I think Latin America demonstrates this most clearly. Achieving a monopoly on the use of force is the most basic function of a state. When you see a country with a high murder rate, the costs go way beyond the actual deaths suffered by victims. The numbers are a reflection of the general unpleasantness of life there. Countries with high murder rates suffer from bad behavior that degrades the human experience across the board, from robberies and violent assaults to gang intimidation of normal citizens and loud music in public.

Below is a chart showing GDP per capita plotted against homicide rates across the world. I obtained GDP, homicide, and democracy score numbers from Our World in Data, and dropped countries with fewer than 500,000 people. See here for country codes, which aren’t always intuitive. “ZAF,” for example, is South Africa.

Latin America really stands out. Nations like Brazil (homicide rate: 20.6), Colombia (24.9), and Mexico (24.9) have incomes that are similar to China (0.5), Azerbaijan (2.0), and Georgia (2.0). Honduras (31.4) is about as wealthy as Pakistan (4.3) and Kenya (4.9).

What is going on here? The chart below provides a clue. On the x-axis, it shows the democracy score for each country. On the y-axis is the residual from the chart above. In plain English, the y-axis shows the actual homicide rate minus the predicted homicide rate based on income. Countries above the line are more violent than you would expect based on their living standards.

We see here that, for non-democracies, wealth pretty much predicts murder rate in a straightforward way. Not a single dictatorship has an unusually high murder rate, at least compared to the residuals we get for Latin America. The Substacker Inquisitive Bird has argued that the homicide numbers in Africa are largely made up and can’t be trusted. To test whether this is a problem for my theory, I simply added 10 homicides per 100,000 for each sub-Saharan African country, and the results were similar. The more violent Latin American states still had massive residuals, nearly unchanged.

Even if authoritarian regimes fudge the data, the official statistics roughly fit with what we know about the world. It is assumed by travelers that your risk of being kidnapped or murdered is astronomically higher in Mexico or Colombia than China or Jordan. The numbers here pass the commonsense test.

This article is part of a series discussing topics covered in more detail in my forthcoming book Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster. Please consider preordering here. The release date is July 7, and you don’t get charged until the book is shipped or you receive the digital version. Preorders are very important in determining how much attention a book receives, so by getting yours in you can help ensure that its arguments reach a wide audience.

There are of course many safe democracies, including ones that aren’t rich. Democracy is not a sufficient condition for having an unusually violent country, but it does appear to be a necessary one. We can say that there are for the most part three types of countries in the world:

1. Rich nations, which are safe

2. Authoritarian nations, which are safe

3. Countries that are middle or lower income and democratic, which can be safe or violent

Most Latin American nations fall into category three. The same is true for the three major non-Latin American outliers with unusually high murder rates: Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and South Africa. Each of these gets a Polity score of 9. Note that Cuba, the most authoritarian country in Latin America, is not known for street violence, even though we don’t have numbers. Venezuela, in contrast, has in recent years had an unusual combination of authoritarianism and wide scale violence. But there just aren’t that many dictatorships with a very high murder rate.

Why would democracy be such a good predictor of societal violence? Note that the way we define “democracy” in political science generally includes a respect for civil liberties. This means you don’t torture suspects or keep them locked up without strong evidence. Such nations get warrants before making searches, grant defendants lawyers, and remind them of their right to remain silent.

In a rich country, these are luxuries that society can afford. The police are paid relatively well and get some basic level of training. They have larger budgets with which to fight crime, and, since corruption is more under control, less of it is stolen or wasted. The court system is more reliable, and is pretty good at distinguishing those who pose a danger to the community from those who don’t.

In contrast, if you’re a relatively poor country with few resources and little state capacity, granting protections to suspected and convicted criminals is a major hindrance to keeping order. Law enforcement and court officials can be intimidated or bribed, and their attention and resources are stretched thin. Gangs are able to control more territory, murderers are less likely to be punished, and deterrence breaks down. In recent years in the US, the murder clearance rate has been about 50%-60%. That’s very bad from a first world perspective, but in countries like Mexico and Honduras, it’s closer to 10-20%, and this is quite remarkable given that state officials themselves are often the targets. In Latin America, there are stories of gang bosses running their empires from prison, which would be unthinkable in most dictatorships. The US regularly pressures Mexico to send us their drug lords, because otherwise they might escape from prison at home.

The idea that there’s a tradeoff between civil liberties protecting criminal suspects and public safety is a staple of police dramas like The Shield. The cops pick up some bad character who everyone knows is guilty or has information important for breaking a case. But there’s no proof that could hold up in court. So the antihero turns off the camera, and does what needs to be done. The criminal is like “I exercise my right to a lawyer” and the cop goes “oh I’ve got your lawyer right here” and starts stabbing him with a pen. The case is eventually solved, and we are left to ponder the moral ambiguity of the story. Seems like writers for TV shows are more comfortable with unpleasant tradeoffs than most people who analyze politics.

TV shows are of course fiction, but it sure seems that the world really works like this. For example, before Bukele’s crime crackdown, even after Salvadoran criminals were arrested, they would rely on family members on the outside to keep their gangs functioning and enforce extortion efforts. Now the government has basically picked up everyone who might plausibly be involved in criminal activity, and extortion and murder have plummeted.

So in the case of Bukele, we’ve seen a move away from civil liberties coincide with an increase in public safety. We’ve also observed this process moving in the other direction: democratization accompanied by the breakdown of public order. In 1980, Brazil had a murder rate of 11.7 per 100,000. It inched up the next few years, and in 1985, military rule ended. The homicide rate shot up over the next two decades, reaching 28.9 in 2003. It’s decreased somewhat since then, but the homicide rate remains highly elevated compared to what it was in the last years of authoritarian rule, even though Brazil is 50% wealthier.

Most Eastern European nations remained safe after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. But in Russia, there was a period of lawlessness in the early 1990s, which peaked at a homicide rate of 32 per 100,000 in 1994. Here’s a graph that shows what happened to the Russian homicide rate as democracy increased and then decreased again.

The timing isn’t perfect here, as the numbers went up for the first three years under Putin, but there has been a steady decline ever since.

You’re probably tempted to say that the problem is not democracy and rights for criminals per se, but state capacity. Which is true enough. But, again, it seems like you need the combination of both low state capacity and rights for criminals to get an unusually high murder rate. Authoritarian governments don’t do a lot of things well, but they can at least maintain order, even while being incompetent in other areas. I suspect that this is because maintaining order is easy, relative to all other things governments try to do. When civil liberties protections aren’t in the way, you just need to target the troublemakers, and who they are isn’t an unsolvable mystery. Criminals are pretty dumb, and in some cases, they even get tattoos on their faces and make things as easy as possible for the authorities. El Salvador is an extreme case in the number of mass arrests, but that’s usually not necessary, since under most authoritarian regimes you end up with a less violent equilibrium and law enforcement can zero in on the few individuals who might be a problem. That is to say that Bukele’s roundups probably don’t need to go on indefinitely.

All over the world, populists say that the system is broken, and you need a strongman who is going to bulldoze over opposition and democratic niceties. This is probably not a very good argument in a country where things are going relatively well, like the United States. But if your nation truly is broken, then you may rationally be willing to take a chance on something radical. A country that has a murder rate of 30 per 100,000 should be considered a failed state, and one that is inevitably going to lose legitimacy. There’s a reason that Bukele’s approval rating is almost always found to be over 90%. His popularity indicates that Western elites have massively underestimated the importance of public order.

If a government massacres a hundred citizens, there’s an international outcry. But if it lets an order of magnitude more people be killed in the name of civil liberties, no one cares all that much, and if human rights NGOs express concern, it’s usually over what methods the government might take in response.

Is there something else Latin American countries have gotten out of democracy? Well, according to the World Bank, between 2010 and 2020, Latin America on average grew more slowly than any other region in the world. Such struggles go back decades.

Violence surely must be part of the reason why. Here’s another reason to be open to radical change in Latin America. Governance in that region has failed in terms of not only keeping citizens safe, but also improving their living standards.

I think people struggle with nuance here. Trump, Orban, Bolsonaro, Bukele, and Milei all fall under the umbrella of right-wing populists. Observers tend to have the same view of all of them, either in favor or against. But they each face a set of completely different challenges. Maybe if Trump was born in El Salvador, he’d be a great leader, because you need a thuggish brute in order to get control of a country as violent as that nation was before Bukele. But in America, violence isn’t that big of a problem, we can afford to grant the full menu of civil liberties protections, and the president doesn’t even have much influence over non-federal crimes anyway, so Trump’s thuggish instincts are directed toward trying to lock up his enemies. I probably wouldn’t vote for Bukele if he were running for president of the United States. But someone like him might make a good mayor of Baltimore.

If democracy is a good thing, we may want to unbundle it to exclude soft on crime policies. The way the world works now, leaders who accept a free press and the peaceful transition of power are usually the same ones who don’t adopt authoritarian methods to deal with crime. There’s no natural reason why states that conduct regular, free and fair elections must have high standards for searching criminal suspects and inform them of their right to remain silent after being arrested. Before the Warren Court, the US had much weaker protections for criminal suspects and was less violent, even though it was still a democracy. If global elites insist on the entire package, this can only discredit democracy itself.

Males start to experience something similar when they are high status. In the status game I am playing, I have achieved something. Nobody would care about me if I went to the premiere of a major Hollywood movie, but in the circles I am involved in, “people interested in right-of-center politics” or “rationalist-adjacent intellectuals,” I have done quite well.

A lot of people want to be in touch. When I first started publicly writing, some rando would message me and say they’d be in my town and they wanted to meet. I wouldn’t ask too many questions or really filter out anyone, since there weren’t a lot of people seeking my attention. Today there usually has to be a good reason for me to meet someone. Maybe they wrote something interesting, or have a very important job, or can provide some kind of connection or benefit I can’t get elsewhere.

To a large extent, I find myself filtering by where people go or went to school, especially when they’re young. It sounds harsh, but this is rational in social relationships, just as it is in the labor market. An undergrad from Harvard is almost certain to be more interesting than one from Ohio State! This is one reason to try to go to the best university possible. Your classmates themselves will be more interesting, it’ll open up more doors outside of school, and your classmates will have the same advantage, making them over time even more interesting than they were when they first started college. I hate conservative nonsense of where they pretend state school kids are better than those who went to the Ivy League. No sane person can possibly believe that. But this is mostly a filtering device for young people; someone who went to Harvard twenty years ago and now lives a completely ordinary life and has a boring corporate job is probably not worth meeting.

But all this doesn’t mean I only befriend accomplished geniuses. When people who on paper (to use a sports term) don’t have much to offer reach out, sometimes I do end up keeping in touch with them. This got me thinking, what makes me like some people more than others?

I think that one of the key features is persistence. There’s a young man, let’s call him Raul, who has texted me nonstop for years. Sometimes I won’t respond for weeks or months. He is of a certain ethnic heritage that makes him care a lot about the politics of the Middle East – one that is known for its verbal fluency and funny hats – so, due to current events, recently I’ve started to check his messages more often and argue with him. The thing I really like about this guy is that, no matter how long I go without responding, he never loses heart. He dropped my name when meeting a female friend of mine once and she was not nearly as charmed. But with me, his style works well.

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But the one thing that did surprise me was how the motivations of the regular soldiers were implicitly understood. For those who don’t know (spoiler alert!), The Iliad covers a period of several weeks of the Trojan War. The conflict began when Paris Alexander, a Trojan, kidnapped Helen from Menelaus, who is the younger brother of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae. Agamemnon leads a coalition of the Greeks that sails to Troy in order to get Menelaus’ wife back. That’s the entire cause of the war.

There’s no mystery about why the particular men already mentioned are fighting. But to me the mystery is why regular Greeks decided to fight so that one nobleman could have his wife returned. The behavior of the Trojans is even more puzzling, as, while Menelaus has suffered a grave insult, it is generally acknowledged that Paris is in the wrong.

In Book 7, during a Trojan assembly, Antenor argues that Troy should return Helen and her property to end the war. Paris refuses — he’ll give back everything else, but not Helen. Priam, the king of Troy and Paris’ father, does not force the issue but refers to his son as “the man who is the cause of this whole conflict.”

You might answer that the story is not a reliable guide to history, which one might suspect based on the fact that it includes transcriptions of discussions of the gods, who regularly join mortals on the battlefield. But regardless, this is the story that the Greeks told themselves. So even if the war didn’t happen in the way portrayed by Homer – whoever he was, if he even existed – the poem was understood to accurately tell a plausible tale about human motivations.

This question of what’s in it for regular soldiers is far from neglected. In the main subplot of the story, Achilles, the Greeks’ best warrior, is missing in action for most of the poem. This is because Agamemnon took from Achilles a woman he won through armed conflict named Briseis. Just as with Paris and the Trojans, nobody on the Greek side agrees with what Agamemnon did, but still they fight on his behalf.

There is only one character of lower social status who stands up to the aristocrats who are always asking other men to die so they can cuck one another. When elite warriors lose heart and seem like they are ready to run, Odysseus gives each a speech in which he says to continue fighting. But when a common soldier tries to do the same, Odysseus strikes him and tells him to “be quiet, pay attention to your betters.” Then Thersites enters the scene (I use the Emily Wilson translation).

So masterfully he controlled the army. They left the ships and huts again and rushed
back to the meeting place—just as when waves
of loud-reverberating water crash
onto the long shore, and the deep sea rumbles.
The men sat down, submissive on their benches.
Only foul-mouthed Thersites argued back.
This man knew how to blather on for hours
with pointless and irrelevant complaints
against the rulers—anything he thought
might raise a laugh among the other Greeks.
He was the ugliest man who marched on Troy.
One of his legs was weak, the other twisted.
His shoulders hunched across his chest. His head
was pointy and his sprouts of hair were sparse.
Achilles and Odysseus especially
loathed him, because he always scolded them.
But now his piercing voice shot sharp reproofs
at glorious Agamemnon, and the Greeks
blamed him inside their hearts. They were enraged.
Thersites yelled and cursed at Agamemnon.

“You, son of Atreus! What do you need?
What is your grievance? You already have
huts full of bronze and full of handpicked women
whom we Greek warriors assigned to you.
You get first choice whenever we take towns.
Do you need yet more gold? Some Trojan horse-lord
will bring it out of Troy to free his son,
captured by me or by some other Greek
and brought to you. Or do you need a woman,
a young one to have sex with and to keep
all for yourself? It is not right for you,
a leader, to involve the Greeks in ruin.
Sweethearts, you are a terrible disgrace—
Greek girls, not men. Now let us sail back home
with all the ships and leave this man behind!
Let him consume his winnings here at Troy,
so he can see if we helped him or not.
Just now he brought dishonor to Achilles
who is a better man than him by far.
He took his trophy from him and has kept it.
No anger lurks inside Achilles’ heart.
He lets things go. If he were more persistent,
this would have been the last time, Agamemnon,
you would have treated anyone so badly.”

So spoke Thersites as he criticized
the shepherd of the people, Agamemnon.
Quickly Odysseus stepped in and scowled,
and scolded him.

“You blabbermouth, Thersites!
You are quite marvelous at public speaking.
But now shut up! You must not pick a quarrel
alone against the rulers of the army.
You are the very worst, in my opinion,
of all the mortal men who came to Troy
with Agamemnon, son of Atreus.
Your mouth should never speak the names of rulers.
You must not level insults at your betters,
or look around for chances to get home.
We do not know yet how these things will go—
whether the sons of Greece will get home safe,
or have a bitter journey. You sit there
and criticize the son of Atreus,
Lord Agamemnon, shepherd of the people,
because the Greeks have given him so much.
You keep complaining, but I tell you this,
and swear that it will surely come to pass,
if I find out that you continue acting
as stupidly as you are doing now,
I hope my head stops resting on my shoulders,
and let Odysseus no more be called
the father of Telemachus, unless
I grab you, rip your cloak and tunic off,
expose your private parts, and beat you up,
humiliating you with blows. I shall
force you to leave the meeting place and go
back to the swift ships, weeping and ashamed.”

With that, Odysseus began to use
his staff to thrash Thersites on his shoulders
till he hunched over, sobbing. On his back
a bloody weal puffed up beneath the rod
of gold. He sat down, frightened and in pain
and helplessly he wiped away his tears.
The men were troubled but they smiled and laughed,
and told each other,

“This is something special!
Odysseus has often done great things.
He forms good plans and marshals troops for war.
But now he has performed his greatest service
for all of us—he silenced that rude windbag!
Thersites will not come back here again,
led by his strong proud heart to criticize
the rulers with insulting words.”

To my modern ears, Thersites seems to have the better argument. Here he’s not even questioning the entire Trojan War, but only why Agamemnon’s desire for a captive female should trump the war effort. This is what we today would call the definition of loyal opposition.

For his efforts, Thersites is described by Homer as an ugly cripple and is beaten by Odysseus. Reinforcing the idea that he is a pathetic and contemptible man, Thersites cowers and sobs in pain. Far from being offended about what has been done to their comrade, the other soldiers are glad to see him put in his place. Even the name Thersites translates into something like “boldness” or “impudence.”

