The article is paywalled but I think it must be saying that having populist leaders for a long period of time reduces GDP by 10% - not that electing just one populist leader reduces GDP by 10%. Because the latter is just an impossibly strong effect.
Still sobering. I am thinking that while swing voters tend to bemoan the fact that the left and right in America are so polarized and far apart, that this is not a big deal. It's okay to have a far left and a far right who compete and balance each other out. The problem in America now is that both sides are too populist.
This is what the article shows: "GDP per capita sharply and almost immediately drops. By year 15, the cumulative shortfall surpasses 10 percentage points!"
Astonishing if true and it would imply that "does this lead to populism" should be one of the biggest criteria for policymaking. Back in the late 2010s I remember people saying that we shouldn't allow much immigration because it can lead to right wing populism but I only treated it as a moderate concern because they didn't come armed with evidence of consequences of such magnitude.
If you don't want populism, you have to get rid of the single thing that is making populists win across the West: mass immigration. People in the West see hordes of third worlders pouring into their countries, they see that the present elites are either doing nothing about it or actively supporting it, so they vote in populists who campaign on overturning that traitorous elite and stopping the migration. This is why Trump won. This is why the far-right is winning across Europe. Yes, rule by populists is bad. But if domestic elites could find the balls to oppose replacement migration themselves, no one would ever turn to the populists. So, if you think populism is bad, and don't want it to reign in your country, the action you need to take is obvious: support, recruit, or create elites who oppose mass immigration, and put those elites in power.
What do you call it when people say "The solution to this issue is to do my completely unrelated thing?" Like when people say the solution to low birth rates is universal health care? This is that. It's pure copium.
Yes, populists cite the existence of immigrants to argue why they should be allowed to run the country (into the ground), they also do the EXACT SAME SHIT in Japan, a country whose economy was mismanaged for thirty years by the same right-wing party that STILL runs it, and has almost no immigration. The populists just appeal to the human id, and the human id is a xenophobe that doesn't recognize truth.
The world is becoming more globalized. Japanese voters can see how mass migration is going in Europe and demand that their country follow a different path.
No, the Japanese populists just rant about Thai tourists not knowing which order to buy/put hot water in the ramen and then blame all crimes on Secret Koreans.
Every Populist looks at their pet issue, and thinks that's whats driving people to populism.
You sound no different than a communist who says the real reason people are driven to Trump is the sigh of late-capitalism or the whatever, or the DSA types who think the reason people chose populism in 2024 was Gaza
What is the control group vs populists? Where I am sitting (Europe) the recent record of anti-populist W.European governments is pretty bad. Just think of recent German “respectable” governments that destroyed their energy systems and trapped country in permanent stagnation since 2020. Or similar thing in UK that havent had proper economic growth since 2010. And Canada didnt fared better with their Elite approved Trudeu regime.
I think its fine to criticise populists and their predictable failures but I dislike simplified narrative where you just select your MSM media approved “experts” with nice credentials and things will work out.
Oh sorry, I though with "destroyed" you meant something like "power outages every month because we shut down three nuclear power plants" or so, I didn't know "destroyed" means "electricity is too expensive for complicated reasons".
I don't think you can isolate populism from the elites abandoning meritocracy and the legitimacy of their institutions. The populists are often worse but they are usually proceded by a damaging crisis of competence.
Do you agree with Matt Yglesias' view that the main reason nobody seems to care about Trump's corruption is because our elite is SO leftwing that they care a lot more about Gaza, corporate power, immigration, women's rights, etc... Corruption isn't such a big deal if you already think that our society is controlled by billionnaires. By contrast, republicans don't have a lot of popular issues on their side so they beat the drums of partisan issues more (corruption, too old, etc...). On his podcast Politix, Matt frequently says that if democrats adopted more moderate social and economic views and focused on partisan anti-trump rethoric instead of socialist-vs-moderate infighting, they could have won against Trump.
What makes you doubtful? To me it seems like Hannania's book gives a perfect explanation of why republicans don't care more (less informed, low IQ, polarization) but in your review you seem to say that you feel even democrats don't care enough. What other possible explanations seem plausible to you?
