‘Be careful. Understand that this thing is difficult to control. Once you unleash these forces, they tend to go in surprising directions.’
Richard Hanania had a ringside seat for the rise of MAGA, as his Substack essays on anti-woke issues gained traction at the highest level of the new American Right. He had great hopes for Donald Trump’s second term, and coined the term ‘Tech Right’, hoping for an administration that worked productively alongside some of the smartest people in Silicon Valley. In practice, the second Trump presidency has proved, he says, ‘a nightmare scenario’.
Hanania’s new book ‘Kakistocracy’ is an attempt to understand what went wrong – and the wider lessons as populism continues to gain ground around the world. He argues that populists, for all their promises of overthrowing corrupt elites, often end up replacing a flawed system with something far more damaging – ‘rule by the worst’.
On this model, elites can be foolish and subject to groupthink, but they are held in check by a status game that rewards honesty and truth-seeking. Populists, by contrast, gain power from their unfiltered relationship with voters, which makes corruption and lies easier to get away with, and encourages zero-sum thinking.
But what about the pro-market successes of a populist like Javier Milei? And what are the risks for the UK, where Reform UK have a real prospect of forming the next government? This week on The Capitalist, I asked Hanania for his take. He doesn’t rule out the prospect that a party like Reform could bring in radical reforms that are good for Britain. But it is a strategy with a big warning label: once these forces are loose, nobody controls where they end up.
Below, you’ll find some short excerpts from our conversation.
Marc Sidwell
Editor, CapX
On the ‘Tech Right’:
‘I coined the term “Tech Right” back in 2023. And I thought these people were less populist, they were libertarian, they were obviously smart. To the extent there’s been a human capital deficit on the Republican side since Trump came along, there would be a solution to that, too. And they had money, and they had influence and they had large voices. You’d think they’d shift the American Right in their direction. But the lesson of the last ten years is that the Trump cult is just much, much more powerful. They were spending all their time on Twitter and getting a lot of brainworms – they didn’t stay who they were when they went over to MAGA. They became more MAGA than they influenced the Trump coalition. It’s a good lesson that no matter how smart you are, you need healthy epistemological standards and connections.’
On Reform UK’s prospects for success:
‘I wouldn’t say it’s completely crazy. The UK is stuck, and if you think there’s some reform Farage will enact that nobody else will, that’s not a crazy way to view the world. I’d just say: be careful. Understand that this thing is difficult to control. Once you unleash these forces, they tend to go in surprising directions – when people were supporting Trump in 2015 and 2016, there wasn’t a hint that anti-vax would end up being part of that coalition.’
What makes someone elite?:
‘What distinguishes elites is not just money or power – Donald Trump is an elite in that sense, so is Elon Musk. It tends to be that they’re playing a status game where they primarily care about the opinions of other elites. Populism is the opposite: someone powerful and influential, but whose source of power is a direct connection to the audience. Trump becomes president not because the Republican Party picked him – in fact they really didn’t want him – but because he had a direct relationship with the voters.’
On AI as an anti-populist technology:
‘AI seems to me one of those technologies that takes us in a less populist direction, because people tend to trust it, and it’s smart – it’s like having a smart person directly talking to you about the issues you care about. The problem with conspiracy theorists is they’ll drop the names of ten studies and you’d have no idea what they’re talking about. What AI can do is actually look up those studies, see if they exist, see what’s wrong with them, and point it out in detail. And if it’s nonsense, you’re not going to convince ChatGPT that anti-vax is true – it has other information at its disposal, and it will hold its ground.’
On defending free markets in a populist age:
‘It's kind of a short-term versus a long-term thing. Trying to convince elites is going to be very hard, but if we get an elite that's open to these ideas, free markets will be on a firmer foundation than they've ever been before – and historically, more educated people have been more pro-market. Populism is a path to sometimes short-term success. Switching elite opinion on these questions is the only long-term goal for free markets to be viable and safe in the long run.’
Is populism ever worth the risk?:
‘Maybe it’s worth it. Maybe your elites fail so badly that what populists say about elites in Argentina, or pre-Bukele El Salvador, is actually true. But they’re usually not that bad, I don’t think, in the US or the UK.’