The lack of pressure on Paris to give back Helen, or Agamemnon to return Briseis, is what is particularly striking. Putting aside common soldiers, even fellow elites seem helpless to change their minds. Agamemnon is at least the leader of the Greeks, but Paris is simply one nobleman among many, and the Trojans let him be the cause of the entire war, as even his father admits.

While people often talk of ancient virtue, this isn’t virtue in any sense we would recognize today. Men are not fighting for their own honor, but dying for their superiors. And The Iliad doesn’t even promise them immortality in the form of being mentioned in a poem or having their names carved into a monument. Only the nobles are remembered in The Iliad for carrying out heroic deeds. Thersites is in fact the only common soldier who speaks for any significant length of time.

We see elites offering more earthly carrots and sticks in a speech by Nestor, a wise elder statesman, in Book 2. Telling the Greeks that Zeus is at their side, the old man proclaims that “no man ought to hurry off back home before he shares a Trojan woman’s bed to pay for Helen’s sufferings and struggles.” And if anyone finds this unconvincing and wants to run back to his ship, “he can meet his fated end and die right here in front of everyone.” The threat is implicit, but nonetheless clear.

Here perhaps are the real motivations: rape and plunder as the carrot, execution as the stick. Yet you would think that elites would be better served by a grand narrative of the war other than the idea that they need to avenge a slight against Menelaus. Rather than gaining individual glory, the Greek soldier simply gets to stand over a Trojan woman at some point and say “This is for Helen!” There’s nothing like nationalism in the modern sense, where the most insignificant member of a community can take pride in the accomplishments of the collective. The Greeks and Trojans speak (roughly) the same language – which we can tell by their ability to communicate clearly on the battlefield – and share the same cultural assumptions and gods. Troy was eventually destroyed, but this doesn’t seem like something that the average Greek had any reason to feel particularly good about in the subsequent centuries.

How to explain this? Thinkers going back to at least Xenophanes and Plato have seen the bad behavior of gods and leaders in Homer as threatening to social stability. I would turn this argument on its head and say that the story has the opposite effect when we consider elite prerogatives and how dissent from below is treated.

The cuckolding aspects of The Iliad may be related to how the epic in its finished form was composed. Imagine you are a local ruler in some Greek village. You want to teach obedience to your population. Is there anything better than a story where elites act selfishly and capriciously, but still should be obeyed anyway? Every other ruler looks good compared to Agamemnon. A story where people follow elites because they’re all wise, selfless, and noble might raise the uncomfortable question of why contemporary leaders do not live up to the same standards. For this reason, when The Iliad portrays figures like Paris and Agamemnon in a negative light, it reinforces the idea that obedience should be unconditional. Note also that Agamemnon eventually admits he was in the wrong and blames the gods for clouding his judgment, which gives leaders who have behaved foolishly an out if they ever need to change course after making a mistake.

The story of Thersites can be understood in a similar way, as a kind of extreme case providing support for the dominant value system. If Thersites were wrong on the substance, then he could be dismissed for that reason. But the fact that he is right and gets beaten for it shows that there’s never a good reason for commoners to step out of line. Only ugly, cowardly cripples dare to criticize their superiors.

I’m not imagining a scenario where a ruler decrees that a story like The Iliad be invented. Rather, we can imagine bards starting to compose a narrative based on a real historical event, which was the destruction of Troy around 1200 BC. But they can’t tell a story that would teach values that threaten elites’ ability to hold on to power, since free speech in the modern sense doesn’t exist. The storytellers would also be seeking elite patronage. So over the years, the narrative gets shaped and adjusted to become more congenial to those who hold power. Maybe some clever poet originally inserted the story of Thersites in order to subtly critique the values of the Greeks, but when the story was told in earshot of elites with armed men under their control, they made this commoner ugly and had him beaten for his impudence.

Eventually, the story reaches something close to an optimization of pro-aristocratic propaganda, so the narrative solidifies and becomes part of tradition.

The Iliad does legitimize opposition to leaders from other elites. Here we may solve the mystery of why nobody is willing to suggest trying to force Paris to give Helen back to end the war. Elite prerogatives are treated as absolutely inviolable, even by other elites, and even if they are in the wrong and their selfishness threatens to destroy the community. Note that Achilles resists Agamemnon not by fighting him, but by simply refusing to participate in his war. He has a right to not engage in the conflict, despite being the most valuable warrior they have. Those of sufficient rank can try to convince Paris to give back Helen or Agamemnon to make peace with Achilles, but they can only rely on the power of persuasion. Commoners don’t even get that; all they can do is obey.

Achilles is at one point about to kill Agamemnon when they have their initial dispute. He begins to draw out his blade, but then is talked out of it by Athena, who promises him “three times as many gifts one day” if he just taunts Agamemnon and tells him what will happen instead of striking him dead. The gods therefore seem to frown on elites killing one another, even if they are fine with slaughter on the battlefield, and often encourage it. And an elite figure may think about killing his leader in anger, but after consulting with a goddess and reflecting on the matter, he simply gives him what he wants in the knowledge that divine providence will make sure that everything works out in the end.

Did regular people actually internalize the values of The Iliad during the long history of Greek civilization? It’s difficult to say since practically all writing comes down to us from literate elites. At the very least, we can say that this is the value system that elites were comfortable teaching.

The Iliad isn’t similar to standard authoritarian propaganda today, in which leaders are treated as unusually wise and virtuous. Such material exists to legitimize the rule of particular individuals. The Iliad has a different purpose: to justify the rule of elites as representing the natural order of the world, which in effect means that defending the virtue of past leaders is unnecessary, if not downright counterproductive.

Most scholars have discussed The Iliad as reflecting the values of its time. Yet in societies based on elite rule, slavery, and the domination of patriarchs, any story that becomes a cultural lodestar needs to not be offensive to those with power. I really doubt large numbers of men went to their deaths around 1200 BC thinking about how much sex one of their leaders was going to have with Helen. For most soldiers, their own personal ability to plunder and their fear of their commanders were probably more important motivations. But over time, I suspect that this story was shaped according to selection pressures that cut out anything that may have felt threatening to those with power, while at the same time presenting enough intra-elite conflict to entertain audiences.

Perhaps this optimization process can explain why Greek civilization flourished. The value system reflected in and propagandized by The Iliad seems conducive to social stability. At the same time, by defending elite prerogatives rather than preaching worship of an individual ruler, as the Persians and Egyptians did, the story contributed to the maintenance of a civilization that was more democratic than anything that had come before, allowing it to benefit from relatively open debate and more opportunities for a wider range of talented men to contribute to society.

This is all pretty speculative. It seems doubtful that I would come up with a brand new theory about The Iliad, but I’ve looked around a bit and haven’t found anyone making a similar argument. Maybe Plato set the tone so that those who came after him would read the story as subversive. Admittedly, I haven’t thoroughly researched the centuries of commentary and scholarship on the topic. So if you’re aware of a tradition that reads The Iliad in the same way, or historical evidence that would make my theory about its composition more or less plausible, let me know.

Thanks for reading. One thing I’ve learned is that when you have a book coming out, you can never assume that even regular readers are aware of it.

For that reason, over the next few months I’m not going to miss any opportunity to inform my audience that I have a new book called Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster coming out in July – details here. If you enjoy articles like this, appreciate me as a truly independent writer, and would like to support my work, the best way to do so is to preorder the book, which you can do at the links here to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening day sales, and will help determine how much attention it receives.

I will be reading the audiobook, in case that makes it more appealing.

On a different note, if a little box appears below, it means that you are not yet a free or paid subscriber. Sign up to get more articles and updates in the future.

I just finished recording the audiobook, which took four days. I forgot how much it sucks to have to go somewhere and actually do things for work. But for those who care whose voice you’ll hear when deciding whether to buy the audiobook, you now know it is me instead of some random voice actor.

Once again, reach out if you want a copy and might review it. Now is the time to start booking podcast appearances, etc.

I found the week grueling. Not just because of the recording, but because I had to talk less throughout the week to help ensure my voice didn’t give out. So this meant fewer phone calls and making less conversation with everyone around me. My voice became a scarce resource I needed to protect. But now I’m free.

In other news, the Substack is going to be a bit slow for the next several months, as there’s a project I’m involved in that is taking up my time. I feel the need to tell you so you don’t think I’ve become lazy. It’s very important work, so know that at least I’m going to be around less for a good cause. It’s not like I’m disappearing, we’re talking still two articles a week, which is below my normal pace.

Bentham was urging people to call their representatives and try to convince them not to gut state level animal welfare laws. Unfortunately, the farm bill has passed. It’s still not law though, as we have to wait for the Senate version, and that’s where the battle will have to be fought. I encourage people to do whatever they can to stop this.

I’ve been rewatching The Sopranos lately. It’s a very conventional take, but I don’t care: this was the best TV show of all time, and my appreciation for it grows as time goes on. I previously discussed the series with Rob, but it is deserving of at least one article, which you should expect before too long. At the same time, I like to pretend that The Many Saints of Newark never happened.

I have a new article in UnHerd on right-wing media’s hysteria over “missing and disappearing scientists.” If you’ve been following some of my coverage of how these narratives spread, you won’t be too shocked. But it’s good to be reminded once in a while how low right-wing media standards are so you don’t get taken in by the headlines when the next fraud comes along.

I also wrote for UnHerd on why I think AI will be bad for populism. I sum up a few studies showing that right-wingers rely on AI more, which is good because they need it.

In a new preprint, economics professor Thomas Renault and his co-authors investigate how fact-checking is used in the wild. They investigated all X posts between February 2025 and September 2025 that tagged either Grok or an AI service called Perplexity, analyzing 1,671,841 fact-checking requests. They found that Republican-leaning accounts were more likely to ask whether information was true. Not only that, but Republicans are targeted more for fact-checking, from both fellow Republican (107.5% more) and Democratic (83% more) accounts. Overall, Grok and Perplexity were more likely to say Republicans were not being truthful. Thus, we have the remarkable finding that even though Grok was designed to be anti-woke by Elon Musk, and Republicans are the ones who disproportionately use it, the tool still rates Democrats as more truth-oriented. This is consistent with what we see with community notes, which flag Republican posts more often, along with other data showing that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to share false information on social media, and less able to differentiate fact from fiction overall. None of this is surprising, given that today’s Republican base is both less educated and less likely to interact with credible sources of news.

So we have the interesting and seemingly paradoxical result that Republicans on social media are more reliant on AI, even as it tells them their favorite narratives are more often wrong than those of the other side. This should be seen as a positive sign. We’ve been asking, “What would happen if fact-checkers had infinite time and patience, considered all aspects of problems, and weren’t a bunch of smug Left-wing know-it-alls?” The answer might just be that those who have lost trust in our institutions begin to recover their sanity.

On to the links, including a deep dive update on the Venezuela situation.

1. Bentham’s Bulldog no longer believes in the Fatima miracle. I was disappointed when he started going down this path, and he seemed to get Scott Alexander thinking there was something there, but reason is winning out in this corner of Substack. Scott also recently moved in the direction of doubting the miracle. This is a situation where my “lived experience” really helped, ironically in the service of rationalism. Coming from a third world culture, my prior was “Of course poor peasants say things that aren’t true all the time out of social pressure, conformity, and religiosity. Doesn’t everyone know this?”

2. New Yorker journalist attends some alpha male bootcamps and reports on them. In one of them, RISE, they spend a lot of time crying and talking about their feelings.

The beatdown started with a low crawl up King’s steep gravel driveway. Relieved of their blindfolds, the men now wore heavy rucksacks filled with colored rocks representing their anger (red), guilt and shame (black), and sadness (blue). “Listen up,” King said, as they panted at the halfway point. “What are you learning?”

“Not to quit,” someone said.

“Teamwork,” another offered.

“What about you?” King asked James, who had been grumbling.

“It’s very easy to just quit—give up, say ‘Fuck it,’ ” James replied after a moment.

“What else in your life have you been close to quitting on?” King asked.

“Myself.”

“O.K., that’s pretty generic. Give me a thing. A specific thing.”

“I’m drawing a blank,” James said.

King looked around. “Who’s not fucking his wife? Is that you?”

“That’s me,” James finally said. “I’ve made excuses. I’ve allowed myself to—”

“Don’t get overly complicated again. What’s the reason? Is she ugly?”

“No.”

“Does she stink?”

“No. It’s me.”

“Is your dick not big enough?”

James paused. “Honestly, it doesn’t work,” he said. “I suffer from E.D.”

“O.K.,” King said, softening his tone. “Here we go.”

James started sobbing. “There’s nothing worse.”

“There was a time when I was younger when I couldn’t get it up,” King offered. “And it fucking embarrassed the fuck out of me.”

“I’ve been there,” another man said. Others nodded.

“I gotta take a fucking needle to my dick,” James went on. “There is no intimacy, no romance.” He stammered. “I can’t give her the things that she needs. And it’s demoralizing. I don’t feel like a man. So why would I be capable at anything else I do in life?”

“That’s why we’re here, brother,” King said. He addressed the group: “The gift that he’s getting right now is just knowing that other men are sitting here listening to him and saying, ‘Hey, we love you, bro. We get it.’ ” He said, “See your brother in his pain.”

I realized here that my definition of masculinity is not only values based, but has an empirical component, which is that therapy culture relies on false assumptions. It would be hard to have a traditional definition of masculinity if it were true, and everyone had deep psychological issues they needed to work through by talking about them. Humans are not that weak! You become that weak if you believe you are – a self-fulfilling prophecy. The victory of therapy culture has been so complete that the guys who think they’re challenging a feminized culture have accepted its language and understanding of human psychology.

3. The poor have been fatter than the rich since about the mid-twentieth century in wealthy countries, but not before. Also, in the US, poorer people being fatter is driven by women. High-income and low-income men are equally likely to be obese! Weight matters much more for women, so it’s unsurprising that being intelligent and responsible would predict being in better shape for them. It’s hard to believe the male result, but maybe because I live in California and don’t see the middle of the country, where all guys who earn a lot of money are fat.

4. I’ve previously said that Texas has had the best recent zoning changes in the country. Perhaps I slept on Montana, which is covered in City Journal here.

The package overhauled local land-use planning rules to streamline development approvals, required cities to allow duplexes wherever single-family homes are permitted, mandated that municipalities allow accessory dwelling units (ADUs) by right on any lot containing a single-family home, opened commercial zones to multifamily and mixed-use development, prohibited local governments from adopting excessively restrictive building codes, and banned rent control.

I put in my article on Texas zoning changes along with this article on Montana into ChatGPT and Claude and asked which is likely to have a larger impact. The AIs got clever on me, and said Texas will have a bigger impact because the population is much larger. Then I clarified and said of course I know that, smart ass, I mean which has done more given the size of each state. Here there was a split, with ChatGPT favoring Texas and Claude favoring Montana.

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The book was of course written before the recent report in The Atlantic about Patel’s drinking problems, which have people in the government worried. The latest news only adds to the case that I made.

The IT-lockout episode is emblematic of Patel’s tumultuous tenure as director of the FBI: He is erratic, suspicious of others, and prone to jumping to conclusions before he has necessary evidence, according to the more than two dozen people I interviewed about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers. Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and private conversations, they described Patel’s tenure as a management failure and his personal behavior as a national-security vulnerability…

Several officials told me that Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication…Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.

Upon being asked for comment, the FBI responded with a statement attributed to Patel that threatened to sue, which he soon did. This has become regular practice for him. Patel has previously filed lawsuits against the New York Times, CNN, Politico, and a pundit who appeared on MSNBC. These never go anywhere, because the standards for winning a defamation suit in the US are quite high, and nothing any of these media companies did came anywhere near the necessary threshold. But now we have an FBI Director who sees the justice system as a tool to intimidate journalists.

Professionalized law enforcement is one of the things that most clearly separates societies that function well from those that don’t. We give certain individuals a badge and a gun, let them spy on us, and take some of us away and lock us up in little cells. To keep us there for a while, they need to present evidence to judges and juries, but law enforcement officials are the ones who, within certain bounds, decide who to target and which evidence to gather. There’s no way to avoid simply having to trust that they’re doing their jobs in ways that are relatively fair and impartial.

Political bias has of course always been an issue, and this is unavoidable to some degree because institutions are composed of human beings. But before Trump’s second term, it was widely agreed that you wanted individuals at the top who went to good schools, were respected by their colleagues, followed the rules, and didn’t hawk supplements on the side.

They behaved like decent gentlemen, and avoided behavior that indicated a lack of professionalism or bias. James Comey refused to shoot hoops with Barack Obama because it would give the wrong impression. Before Trump, a DOJ “scandal” was that Bill Clinton had a brief meeting, approximately twenty minutes, with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on a plane at a time when the FBI was investigating Hillary. The Inspector General looked into it and found no evidence that they discussed the Hillary case, nor that Lynch pressured the FBI on the issue. Meanwhile, Trump publicly signs executive orders telling the administration who to go after, and hires and fires officials based on who will most zealously prosecute his enemies.

In 2013, James Comey was appointed by Obama and confirmed 93-1 in the Senate, with only Rand Paul objecting on civil liberty grounds. There were never any questions raised about his character, and he would in subsequent years go on to anger both sides of the political spectrum. Trump broke a long established norm in 2017 by firing Comey, and then appointed Chris Wray, who was opposed by only five Democrats in the Senate, in part on the grounds that he had been hand picked by Trump. But Wray was still widely respected and was easily confirmed. Like Comey, the new director also wouldn’t simply do Trump’s bidding, so he resigned after Trump won reelection and it was clear that he would be fired to make way for someone like Kash.