Dems are also a “big tent” and the voters have more variance in the issues they care about the most. Dems lost many voters in 2024 for not caring about Gaza “enough” (see eg Michigan) or anecdotally, many young people for being “uninspiring.” The wide variance means that Dems can’t win as easily by pandering one-liners on any one issue, and it’s literally impossible to cater to a rifted base (part believe in LGBTQ rights expansion, parts don’t, both willing to ride their votes on it)
I haven’t read Yglesias’ arguments for that view so maybe I’m missing something, but it sounds wrong to me. My guess is that most of the elites are mainly split into the following categories:
1. Self-interested elites who don’t care much about any of the issues you mentioned (including Gaza or Trump’s corruption) because none of that directly affects them. Some of them may even swing the opposite direction and actively kiss Trump’s ass because they want favors.
2. The liberal elites who might care about the issues you mentioned, but also DO care about Trump’s corruption.
I just don’t think there are many super far left elites out there, so I’m not sure how if Yglesias’s hypothesis could explain the *widespread* disregard among lots of elites. I suspect the self-interestedness scenario is the main explanation.
A deep irony is that Călin Georgescu is or was the platonic ideal of a technocrat; a well respected academic with a PhD in agronomy and an UN official dealing with hazardous waste. He just turned out to be a total crank when he entered politics.
We have to consider that anti-elitism being popular because elites are not doing a proper job. And, BB, most people are not utilitarian police wonks. What the elites say matters more than what they do. Like when they called everybody who had a problem with COVID policies - think Freedom Convoy - some kind of a fascist, this was bad. "You can put half of them into a basket of deplorables" and so on. The most important thing is that the elites must speak the language of the people and show respect to the uneducated. They do not necessarily need to change their policies - the uneducated will not follow up on that anyhow.
Couple this with conservative unitary executive theory, and it sure sounds like conservatism is paving the way for more populists all over the federal government.
COVID lies. Russia Collusion hoax. Biden's hiden senility. Mostly peaceful protests. Hunter Biden's laptop was Disinformation. I could go on for a week with major lies of the elites. But somehow, you only see populist danger.
Both the elites and populists make politically-motivated errors. Populists also make up crazy things. So the problems of the mainstream media are non-unique, but the pathologies of the populists are unique.
These were not errors. The evidence for that is so overwhelming I cannot believe you are taking that position.
I used to think you were an unbiased observer, someone whose philanthropic ideas were different from mine but worth considering. I no longer believe your opinions are to be trusted if you are so partisan as to identify the lies of the elites as all "errors".
It wasn't just the mainstream media; read Alex Berenson on Covid. Find me anyone in the government - or universities for that matter - who were warning about Biden's mental health. Anyone in the White House press corps who covered Biden daily, whose JOB it is to shine light on power.
You won't find 3. And the levels of incompetence in the Biden Administration were legion, despite all positions being filled by "elites". Afghanistan, for one example.
The most serious problem in our culture is the collapse of honesty. There is nothing close. From the ideas of Moral Relativity to Postmodernist ideas that all narratives are simply naked power grabs, honest admissions of error are almost extinct. And so we will never agree on solutions to any problems now, because all opinions are valid as "my truth".
I can no longer take you seriously. Sorry. I found you somewhat convincing on animal rights.
For what it's worth, I don't think that by "politically motivated errors" he meant "accidents". It seems that most people propagating falsehoods lie somewhere between unwitting and witting. These were errors in the sense that they had unintended bad consequences (it wasn't part of the plan to trash public trust in elite institutions).
Respectfully, the negative consequences to the majority of society by enacting most leftist policies today are intended consequences, not unintended ones.
You *may* have been able to claim 50 years ago that the bad results of borderline Marxist policies were unintended, but if you are even remotely adjacent to “elite”, you can no longer do so.
Zero- sum intersectionality oppressor-oppressed ideology that dominates the left today is all about intended negative consequences on the disfavored (by leftists) to advantage those that leftists favor.
You simply cannot have it both ways at this point. If you are going to call them “elites” and they keep pushing the same policies known to fail and have bad consequences, you cannot excuse those consequences as unintended.
