter what your views are, you will find something that reflects those views. And so like these people have a voice now. Like, if you just think of, of like you have to, you know, it's not just, I believe in 9, 11, truth or ism, and therefore I can, you know, elect a member of Congress. Somebody could run on that. But that person is going to be ignored by the mainstream media. They're not going to get donors, they're going to be treated as a crank. They're not going to be able to just tweet directly. They're not just going to be able to go on large podcasts. They're going to be sympathetic to them. There needs to be kind of a informational environment where these people have something more of like an equal shot where. Where their views that are rejected by the elites don't get them gatekept, don't get them isolated and kept out of power. And I think that's what happened. It's this. Every kind of movement in communications Technology the last 30, 40 years, not everyone, but the major ones, cable news, podcasts, Internet, social media, happened in the direction of greater democratization of the public sector square.
- [56:32]
Coleman Hughes
So is there, Is there also a difference between elites and populists with respect to simple stylistic things like how you speak, how you dress, and if so, why. Why is that important?
- [56:47]
Richard Hanania
Yeah, I mean, there is, you know, I think populists, they are how you speak, how you dress. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's kind of the rambunctious kind of, kind of combative style is like, almost central to the definition of populism. And I think it's like the way that certain. The way that certain views are underrepresented among elites, like the ones we talked about, certain styles or aesthetic things, aesthetic kind of ways of just going about in the world are underrepresented among elites. So a politician 20, 30 years ago, they're probably someone who's from the upper class or assimilated towards the upper class. They speak in complete sentences. They, you know, they. They don't like, engage in ad hominems usually. They don't attack their opponents. They. They don't, you know, just say crazy things. Usually there's some kind of, you know, there is a class thing here. And populism is one of those things where one of the aspects of populism is that basically some people like, you know, the monster truck rally, some people like professional wrestling, some people like the ufc, you know, on the White House lawn, Right. There's. These things are underrepresented and the populace are giving them that. The. They're giving the people who want a show, who want some entertainment, who find kind of elite culture too stuffy or maybe they would say inauthentic. They're giving them what they want.
- [58:08]
Coleman Hughes
Okay, I want to ask you some questions about your. Your, actually, your first book. Your first book is called. What's it called? Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy.
- [58:18]
Richard Hanania
Yes. That. You're going way back with that one.
- [58:20]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. So it's. It's effectively a book about why we make the military decisions that we do. Right. And so I imagine you have a view about whether the military industrial complex is a real thing, what those concepts mean properly understood, and how that sort of like how that. Because obviously this interfaces interestingly with your, with your new book because one of the more commonly held beliefs among populists and their audience is that industry runs America's military choices. And we get into wars because the people at Raytheon need to make money. They have lobbyists that shape the opinions of our security state and they are all too eager to get us involved in wars as a result that then we're down to the financial benefit of the people at Raytheon on. Who live in a revolving door. You know, many of the people in our security establishment find cushy jobs at such, such companies soon after their departure from public service and so forth. So to what extent is that true? And how do you, how do you fit that into your kind of like, experts tend to be. Right framework?
- [59:43]
Richard Hanania
Yeah, so I talk a little bit about this in the book. I had actually a. I actually had a paper with Max Abrams many years ago where we polled actual experts in foreign policy, and we saw what they thought. And going back to the point about whether experts ever believed that defunding the police was a good idea, foreign policy experts tended to be a lot less hawkish than kind of the D.C. establishment. And so, yeah, a lot of the think tanks, a lot of the kind of environments and the intellectual elite in Washington is either somehow, indirectly funded by the, by the, by weapons manufacturers, although I think that's easy to exaggerate. I think a lot of it is actually, you know, people who have an ideological stake in American foreign policy. Or a lot of cases, it's actually foreign governments who are very good at lobbying. And so, yeah, American foreign policy is kind of a unique and interesting thing in that most Americans do not have. Have any direct experience with it. Right. And so we are just kind of so like information and they usually don't prioritize it outside of, you know, in, in voting or whatever, outside of an unusual circumstance. And it doesn't, you know, it's even ideologically, it's not what most Americans who are ideological care about. And so we are like, really, really dependent on the informational environment. And another thing about foreign policy is it's hard to develop real expertise like vaccines, medicine. You can do, you can do randomized control trials. You, whether this medicine works or that vaccine works or whatever. Even social science Economics, there's tons and tons of data you can look at. There are experiments people use foreign policy like, you know, I have a PhD in Political Science with a focus on international relations. The expertise is a very, very limited use because it's just. There's so many different parts. Like what? Exactly.