The list of ways in which Patel’s appointment and tenure as FBI director have broken with previous practices is practically endless. FBI directors were not supposed to change with the president, but rather served 10-year terms so they would be more independent. They were supposed to be individuals whose personal integrity was beyond question. They avoided drinking to excess in public, and scams to milk their supporters for money. Previous candidates for FBI director didn’t even have “supporters” in the way Patel does. They didn’t make the podcast circuit or write books encouraging children to worship the presidential candidate who they hoped would one day appoint them to the position. They didn’t have colleagues and subordinates talking to journalists about their erratic behavior, and when there was reporting they didn’t like, they didn’t file frivolous lawsuits in order to intimidate the press. Previous FBI directors didn’t have memecoins, and didn’t use government resources in order to chauffeur around and provide security for their girlfriend, and then think of ways to criminally go after journalists who reported on it.

I don’t know anyone who would argue that the previous norms weren’t simply better. Nobody ever said: “You know, we need law enforcement that is more corrupt, thuggish, unprofessional, and incompetent.” Comey, Wray, and every previous FBI director were simply better men than Kash Patel – and yes, that includes J Edgar Hoover. It’s hard not to laugh when conservatives talk about “third worldization.” I don’t know how you could invent a figure that would more clearly represent the decline of basic ethical and moral standards than Trump, the candidate of white grievance. And if your MAGA brain can’t process the idea that a white president with a white base of support is what you pretend to fear, then take a look at Kash. Maybe the fact that he’s Indian will help your racial bias overcome your political tribalism and get you closer to truth.

The important difference between Comey and Wray, on one hand, and Patel, on the other, is not “ideology” in any real sense. It is a matter of competence, personal integrity, and professionalism. Patel is playing a different status game than his predecessors. Chris Wray didn’t get sloshed on the job and file lawsuits that would immediately get thrown out of court because he cared what smart and decent people thought of him: the kind that try not to lie, make a good faith effort to be informed about issues before commenting on them, and hold themselves and others to certain ethical standards. MAGA is a populist movement, so individuals get ahead by appealing to the gullible and less informed. Members of their base don’t expect ethical behavior from leaders, and don’t read enough real news to even have a good sense of who is behaving ethically anyway. You will live your life in different ways depending on whether you want to be thought well of by newspaper readers and professionals in your field, or listeners of Benny Johnson’s podcast and nursing home patients with borderline dementia whose names are on Republican mailing lists.

Although we live in cynical times, I think the second Trump administration has served as a reminder of how good we had it in the recent past. In 2020, leftists misrepresented the state of American law enforcement because they did not like what arrest data and police behavior told us about racial differences in crime rates. In recent years, the right has become a cult of personality centered around a conman, and they need to pretend that institutions like the FBI were always so corrupt that it justified them not even having to pretend to adhere to old norms. Both are wrong, but the threat that the MAGA movement poses is more immediate because it is the one with power, and on the right you do not find a more responsible class that makes up enough of a critical mass to check pressures that come from below, and keep in line figures who would appeal to the lowest instincts of the base.

My new book will argue that Kash Patel is not an anomaly. He’s the natural consequence of what happens when low-trust movements that are motivated by the grievances of less informed voters take power. Watching other countries, we usually only get glimpses of what is going on when they are experiencing a populist wave. For Americans today, following the news provides, in granular detail, nonstop reminders of the differences between advanced and less developed cultures, at least for those of us who have long enough memories to remember what our leaders were like only a few years ago.

For some, it’s hard to be truly disgusted with Trump. He’s too funny, and in ways too innocent to hate: a fat toddler approaching 80 who seems to brush off unrelenting hostility from all establishment institutions and the bullets of would-be assassins, and who most of the time barely even pretends that he isn’t lying to you. He even seems to share in the natural contempt nearly all smart people feel for his most enthusiastic supporters. Patel, in contrast, is the kind of figure who typically rides to power on the coattails of a charismatic strongman: a brown-nosing striver who has no talents outside of sucking up. His tenure at the head of the FBI is a blot on the institution and the history of American law enforcement. It is yet to be seen whether this is a one-off or a watershed moment in the decline of professionalism and standards among American elites.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoy articles like this, the global rise of populism is the subject of my next book, titled Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster. Taking a global perspective, it will argue that what we are seeing is not the rise of a new ideological movement, but rather a moral and intellectual decline among leaders resulting from changes in communications technology that allow more uninformed and uneducated citizens to have their voices heard. The Trump movement is the most consequential example of this phenomenon.

You can preorder Kakistocracy at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening-day sales, and will help determine how much attention the book receives. You are not charged until the book is shipped or you receive the digital copy, so there is no reason not to preorder.

On a different note, if a little box appears below, it means that you are not yet a free or paid subscriber. Sign up to get more articles and updates in the future.

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The religion of the Greeks does not yet prosper as I would wish, on account of those who profess it. But the gifts of the gods are great and splendid, better than any prayer or any hope…Why then do we think that this is sufficient and do not observe how the kindness of Christians to strangers, their care for the burial of their dead, and the sobriety of their lifestyle has done the most to advance their cause?…

Erect many hostels, one in each city, in order that strangers may enjoy my kindness, not only those of our own faith but also of others whosoever is in want of money. I have just been devising a plan by which you will be able to get supplies. For I have ordered that every year throughout all Galatia 30,000 modii of grain and 60,000 pints of wine shall be provided. The fifth part of these I order to be expended on the poor who serve the priests, and the rest must be distributed from me to strangers and beggars. For it is disgraceful when no Jew is a beggar and the impious Galileans [i.e., Christians] support our poor in addition to their own; everyone is able to see that our coreligionists are in want of aid from us. [emphasis added] Teach also those who profess the Greek religion to contribute to such services, and the villages of the Greek religion to offer the first-fruits to the gods. Accustom those of the Greek religion to such benevolence, teaching them that this has been our work from ancient times. Homer, at any rate, made Eumaeus say: "O Stranger, it is not lawful for me, even if one poorer than you should come, to dishonor a stranger. For all strangers and beggars are from Zeus. The gift is small, but it is precious." Do not therefore let others outdo us in good deeds while we ourselves are disgraced by laziness; rather, let us not quite abandon our piety toward the gods…

We ought to share our goods with all men, but most of all with the respectable, the helpless, and the poor, so that they have at least the essentials of life. I claim, even though it may seem paradoxical, that it is a holy deed to share our clothes and food with the wicked: we give, not to their moral character but to their human character. Therefore I believe that even prisoners deserve the same kind of care.

A concern for the poor and marginalized supposedly went back to Homer! In his mind, Julian was encouraging the Greeks to return to their charitable and humane roots.

Tom Holland argues that the Emperor was deluding himself. The Greek gods thought little of the poor and sick. They were warriors, and sometimes murderers and rapists, traits they shared with the human and semi-divine heroes of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Julian, who was raised a Christian, had taken the values of that faith for granted so much that he imagined their existence across the entire history of Greek culture.

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A single criticism from any one individual may not tell us much. But when a criticism recurs and is common among a certain political community, it says something about me, that community itself, or both. At the end of this article, I’ll put forward a unified theory of Hanania-hate. Yes, as you might predict, it involves me being unusually brilliant and courageous, but it’ll hopefully include some things you don’t yet know.

Left-wingers want to feel smarter than others and exclude them based on having the wrong ideas. Right-wingers are paranoid and conspiratorial. Thus, the left will say I have really evil values, and their criticisms are aimed at others on their side of the political spectrum who talk to or associate with me. The right will accuse me of lying, because they are always on the lookout for someone trying to trick them. My views on liberals reading and conservatives watching TV are shaped to some extent by how each side reacts to me, as only one of them appears able to understand my views.

Although the list could be much longer, when we discuss categories of haters, three in particular stand out in terms of the number and prominence of adherents to each school of Hanania criticism. I thought about including a fourth category of “pedo hunters,” or those particularly triggered by me not taking the Epstein files seriously and showing contempt for the idea that we would lock female teachers up for having sexual relationships with male students. But let’s set that aside, as it’s not as directly relevant to politics. Here we’re talking about a specific kind of moral panic, which I’ve already criticized elsewhere.

1. Culture of Life Types

The first category is the simplest and most straightforward to understand. I take extreme positions on abortion, surrogacy, and euthanasia. This is offensive to people who believe in what has been called the Culture of Life, whether rooted in Catholic theology, some other religious tradition, or common gut instincts. Sometimes, social conservatives will criticize utilitarian approaches to these topics, imagining Peter Singer types as their enemies. My views are partly rooted in utilitarianism, but also in an explicit rejection of the moral values of the Culture of Life framework. For example, some will talk about “human dignity” when opposing euthanasia, and I agree that this is an important consideration. But to them it means being forced to continue breathing no matter how low your quality of life sinks and how much of a burden you are on others. To me, dignity means being independent, healthy, able to make one’s own choices, and supporting one’s loved ones instead of being a drain on them. At a certain point, not killing yourself is simply indecent. For these reasons, I find opposition to euthanasia in particular deeply contemptible. I have more sympathy for pro-life ideology, yet it’s disturbing how much those who oppose abortion prioritize saving fetuses with severe handicaps over other children.

A lot of people agree with me on aborting fetuses with Down syndrome, and letting people end their own lives. But if these issues aren’t your main focus, and they aren’t for me, then it makes sense to keep one’s mouth shut about these positions. I can think of quite a few writers who make opposition to euthanasia a major priority, but few who are as committed to the pro-liberty position. I am willing to take the heat by saying what many people believe but will not articulate because there is little upside to doing so.

Culture of Life types are the easiest haters to understand. They believe in one set of values, I believe in another. As we’ll see, the two other kinds of haters dislike me for very specific reasons that are central to their own psyches and their views of my relationships with other people. A Christian conservative writer once DMed me and said that at first she hated me but then realized that I actually care about what’s true so now she feels differently. This is what honest disagreement looks like. This is not possible with the morons in the next category, or the shrieking authoritarians in the one after that.

2. Jilted Rightoids

In my first few years as a public figure, I was known largely as a harsh critic of wokeness. Over time, I would become disgusted with the right, and start to believe that they were wrong on immigration, and also that they had formed a community that was extremely lacking in epistemological standards and basic morality. The year 2021 was key here, as it was when the stolen election and anti-vaxx narratives started rising on the right, and I could see that I was one of the only people within the tent who was willing to tell the truth about what was happening. Actually, we can go one step further, as I was one of few people not so partisan-brained that I could understand that there was nothing to either narrative.

I was still known as a right-wing writer when the Huffington Post exposed my past racisms in summer 2023, and the article that was published actually recreated some of the goodwill that had been lost. Nonetheless, this did not change my perception of the problems with the right, which would get worse over the years.

Many of the “noticers” have not appreciated this noticing. Since, as I’ve documented, conservatives don’t read, they miss the longform articles explaining in painstaking detail what I’ve been thinking, and jump to the idea that I’m just saying the things I say to gain acceptance from the left. Here’s an exchange I had with Yarvin late last year:

The entire justification for the 2023 Huffington Post piece was that I was close to Republican politicians and Silicon Valley rightists. The exposé came out at the exact moment when, instead of hurting your prospects, being seen as based was increasingly an asset. The best path to profiting from all this would’ve been saying something like “that was bad, but it was a long time ago, leftists are scum for bringing this up, and I’m going to fight them because they’re the real racists and want to cancel people for saying the wrong thing” or something of that sort. Instead I told the truth, which was what I said was bad, leftists actually have a point about racism on the right, and that rightists were still flawed for denying elections, hating vaccines, and not engaging with any real sources of news.

I had a friend comment that turning against the tech right around 2023-2024 was basically the definition of selling an asset when the price is low. But I didn’t care! Everything within me rebels against smart people turning into Catturd, and there are few things more disgusting than watching intelligent individuals like JD Vance and Elon Musk shape their ideologies to fit the prejudices of the lowest kinds of slop merchants. It would be one thing to try to appeal to stupid people while keeping in mind that they’re stupid. But as Trivers taught, human psychology doesn’t work like that. There’s a saying that people become what they pretend to be. In politics, the equivalent idea is that you become who you pander to. Having contempt for low human capital is more than a matter of gaining the benefit of excluding less intelligent voices from the discourse. It is a kind of protection for the soul, preventing those who might in other circumstances know better from losing their dignity.

But it’s not simply that I’m a heretic of the Cult of Based. I strike at the very heart of rightoids’ self-conception. Vanguard conservatism in the last decade has been rooted in the idea that the right’s political views are the natural consequence of taking a series of “red pills.” This leads to clarity and the acceptance of supposed truths surrounding topics like race and sex differences, the overwhelming harms of mass migration and diversity, the negative role women have come to play in political life, the flaws of democracy, and the evils of egalitarianism. I come along and tell you that I know rightists’ arguments better than they do, I’ve made many of them myself, and, with a handful of exceptions, you’re much better off listening to the mainstream media than right-wing intellectuals and influencers on the issues they care about.

One of the themes I’ve often hit on is that, as much as the neoreactionary and nationalist types see themselves as anti-egalitarians, they are often critiquing the establishment from the left. When I or others point out that Steve Sailer’s opposition to high-skill immigration makes little sense given his stated values and priorities, he retorts that he is the only one who is primarily considering the well-being of citizens. See also my debates with Amy Wax on Indians in America. The arguments against high-skill immigration are really bad, but particularly so for those who take seriously the importance of IQ. If you think high intelligence has all kinds of positive externalities, then you must really hate having non-whites around to justify restricting skilled immigration, and since even self-styled thought criminals don’t like to admit that they’re that prejudiced, they selectively turn into socialist degrowthers when the topic comes up.

Amy is still a friend, and I’ve had pleasant interactions with Steve, despite his propensity to take shots in comments sections. But to be able to remain on civil terms with Trump supporters has been increasingly difficult, especially when they are hyper online types.

Last year, Deep Left wrote an article on Hanania Derangement Syndrome, which focuses on this group of haters. The top comment is from a rightoid proving my point.

I’m in awe of how people can think about a topic (me) this much while doing so little research to check their theories against the evidence. I do not “strike” this person as someone who learned something new about the world, even though I spend so much time writing about how I’ve changed my mind and the exact reasons why that I’ve decided I need to stop doing it and just refer people to older essays going forward. But this guy – and there are many more like him – probably has not read many essays and sees a handful of tweets now and then and so spins up a theory based on the most uncharitable interpretation possible.

Rightists are conspiratorial and intellectually lazy, so they naturally believe their opponents are lying about their views. From them, I often get replies like “You know X, but are choosing to lie about it.” Most of the time, neither of the other two camps of haters accuses me of dishonesty. In fact, the criticism goes in the other direction, with the tone of “and he’s not even trying to hide it!” Observing rightists interact with my work has been one reason why I’ve polarized so strongly against them. Leftists also have criticisms, but at least have the decency to kind of know what they’re talking about.

Once in a while, conservatives will make something close to the opposite argument, and gloat that the left will never accept me. Or perhaps the two views are reconcilable, and I am Machiavellian, but really bad at it. Few among this crowd consider a third possibility: that leftists who agree with me appreciate my work, and those who disagree don’t! Either way, the most prominent rightists today have brains that really are poorly equipped to understand that some people actually care about ideas. It’s not like I’m the only one they misunderstand. When it tries to explain the left, intellectual conservatism today emphasizes factors like status and power seeking. There’s a place for this kind of analysis, but when that’s all you talk about and it is your entire model for understanding politics, you are going to miss a lot.

3. Yglesias-Haters

The final category is the Yglesias-Hater. To them, I’m simply a pawn in a larger war over the future of the left. These are the people who just can’t believe that I am treated with respect by important and influential writers and institutions.

Taylor Lorenz isn’t completely wrong. Some on the left want to take their side in a more pro-market direction. I am pro-market. This correlates strongly with being skeptical of woke, so the alignment makes sense. Again, you have to credit the left for actually seeing what’s going on much more clearly than conspiracy-brained rightists.

Emil Kirkegaard has created a tool for investigating Substack networks based on shared subscribers. Here is mine.1

As expected, there’s overlap with Noah Smith, Nate Silver, and Yglesias. These are some of the main targets of people on the left who want their side to be purer in its hostility to corporations and unwillingness to question politically correct dogma.

Many leftists are obsessed with linking me to Yglesias in particular. From reading them, you would think that we go on vacations together and hold hands while taking long walks on the beach. Yet the extent of the relationship is basically Yglesias once in a while shares my essays and responds to my tweets. As a result, the Bluesky crowd will summon him at random times to answer for my sins.

It’s funny to note that years ago I was in a right-wing group chat that at one point was named “Matt Yglesias fan club,” because I spent so much time defending Yglesias from the charge that he was slimy and dishonest that it became a running joke. So while leftists hate him for responding to my articles, I’ve had similar conflict with rightists over standing up for Yglesias. Yes, it’s basically horseshoe theory again, in which tribal minds think alike, and are particularly triggered by those who approach issues in more nuanced and less partisan ways. It’s like fate wants to bring us together, but, alas, we are not actually friends.2

Derek Thompson’s appearance on my podcast to talk about Abundance has become a point of contention in the discourse surrounding the book. This one I feel bad about, as Derek is such a nice guy, describing himself as “pathologically agreeable” when I talked to him. Being hated by hordes of drooling morons is probably not as fun for him as it is for me.