If you're unfamiliar with Hanania's views, he agrees that elite journalism and institutions are politically motivated and corrupt and have problems with honesty, but that the alternatives are much worse. I tend to agree. Reading the New York Times will give you a skewed view of the world, reading only non-mainstream or right-wing media will be even worse for you. That's the baseline we have to deal with.
In your view are the radical oppressor-oppressed leftists also populists with similar authoritarian problems to the right populists? If not, why not? Why are the crazy, illiberal, demonstrated to be wrong Marxist left ideas (most of which the mainstream media support or sanewash) not equally pathological?
"Populist leaders are those who oppose elites and blame them for social problems. Elites, as Hanania defines them, are those in contact with long-lasting established institutions with traditional power."
By this definition, essentially every revolution, including every historical independence movement, would basically qualify as populist. Do scholars of populism include those as data points in their datasets? Was the fall of the Berlin Wall a result of a populist movement?
Perhaps it is more useful to move the focus away from populism per se, and towards "the establishment". Hanania wants to make an anti-anti-elitism argument. Instead, perhaps, he should make a pro-elitism argument, *in the context of a modern liberal capitalist democracy where elite selection functions are reasonably good*.
Example, the LSAT is a standardized test of reasoning ability. Kash Patel (presumably) went to a no-name law school because he did poorly on a standardized test of reasoning ability. If we were more pro-elitism, we would select more heavily on attending elite law schools where the graduates are actually good at reasoning.
A feudal revolt is therefore not a populist movement, because feudal elites are selected on the basis of their ability to exploit violently, not answer LSAT questions.
Populism lacks the correlation with meritocratic leadership that traditional institutionalism possesses. That doesn't *necessarily* mean it is always *anti*-correlated: JD Vance graduated from Yale Law, and seems to be a smart guy who nonetheless has populist views / plays a populist character.
Interestingly, the above argument makes right-populism rationally more attractive in a world where institutional selection functions are distorted by the presence of DEI. (On the margin, at least.) Actually, you could go even further, and define DEI as itself being a populist movement which is skeptical of "institutionally racist" "heteropatriarchy". In that sense, Trumpism could be seen as a sort of counterpopulism.
Anyways, perhaps the best anti-populist messaging is something along the lines of: We're better off with smart people in charge, and our institutions are reasonably good at selecting for smart people who are reasonably ethical. Ironically, I think much of Hanania's messaging risks *increasing* the popularity of populism. He's fond of saying "you're just jealous of elites because you're stupid", which carries the subtext that elites feel contempt for ordinary people, and are thus untrustworthy as rulers.
Another puzzle piece is Charles Murray's *Coming Apart* thesis, that intelligent people are increasingly geographically segregated from ordinary folks. It's not surprising that such segregation would breed contempt ("flyover country") and mistrust in equal measure.
I think perhaps that the economic success of populist libertarian is more due to being libertarian thatn due to being populist; libertarians love to shrink government so the people in power can steal less money; compare the alledged near 1 millon that Adorni in Argentina couldnt explain vs 800 millon dollars that Kirchner & cia stole in 1 of the many corruption schemes;
The article is paywalled but I think it must be saying that having populist leaders for a long period of time reduces GDP by 10% - not that electing just one populist leader reduces GDP by 10%. Because the latter is just an impossibly strong effect.
Still sobering. I am thinking that while swing voters tend to bemoan the fact that the left and right in America are so polarized and far apart, that this is not a big deal. It's okay to have a far left and a far right who compete and balance each other out. The problem in America now is that both sides are too populist.
This is what the article shows: "GDP per capita sharply and almost immediately drops. By year 15, the cumulative shortfall surpasses 10 percentage points!"
More here: https://statsandsociety.substack.com/p/populists-cause-lower-gdp-higher
Astonishing if true and it would imply that "does this lead to populism" should be one of the biggest criteria for policymaking. Back in the late 2010s I remember people saying that we shouldn't allow much immigration because it can lead to right wing populism but I only treated it as a moderate concern because they didn't come armed with evidence of consequences of such magnitude.