- [61:38]
Coleman Hughes
Inherently unpredictable, right?
- [61:39]
Richard Hanania
It's inherently under. Predictable. It's a very. It's a very complex system. There are some, you know, there's, you know, I think during the British Empire, people would develop actual expertise in, like, regions of the world. Like, somebody would know, you know, the Arab tribes or they would know a part of India very, very well. We tend not to do that as much. International relations people, experts are kind of generalists for the most part. And I think that is just like. Like what even is expertise, international relations.
- [62:09]
Coleman Hughes
Our National Security Council doesn't have like, one area expert on.
- [62:14]
Richard Hanania
They probably do. I mean, but even like, when that paper I talked about, when we pulled the experts, we even asked, like, people, are you an expert in, you know, the Middle east or Iran or something? And then we'd ask, do you speak Arabic or Farsi? And, you know, a huge portion. I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head now, but a huge portion of them did not even speak the language of the country they were experts in. They were, I don't know, reading reports of activist groups. I don't know, like, exactly what they're doing to be experts. Reading the newspaper. I mean, I'm an expert. Expert that in, you know, these foreign countries in that case. So it's.
- [62:46]
Coleman Hughes
Well, you actually speak a little Arabic, right?
- [62:47]
Richard Hanania
Speak a little Arabic. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't consider myself an expert in the region by. By any means. And yeah, it's, you know, even whether in theory. In theory you could develop, you know, expertise, international relations. Interesting question. In practice, I don't think anything we do as a society actually gives you. Gives you, like, expertise that makes your opinion that much better than a random educated person who's following the news. And I Phil Tetlock, his research on who's good at predicting things, I think he found that. Right. A lot of it was geopolitical focus. Whether these experts knew more than they tended to do better. The experts would do better than just a random person who knew nothing. But if you compare them to an educated person who just follows the news and tries to predict things, they were about equal, if my recollection of Tetlock's work is correct. So, yeah, international relations, kind of geopolitics is kind of a very interesting place where even the definition of expertise can be contemporary tested.
- [63:47]
Coleman Hughes
So it's easy to find examples of left wing populism in Latin America. They're a dime a dozen. And I think most of the examples of left wing populism you've talked about in the podcast come from Latin America. Is there, are there left wing populists in America? Who are they? Could you name them or think of them? And do you think there is a prospect for popular and successful left wing politicians at the national level in America?