Leftists have traditionally seen themselves as the arbiters of what ideas and people are acceptable. Circa 2015-2021, they were at the height of their power, and could in many cases essentially erase views they disliked from the internet. The decline of gatekeepers and an increasingly successful (and authoritarian) right made this impossible to maintain. So many of them retreated into more extreme bubbles. Unable to police society as a whole, they try to set the terms for what others on the left can say and who they can talk to. Figures like Yglesias, Klein, Thompson, and David Shor stand out as prominent intellectuals who they see as not practicing the same kind of politics of exclusion, willing to push back on sacred cows, and perhaps in their hearts harboring some cancellable views themselves.

I’m impressed by their dedication. They can’t let the smallest interaction with Yglesias go! We’re not talking about him ever agreeing with me that racism is good or something, it’s just normal nerd stuff. The instinct to set the bounds of acceptable discourse is a fundamental drive for many of these people, and it seems that deciding who matters is key to their sense of self-worth. I’ve previously written that the distinction between populism and elitism can be understood in terms of whether individuals seek status by trying to impress large numbers of people or a select group. The conservative influencer gets his status from the number of followers he has, while the left-wing journalist is attached to prestigious institutions, and may have little independent public profile at all. The latter is generally preferable, since elite institutions sometimes get things right, while appealing to a massive audience when talking about political issues is practically always a negative signal, since all but a tiny portion of the population is either dumb or intellectually lazy.

Yet while all elite institutions and epistemological communities gatekeep, sometimes gatekeeping is done by ideologues with awful political commitments. Yglesias has written about how he’s too big to be bullied, but attacking him sends a signal that there are a lot of people out there ready to make life difficult for anyone on the left who is less prominent and might be tempted to step out of line. I don’t know how much left-wing cancellers consciously think in such strategic terms, and how much they’re just emotionally lashing out and indirectly creating a chilling effect, but it’s probably a combination of both.

If Yglesias were on the right, he would not have nearly as many haters on his own side. Imagine a conservative who was willing to challenge some right-wing ideas, but did it mostly in long-form essays and always voted Republican in the end. Right-wingers wouldn’t read enough of his articles to get the nuance of his views, and in the end what they care about most is that individuals affirm tribal loyalty by voting the right way. Yglesias-hate is for people who read. Here, you are dealing with deranged ideologues rather than conspiracy theorists or low trust individuals who always think they need to be on guard so you don’t fool them.

The Common Theme

Setting aside the Culture of Life folks, I think that the two remaining types of haters share a fundamental critique. Both dislike the centrist establishment, and are upset that I have a certain level of acceptance within it. To the rightists, this says something about my character, since I apparently just figured out what buttons to push and was let into the club. I succeeded by pulling the wool over their eyes. The leftist haters are less interested in me as an individual and see me as a symbol with which to smear others within their coalition they want to keep in line, particularly Yglesias, who they imagine is my soulmate.

I think there’s a broader lesson here. My haters provide strong support for my view of politics. Right-left remains an important axis. But there is also a populist-antipopulist axis, and on this dimension few people unapologetically take the antipopulist side. The GMU economics department is a major exception, and it’s unsurprising that some of the closest Substacks in my network are Caplan, Hanson, and Decker. But Tyler and Bryan are too nice to be hated, and so all the rage people feel toward the substance of unapologetic antipopulism is directed at me (and sometimes Decker when he’s imagining himself fighting a civil war or getting cucked).

I found this exchange quite amusing.

One guy can’t believe that I succeeded while being too racist against black people, and the other responds with a complaint that I’m too harsh on white people. I’m pretty sure no one else can inspire such a conversation!

I see a symmetry on the ends of the political spectrum, where both sides have built images of themselves as defenders of oppressed minorities. For the left, it is various identity groups, but particularly American blacks. The right is now doing the same thing with working class whites. I wrote about JD Vance as the white Sharpton, pointing out the psychological and ideological similarities between these two approaches to politics. Those who are fans of Vance or BLM do not want to see themselves in the other side. But my fanbase is composed to a large extent of those who can look beyond the right-left divide and see similarities in the most prominent forms of American identitarianism.

I think the Bluesky message below gets at something important.

One of the questions for the future is whether politics will reorient in a way that will make my politics more legible to a larger number of people. As Sam Kriss wrote last year:

Maybe the greatest ideological entrepreneur of our era is Richard Hanania. Far more than any of his competitors—Curtis Yarvin, Bronze Age Pervert, me—he seems to prefigure the politics of the future…

In the last few years, Hanania has made a kind of aretaic turn. Instead of the white race, he now believes in a universal herrenvolk stratum of ‘elite human capital.’ He now supports gay marriage and trans rights, because gay and trans people tend to be wealthier, more liberal, and higher IQ, and because openness to sexual minorities seems to be a trait of elite human capital. He supports abortion, and quotes Jessica Valenti while doing so. He opposes Trump and the MAGA movement, because they’re all plainly morons. He no longer opposes mass immigration, because it provides a wider talent pool from which elite human capital might be drawn, even if it’s statistically likelier to come from some groups than others. He likes Jews. He has rearranged his Hitler particles into an almost perfect facsimile of liberalism, with just one piece missing, which is the assumption of a universal human dignity. Perhaps relatedly, he also believes that he, as an instance of elite human capital, could easily write a Jacobean tragedy as good as any of Shakespeare’s, if he had a few days to learn all the old-timey words.

I hate to say it, but I think this thing might have legs. The centre-left is hollowed out, it’s empty, its current best idea for 2028 is just running Kamala Harris again in the hope that things go differently. That space is there to be filled, and what makes elite human capitalism potent is that it doesn’t just flatter the position of the ruling classes—they have plenty of options on that front—but also provides the materials for an entirely new round of shrieking moral priggishness.

Basically, I believe in the need for a ruling class. From the perspective of the broad scope of human history, American elites in the post-World War II era have been close to the best anyone can hope for. This is true even if they say some not very nice things about me. Yes, they kind of went crazy in the 2010s, but the answer was to try to reform the institutions they had built, not tear them down with no hope of alternatives through the efforts of a coalition of social media grifters, theocratic freaks, internet misanthropes, hateful racists, borderline schizophrenic podcast hosts, conspiracy theorists, and brain rotted tech bros. Something like the Elite Human Capital framework can potentially provide the moral courage and intellectual scaffolding to fight the two-front war against barbarians from outside Western institutions and those who would subvert them from within.

I think those who like my work understand this, which is why they think it is sometimes worthwhile to take the heat that comes from engaging with me. I may be the tip of the spear of a new political realignment. Or I may continue as an interesting intellectual sideshow in a politics that continues to be defined by two sides that have embraced forms of identitarianism that are largely mirror images of one another.

As you can probably tell, I’m more emotionally disgusted with the right-wing haters. If the left ever seizes total power and wants to imprison me, their indictment will actually have accurate citations. Rightists will spin up paranoid fantasies and charge me with being a gay Jewish pedophile and credit Nick Shirley’s stellar reporting for breaking the story. To not be understood is much worse than being hated, and rightists just have a less accurate model of reality almost across the board.

All of this is a bit self-aggrandizing. So let me close by talking about my flaws. Mainly, I can be kind of a prick. It’s getting better over time, but there are moments when I’ve been mean-spirited, rude, and sadistic. Yes, yes, my work as a whole is in the service of truth, but sometimes I want to make people who deserve it feel bad. This may not be the healthiest instinct, but it is one of the secrets to my productivity, and I think the same is true for a lot of people involved in political or intellectual life. One thing I’ve lost the right to do as a result is complain too much when people hate me. All I ask is that they at least do the reading.

Thanks for reading. One thing I’ve learned is that when you have a book coming out, you can never assume that even regular readers are aware of it.

For that reason, over the next few months I’m not going to miss any opportunity to inform my audience that I have a new book called Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster coming out in July – details here. If you enjoy articles like this, appreciate me as a truly independent writer, and would like to support my work, the best way to do so is to preorder the book, which you can do at the links here to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening day sales, and will help determine how much attention it receives.

I will be reading the audiobook, in case that makes it more appealing.

On a different note, if a little box appears below, it means that you are not yet a free or paid subscriber. Sign up to get more articles and updates in the future.

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I also share subscribers with Michael Tracey, probably because we do a lot of streams together. But he’s so far away in the network map that to show Tracey would require one to zoom out and be less able to see what is going on. What this means is that, although Michael and I share some subscribers, it’s an idiosyncratic relationship in terms of the overall Substack network and we cluster in completely different places.

For fun, here’s what Michael’s network looks like, which is truly all over the map.

Should writers use AI? It’s a topic that has generated frenzied discussion. Recently, Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle kicked up a storm when she wrote on X that she uses AI for such tasks as transcribing interviews, analyzing her arguments, and fact-checking. Critics accused her of outsourcing her thinking and told her to find a new job. A Rutgers philosophy professor even said that “in a healthier media culture, an admission like this would at the very least get her fired.” One wonders what he means by at the very least and what kind of punishment he has in mind as a maximum.

Yet the arguments one can make against her use of AI also apply to other forms of technology that are widely considered acceptable. In fact, I would go one step further than McArdle and say that there is nothing inherently wrong with writers using AI to compose text. The only way it would be unethical is if writers fail to disclose it, because people have an obligation to disclose information that publishers or readers might find relevant. Since I can write fast and well enough not to benefit much from AI writing, and because it would be against the rules of Globe Ideas anyway, I did not use AI to write this piece. But I would encourage publications to avoid blanket rules against such a practice for those who need it. (I did use AI to check spelling and grammar before submitting my draft.)

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I can put it this way: For people who tend to think illogically and get their facts wrong, AI is better than what they have traditionally used to develop their worldviews. For those who are smart, based in reality, and diligent about getting things correct, LLMs are also a plus. We should therefore expect AI to make society smarter nearly across the board. This is unlike the internet, which I have argued has been good for some people and bad for others. The table below reflects my views.

Here I want to focus on the right side of the bell curve. More specifically, what kind of relationships should writers have with AI?

Note that I’m using “writer” here very broadly, to refer to not only essayists but also journalists and academics.

Imagine some time next year we all start to notice a brilliant young thinker who has a lot of interesting things to say. He seems to be on top of trends, presents new ways of looking at current events, and has a perspective that helps accurately predict what happens in the world. The writing is clear, neither dumbing down the ideas nor presenting them in ways that are inaccessible. When you fact check this person’s claims, they are almost always correct, and when it is called for he owns up to a mistake and issues a correction.

It is then revealed that this person’s writing was all done by AI. How should we react to this news? From my perspective, it shouldn’t really matter, and we should hope that this person continues to do the same kind of work. If their articles are thought provoking and factual, there is no reason that them being written by AI takes away from these qualities. The only argument I see you can make against him is that he was not fully honest with his audience, but this raises the question of why we should care in the first place. Let’s say this writer apologizes for the deception and says he’s going to fully disclose his use of AI from now on, but that his process will remain the same. I think at that point he would still be worth reading.

Maybe the problem is that using AI is not fair to other writers? Banning it would be like prohibiting steroids in athletic competition. But LLMs are available to everyone, and they don’t cause long-term health damage, so this is not the same thing. Some leftists seem to think that we should ban or refuse to use AI because it will take jobs, but this is just classic lump of labor fallacy, and instead of going over why this is the wrong way to view the world, I’m just going to send you here, here, and here.

Another potential issue people bring up is that AI may reduce our ability to think. This seems silly to me. One could’ve said the same about the internet. “Oh, you can just Google something? Doesn’t that rot your brain, when before you would have had to learn the Dewey Decimal System, get a stack of books, and look through them until you found the exact information you want?” Sure, the internet has made a lot of people dumber, but it’s also made the best quality work smarter. I think we should be more optimistic about AI raising the collective intelligence of society as a whole, which would be the opposite impact of social media. If you care about truth and are an intelligent person, there’s no way that immediate factchecking and more access to information won’t improve your work.

Maybe the specific skill of writing itself will atrophy. But skills often atrophy when they’re no longer necessary, and that’s fine. People’s penmanship almost certainly got worse after the invention of word processors. Maybe in a decade, intellectuals are just basically polishing AI content, or editing it to fit their views. Whatever thinking skills writing develops will probably still be exercised by the need to determine what is true or false in the output of AI, packaging ideas, and marketing them.

Some people are bad or slow writers, but there’s no reason that should exclude them from public discourse. I can’t relate to this particular problem. I once had an Ivy League professor tell me he doesn’t know if it’s worth producing op-eds, because each time he has to take a day to do it. I was shocked, as I can write an op-ed on any topic I’m knowledgeable about in an hour, with maybe two hours to get from a blank page to the finished product. I’m not saying this as a theoretical skill; it’s something that I’ve done regularly over the years for some of the most prominent newspapers in the country. There’s no temptation to just put my notes or outline into an LLM and ask for an article, since I don’t really produce notes or outlines except for a few phrases or sentence fragments that I put down to jog my memory, and it would take about as much time to explain to the LLM what kind of article I wanted as it would to just write it myself. It’s hard to imagine this changing even as AI gets better, since writing is simply not my bottleneck for producing essays.

Yet this is a gift, and there may be people out there with ideas just as good who simply don’t have this one particular skill. For them, AI for writing is no different from glasses for those who can’t see well: a technological fix to a natural shortcoming. We shouldn’t shame them for this. We don’t care whether an author used reading glasses when he was researching a book. Similarly, if I knew a writer used AI to help them compose their work, all I would care about is whether it was high quality.

In addition to making writing more accessible for those who have something important to say, AI-maxxing can create new forms of journalism and academic work there wouldn’t otherwise be a market for. Yglesias recently wrote about how AI can produce pretty decent local news coverage during a time when doing it the old-fashioned way makes less economic sense. Sure, you need enough human control to feel safe that the work is accurate, but that is much less expensive than hiring a team of reporters. When it comes to local journalism, we are going to have to choose between AI reporters and not having much news coverage at all. You can imagine something similar with academic work. Archives are increasingly being digitized, and there may not be enough human scholars with the time and expertise to extract what is important from the material. Again, quality control is necessary, but I would have no problem reading an AI book on ancient history or political science if it went through proper factchecking protocols.

I was thinking about this when listening to a Blocked and Reported podcast on recent AI scandals. People have very strong opinions on whether and under what circumstances writers and journalists should use this technology. But the entire discussion strikes me as pointless. Imagine if there was a debate in 1999 over whether authors should use the internet. AI is so beneficial to writers and content creators that people will have no choice but to use it. This is true whether you are producing high quality journalism or academic work, or slop that you want to go viral on X. It’s going to be impossible to resist the temptation to put notes into an LLM and ask for a rough draft, or to ask AI to occasionally structure a sentence better.

When I was in law school, I would edit law review articles by professors, and occasionally I’d see a citation to a newspaper story. This was in an earlier era of the internet, and they would put the page number in there to make it look like they were citing the physical copy. But I could tell they didn’t get it from there because there were sometimes differences in the headline between the paper version and the article posted on the internet. Today, there’s less reason for anyone to pretend that they tracked down a paper copy for a citation. Once newspapers went online, it was unrealistic to expect people to go to a newsstand or library to get the same article they can just make pop up on their computer. Likewise, no one is going to forgo the convenience and productivity-enhancing aspects of AI when it comes to writing, editing, proofreading, and factchecking.

Current AI scandals remind me of discussions over botched plastic surgery. Once in a while, you’ll see someone whose face has been disfigured, and people will use it to advise against getting any work done. But we don’t notice all the people who have gotten facelifts or Botox injections and achieved a natural and more appealing look. I’ve noticed that in recent years, women are staying attractive for much longer, and this is obviously something that should be celebrated. With AI, we similarly hear about instances when things go poorly, while ignoring cases where people are using the tool correctly.

One of the scandals covered by Katie and Jesse is that of the UK populist writer Matt Goodwin. The author’s latest book included fake quotes, which people naturally presume he got from AI. The problem here though isn’t AI, but rather that he is apparently a careless researcher who didn’t know enough about the tool he was using to realize that you need to check its references. I use AI for factchecking and research all the time, but to my knowledge, I’ve never included a fabricated quote in an article, because I always try to track down my sources. Likewise, when it comes to producing legal documents, we hear about lawyers who get caught citing cases that don’t exist, but surely there are many more people in the legal profession using LLMs whose finished work is beyond reproach.

One can imagine true cases of fraud. Let’s say I write a memoir, but I tell ChatGPT to just make stuff up based on some notes and information about me that is available on the internet. This is dishonest and wrong, since people will buy the book because they’re interested in my experiences and how I perceive them. In such cases, using AI should continue to be banned or stigmatized. Perhaps people have similar expectations when it comes to fiction, wanting the author to take them on a personal journey. But what about if someone is writing about housing policy or the national debt? In that case, what matters is whether what is being published is factual and well-argued, not how humans and robots divided the work.