This does not read like a book review, more like going thru the main scandals of Trump and his clique.
If you don't want populism, you have to get rid of the single thing that is making populists win across the West: mass immigration. People in the West see hordes of third worlders pouring into their countries, they see that the present elites are either doing nothing about it or actively supporting it, so they vote in populists who campaign on overturning that traitorous elite and stopping the migration. This is why Trump won. This is why the far-right is winning across Europe. Yes, rule by populists is bad. But if domestic elites could find the balls to oppose replacement migration themselves, no one would ever turn to the populists. So, if you think populism is bad, and don't want it to reign in your country, the action you need to take is obvious: support, recruit, or create elites who oppose mass immigration, and put those elites in power.
What do you call it when people say "The solution to this issue is to do my completely unrelated thing?" Like when people say the solution to low birth rates is universal health care? This is that. It's pure copium.
Yes, populists cite the existence of immigrants to argue why they should be allowed to run the country (into the ground), they also do the EXACT SAME SHIT in Japan, a country whose economy was mismanaged for thirty years by the same right-wing party that STILL runs it, and has almost no immigration. The populists just appeal to the human id, and the human id is a xenophobe that doesn't recognize truth.
The world is becoming more globalized. Japanese voters can see how mass migration is going in Europe and demand that their country follow a different path.
No, the Japanese populists just rant about Thai tourists not knowing which order to buy/put hot water in the ramen and then blame all crimes on Secret Koreans.
Every Populist looks at their pet issue, and thinks that's whats driving people to populism.
You sound no different than a communist who says the real reason people are driven to Trump is the sigh of late-capitalism or the whatever, or the DSA types who think the reason people chose populism in 2024 was Gaza
What is the control group vs populists? Where I am sitting (Europe) the recent record of anti-populist W.European governments is pretty bad. Just think of recent German “respectable” governments that destroyed their energy systems and trapped country in permanent stagnation since 2020. Or similar thing in UK that havent had proper economic growth since 2010. And Canada didnt fared better with their Elite approved Trudeu regime.
I think its fine to criticise populists and their predictable failures but I dislike simplified narrative where you just select your MSM media approved “experts” with nice credentials and things will work out.
What do you mean, "destroyed energy systems"? Energy works just fine.
If by 'fine' you mean 'the most expensive in the EU, causing a slow collapse of key economic sectors', then yes, it's fine.
https://www.wsj.com/economy/china-is-devastating-the-last-stronghold-of-german-industry-c7a98514
https://images.euronews.com/articles/stories/09/77/97/98/1920x1080_cmsv2_c23b4685-7cfa-50dd-a6a2-a3a2b50ac319-9779798.jpg
Oh sorry, I though with "destroyed" you meant something like "power outages every month because we shut down three nuclear power plants" or so, I didn't know "destroyed" means "electricity is too expensive for complicated reasons".
I don't think you can isolate populism from the elites abandoning meritocracy and the legitimacy of their institutions. The populists are often worse but they are usually proceded by a damaging crisis of competence.
https://spectator.com/article/revealed-how-the-treasury-abandoned-numeracy-to-boost-diversity/
Do you agree with Matt Yglesias' view that the main reason nobody seems to care about Trump's corruption is because our elite is SO leftwing that they care a lot more about Gaza, corporate power, immigration, women's rights, etc... Corruption isn't such a big deal if you already think that our society is controlled by billionnaires. By contrast, republicans don't have a lot of popular issues on their side so they beat the drums of partisan issues more (corruption, too old, etc...). On his podcast Politix, Matt frequently says that if democrats adopted more moderate social and economic views and focused on partisan anti-trump rethoric instead of socialist-vs-moderate infighting, they could have won against Trump.
Not sure.
What makes you doubtful? To me it seems like Hannania's book gives a perfect explanation of why republicans don't care more (less informed, low IQ, polarization) but in your review you seem to say that you feel even democrats don't care enough. What other possible explanations seem plausible to you?
