Imagine four quadrants. People can be smart or dumb, and they can be interested or uninterested in politics. When I say smart, I’m not referring just to IQ, but some combination of intelligence and a lack of intellectual laziness. Elon Musk is an extreme case here: obviously smart when it comes to engineering and business, but about as stupid as human beings get when it comes to politics. Of course, both intelligence and interest in politics exist on a spectrum, so keep that in mind, as this is a simplified model of the world.

The degree of populism in a political community is based on the balance between Quadrant I and Quadrant IV. Society doesn’t really change all that much in intelligence, but the degree to which smart or dumb people are interested in public affairs varies greatly.

One of the biggest changes in American politics from the 1990s to today is the rise in Quadrant IV. If you wanted to consume political material in 1995, your choices were basically limited to stuff like reading The New York Times, watching 60 Minutes, picking up a book from a mainstream publisher, turning on C-SPAN, or finding an intellectual magazine such as National Review or The New Republic. If your intelligence is so low that the only narrative you can find compelling is one that blames foreigners or transsexuals for all that has gone wrong in the world, there weren’t a lot of options. Today, however, you are drowning in them.

This article is part of a series discussing topics covered in more detail in my forthcoming book Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster. If you find the ideas expressed in this article interesting, 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.

Imagine if, before the streaming era, the only kind of music available to purchase was classical. Some dumb people might get into Mozart, but for the most part the left end of the bell curve would just buy less music overall.

Quadrant IV has grown mainly due to technological developments, namely the rise of the internet and social media. Yet this does not mean that nothing else matters for determining the balance between Quadrants I and IV. Specific leaders can have a major influence. Trump swelled the ranks of Quadrant IV, as he made politics as interesting as a reality show, so a lot of people who would be into reality shows are now more active participants in the political process. He also concentrated them into one party, increasing their influence. So in 2012, anti-vaxxers and the people who believed in globalist plots to make everyone gay were on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Today, because of Trump’s unique appeal to the stupid, they all march under the same banner, and so have an entire political party that caters to them. Trump was responsible for Operation Warp Speed and tried to defend its legacy, but anti-vaxxers still like him better than other politicians because he is the kind of leader that the less intelligent naturally look to.

I used to see Trump occasionally be less anti-vaxx and anti-immigration than his followers, and thought that meant that he was keeping the right from going even more insane. I’ve changed my mind on this, and now believe that the effect is dominated by the degree to which he animates and consolidates Quadrant IV. Even if Trump sometimes has the salutary effect of checking the worst impulses of his fans, many of them wouldn’t be as interested in politics in the first place if he were still a reality TV host. If Ted Cruz or JD Vance were leading the Republican Party, many would find the show too boring to continue paying attention to.

Some political figures, like Obama and Macron, expand Quadrant I. The French president has been paradoxically referred to as an “anti-populist populist.” Such figures usually project youth and competence, and make more educated people feel better about the system they live under. They also appeal to the better angels of human nature, since they draw into the political process more of those who are happy with their lives and fewer who have failed and are looking for someone to blame.

Institutions also matter. Open primaries have moved us in the direction of more populist figures being elected. If we still had stronger political parties exercising the kind of control they had in the mid-twentieth century, Trump would never have survived the 2016 primaries. And in this cycle alone, we would have been spared Ken Paxton and Graham Platner, each party’s most ethically compromised Senate nominee.

Even technology itself is not immune to policy decisions. We decided to give social media companies Section 230 protections, which meant that they could not be sued for things posted on their websites in the same way that newspapers can when their journalists and writers make false claims. When you think about it, this creates an asymmetry, in which actual publications have to be a lot more careful about the kinds of claims they make, putting them at a market disadvantage. In theory, you can sue individual social media users for what they post, but since most of the time your targets don’t really have deep pockets or much to lose, and the defamatory contribution of each individual spreading a lie is so small, in practice this is rarely worth doing. In contrast, I think AI is probably going to be anti-populist in its effects, so this is another reason to encourage its development and deployment.

People will often argue that economic grievances put people into Quadrant IV. I can think of few ideas in politics more straightforwardly refuted by data. As Western societies have gotten wealthier, policy programs of major parties have focused more on cultural issues and less on economics. If you’re actually worried about your economic situation, the most rational thing to do is not waste time on politics at all, since you’re not going to change much on your own. People who pay the most attention to politics treat it as a form of entertainment and an escape from their jobs, not as part of a diversified portfolio in which they seek economic advancement by combining work with activism.

Stupid people will explicitly tell you what they’re angry about: vaccines, having to see brown people, women not knowing their place, gender non-conformity, pedophile conspiracies, etc. Populist-leaning intellectuals like to pretend that these are just excuses and the true source of pain is always material. Ironically, how populists explain populism is itself an example of the poor epistemological standards of populism. Anger at the rich seems to be more of a phenomenon of the relatively poor intellectual and artistic class, rather than the most disadvantaged. Think of the anti-monopoly movement, which is a bunch of law professors and professional activists trying to find a broad base of support, in contrast to conspiratorial, anti-immigration, anti-trans, and anti-vaxx sentiments on the right, which are genuinely grassroots phenomena that conservative elites resisted for a while.