Since I’m calling for AI-maxxing, I’m going to close this article by taking my own advice. I’m done making my points, so instead of writing a closing paragraph myself, I’ve outsourced the job to AI. Putting an earlier version of this article into ChatGPT, I asked it to come up with a 300 word or less closing paragraph that sums up the arguments in the style of the author. Here is what we get:

In the end, the case against AI writing collapses once we focus on what actually matters: truth, insight, and usefulness. If a piece of journalism, scholarship, or commentary is accurate, well-reasoned, and illuminating, the division of labor between human and machine is largely irrelevant. Technologies have always displaced specific skills while expanding the range of people able to contribute—word processors weakened penmanship, search engines replaced library stacks, and online archives transformed research—but each ultimately raised the ceiling of intellectual production. AI promises the same, lowering the barriers to entry for those with ideas but limited writing ability, enabling new forms of local journalism and large-scale academic synthesis, and accelerating fact-checking, editing, and discovery. The real risks are not unique to AI but familiar ones: carelessness, dishonesty, and poor verification. When fabricated quotes or nonexistent cases appear, the problem is sloppy authorship, not the tool itself. We already judge work by its quality rather than whether someone used reading glasses, spell-check, or online databases; AI should be treated no differently. There may remain narrow domains—memoirs, personal narratives, or works marketed as direct expressions of lived experience—where undisclosed AI use would mislead readers. But for analytical writing about policy, history, or public affairs, what ultimately matters is whether the final product is correct and valuable. As with the internet before it, AI will become unavoidable because it makes writers more productive and readers better informed. The sensible response is not to police its use, but to demand higher standards of accuracy and argument, regardless of how the words were produced.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Thanks for reading. One thing I’ve learned is that when you have a book coming out, you can never assume that even regular readers are aware of it.

For that reason, over the next few months I’m not going to miss any opportunity to inform my audience that I have a new book called Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster coming out in July – details here. If you enjoy articles like this, appreciate me as a truly independent writer, and would like to support my work, the best way to do so is to preorder the book, which you can do at the links here to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening day sales, and will help determine how much attention it receives.

I will be reading the audiobook, in case that makes it more appealing.

On a different note, if a little box appears below, it means that you are not yet a free or paid subscriber. Sign up to get more articles and updates in the future.

The bulk of the conversation focuses on the war with Iran and what comes next. Michael expects Trump to keep going all out for regime change, while my money would be on TACO. We read the tea leaves and debate Trump’s many muddled and contradictory statements.

I don’t have a high degree of confidence in my view; Trump is obviously an increasingly unstable lunatic who can go in any direction, and his babble on this topic is even more incoherent than normal. As I explained on X, I think that Hormuz and his lack of palatable options have broken him. But underneath it all, I believe that he’s first and foremost a political survivor, and that means trying to get the best possible outcome for Republicans in the midterms so nobody investigates his crimes and corruption.

We close with some discussion about the Eric Swalwell situation and questions from the audience.

Links to articles mentioned in the discussion

David Ignatius on what comes next

NYT on how Mojtaba Khamenei became his father’s successor, article and podcast

Note: If you would like to get this podcast through a regular podcast app, go to richardhanania.com on a browser on your device (it doesn’t work in the app), log in to Substack, and click on the tab for either the Hanania Show or the H&H Podcast. Select the episode you want, and then choose one of Apple, Spotify, etc. under “Listen on” to your right. You’ll be able to add the show through an RSS feed, after which you will get new episodes, either free or paid depending on what kind of subscriber you are, through whichever platform you use.

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I’m fascinated by what the author ended up doing to Shatov. He had the worst outcome of any major character. But from his politics and background, Shatov appears to be a stand-in for Dostoevsky. So Dostoevsky has himself get cucked and killed, and then his wife and stepson also die. What’s going on here?

We discuss Stavrogin’s suicide as him reenacting the death of Matryosha, the one act he never forgave himself for.

Of all the characters, Stepan is the only one with a true redemption arc. He’s LARPing his whole life, but in the end does take a stand for his principles against the young radicals and their supporters among the mob.

On the topic of politics, I explain how I believe that, while Dostoevsky was correct in his critique of the leftists and nihilists, in the end the Russian Empire was brought down by the stupidity and incompetence of the reactionaries. Slavophile ideas ensured that Russia entered World War I on the side of Serbia, Tsar Nicholas II refused to reform and kept his country in a state of backwardness, and the bizarre tale of Rasputin shows what can go wrong when your elites are not grounded in Enlightenment values.

One of Dostoevsky’s greatest strengths is as a savage critic of his former political allies on the nihilistic left. His blind spot seems to have been his steadfast support of royal absolutism, yet in this novel at least, he takes several opportunities to mock monarchists and reactionaries.

Links

Reviews of Part I, and Part 2

John Psmith book review

Rob’s review of Demons, Part 1 and Part 2

My review of Crime and Punishment

Note: If you would like to get this podcast through a regular podcast app, go to richardhanania.com on a browser on your device (it doesn’t work in the app), log in to Substack, and click on the tab for either the Hanania Show or the H&H Podcast. Select the episode you want, and then choose one of Apple, Spotify, etc. under “Listen on” to your right. You’ll be able to add the show through an RSS feed, after which you will get new episodes, either free or paid depending on what kind of subscriber you are, through whichever platform you use.

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This is quite remarkable, since nearly every point in the plan involves the US moving toward the Iranian position, rather than vice versa. Among the provisions are lifting all sanctions, continued Iranian control over Hormuz, US military withdrawal from the Middle East, reparations for the war, and acceptance of nuclear enrichment, although Iran commits not to build nuclear weapons.

Obviously, the US is not going to completely withdraw from the region or pay reparations. But Trump already lifted some sanctions during the war. And he’s now talking about the US and Iran working together to collect tolls through Hormuz! I would be shocked if this happened, given the many institutional and political barriers standing in the way of such an arrangement. Much more likely is that the US just accepts de facto Iranian control, which it could use to charge tolls or perhaps get other kinds of concessions from the international community. Understand that there’s a lot of room between Iran letting traffic flow freely and closing Hormuz. They now have the luxury to favor some countries and business interests over others, from which they can extract concessions. Even before the ceasefire, Trump was saying that the US didn’t care about Hormuz, right before demanding Iran open it or see its civilization destroyed. This indicates that he knew that the passage matters, but wanted to find a way to let the Iranians have control while saving face.

I was more optimistic than most at the outset of the conflict. But here’s what I wrote in an op-ed in the days after it began.

Now the United States and Israel have gone well beyond the Soleimani assassination, killing Ayatollah Khamenei and several other top Iranian officials. It is too early to say what will happen, and there may yet be negative consequences for the greater Middle East and perhaps some terrorist attacks elsewhere, like the shootings that just occurred in Austin, Texas. But note that anti-interventionists no longer discuss “World War III” or make such apocalyptic forecasts, which generally depended on the assumption that Russia or China might come to the aid of the target of American intervention. And although a broader regional war is possible, Iran would fight it practically alone against the United States, Israel, and the Gulf Arab states. Trump’s latest gambit may be ill-considered, but through the killing of Soleimani, the decimation of Hezbollah, and our maximum pressure campaign, over time we’ve learned that the Iranian ability to inflict significant harms on the United States is quite limited.

Most of this holds up. We didn’t have terrorist attacks, major American casualties, or World War III. But the last sentence should be modified. Iran’s ability to harm the US may be limited, but, by shaving a couple percentage points off the stock market and sending oil well over $100, they could clearly do enough to make fighting them a negative sum proposition for the US.

I’ll admit getting a bit too excited in the first 24 hours on X, but I was impressed that we wiped out much of the leadership of the country right from the beginning, and that indeed was a pretty remarkable accomplishment. But even here, again, I did not claim that the war was obviously a good idea, and said we’d have to see how it turns out. Yes, I know Trump is an idiot, but you cannot get around the fact that Venezuela was a clear victory, and I maintain it wasn’t completely irrational to think that this could’ve worked out too.

Of course, it was too early within the first few days to pass judgment, since we didn’t know what information the US and Israelis had access to. Looking back at Venezuela, it seems likely that there was some kind of agreement with Delcy Rodriguez and perhaps others. Plausibly, something like that could’ve been going on with Iran, and we needed a little time for it to be clear whether this was the case.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that you should judge foreign policy decisions by their short-term results. Not the first 24 hours, but on the order of weeks or months rather than years or decades.

Now we’ve arrived at a ceasefire, which means either the war is over, or we’ve reached the official end of its initial phase. Either way, I consider a ceasefire to be the absolute latest point at which you can pass judgment – a sufficient condition, though not a necessary one. And here I am concluding that the decision to launch the war was a failure. Maybe wiser decisions will be made down the line and things will work out anyway, or currently unforeseeable circumstances will emerge that leave us better off, but as far as the original initiative, the status quo ante was clearly preferable to what we have now, and this should be the verdict of history.

Stanford political scientist James Fearon once posed the question of why wars occur if they are costly. We might think that perfectly rational actors would forecast the likely end result, and simply negotiate toward that position, without the downsides of actually fighting. One answer is that there is often asymmetric information about capabilities, intentions, and resolve. Country A might make a threat against Country B, but Country B doesn’t know if they’ll actually follow through. Neither side, of course, has perfect insight into the other’s military capabilities or willingness to fight. There are also cognitive biases, and the world is just too complex to expect each side to come to the same conclusion regarding the likely outcome of a conflict. From this perspective, one way to understand what happened over the last six weeks is to ask what we have learned, and how the new information changes the contours of international politics.

Iranians Had More Resolve Than We Thought

The New York Times reported the following the week before the US attack:

“[Khamenei] is expecting to be a martyr and thinking, this is my system and legacy, and I will stand until the end,” Mr. Nasr said. “He is distributing power and preparing the state for the next big thing, both succession and war, aware that succession may come as a consequence of war.”

Iran is operating on the basis that U.S. military strikes are inevitable and imminent, even as both sides continue to engage diplomatically and negotiate on a nuclear deal, the six officials and three Guards members said. They said Iran had placed all of its armed forces on the highest state of alert and was preparing to resist fiercely.

The country is positioning ballistic missile launchers along its western border with Iraq — close enough to strike Israel — and along its southern shores on the Persian Gulf, within range of American military bases and other targets in the region, the three Guards members and four senior officials said.

Iran said it would resist fiercely, but its response to previous attacks had been quite limited, so it was possible to expect that the same thing would happen this time. Consider the following timeline:

1. In January 2020, Trump killed Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the IRGC, and Iran retaliated by firing more than a dozen ballistic missiles at US bases in Iraq. No troops were killed, and Iran signaled that there wouldn’t be any more strikes.

2. In April 2024, Israel killed senior IRGC officers at an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus. Iran’s response was firing 300 drones and missiles directly at Israel.

3. In June 2025, in what came to be known as the “Twelve-Day War,” the US and Israel struck Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran again fired on Israel and a US air base in Qatar, while some drones were intercepted over neighboring countries and smaller incidents occurred at US sites in Iraq.

Notably, the US and Israel broke new taboos in each of these strikes. Before January 2020, it was considered practically unthinkable for the US to publicly assassinate a top Iranian official. April 2024 involved hitting a diplomatic compound, something that has traditionally been off limits. Finally, June 2025 was a further escalation, with the US and Israel finally bombing Iranian soil.

In each case, the Iranian response was mostly limited, symbolic, and designed to save face while avoiding escalation. Notably, there were no significant or lasting attacks on the Gulf Arab states, and no closing of the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump was certainly feeling confident after the success of the Maduro raid. But we know that the other factor weighing on his mind was how weakly Iran had responded to previous attacks. He dismissed the idea that Tehran would close the Strait of Hormuz rather than capitulate. It wasn’t that crazy of a view.

But, as it turned out, the US and Israel went to the well once too often, and this time the Iranians decided to really fight back. In a way they had no choice, because once you kill their top leaders, demand regime change, and try to wipe out their military capabilities, there isn’t much reason for them not to keep going. But, as will be discussed below, it looks like regime change wasn’t something the administration even considered really doable, in which case that raises the question of how exactly they expected this to go well.

The Regime Is Not That Fragile

In addition to showing more resolve than expected, the regime has more control over the country it rules than we thought. In the early days of the conflict, it looked like there might actually be a plan to overthrow the current government. Trump recently revealed to an interviewer that the US sent guns to the Iranian opposition, but he thinks that the Kurds kept them. There was initially talk of having the Kurds themselves go fight the Iranian regime, which would have made sense if they had in fact been armed, but Trump poured cold water on the idea, and it seems like they were unwilling.

Regarding what the expectations were going in, the New York Times tells us that on February 11 Netanyahu gave a presentation to Trump and other top US officials arguing that there was a decent chance of regime change. For its part, American intelligence said that killing the ayatollah and reducing Iranian power were achievable, but regime change and a popular uprising were much less likely. The Trump administration decided to go in anyway, on the grounds that the first two goals were enough. To me, regime change was the large payoff that could potentially justify a war, but if that was never really on the table, then it’s a lot less clear exactly what a positive outcome would have looked like, other than a complete Iranian surrender.

The realizations that the Iranian government has resolve and that it is not that fragile are related. When dictatorships fall, it is often because there are factions within the state that will not act decisively to crush a protest movement or uprising. This is what happened with the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt, and during the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the Iranian government is competent, self-confident, and brutal enough to both face off against the US and its Middle East allies, and also stop any grassroots uprising from below from threatening its power. Now that we know that, the war has put it in a better position at home and abroad.

The US Cannot Open Hormuz by Force on a Politically Realistic Timeline

So if regime change was off the table, the second-best result was to have a weakened Iranian government, further away from having a nuclear weapon, and with many fewer missiles and offensive capabilities. But the reason that we didn’t want a strong Iran was in part that it could menace its neighbors and the global economy, by hitting oil producers and closing the Strait of Hormuz. Yet during the war, it did both of those things, and will probably hold on to Hormuz.

The Iranian regime cares about its own survival, and Trump presumably cares most about the stock market and low gas prices, so Republicans can win office and he can keep all his gains from the presidency and not go to jail. So even though the US can do more damage to Iran than vice versa, the mullahs it turns out had more leverage. During the fighting, Iran didn’t have to dominate the Strait of Hormuz or destroy the Arab Gulf states. All that was necessary was to keep Hormuz closed by making the waterway a war zone and harassing its neighbors.

That’s what it did, as shown in the map below, which tracks strikes in the region between February 28 and March 10.

As a result, traffic in oil, fuels, and natural gas through Hormuz all collapsed.

The experience of the conflict with the Houthis of the last few years gave few reasons to have been optimistic regarding any battle for Hormuz.

On the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, diagonally from the Strait of Hormuz, there’s another passage called Bab al-Mandeb.

After the beginning of the Gaza War in October 2023, the Houthis began to fire at Israeli cities and commercial vessels. In December, the US launched Operation Prosperity Guardian, which involved defensive naval escorts and shooting down drones and missiles. The next year saw the US conduct airstrikes against Houthi targets within Yemen, and Trump escalated the effort in March 2025. That operation can only be considered a failure. The US dropped $1.5 billion worth of munitions on the Houthis and lost more than a dozen Reaper drones worth about $30 million each. Three fighter jets valued at $67 million each also fell into the ocean, including one that went overboard when the USS Truman swerved to avoid a Houthi attack. Houthi leaders were killed and many of their weapons were eliminated, but their ability to disrupt sea traffic remained intact.

A ceasefire was announced last May, in which the Houthis promised not to attack US vessels, but they would otherwise continue to do what they wanted. By summer, the Houthis were attacking merchant vessels again. Today, traffic through Bab al-Mandeb remains half of what it was before October 2023.

Trump could afford to walk away from the conflict with the Houthis because Bab al-Mandeb is not as important to the global economy as the Strait of Hormuz. Before the war with Iran began, one-fifth of the world’s oil supply went through the Strait of Hormuz, compared to about 9% for Bab al-Mandeb when the Houthis began disrupting shipping. Aside from the numbers involved, the goods that went through Bab al-Mandeb had an alternative route that involved going around the Cape of Good Hope, which can be seen in the chart below.

As oil going through Bab al-Mandeb declined after 2023, the amount transported via the southern coast of Africa went up by about the same amount. But there’s no alternative sea route to the Strait of Hormuz, and available land options can only handle a fraction of the traffic. Moreover, Iran was hitting oil facilities directly, which added more to the strain on the global economy.

Of course, although the Houthi conflict did not provide encouragement, before the war we couldn’t say for sure that the US wouldn’t be able to open Hormuz by force. There may have been some reason that the situation in Bab al-Mandeb was different. In fact, according to a March 11 report from the Congressional Research Service, “Prior to Operation Epic Fury, there appears to have been consensus among analysts that the U.S. military has the capacity to counter Iran’s forces and restore the flow of shipping in the event of Iranian attempts to disrupt the Strait.”

One could have thought before the war that simply threatening to bomb Iran into the Stone Age would be enough – the Houthis were already there! (not literally, obviously, but closer than Iran) But Trump tried that, and ended up folding. Other countries rejected American requests for help with Hormuz. If Trump was being told by military leaders that the US could open the Strait alone fast enough, given his character I think there’s a good chance he would’ve tried. But it looks like it was never considered possible, or at least not on a short enough time scale for it to make sense politically. If Trump was informed that it could be done, but it would take two years, obviously he wasn’t going to accept that given that he thinks more about his financial interests than his legacy.