Dems are also a “big tent” and the voters have more variance in the issues they care about the most. Dems lost many voters in 2024 for not caring about Gaza “enough” (see eg Michigan) or anecdotally, many young people for being “uninspiring.” The wide variance means that Dems can’t win as easily by pandering one-liners on any one issue, and it’s literally impossible to cater to a rifted base (part believe in LGBTQ rights expansion, parts don’t, both willing to ride their votes on it)
I haven’t read Yglesias’ arguments for that view so maybe I’m missing something, but it sounds wrong to me. My guess is that most of the elites are mainly split into the following categories:
1. Self-interested elites who don’t care much about any of the issues you mentioned (including Gaza or Trump’s corruption) because none of that directly affects them. Some of them may even swing the opposite direction and actively kiss Trump’s ass because they want favors.
2. The liberal elites who might care about the issues you mentioned, but also DO care about Trump’s corruption.
I just don’t think there are many super far left elites out there, so I’m not sure how if Yglesias’s hypothesis could explain the *widespread* disregard among lots of elites. I suspect the self-interestedness scenario is the main explanation.
A deep irony is that Călin Georgescu is or was the platonic ideal of a technocrat; a well respected academic with a PhD in agronomy and an UN official dealing with hazardous waste. He just turned out to be a total crank when he entered politics.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-toxics-and-human-rights/mr-calin-georgescu-former-special-rapporteur-2010-2012
We have to consider that anti-elitism being popular because elites are not doing a proper job. And, BB, most people are not utilitarian police wonks. What the elites say matters more than what they do. Like when they called everybody who had a problem with COVID policies - think Freedom Convoy - some kind of a fascist, this was bad. "You can put half of them into a basket of deplorables" and so on. The most important thing is that the elites must speak the language of the people and show respect to the uneducated. They do not necessarily need to change their policies - the uneducated will not follow up on that anyhow.
Couple this with conservative unitary executive theory, and it sure sounds like conservatism is paving the way for more populists all over the federal government.
Or Unitary Executive is putting Congress in a position to legislate and take that away from the branch that's been doing it for the last 20 years
COVID lies. Russia Collusion hoax. Biden's hiden senility. Mostly peaceful protests. Hunter Biden's laptop was Disinformation. I could go on for a week with major lies of the elites. But somehow, you only see populist danger.
Both the elites and populists make politically-motivated errors. Populists also make up crazy things. So the problems of the mainstream media are non-unique, but the pathologies of the populists are unique.
These were not errors. The evidence for that is so overwhelming I cannot believe you are taking that position.
I used to think you were an unbiased observer, someone whose philanthropic ideas were different from mine but worth considering. I no longer believe your opinions are to be trusted if you are so partisan as to identify the lies of the elites as all "errors".
It wasn't just the mainstream media; read Alex Berenson on Covid. Find me anyone in the government - or universities for that matter - who were warning about Biden's mental health. Anyone in the White House press corps who covered Biden daily, whose JOB it is to shine light on power.
You won't find 3. And the levels of incompetence in the Biden Administration were legion, despite all positions being filled by "elites". Afghanistan, for one example.
The most serious problem in our culture is the collapse of honesty. There is nothing close. From the ideas of Moral Relativity to Postmodernist ideas that all narratives are simply naked power grabs, honest admissions of error are almost extinct. And so we will never agree on solutions to any problems now, because all opinions are valid as "my truth".
I can no longer take you seriously. Sorry. I found you somewhat convincing on animal rights.
For what it's worth, I don't think that by "politically motivated errors" he meant "accidents". It seems that most people propagating falsehoods lie somewhere between unwitting and witting. These were errors in the sense that they had unintended bad consequences (it wasn't part of the plan to trash public trust in elite institutions).
Respectfully, the negative consequences to the majority of society by enacting most leftist policies today are intended consequences, not unintended ones.
You *may* have been able to claim 50 years ago that the bad results of borderline Marxist policies were unintended, but if you are even remotely adjacent to “elite”, you can no longer do so.
Zero- sum intersectionality oppressor-oppressed ideology that dominates the left today is all about intended negative consequences on the disfavored (by leftists) to advantage those that leftists favor.
You simply cannot have it both ways at this point. If you are going to call them “elites” and they keep pushing the same policies known to fail and have bad consequences, you cannot excuse those consequences as unintended.