- [64:14]
Richard Hanania
Yeah. So the question of like populism's relationship to the ideological spectrum. There's a researcher named Lawrence Gunther who I cite in the book and basically what he finds is like, you know, I say populism is not about ideas. Mostly it's not completely not about ideas. Like on immigration in particular, what Gunther finds is that he looked at polls of Europeans and then European politicians, right, and the European politicians and the masses had about similar views on economics, similar views on social issues. Immigration and crime were the big ones where the elites were just way, way to the left of where the voters are. And so that's part of the reason why we have right wing populism. It's that the right wing views on crime and immigration in particular are just underrepresented. So most in the, in the Western world, most populous, anti elites, they tend to be, they tend to be right wing. There are left wing populists, but there's not this gap. Left wing populists tend to focus on economics. There's not this as large of gap in economic views between the elites and the masses. So there's just not a lot of market space for them in the American context. Yes, there are left wing populists. I'd say Bernie Sanders is clearly a populist. Graham Platner is clearly a populist. They have this aspect. They're, they're not the first choice of the Democratic Party by far. Chuck Schuber endorsed Graham Platner's opponents, Bernie Sanders. His followers are always accusing the Democrats of stacking the field against him in the primaries or rigging the election. So these are not establishment people. They do divide the world into us and them. They don't focus on social issues or. Well, they do focus a little bit on social issues, but it's not about. Immigration is not their main focus or social issues is not their main focus. It's economics. Right. And there is an audience for that. Whether that has a prospect of succeeding, it's the question. It's like the question of the next 5, 10 years of the American left, what direction it's going. You've seen kind of these parallel rises. You've seen kind of like this rebranded neoliberalism. As I see the abundance movement, you see that very successful. You see California governor, governor of New York York, citing Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's work. At the same time, you see kind of these people with their roots in dsa, people like Mamdani, people like Graham Platner rising up and having political success. So that's going to be kind of, that's kind of whether there'll be a synthesis or whether one side will win. That's kind of the battle of the next five years in the Democratic Party as a matter of, like, prospects. I will say, compared to the, the conservatives, what liberals have is they do actually have a real establishment. So even if you go back before Trump in 2016, if you look at the 2012 primary on the Republican side, it was wild. I mean, you had these novelty candidates. You had these people like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann, like, rising in the polls, leading. It was, you know, it was a reality show, right? The Centaurum Huckabee. It was like, it was a kind of crazy free for all. The Republicans already were like, you know, we're already into populism, the Tea Party movement. And by 2016, the party was just ripe for Trump's taking, right? These people, like never Trumper's National Review at that point, they didn't have much influence in the first place, which is why they couldn't stop him on the left. Like these people who are not populous, who are left wing, like New York Times columnists, like, there's big substackers, big media outlets. They're still there and they have, they have reach and they have intellectual prestige. Right? So this populism is this force. There is this, you know, actual kind of grassroots support on the left for left wing populist ideas. And then there is this establishment that they're going to kind of run into. And whether one side co ops the other or which side wins, I don't know. It's yet to be seen. But this is, yeah, this is the thing to watch on the left.
- [68:15]
Coleman Hughes
And why is it that populism skews more right wing? I mean, you know, you, you explain that the divide on immigration and crime is big and that leaves an opening for populist candidates. But, but is there something inherently more right wing about populism or is it just a historical accident? At this moment there happens to be this big gap.
- [68:39]
Richard Hanania
Yeah. I mean, I think that the idea that elites are more liberal on like race and sexuality and issues like that, I think, you know, I've, I've written, written some articles on this and I've looked into some data. It's, it's practically a universal thing. I looked at like, you know, 20, 30 different countries and in each case, or almost each case, more educated, more educated people were more like in favor of gay marriage, more liberal on, you know, welcoming like who is part of the nation. So I do think there is something inherent there where like smart, ambitious people like move to big cities and are open minded and are tolerant of different groups. Groups. Now you get like wokeness, you get to like OD on that. You go, you can go too far. But I do think that like in general, elites are more liberal on these issues.
- [69:26]
Coleman Hughes
Was that a personality, a side effect of personality, like higher in openness to experience or something?
- [69:31]
Richard Hanania
Yeah, yeah. I'd say intelligence too. I mean, that's less politically correct to say, but like a lot of the kind of, you know, racism and sexism is often very, very dumb. I think it was. We've seen, you know, anyone could browse Twitter for five minutes and, and see that the left wing populism, it's had a history. It's been in Latin America. I think this probably historically what has happened is economic governance, like economic policy has become more left wing. We've had a rise in the welfare state. There's no aristocratic privilege in Western countries anymore. There is redistribution, there are regulations, nations. And it seems like we've kind of reached the, you know, we've kind of reached the equilibrium. Maybe when people are very, very poor, it's easier to get them worked up about, you know, the rich elites. There's a, there's some research showing that basically as Western countries became wealthier over the second half of the 20th century, they became wealthier and political party platforms tended to focus more on social issues and less on economic issues because, you know, people were wealthy. They were, they were fighting over express of values. And so like that's why maybe in the third world, in developing countries you will see more economic populism and that's why you see less of it in western countries. And we're still fighting these culture war issues.