What Comes Next

I think Iran has won a kind of peace of mind. They’ve shown that they can cause great pain for the rest of the world, and that their regime won’t fold or collapse in the face of a major attack. Every American president from now on will know that deciding to go to war with Iran will tank the global economy and become the dominant issue of their presidency, hindering the ability to achieve all other political goals. Before, they could delude themselves that it could be quick and easy. Even future presidents hostile to the regime are unlikely to care so much about Iran that they think that the issue is worth tanking their approval rating by ten points and risking nearly all of their political capital.

This likely applies to Trump too once the two-week ceasefire is up. I expect him to find a way to save face and not restart the war. The thing to understand about Trump is that he’s very petty and selfish (I know, I know, breaking news). He wants to do well in the midterms and have a Republican president as his successor, since the goal is to – in addition to looking like a winner – avoid investigations and potential liability for the corruption and crimes of himself, his family, and associates. You obviously never know with this guy, but from the way he talks about Hormuz, it seems clear he wants a way out.

Iran didn’t even go all the way up the escalatory ladder, and promised to hit the energy producing facilities of the Gulf Arab states if Trump followed through on his threat last night. It was Trump who blinked, and no president is likely to be even more willing to accept such a risk. Closing Hormuz is no longer a theoretical cost of war. Iran will probably maintain some control, and that makes it a sure thing in the event of another conflict.

Assuming the Iranians wait out Trump, the next president will be much saner, so of course will likely conclude that a war with Iran is basically off the table unless they do something really crazy. Which they actually might, given that US intelligence believes that they tried to kill Trump.

From this perspective, it doesn’t matter much that the US and Israel have degraded Iranian military capabilities and added to a potential timeline to obtain nuclear weapons. Before the war, the regime was building its strength but had to worry about an American attack. Military force only works to permanently set the regime back if you can credibly promise to keep doing it, which I don’t think any US government can at this point.

Does this mean that Khamenei the younger goes full steam ahead for a nuclear weapon? Perhaps not. This is one of the things that can turn the world fully against the Iranians. If they judge that they extracted a high enough cost that they believe that no American president will launch another war, the rational approach would probably be to rebuild their missile program and other conventional capabilities, while holding off on nukes. Recall that even after Trump left the JCPOA, Iran stayed in the deal for nearly two more years because it valued what it got in terms of better relations with other powers and sanctions relief. Of course, there’s no guarantee that the Iranians see things this way, and perhaps the new supreme leader, who is said to be more extreme than his father, might now be determined to build nuclear weapons. But I think the regime doing so would be much more likely if the result of the conflict was more ambiguous.

I expect Trump to pivot away from fully supporting Israel. Honestly, it’s a bit of a mystery why he hasn’t up to this point, and I would chalk it up to the personal influences of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, along with Fox News. But positioning as anti-Netanyahu would get him good coverage both among the MSM and right-wing influencers, along with creating more goodwill among the international community. There are some among Trump’s fans who still like Israel, but they are the ones who are most cult-like – think Catturd – so will change positions as soon as he does. Trump may also feel misled or betrayed by Netanyahu’s advocacy on behalf of war. That said, Fox, Kushner, and Witkoff are still there, and so maybe nothing changes in the general US approach to the Middle East.

This all sounds kind of bleak, but I think an unambiguous result in either direction may have been better than a stalemate. Best case scenario was of course the regime falling and being replaced by something better. But given that didn’t happen, it might be preferable to take another war off the table than have a more uncertain result. Iran has shown it can inflict enough damage to make another attack all but unthinkable for any American president, perhaps including Trump. This is in the end what matters, and the regime is stronger now that everyone knows this.

Thanks for reading. One thing I’ve learned is that when you have a book coming out, you can never assume that even regular readers are aware of it.

For that reason, over the next few months I’m not going to miss any opportunity to inform my audience that I have a new book called Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster coming out in July – details here. If you enjoy articles like this, appreciate me as a truly independent writer, and would like to support my work, the best way to do so is to preorder the book, which you can do at the links here to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening day sales, and will help determine how much attention it receives.

I will be reading the audiobook, in case that makes it more appealing.

On a different note, if a little box appears below, it means that you are not yet a free or paid subscriber. Sign up to get more articles and updates in the future.

Consider another paradox. In the months following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, polls showed that around 80%-90% of Ukrainians were against any territorial concessions to end the war, and about 70% said that their nation should fight until victory. At the same time, Ukraine banned men of military age from fleeing the country under martial law. One might ask why such a step would be necessary. If there was a near societal consensus on the desirability of the war effort, you would think that people would voluntarily sign up, or at least stay home and contribute in other ways. Of course, just because the government banned military-age men from leaving, it doesn’t prove that this step was necessary for the war effort. But I think most of us understand that it probably was.

All of this means that in both Gaza and Ukraine, in the early days of each conflict at least, your typical male would likely tell a pollster they want their country to fight to the end, but would also seriously consider packing up and leaving to somewhere safer if the option were available.

There are similar phenomena closer to home. Most Americans say that it is important that their food and groceries be produced domestically. Yet if this is the case, you might ask why tariffs would be necessary in the first place. Nothing is stopping businesses from making things in America, charging a higher price, and benefiting from the economic nationalism of consumers. Yet while you’ll often see a “Made in America” label on goods, this is cheap talk and people in the end care a lot more about prices. When Trump put a tariff of 145% on Chinese goods, a businessman decided to conduct an experiment. Visitors to his website were able to buy a specialized shower head. For some, he offered a Chinese-made product that was $129, while for others he offered one made in America that cost $239. He sold 584 Chinese-made shower heads and no American-made ones. Surveys sometimes show a willingness to pay more money for goods manufactured domestically, but these results don’t bear out in the real world.

One more: The Nazi Party could not even get its own members to boycott Jewish-owned stores. Despite massive propaganda, as long as Jews were able to provide the goods and services people wanted for better prices, they could still economically prosper in a Germany that made antisemitism state ideology. Even Hitler and Göring bought drapery from a well-regarded Jewish firm. When boycotts and voluntary efforts to direct business toward Aryans failed, the government famously resorted to more extreme methods.

The lesson here is that when you talk about what people want, you need to differentiate between what we can think of as two forms of the collective will: political attitudes and the choices reflected in everyday behavior. There are Palestinians who are among the lucky few who have fled their homes and made it to a Western country, but would show outrage if you suggested that all those they left behind should be allowed the same right.

The most important difference between the two kinds of views and attitudes is that, when it comes to everyday behavior, people have an incentive to think carefully about their actions, because they actually suffer the consequences of the choices they make. In politics, one vote or one guy’s opinion is unlikely to make a difference, so people indulge in whatever positions happen to sound good. This simple concept explains why most have such dumb political views. No control over what happens means no incentive to get things right, which means there is little reason to expect rationality.

Wokeness sounds good, so people say that all races and both sexes are equally capable of doing any possible job. Yet corporate executives constantly beat themselves up over not hiring enough women and minorities, or at least they did before the second Trump administration. This is because when they act as businessmen, they are plugged into reality, but when they are talking about politics, they blow with the wind. And this hypocrisy is a good thing! You wouldn’t want them all acting on their stated beliefs. It’s not an accident that affirmative action goes furthest in places where quality is subjective or market incentives are muted, namely journalism and academia.

A major division in politics revolves around which form of public opinion you think we should give more weight to. On the About page of the online magazine Compact, we find the following.

Compact, an online magazine founded in 2022, seeks a new political center devoted to the common good. Believing that political forces, not economic ones, should determine our common life, we draw on the social-democratic tradition to argue for an order marked by authentic freedom, social stability, and shared prosperity.

I would translate the phrase “that political forces, not economic ones, should determine our common life” as in effect saying “society should be governed by humans at their most irrational, not when they are most rational.”

Practically everyone agrees that there are some situations where the social good should trump selfish, individual interests. Classic collective action problems provide the clearest instances of this. For example, the best world for me is one where I am allowed to pollute the environment but no one else is. So we have laws creating penalties for pollution, which restrict individual liberty but make most people better off. Yet laws like this are not controversial, even if we might debate questions like whether current environmental regulations go too far. We can differentiate between two kinds of state interventions that overrule individual choice.

1. Those that are used to overcome collective action problems

2. Those that are used to force a moral or aesthetic vision onto society

Most of the examples I bring up above are not collective action problems. If we all decide to just buy American, or government forces that choice on us, any serious economist in the world will say that we won’t become better off. We’ll become poorer, and there’s nothing to indicate that the joy of American-made toasters will provide any substantial degree of psychological compensation, since you can buy domestic goods for higher prices now and nobody does so. Maybe you can say that this itself is a collective action problem; I won’t feel better by voluntarily buying more expensive patriotic toasters, since that will make me poorer than my neighbors, but if everyone is forced to, we’ll all get poorer and happier together through paying more to support American jobs. But this seems quite far-fetched.

If all Palestinians gave up on fighting Israel and focused all their energies on creating political conditions that would allow them to leave, they would be better off. Ukraine is a more difficult issue, in that being conquered by Russia sucks, and, unlike the Palestinians, they could probably start building a decent country in the event they win the war. I think a “free Palestine” would be a basket case anyway, and if I found myself among a people with a political culture that screwed up, I would support surrender to most foreign enemies or mass emigration. So only Ukraine arguably resembles more of a classic collective action problem, where we could plausibly think that the country is better off via conscription, even if many individuals would rather free ride off the sacrifices of others. Gaza has a kind of conscription imposed by Hamas and the international community, in that the people there are forced to remain as human shields. But no one has ever explained to me in a satisfactory way what is supposed to be the greater good that they need to remain on their land for.

Populists, socialists, nationalists, and nativists don’t want to accept that they are usually fighting for 2. They pretend that their policies are actually about overcoming collective action problems, or the selfish actions of a few. Greedy capitalists ship jobs overseas, and employers hire immigrant labor, and practically everyone who opposes immigration argues that stopping this from happening would make Americans better off. Nazis did not simply say they wanted a country where only Aryans were in charge because they hated Jews; instead they represented them as spiritual and moral contaminants and argued they made Germans worse off. When you point out flaws in the empirical arguments of nationalists, they resort to “there’s more to life than GDP” or “we’re a nation, not an economy.” Well ok then. Stop lying about economics if you think it’s not that important. Tell us exactly what we’re getting in exchange for a lower standard of living and more expensive goods.

All of this indicates that socialist and nativist intellectuals are close to admitting that if they’re wrong on the facts, then their positions cannot be justified. Or at the very least, they would have a tough time selling them to others. Most people are pragmatic, and want policies that will make the lives of themselves and their co-nationals better. So while a significant minority of the population just dislikes foreigners or corporations and reverse engineers narratives that blame at least one disfavored group for societal problems, to build winning coalitions, they need to win over those who are open to supporting whatever they think works. It is true that a majority of the public might share similar inclinations and biases, but what makes normies different from ideologues is that the squishy middle can be moved relatively easily via moral or utilitarian argumentation.

Thus, while economic nationalism sells well, most Americans are opposed to Trump’s tariffs. Sure, the average voter loves the idea of Buy American. But as we’ve seen, not enough to actually pay more for domestically-made goods. Regular Americans can afford to be irrational when it comes to their political opinions, but even here, the fact that media and political elites are so skeptical of Trump’s tariffs and are constantly spelling out their costs is enough to make them unpopular. The average voter is of course not so rational that he draws the lesson that protectionism is bad in principle. He just keeps hearing that what Trump is doing is making life more expensive, and somehow goes on assuming that a more thoughtful form of economic nationalism can actually work. A more typical president would just do some protectionist things that sound good but aren’t consequential enough to hurt him politically. Trump, though, because he is crazy and surrounded by sycophants, engages in more clearly self-destructive policies.

I would take one more step, and say that the aesthetic appeals of nativism, socialism, and populism collapse even for many of the most dedicated proponents of these ideas once the assumptions that undergird them are shown to be false. I have always liked the aesthetics of fascism. But as I become more certain that the empirical assumptions of the far-right are wrong, my aesthetic judgments shift accordingly. Tribalism is fun, egalitarianism has no natural appeal to me, and I love watching Game of Thrones and reading about aristocratic societies because life seems a lot more meaningful with hierarchies. I share the rightist disgust instinct for things like fat people and tattoos. But, even if you have such natural inclinations, if you’re also smart and intellectually honest, you have to realize at some point that liberalism is the worldview most correct in its empirical claims, and every other ideology sacrifices human health and prosperity for the sake of maintaining emotionally comforting delusions. And just because your delusions are based in anti-egalitarian principles rather than a notion of equality doesn’t change that fact.

My natural instincts are fascist, but every modern anti-liberal thinker I find painfully embarrassing at an intellectual level, and so the instincts have changed. I can now appreciate trans women. Maybe this is why I hate rightists so much. They’re what I would be if I were dumber, which I find horrifying. I sometimes am tempted to come up with my own non-liberal philosophy, but I don’t think I would have any followers. So liberalism easily defeats all the alternatives.

This is a reason to keep making empirical arguments. Yes, people will often be disinclined to believe them, for reasons of ego maintenance, personal ambition, and, as mentioned already, the fact that there is usually little to no incentive to form rational political opinions.

But sometimes, if your arguments are good enough, you present them well and often enough, and the people expressing those opinions have enough prestige, you can go against the grain of human nature. Liberals have historically been opportunists, being effective in situations when a policy that would usually be popular clearly fails – think Trump’s tariffs – or in places the political discourse is not paying attention, so that well-placed individuals can push through reasonable policies – think of some of the FDA reforms that are currently happening. To expect broad political movements that are in any sense coherent and rational at this point is perhaps asking too much. Such political forces have existed in the past, with mid-twentieth-century neoliberalism being a good example. The conditions for such movements are less favorable today. But hopefully this is only a temporary state of affairs, rather than a permanent shift resulting from changes in communications technology. I am beginning to hope that AI will lead us in a better direction.

Thanks for reading. One thing I’ve learned is that when you have a book coming out, you can never assume that even regular readers are aware of it.

For that reason, over the next few months I’m not going to miss any opportunity to inform my audience that I have a new book called Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster coming out in July – details here. If you enjoy articles like this, appreciate me as a truly independent writer, and would like to support my work, the best way to do so is to preorder the book, which you can do at the links here to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening day sales, and will help determine how much attention it receives.

I will be reading the audiobook, in case that makes it more appealing.

On a different note, if a little box appears below, it means that you are not yet a free or paid subscriber. Sign up to get more articles and updates in the future.

I’ve previously blamed my right-wing radicalism on being a loser. But looking back, the hate was so overwhelming that I think that even had I been unusually socially adept, I still would’ve had a deep bitterness toward the world and sought to harm it. When people behaved kindly to me, I felt contempt for their weakness. When they insulted me, I was affronted. In either case, my pride was wounded. I believe that a lot of men are like this, to varying degrees. At the left end of the bell curve, they form gangs and engage in street crime. The smarter among them develop ideological preoccupations, and whether these are harmless or end up causing damage to the world depends on historical circumstances. Even the dumb ones have their own ideologies of a sort – think of how important rules and codes of honor are to the functioning of mafias and gangs.

Christianity has historically been a way to make young men somewhat less awful, and, since that won’t fly for most modern educated people, we have feminized leftism. I’ve always been amused when conservatives try to draw an intellectual and spiritual connection between modern leftists and mid-twentieth century communists. No, they’re not going to put you in death camps or gulags, you hysterical brain-rotted rightoid. They’re too contemptuous of masculine norms to do that. But “feminization has made leftists less murderous and given us less to complain about” isn’t an appealing message.

All of this is to say that young men in their default state are a menace. The rise of Fuentes, crypto scams, Tate, Clavicular, sports betting, the manosphere, and support for Trump are all part of the same phenomenon. Christianity has gotten weaker over the previous decades, and so has, over the last few years, political correctness. When not constrained by either of these worldviews, males return to their natural state: gooning degenerate crypto scammers. If you meet a young man who has got his life together and is of solid moral character, he’s usually at least semi-woke or part of a religious community. The fact that so much degeneracy happens in cyberspace today likely helps save us from any substantial increases in violence as the restraining power of civilizing ideologies declines.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) is essentially about the self-justifying evils of this demographic, told through a psychological portrait of a former student living in St Petersburg named Rodion Raskolnikov. Make all the excuses you want for young men. Blame society, their families, or women. In the end, granting too much explanatory power to any of these variables amounts to denying human nature.

Dostoevsky gradually strips away any such illusions you might have. Raskolnikov may be an extreme case, but his brooding hatefulness and smug moral imbecility are things that most young men need to answer for in some degree. The book also shows a path out of a prideful contempt for humanity. One hundred and sixty years after Crime and Punishment was published in monthly installments, it is still a striking read, particularly at a time when the awfulness of young men is once again prominent, largely interpreted and understood by intellectuals through the language of statistics and academic social science.

Read more

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Idiocracy — director Mike Judge’s sci-fi comedy envisioning a future America staggering under the weight of popular stupidity….It returned as a cultural touchstone in the wake of the 2016 election, which many in liberal America saw as a harbinger of the kind of society depicted in the film: mindlessly consumerist and enslaved to low passions, with a public discourse more befitting of WWE-style wrestling than a Jeffersonian republic (Donald Trump had appeared in WWE events, after all).