If you're unfamiliar with Hanania's views, he agrees that elite journalism and institutions are politically motivated and corrupt and have problems with honesty, but that the alternatives are much worse. I tend to agree. Reading the New York Times will give you a skewed view of the world, reading only non-mainstream or right-wing media will be even worse for you. That's the baseline we have to deal with.
Still, if elites want to.keep.populists at bay,one of the things they need to do is clean up their own act -- be visibly competent and non-corrupt.
In your view are the radical oppressor-oppressed leftists also populists with similar authoritarian problems to the right populists? If not, why not? Why are the crazy, illiberal, demonstrated to be wrong Marxist left ideas (most of which the mainstream media support or sanewash) not equally pathological?
1 million people did die of COVID.
Roger Stone was in contact with Russian Hackers and was pardoned for his interfering in the investigation into Trump
Evidently nobody actually cares about senility when Trump hasn't made a coherent sentence in 4 years
"Populist leaders are those who oppose elites and blame them for social problems. Elites, as Hanania defines them, are those in contact with long-lasting established institutions with traditional power."
By this definition, essentially every revolution, including every historical independence movement, would basically qualify as populist. Do scholars of populism include those as data points in their datasets? Was the fall of the Berlin Wall a result of a populist movement?
Perhaps it is more useful to move the focus away from populism per se, and towards "the establishment". Hanania wants to make an anti-anti-elitism argument. Instead, perhaps, he should make a pro-elitism argument, *in the context of a modern liberal capitalist democracy where elite selection functions are reasonably good*.
Example, the LSAT is a standardized test of reasoning ability. Kash Patel (presumably) went to a no-name law school because he did poorly on a standardized test of reasoning ability. If we were more pro-elitism, we would select more heavily on attending elite law schools where the graduates are actually good at reasoning.
A feudal revolt is therefore not a populist movement, because feudal elites are selected on the basis of their ability to exploit violently, not answer LSAT questions.
Populism lacks the correlation with meritocratic leadership that traditional institutionalism possesses. That doesn't *necessarily* mean it is always *anti*-correlated: JD Vance graduated from Yale Law, and seems to be a smart guy who nonetheless has populist views / plays a populist character.
Interestingly, the above argument makes right-populism rationally more attractive in a world where institutional selection functions are distorted by the presence of DEI. (On the margin, at least.) Actually, you could go even further, and define DEI as itself being a populist movement which is skeptical of "institutionally racist" "heteropatriarchy". In that sense, Trumpism could be seen as a sort of counterpopulism.
Anyways, perhaps the best anti-populist messaging is something along the lines of: We're better off with smart people in charge, and our institutions are reasonably good at selecting for smart people who are reasonably ethical. Ironically, I think much of Hanania's messaging risks *increasing* the popularity of populism. He's fond of saying "you're just jealous of elites because you're stupid", which carries the subtext that elites feel contempt for ordinary people, and are thus untrustworthy as rulers.
Another puzzle piece is Charles Murray's *Coming Apart* thesis, that intelligent people are increasingly geographically segregated from ordinary folks. It's not surprising that such segregation would breed contempt ("flyover country") and mistrust in equal measure.
Two relevant Substack posts:
https://josephheath.substack.com/p/populism-fast-and-slow
https://josephheath.substack.com/p/the-prospects-for-left-wing-populism
Here's another interesting post, by billionaire investor Ray Dalio, on the causes of, and results of, populism
https://x.com/RayDalio/status/1932083051829318068
“One doesn’t need to understand the world much to blame other people for their problems.”
Is it paradoxical to blame populists for many of the world’s problems?
Can you imagine how much social security must have cost on the Marshall Islands when its residents were living for 150-200 years?
I think perhaps that the economic success of populist libertarian is more due to being libertarian thatn due to being populist; libertarians love to shrink government so the people in power can steal less money; compare the alledged near 1 millon that Adorni in Argentina couldnt explain vs 800 millon dollars that Kirchner & cia stole in 1 of the many corruption schemes;
It’s Frankie ism and it runs on the power of the chairman of the board ; Sinatra 😎