- [70:50]
Coleman Hughes
Okay, so something that maybe not as many people know about you is that you're Palestinian and Jordanian.
- [70:58]
Richard Hanania
Yeah.
- [71:00]
Coleman Hughes
You've written about Israel and the war. In Got Plaza. Is there any window or vantage point that, that Your heritage gives you there or is. Are you effectively feel you're no different than someone. You're reading articles, trying to make sense of it from afar.
- [71:17]
Richard Hanania
Yeah, I think that I'm mostly reading, thinking, coming up with my own ideas. But everyone's, like, background is going to affect kind of how they see the world, how they see politics, political issues. I think that, like, populism in particular. I think just like, knowing people from, like, the Middle east and knowing immigrants to America, it's kind of given me a perspective on, like, what actually is, like, it's. It made. It made Western elites seem like strange people. Because I look at, like, regular America. Like, I grew up. Most people I grew up with, you know, their parents didn't have college degrees. It was, it was. It was working middle. Working class. And then I think about kind of the people who came from the Middle East, a lot of similarities there. And I think actually the elites I've been around, when I've been around places like Columbia and UCLA and dealing with people in the media, I think that they are actually different and interesting. And that's probably changed. That's probably influenced how I think about these issues. I think you're asking about is the Israeli Palestinian dispute and Middle Eastern politics, maybe more specifically. Yeah, my view is, like, it's hard for. I just said that kind of like, the American working class and Middle Easterners are same in some ways, but they're also very, very different. And one way that they're very, very different is it's hard for, I think, Westerners to understand the kind of overwhelming social conformity that there are in these societies. So you'll say, you know, people will look at, you know, Israel and Hamas and they will say, well, not all Palestinians support Hamas. You know, I'm sure not. It's not 100%, you know, all the. Or they'll say, you know, this is, you know, they'll try to, like, talk about, like, oh, we have to give these people in the society more of a chance than these people. And I think what a lot. A lot of people don't understand, like, there is a lot more kind of social homogeneity in these societies and what people believe than there are in Western countries. And probably being, like, involved in a war zone, involved in an act of conflict is probably going to up that to the nth degree. We see that in our own society when there is. When there is conflict or when there is a foreign threat. So, yeah, I mean, it does have some influence. You know, you never want to Be one of those people who says, you know, my background gives me some expertise. You always want to ground what you believe in kind of facts and empirical arguments everyone can understand. But, you know, of course, it does influence how I think.
- [73:37]
Coleman Hughes
And, and you're. I think. Which one of your parents is from Christian Palestinian? Is your.
- [73:44]
Richard Hanania
Yeah, my dad's Greek Orthodox and my mom is Catholic.
- [73:47]
Coleman Hughes
I wonder about the role of religion there in the conflict, if that gives you any, if you have thought about that at all. I had Oren Caster on the podcast who wrote a great book, 1936, about the Arab revolt in the late 30s. And I asked him whether there were any examples he found in all his research of Christian Palestinians participating in terrorist attacks against the British Jews, et cetera. And I believe he said he had found none. And he was pretty exhaustive account of, of that, of that revolt. And it's interesting there is a case study because to the extent that Palestinians have legit grievances against the British and, and, and they do from, from that era certainly have, have grievances, you would expect the violence to be distributed among Christian Palestinians as well, which were, you know, 10, 15% of the population or something. But you don't see that.