Yet today, it’s clear that Idiocracy was, if anything, too optimistic. Twenty years hence, American public discourse is cruder and attention spans are shorter; mind-deadening drugs have become more pervasive, and politics is far more tribal and hateful than anything depicted by Judge. All this has taken place on a much faster time scale than Idiocracy predicted, moreover, and the changes are far more the result of ideologies spun up from resentment and hate than the biological degeneration featured in the film.

Read the whole thing here.

I just did a podcast with North Korea expert Peter Ward for the CSPI podcast. We discussed the clampdown that has occurred after the failed negotiations with Trump and Covid, Kim giving up on reunification, and what Kim is thinking by creating the impression that he has chosen his teenage daughter as his successor. For those who need reminding, I suggest subscribing to the CSPI newsletter and adding the podcast to your feed. All the material is free. Think about it as covering many of the similar topics as this newsletter, but more academic and without the personal touch.

I’ll be doing an event at Northwestern on May 5. More details to follow. If you want to invite me to something else in Chicago around the same time, this is the opportunity to do so.

I’m going to remind you to preorder my book again (Amazon link), as I will regularly until it is released. Find more details here. As I’ve written,

Aside from providing support to me personally, Kakistocracy can be seen as a book that explains what has been perhaps the main global political development of the twenty-first century. It sets out to explain populism in a way that will be satisfying to both the political scientist and the interested news consumer. Until about a decade ago, we were all used to thinking about politics primarily in terms of right versus left. While it would be ridiculous to claim that ideology as traditionally understood doesn’t remain extremely important, one country after another has been shaken up by the increasing salience of the populist–non-populist axis. This often centers around the topic of immigration, but populism has also risen in countries where this isn’t a major issue, and it more broadly reflects a shift in how citizens interact with the institutions that rule over them and claim to provide structure, guidance, and information.

Preorders are extremely important for how much attention a book gets, so please just buy now. For the superfans who read everything and are getting tired of the endless plugs, I ask for your patience. Somewhere out there is sure to be someone reading this who maybe glances at one in five articles and for the first time has just learned that I have a book on populism coming out. Endless self-promotion is the cost of being a writer who is almost completely independent (yes, yes, I didn’t forget about UnHerd and The Boston Globe).

I promised that I wouldn’t be too long in judging the wisdom of the Iran War, based on my belief that we should judge foreign policy decisions by their short-term impacts. I think this is increasingly looking like a blunder. I wrote that a leader-decapitation strategy approach to foreign policy makes sense, but not in a situation where you set off a war that has major costs and you have no clean path to finish. There was no way of knowing at the beginning whether the US and Israel had contacts on the inside or some coherent plan for regime change. It’s increasingly looking like they didn’t.

Below the fold, I review the new Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere, and share thoughts on EHC liberalism versus EHC libertarianism, MAHA declining as Trump enters his lame duck phase, the problem with the Giving Pledge, and more.

1. Tyler Cowen has a new free book out: The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution (Sumner review here). I realized as I was reading this that what Tyler calls marginal thinking I always just thought of as economic reasoning. Examples of the insights of this method that he gives: congestion pricing forces drivers to pay for their externalities and can change behavior; closing abortion clinics can reduce abortions; if people don’t buy health insurance, it might indicate that they don’t care about health insurance that much. Here’s how Tyler explains the related concept of price theory: “The price theory approach suggests that you should think very carefully about basic economic concepts and try to figure out which of those apply to the problem you are working on.” I would hope so!

It seems to me that lurking in the background here is a fundamental political disagreement. Marginal economists are more pro-market, and economists who take different approaches are less so. These different approaches seem to be complicated mathematical models that many people can’t understand and empirical research using the highest evidentiary standards. One empirical result, or even a literature, rarely tells you what general approach to policy makes sense, and so if you don’t like the implications of marginal thinking – because it forces you to be too pro-market or come to politically incorrect conclusions – drowning your opponents in findings from studies is a good way to give yourself enough wiggle room to adopt whatever politics you want.

I’m generally impressed with the empirical work in top economic journals. Much less so in political science, which was my field of study. Tyler agrees. When discussing why economists write so many papers outside of their area of expertise, he notes “The dirty little secret is that what distinguishes economics as a field, right now, is a mix of higher standards, harder work, better math, and higher IQs.” This is clearly true; being familiar with economic papers has made me feel embarrassment toward the kinds of political science articles I used to take seriously, where you simply find some data, conduct a regression, and declare that you have found evidence for causation.

Despite this, it seems to me that we are now nowhere near the point of diminishing (marginal) returns of making the basic insights of marginal thinking better known and working to apply them to policy. Look how many cities have rent control, and how few have congestion pricing! How ashamed we should be that free parking on crowded city streets still exists! There is a long way to go. Sumner is right that the abundance movement is largely selling old wine in new bottles.

A question I had reading this is what the field of economics would look like if the marginal revolution were still going strong. Many of the fundamental insights can only be discovered once. A defender of where economics has gone might say that as we investigate more complex questions, we need more complex theories and empirical approaches. But I think that there’s probably a good deal of low hanging fruit that could be explored from a marginalist perspective. Yet when I try to understand what those are, I keep coming back to the idea that hypothetical younger marginal economists would simply test more theories that have politically incorrect or pro-market implications.

For example, most advanced countries right now are facing an immediate future that will be dominated by an aging crisis involving expensive pensions and too many old people relative to young workers. What political economy factors explain this? And what kind of incentives do we create when we shift so much consumption toward the end of life? A non-marginalist could investigate these questions as much as a marginalist. But he’s probably less likely to. Perhaps Tyler’s complaint can be reformulated as the field has moved too far to the left from the perspective of reaching important truths and benefiting society. That’s my “Straussian” reading anyway, which I’m sure Tyler would appreciate. The triumph of MAGA, unfortunately, has made such frontal political attacks that involve taking up the banner of the right more difficult since thinking people do not want to be associated with the current clown show.

2. Upon publishing my article on Christian history, Lyman pointed me to his piece from last year covering similar topics. He thinks Christians were not exactly prone to turning the other cheek, and actually got ahead through persecuting their enemies. He also argued that Philip the Arab was a Christian based on circumstantial evidence. I asked Claude about these claims, and it treats them as not crazy but open to scholarly debate.

3. Multiple methods converge on the estimate that there were around 14,000 murders in the US in 2025. That is the lowest absolute number since 1968. The negativity bias in the news is incredible to ponder. You have to go to highly specialized Substacks to find this information, while every uptick in crime is a huge national story. Murder plummets and there’s zero interest in what we’re doing right. Perhaps at some point it goes up again, and we’ll be less prepared to deal with the problem because we put forward practically no effort toward figuring out what happened when things were going well.

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Politically, as we all know, they are almost as far apart as two states can be. Trump won Texas by 14 percentage points, while Harris took her home state by 20. Every statewide elected official in Texas is a Republican, and every statewide official in California is a Democrat.

This has had all kinds of policy implications, but one of the clearest differences is on housing.

In California, the median home price is $809,000, second behind Hawaii. That is over 2.5 times higher than Texas, where it is $308,000. This isn’t because Californians all enjoy larger homes. If you do the math as price per square foot, California housing is still twice as expensive as it is in Texas.

Taking into account income doesn’t change much either. As M. Nolan Gray writes,

If we zoom in on cities, the situation is even bleaker. Take Harris County, home of Houston, and Los Angeles County, home of Los Angeles. In 1970, the ratio of median home value to median household income was 1.4 and 2.2, respectively. In 2020, it was 3.0 and 8.6. While Houston remains a place where normal Americans can show up and claim their slice of the dream, Los Angeles excludes all but the most affluent households.

Housing is the single biggest item in the budgets of US households, making up about 20% of consumption.1 In some states, it costs 2-3x as much as in others.

This is why Abundance, probably the most influential book on the left of the last few years, acknowledges that Democratic governance has failed miserably in this area. On the left flank of Ezra and Derek, there are “anti-monopoly” types who will say no, the main problem to focus on is the power of major corporations. Yet they have not been able to show any substantial relationship between corporate consolidation in the building industry and housing prices, the way you can just look at differences between red and blue states. The world is not as mysterious as those hostile to free markets pretend.

When Ezra interviewed one of the shining lights of the anti-corporate cause, she was unable to answer the question of why Democratic states are so much more expensive than Republican ones.

Ezra Klein: But California versus Texas — I want to keep grounded there.

Why is it four times more? If you only look at market-rate housing, California is more than two times per square foot than Texas. Why?

Zephyr Teachout: As I wrote in the review, I have some initial thoughts on housing. But I actually think there are a lot of areas of overlap on housing. We both agree that there are actually significant problems with zoning.

My suspicion is that there is a decent amount of problem in the concentration in the home-building market and some of the supplies for construction market. I don’t know if that’s different in those different areas —

Ezra Klein: It just seems unlikely to me that California would be much more porous to corporate power than Texas.

Zephyr Teachout: Yes. I don’t need to fight you on particular housing policies that you’re deep in the weeds of, on zoning policies. Your theory, as I understand it, is that the main reason for the cost difference is left-wing resistance. Rick Caruso is this billionaire in Los Angeles who was leading a big NIMBY movement to make sure that you didn’t have any reform on single-family housing. Does he fit into your story?

This is embarrassing. Some on the left have simply decided that corporate power is the problem, and then work backwards. In 2024, more new housing permits were granted in Dallas and Houston than all of California. The cause of the disparity in housing prices is obvious. Land use restrictions are supposed to have some kind of positive payoff, but I’ve heard nothing to indicate that Texas suffers more than California in terms of extra traffic, strained infrastructure, noisy neighbors, or anything else that strict zoning laws are meant to prevent. I went to Dallas once and it was remarkably ugly, but Austin manages to be both pleasant and affordable. Whatever benefits stricter zoning brings to California, there is no way that they outweigh pricing people out of living in the state. I know tech workers for major corporations around LA and San Diego who make six-figure salaries but see owning a two-bedroom home within reasonable commuting distance of their job as an unreachable dream. The Bay Area is of course even worse. There is no natural reason for this; it is simply a set of policy choices that led to this state of affairs.

The rise of the Abundance movement has given me some hope. In both Republican and Democratic states across the country, there have been steps to remove supply-side constraints on housing. Texas and California have both passed major laws in the last few years on this issue. You would think that perhaps this would close the gap in land use regulations between the states. However, despite starting out with less burdensome restrictions, Texas is going farther than California in its reforms, which means that the disparity between the two states is likely to grow rather than shrink.

California Assembly Bill 130 (AB 130) and Senate Bill 131 (SB 131) substantially expand California Environmental Quality Act exemptions and streamlining for infill housing. As with its federal equivalent, the state’s environmental review process has been identified as one of the major barriers to building more housing. SB 79, also signed last year, overrides local zoning to allow mid-rise housing near transit. This is on the heels of steps taken in 2024 to make it easier for individuals to build accessory dwelling units and for the state government to place pressure on local communities that block housing.

Meanwhile, through SB 840, Texas has adopted by-right zoning rules in cities with populations of over 150,000 that sit in counties of over 300,000. This would cover 19 of the 22 largest cities in the state, with Amarillo and Laredo not meeting the county threshold, and Denton being slightly below 150,000 people as of 2020, though it will certainly meet the requirement after the next census.

With by-right zoning, cities must approve multifamily housing projects in areas zoned for commercial, office, retail, warehouse, or mixed use, so long as the project complies with applicable development rules. It largely eliminates local discretion, or the ability to keep people from residing in nonindustrial commercial districts, though certain exceptions remain for heavy industry and sensitive areas.

The Texas legislature didn’t simply accept preexisting zoning requirements as given, but placed meaningful limits on what covered cities are allowed to do in this area. More specifically, “municipalities cannot impose height, density, setback or parking requirements more restrictive than 36 units per acre, one parking space per unit, 45-foot building heights or 25-foot setbacks.” SB 840 was followed up by SB 15, which requires covered cities to allow smaller-lot single-family development on qualifying unplatted land, limiting municipalities’ ability to use minimum lot-size, setback, parking, and related zoning rules to block that housing.

While it’s a great step for California to eliminate environmental review for some infill housing, Texas never required such paperwork in the first place. Both states took steps to overrule local zoning discretion, but California did it near public transit, while Texas did so for all commercial or mixed-use areas in nearly all of its largest cities. California hopes to nudge localities into better behavior; Texas is now simply telling them that they can no longer restrict the rights of their residents and stomp on the American dream to placate selfish and short-sighted interests.

One way to think about the new Texas law is that, in most commercial and business zones in the affected cities, multifamily housing must be allowed by right, with some exceptions. In California, by contrast, as in practically all other states, major cities can still designate areas for commercial or business use only, where housing is either prohibited or subject to discretionary approval and significant conditions.

I’ll note here that Florida also passed a zoning reform in 2023, but it made by-right zoning dependent on a percentage of units being affordable. This is of course silly, since market rate housing increases supply and reduces costs for everyone. Even if you only build McMansions, then McMansions will be more affordable and more people will move into them. At that point, there will be more availability of homes at the next tier of affordability, all the way down to the least expensive forms of housing. What we actually need most desperately is higher supply and lower prices for higher-end housing, since that allows the most skilled workers to be more productive. Texas is unique in the breadth and scope of its zoning reform, which has been one of the most undercovered stories in politics.

It is interesting to watch Texas extend the gap between itself and California, even as major politicians, including Gavin Newsom, heap praise on Abundance. Conservatives are not reading books on how we need to scale back land use regulations. They’re not reading much of anything, yet somehow continue to do the right thing. Ezra and Derek haven’t completely failed in their efforts, and deserve credit for the reforms that California has undertaken in the last few years. They only look small relative to what Texas is doing.

What lesson can we learn from all this? Consider it a blow against Elite Human Capital theory, which says that on average, smarter and more intellectually inclined movements will be more likely to get policy right. And maybe ideas don’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, or they are downstream of coalitional interests. Republicans protect the interests of business, while Democrats are beholden to a professional activist class. Each side has its own parochial concerns, but the interests of business are more likely to be aligned with the common good than are the interests of environmentalists, labor union leaders, or civil rights activists.

After all, businesses generally get rich by selling products and services to people that they voluntarily buy. The activist class focuses on forcing people to do things that they wouldn’t otherwise. Sometimes, this can serve the common good, when for example they prevent pollution. Other times, however, it may be pure parasitism, as when a union demands a higher wage for its members, which improves their situation but restricts output and raises prices, making society as a whole worse off. Labor unions are among the most formidable opponents of abundance-style reforms in California. They get higher wages for a few construction workers, at the cost of making it much more difficult for working class people of any profession to build a life in the state. Or you might see groups with an aesthetic vision that they prioritize over human well-being, as is the case with many environmentalists.

Maybe ideas move things on the margins. Ezra and Derek topping the New York Times bestseller list might make California, say, 20% less restrictive when it comes to land use regulations. But all their success cannot change the nature of their coalition enough to get the state to Texas-level freedom. On the other hand, maybe they do in the long-run and the reforms of the last few years are just the beginning. But Texas on housing is already where the abundance crowd dreams of California being, and the former arrived at this point even as the right-wing discourse continues to be dominated by uninformed trash.

It must be noted here that the Trump administration’s main contribution to the housing issue has been trying to clamp down on corporate ownership, a completely irrational concern, but one that it shares with Elizabeth Warren and her allies on the left. This led to a disastrous provision in a recent bill that passed the Senate requiring that institutional investors – those owning at least 350 homes – sell single-family houses they build or acquire for rental purposes to individual buyers within seven years. This makes the entire bill, which otherwise has many good provisions, likely a net negative, and the whole thing may thankfully get killed in the House.

Here’s Warren justifying the ban on institutional owners of single-family homes.

They can also build as many apartment houses, as many condo complexes, as many triplexes as they want. But there’s a point of principle here, and that is that private equity cannot come in and buy up all of the housing supply in America. Homes should be for families, not for giant corporations.

The phrase “homes are for people, not corporations” is so stupid it hurts.

According to Warren, then, it’s fine to rent from a large corporate owner if…you share walls with someone else? Otherwise you either buy a home yourself, or rent it from a small company or individual? This is apparently a matter of great principle! The Warren quote above is so bad that all on its own it has shaken my conviction on how much the right dominates the market for stupid ideas. Then again, when you ask Vance which Democrats he likes, Warren is the one whose name he brings up.

So as Texas moves in a positive direction, the Trump administration and the national Republican Party shifts towards Warren-style anti-corporate demagoguery. This reflects the conservative movement now being a combination of the ghost of Reagan and business interests on one side, and stupid populism on the other. Which faction predominates depends on whether we are talking about the state or local level. The problem with national politics is that it grabs the attention of right-wing media figures and influencers, who are overwhelmingly driven by culture war grievance, conspiracy theories, and the kinds of ideas that sound good to the simple-minded. In the Texas state legislature, the ghost of Reagan and the self-interest of developers dominate. But within the Trump administration, the national conversation is shaped by influencers, and also more intellectually-inclined populists who seek to differentiate themselves from the pro-market policies that have been working at the state level.

People sometimes accuse me of worshipping Elite Human Capital. Far from it. I would be very happy to have a movement that was somewhat dumber but more pro-market and not hobbled by domination of the activist class. Unfortunately, go too far left on the human capital spectrum, you reach many of their same positions. Trump ends up agreeing with Elizabeth Warren on important issues because he’s an idiot, and the same is true of Vance because he’s outsourced his thinking to idiots in the service of gaining power. I guess we can say that at least Warren will let smart people into the country and allow scientists to develop vaccines.

If there’s one thing that can be said in defense of right-wing populism, it’s that it is too scatterbrained to ever do as much economic damage as Elizabeth Warren and the generations of activists who ruined housing in California. And it’s easily co-optable in a pro-market direction. The same voters who love every piece of populist slop Trump throws in their direction also gave pro-housing Republicans control in Texas. Unfortunately, Trump’s successor appears to be a true believer in some of the worst economic ideas out there, and someone who would fight to push the rest of the conservative movement in the populist direction. If he is successful, there may one day no longer even be relatively pro-market states we can use to point out the failures of leftism.

We contrast Nikolai and Pytor. Nikolai is a natural alpha, and seems to not care about or need politics. For Pyotr, it is a source of his identity. There’s a broader lesson here in how ideology tends to factor more prominently in the psyches of those who are less good looking and likable.

Rob brought my attention to the censored chapter, which wasn’t in the version of the book that I had. As you’ll see, the chapter is actually quite vital for understanding some of the most important themes of the book, and I’m glad Rob brought it to my attention.

I just read Crime and Punishment too. It had much more of an effect on me than Demons, so look forward to a written review.

Links

Our review of Part I

John Psmith book review

Rob’s review of Demons, part I and part 2

Note: If you would like to get this podcast through a regular podcast app, go to richardhanania.com on a browser on your device (it doesn’t work in the app), log in to Substack, and click on the tab for either the Hanania Show or the H&H Podcast. Select the episode you want, and then choose one of Apple, Spotify, etc. under “Listen on” to your right. You’ll be able to add the show through an RSS feed, after which you will get new episodes, either free or paid depending on what kind of subscriber you are, through whichever platform you use.

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This began as a stream with Nikos Mohammadi (X, Substack), a student at Columbia University whose work has appeared in UnHerd, The Spectator, and elsewhere.

As everyone knows, I’ve been fascinated by the Fishback phenomenon. Nikos wrote one of the articles I cited as a sign he was getting a respectful hearing in the right-wing press. My argument has been that those inclined toward populism on the right who are not Groypers have proved too eager to claim Fishback as their own, given his many scandals and shortcomings.

About forty minutes in, someone with the profile name James Fishback showed up in the chat. I was skeptical that this was the real thing, but then I saw one of his campaign staff vouch that it was actually him. Before long, Fishback, sitting in Starbucks, was taking questions on the stream!

I didn’t know exactly what to do with this, and it’s always awkward facing someone you’ve criticized harshly. There were a lot of angles that I could take, but I decided to focus on policy questions. I asked him about school choice, taxes, and crime. Fishback sounded more like a conventional Republican than I expected. On housing, I pushed back on his lack of enthusiasm for removing supply-side constraints, the one thing we really clashed over. I thought this would be more fruitful than fighting him on immigration, where he was less likely to budge. My view is that anti-immigration sentiment is too fundamental to populism to shift people on, but nearly everything else is more incidental, so I could maybe move him and his followers toward YIMBYism. I gathered that racism-related questions would be pointless, as I rarely find it informative when journalists focus on bigoted statements in interviews.

Still, I felt the need to ask about By’rone. I was surprised by the candidness of his response.

Having now personally experienced Fishback’s charm, I can confirm he’s very good at this. He said my name a lot, claimed to have read my book, and complimented me as a keen scholar of the conservative movement — particularly amusing since I have been arguing that his rise is a sign of its decline. After Fishback left, Nikos said he sounded more pro-market with me than he did during the discussions for UnHerd, which gets back to the idea that he is a talented politician. Fishback talked about learning economics from Mankiw’s textbook, which I have mentioned reading before. Maybe it was all coincidental, but the whole thing felt eerily micro-targeted.

Fishback ended up inviting me to come cover his campaign in Florida. I hope to take him up on the offer. Even in the likely case that he loses, I’m quite confident this guy is not going away, and we’re seeing the rise of someone who is going to be a major force in Republican politics for years to come.

Note: If you would like to get this podcast through a regular podcast app, go to richardhanania.com on a browser on your device (it doesn’t work in the app), log in to Substack, and click on the tab for either the Hanania Show or the H&H Podcast. Select the episode you want, and then choose one of Apple, Spotify, etc. under “Listen on” to your right. You’ll be able to add the show through an RSS feed, after which you will get new episodes, either free or paid depending on what kind of subscriber you are, through whichever platform you use.

I want people to stop giving younger generations names. Except in articles like this where you deconstruct the concept, there is rarely any reason to use terms like “Generation Z” or (God help us) “Generation Alpha.” For cohort analysis, you can just split people up by the decade they were born and get all of the same benefits without the drawbacks. The names of generations used to mean something, and were applied retroactively. Today, we simply assign young people to arbitrary letter cohorts. This is pathological, and likely has had harmful downstream effects.

I asked ChatGPT to give me a table describing American generations, and this is what it came up with.

There is something strange about this list. Note that the first four are named after shared experiences. People born in the early twentieth century were “great” because they lived through the Depression and won World War II. Then came the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers. Gen X represented the idea that we didn’t know what was coming after the Boomers.

But for the last three generations, we are just phoning it in. X started out representing an unknown variable, but was reinterpreted as a chronological placeholder. We call those who came of age at the turn of the millennium “Millennials.” Then you get Gen Z as the second cohort after Gen X. Having run through the alphabet so quickly because we started near the end, we decided to start over and switch to Greek, and so say hello to Generation Alpha.

This is like if you’re having kids, and name the first two Tom and Sally. Then you call your third Octavian, because you’re a big fan of the Roman Empire. At that point, you start naming the next ones Nonius, Decimus, and so on. Octavian wasn’t your eighth kid, and Generation X didn’t get its name because it was the 24th generation since the founding of the United States. But for some reason, its label now determines what every subsequent generation is called. And this doesn’t work retroactively. If X is going to be our reference point, maybe we should change “Baby Boomers” to Generation W, and say that Abraham Lincoln was a member of Generation N or however the math works out, but no one ever suggests doing this.

The reason that generations now have generic names is we’re naming them much earlier than before. Here’s another ChatGPT chart, which lists the source or context of each label.

The phrase “Greatest Generation” wasn’t in circulation until all members of that cohort were at least at the cusp of old age. Even with Generation X, the popularization of the term is traced to 1991, when everyone in that group was between 11 and 26. This means that many Generation Xers reached adulthood without ever hearing about themselves as part of a specific generation. Now, we’re already talking about “Generation Alpha,” a bucket we’re going to presumably put all babies into until 2028. Here’s a Google ngrams chart demonstrating the same point.

Confirming the ChatGPT analysis, almost nobody talked about Generation X until the 1990s. That’s more than a decade after the last of that generation was born. “Millennials” takes off much earlier. Meanwhile, the younger members of Gen Z were born in 2012, and at that moment Gen Z discourse was already a thing. The Greatest Generation was collecting social security when they got their label, but today Americans are already classified as fetuses. We’re naming generations so early that we have to default to letters of the alphabet since the kids haven’t even had a chance to grow up and earn designations that reflect common experiences or shared traits. Think about how lame it would be if today we were stuck referring to the men who landed at Normandy and fought through one island after another in the Pacific as “Generation U.” Or imagine the Gettysburg Address using our contemporary naming conventions:

Four score and seven years ago, Generations H through J brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now, those of us of Generations L-M-N-O-P are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. Our brave soldiers of Generation O and Generation P fought on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this, so that one day even those whom we shall call Zoomers may live in freedom, and the blessings of liberty will extend even beyond the Latin alphabet and into the Greek.

Beyond making everything sound ugly, I think that all of this has a subtle impact on the culture. Before we named generations, we used to talk of “young people.” A young person has certain traits that make them different from someone who is middle-aged or elderly, but there was a time that everyone was expected to reach certain milestones and graduate to later stages of life. You didn’t grow up with an identity that implied you were in the very essence of your being distinct from your parents and grandparents.

Yet when we name generations before kids have even become adults, you get something like the following process.

1. From a very young age, you know that you are a “Zoomer.”

2. People start to have stereotypes of what it means to be a Zoomer. Since Zoomers are young, these stereotypes relate at least in part to things that are universal to young people, namely being irresponsible and immature.

3. When Zoomers grow up, they still take the generational identity with them. A middle-aged Zoomer is still a Zoomer.

4. This contributes to extended childhood. Do Zoomers move out on their own, find stable careers, get married, have kids? Much less than previous generations. They’ve already internalized stereotypes about themselves that make them think of themselves forever as young people.

I obviously can’t prove this. But there’s a correlation: we started naming generations earlier, and people started growing up later. And the process makes sense to me. The real question is what we actually gain by saying “Generation Z” instead of “young people” when talking about the same group of individuals. I can’t think of many benefits. If it turns out that Zoomers maintain their traits into old age, we are free to make a retrospective judgment about that fact. Perhaps growing up during Covid or the Trump presidency turns out to have created lasting scars. Then we can start calling them “Generation Covid” or “Generation Trump” or whatever, instead of imposing the idea that they are going to grow up in a way that makes them different from previous cohorts. What we shouldn’t do is force an identity onto them, and then when things happen, peer over their shoulder going “See? See? You guys are so special and have been through SOO MUCH.”

Think about meeting a thirty-year-old sometime next year. Maybe that person is considering getting married. They can ask themselves the question in one of two ways.

1. Is it normal and right for people to get married at 30?

2. Is it normal and right for Zoomers to get married at 30?

There is an important distinction here in terms of setting expectations for one’s self, along with the ones we have for other people. With (1), you are putting your experience and life situation in the context of the full scope of human history, or at least the time of your parents and grandparents, which serves as your reference point. With (2), you ask whether this is something that makes sense for someone in your generational cohort.

Of course, in 2027, we will all assume that of course “Zoomers” don’t get married at 30. No Zoomer has ever been 30 before (the same process can explain why they didn’t get married at 20 or 25, and might not at 35). And we’ve spent the last decade plus using “Zoomers” as a general term for young people. I think that even when Millennials and Gen X are well into their golden years, they will still think of Zoomers as a bunch of unserious kids. And maybe with Zoomers having set the bar so low, Generation Alpha comes along and starts to be thought of as even less mature and capable of adult living. That is, unless nominal determinism means that the name Generation Alpha increases their self-esteem. In that case, we will observe a precipitous rise in swashbuckling behavior among young men, before the next generation sees its confidence collapse as a result of always being told that they are Beta.

Instead of emphasizing what is common to the human experience as we reach different stages of life, young people now walk around with the implicit assumption that they are somehow different. When you say old people might have something to teach young people, it sounds plausible. But if you frame the same thing as a matter of whether a “Boomer” has anything useful to say to a “Zoomer,” we’ve defined people in such a way that we expect there to be unbridgeable gaps. I get frustrated when I hear young people talk about how nobody older can understand their dating or financial struggles. I think it’s in part that they’ve been taught their whole lives that contemporary adults grew up in a social context that was too divorced from their own to provide any insights. So if I say that some young man should stop acting like a loser and just approach women, they’ll act like this is impossible, as if human nature has completely changed and even basic lessons of evolutionary psychology – like things as fundamental as men care more about looks than women – have been completely invalidated by recent technological and social changes.

It’s deeply annoying, and I’ve observed that the more that people latch on to generational analysis, the more self-pitying and conspiratorial they are. When I hear someone talk about their experience as a Zoomer, it’s usually a red flag, like when someone centers their racial background in a discussion of how they view the world. I expect to soon hear about how hard their life is and how they lack the ability to improve it due to forces beyond their control. As with all forms of identity politics, focusing on generations leads to judging arguments by the traits of the speaker, and elevates “lived experience” over logic and empirical evidence.

A New York Times headline from last Thursday reads “‘It Feels Like There’s No Jobs’: 12 Gen Z Voters on the U.S. Economy." It’s obvious to me that as soon as the report is framed as Gen Z talking about its experiences, we know that the spin is going to be negative. The connection between the labeling of identity groups and the culture of victimhood is so strong that if the narrative were positive, it would be more natural to use a different term to refer to those being profiled.

Classifications have their own way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. I’ve previously discussed how terms like “Asian American Pacific Islander” and “Hispanic” were used as government categories before being adopted in the wider discourse. Once the state divides people into groups and distributes advantages on that basis, the relevant labels acquire cultural resonance. We are not even giving kids a chance to grow up before putting into their minds the idea that everything they experience will be different from all that came before. Of course, each generation does face new challenges. But we are biasing the way we view the world by deciding ahead of time that each cohort is going to experience something so unique that it needs its own label. This reinforces young people’s natural tendency toward self-absorption and creates a psychological barrier that prevents them from benefiting from the accumulated wisdom of previous generations.

And consider the arbitrariness with which we do this. For some reason, we have settled on sixteen-year intervals, maybe to accommodate our shorter attention spans as we seek out new things to talk about. I was born in 1985, and so I’m supposed to have more in common with people born in 1995 (“fellow Millennials”) than in 1980 (Gen X). But there’s no reason why that should be the case. I’m old enough to have gone through most of my formative years without the internet. This must have created a very different experience from that of the youngest millennials.

I actually didn’t find out what generation I was until Gabriel Rossman told me a few years ago. I’d always been so allergic to generational analysis that I refused to learn exactly where the lines were. My assumption was that I was Gen X, because that was the cohort people talked about when I was growing up in the 1990s. Had I known that I was a Millennial, perhaps I would’ve turned out much more emotionally fragile and lived up to that stereotype, or even gone gay.

Imagine if we taught history in this way. Maybe we decide that it should be understood as occurring in twenty-five-year intervals. So we talk about 1926-1950, 1951-1975, 1976-2000, etc. Instead, we discuss events thematically – the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Cold War, etc., – since that is the best way to gain an understanding of what is important. The Boomers, the final generation not to span the now-standard sixteen years, were named according to a demographic trend that we could bracket as it was nearing its end. This one made sense, because large families create a different kind of society than one where more people go childless or stop at one kid. But as people were living through it, they just considered this the norm. They had no way of knowing that America would not stabilize at a TFR of 3-3.5 indefinitely, and the uniquely family friendly and pro-natalist culture that the United States enjoyed in the postwar years could only be appreciated once we saw what came next.

There isn’t any grand conspiracy behind generational naming conventions. This is something we’ve just lazily slid into without giving it much thought, as society has turned more toward therapy culture, identity politics, and navel gazing. We choose time periods like 1981-1996 because they appear to span a multiple of five years, without stopping to notice that they actually cover sixteen – which seems even more senselessly random.

I hope to convince people that this has all been a mistake, and instead of using letters to refer to people born during arbitrary sets of time, we should just talk about “kids,” “young people,” “teenagers,” etc, the way everyone did before the early aughts. When discussing the past, we can always look back and decide what was noteworthy in the formative years of any particular cohort of Americans, and where exactly we should draw the lines. But I see little evidence that imposing arbitrary generational labels prospectively has much benefit, and good reason to believe that it prolongs adolescence and creates unnecessary barriers to understanding between Americans of different ages.

The book is conveniently divided into three parts, and so we are doing a three-part podcast series on it. The other two parts will be released over the next few weeks.

We decided to begin Demons after I came across this review by John Psmith. I stopped reading the review midway through, as it made me want to go to the original source and I didn’t want any spoilers. I’ve now gone back and read it.

According to the Word document that I use to keep track of which books I’ve read, I’ve finished two other works by Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov and Notes from the Underground. I was probably in college at the time, and I only vaguely remember Notes from the Underground being about some lowlife who makes up high-sounding philosophical justifications for his crimes, but that’s it. The Brothers Karamazov is completely gone from my mind. I tried to jog my memory by looking over the plot but just about nothing rang a bell. I now know there were three brothers, and their surname was Karamazov, and that’s the extent of it. I have a vague recollection of a drunk father rambling and pouring out a drink for his son. Maybe it’s time to go back to these books.

Anyway, regarding this convo, Rob and I recorded this after we got through Part I, so there will only be spoilers up to that point. If you like, you can read along with us. We do screen share throughout the conversation, so if you watch the video you can see us going back to passages that made an impression. Topics covered include:

• Dostoevsky’s influence and reputation

• Nikolai as a charismatic figure

• Themes of liberalism, radicalism, and hypocrisy

• Cultural insights into Russian society, politics, and ideas of honor, and how they differ from our own culture

• The historical context of 19th-century Russia nihilism and its impact on society

I will say that the book holds up extremely well. The radicals and the more moderate liberals, and the psychological dynamics between those two groups, are clearly recognizable in twenty-first century America.

See also Rob’s review of Demons, part I and part 2.

Note: If you would like to get this podcast through a regular podcast app, go to richardhanania.com on a browser on your device (it doesn’t work in the app), log in to Substack, and click on the tab for either the Hanania Show or the H&H Podcast. Select the episode you want, and then choose one of Apple, Spotify, etc. under “Listen on” to your right. You’ll be able to add the show through an RSS feed, after which you will get new episodes, either free or paid depending on what kind of subscriber you are, through whichever platform you use.

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