- [74:45]
Richard Hanania
Yeah, that is a good point. In the second half of the 20th century, there was this Christian Palestinian who was the leader of some kind of terrorist group. It was officially like a Marxist group, but it was under the umbrella of Palestinian resistance. So there was a time when Christians in the Middle east, actually Christians in the Middle east had been overrepresented in like Ba', Athism, in kind of these secular, secular, nationalistic, pro Palestinian ideologies. Michelle Affleck is the intellectual behind Ba'. Athism. It attracted minorities, you know, like Bashar Al Assad's regime, the Alawites in Syria. And, you know, Christians were, support. Tended to be more supportive of that regime than Sunni Arabs were. And yeah, so there was this like, Arab nationalism that kind of, kind of incarnated, compassed, like different kinds of Arabs, different kinds of Middle Easterners. But on the broad scheme of things, like, you're right, you do see Christian Arabs are more likely to just have moved away from the Middle east and gone on with their lives. Which is better for them and better for their descendants than fighting, fighting forever. You see that in the American occupation in Iraq, you know, there were no terrorists by, There were no suicide bombings by Christians. It was, there was a Sunni insurgency first, and the Sunnis and the Shia started fighting. And then Christians were ultimately victimized. You See that in Lebanon. I mean, when Israel invaded Lebanon in the late 1970s, 1980s, they wanted to install a Christian government because they thought it would be friendlier to Israel, even though it was the same ethnic group. And if you know something about Christian Arabs and Muslims, they speak the same language, they eat the same food, kind of their family practices and like how they see how they see family and like their attitudes towards like sexuality and marriage and child rearing are very, very similar. Like you will actually, like you can meet them and not tell who's a Christian or who's a Muslim unless you're seeing somebody wearing a hijab or something like that. And so, yeah, I think that the role of Islam. And you mentioned Sam Harris. I mean, I think he's right to point this out. It absolutely is significant.
- [76:53]
Coleman Hughes
Okay, final question. Question. This goes back to the beginning of our conversation about your long intellectual journey. You know, as someone who had a window into what it is like to be a disgruntled, angry young man and has made a journey to. I understand, you know, first of all, being very successful, seemingly well adjusted, I'd
- [77:20]
Richard Hanania
like to say so. I like to think so I'm right
- [77:22]
Coleman Hughes
that you have a family.
- [77:23]
Richard Hanania
Right, I have a family.
- [77:24]
Coleman Hughes
So you've checked all the boxes of what I think makes a good life as a man and you've come on that journey from a less healthy place. What advice do you have for a young man that you could call it incel or not incel adjacent, angry, alt. Right. Whatever label you want to use that paints the picture. What's like your most honest, genuine and helpful advice that you could give such a person?
- [77:55]
Richard Hanania
Yeah, I mean I've always believed that victimhood kind of self pity, these are spiritually, intellectually poisoned. And I think that a lot of kind of crazy politics comes from people not realizing that their anger is internal and extrapolating out to the rest of the world and getting angry about something in the world from a broad historical perspective, not the that, you know, you could have suffered from, you know, affirmative action or something. You might have been a victim of a crime, whatever. You're in America, living in 2026. Most people listening to this are probably middle class or higher. Your life is pretty good from an objective perspective. There's nothing, you know, you get into masculinity. There's nothing masculine about exaggerating your problems, whining about them, seeing yourself as. Seeing yourself as a victim. So like if you are angry, it's probably something personal and something I always believed in. And something that I practiced is actually self improvement, like reflecting on like who you are, kind of what you're doing wrong. Learning to socialize. Like some of us, it takes more effort or it took more work than others to be able to do that, like learn. You have to be honest about what's bothering you, what's kind of, if you feel some kind of discontent in the world, what is the ultimate source of, of that. And if you are like, you know, if you do find yourself getting into these, you know, quote unquote red pill politics or white identitarianism or whatever it may be, like, I, you know, you don't have to listen to, you know, you don't have to listen to Abraham X Kendi or something. You can listen to me, you can listen to Coleman. There's a lot in that worldview that is just as false as the things that you think you are rebelling against. So victimhood is a cancer. Focus on self improvement and just keep an open mind and actually try to seek truth rather than rejecting a certain community, people you feel resentful for and then just falling into a rabbit hole, which is also going to lead you in a bad direction.
- [79:53]
Coleman Hughes
All right, Richard Hanania, the book is Kakistocracy. There's a lot in there we didn't get to. Thank you so much for coming on my show.
- [80:00]
Richard Hanania
Thanks, Coleman. Really enjoyed it.