You can’t defeat populism by turning back the technological clock. But you can think about what the impacts of laws we pass and communications strategies we embrace are going to be on the balance between Quadrants I and IV. I see my war on Low Human Capital as part of this effort. I want smart people not to consider dumb people who happen to agree with them in the moment for tribal or accidental reasons their true allies. And I’d like to see the dumb people themselves either be demoralized and leave politics, or perhaps otherwise find me so entertaining that they outsource their thinking to me rather than James Fishback.

From a public relations perspective, one does not have to think about fighting Quadrant IV as going to war with the masses. Most of the public is in Quadrants II and III, at least if we set the bar for interestedness in politics high enough. That means they are passive, and, to the extent that they have opinions, they will shape them in response to what is going on in Quadrants I and IV. To pull up an arbitrary number, I’d estimate that the stupid-interested demographic makes up maybe 20% of the population.

William F Buckley famously quipped that he would rather be ruled by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phonebook than the faculty of Harvard. That was never the choice, as we’ve clearly learned in recent years. The alternative to organic elites isn’t a random sample of the population, but the guest list of the Joe Rogan podcast and MAGA influencers. The case against populism has therefore become much stronger.

As discussed in the case of the anti-monopoly movement above, one major group that doesn’t cleanly fit into the schema presented is highly ideological left-wing elites. Someone who writes books preaching Critical Race Theory may be bad at thinking, but it would be wrong to say that they lack intelligence or are in a true sense intellectually lazy. Nonetheless, I still want to see these people defeated.

On an optimistic note, I would argue that there is something deeply artificial about this class, with its dependence on government subsidies through the university system and civil rights law creating a demand for DEI bureaucrats in addition to other kinds of regulators. The free market will give you The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tucker Carlson, and Joe Rogan, catering to either smart or dumb people. But it will not give you the Journal of Black Queer Disabled Studies. Note that the most successful media outlets in the country are practically all either liberal-establishment or right-wing populist slop. Wokeness has a strong top-down component, and this is why I’ve always stressed the importance of taking apart its legal and bureaucratic underpinnings. The true threat to American living standards and the maintenance of a free country coming from the left is the more masculine form of socialism represented by Platner, because it has a much stronger base of support throughout all four quadrants.

Woke did have something of a populist moment in the early 2010s. As described in Ben Smith’s Traffic, people who were running websites at the time have discussed how identity-focused articles and blog posts would draw the most eyeballs. But this seems to me to have been the product of a unique historical era, in which we were reeling from the shock of the initial rise in social media. It only took a little over a decade for our politics to go back to centering on socialism and racism (the classical kind, not the woke version), two of the main pillars of human nature when it sets its sights on the political arena. We’re returning to the pre-2010 norm, in which crazy academic theories about race and human sexuality are mostly sequestered in universities and certain activist communities and, although generally aligned with the political left, by no means its dominant force.

Woke is not only wrong on the merits, but it also provides steroids for Quadrant IV (unlike economic grievances). The trans issue in particular riles up idiots like practically nothing else, and I say this as someone in no way sympathetic to gender theory. I’ve always said that Democrats could probably reduce the strength of Trumpism by perhaps 10% through simply accepting that God is a cisgender male and sports should be segregated by biological sex. Doing these things is not enough to defeat the right on its own, but there’s nothing else where you can get so far by giving up so little in material terms. Regarding gender-affirming care for minors, here leftists might feel that the stakes are too high to simply surrender, but the pronoun talk certainly hasn’t helped on that front either.

In my forthcoming book, Kakistocracy (again, preorder here), I explain my own disillusionment with right-wing politics as it got taken over by idiots, to the point that even intelligent people I knew surrendered their brains to the chuds.

My own alienation from the right had two major catalysts in vaccine denial and narratives that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. I had taken it for granted that conservatives and liberals often engage in motivated reasoning. But I thought that there was nearly always an ideological basis for disagreements, and that motivated reasoning almost always had at least some nexus in truth. Conservatives might believe, for example, in lower taxes and less government spending, and be more inclined to trust economic analysts who tell them that Reaganomics is the best way to achieve prosperity. Liberals might be inclined to accept a flawed study that told them that law enforcement was racist. This is the normal stuff of politics, and no longer shocking, particularly in a highly polarized era.

What was mostly outside my field of imagination was the idea that a movement could come to believe in lies with little to no grounding in ideology, or even fact. I watched in shock as both right-leaning friends and the conservative movement more generally became less and less connected to reality. They believed in propositions for no other reason than that Trump said them, in the case of election denial, or the effects were bottom-up, as when the misinformed and uneducated right-wing mobs on social media became enraged about the Covid vaccines.

What made me different from others on the right? While I had an identity as a conservative, I also had an identity as someone who believes that truth actually matters. There was sometimes a psychological pull toward agreeing with my tribe, but an even stronger sense that I am an honest person who deals in the realm of facts and has the courage to stand up to the mob.

People often discuss the need for a politics of meaning. Usually, I am not that big of a fan of such talk, since meaning is subjective and what we should be focusing on most of the time is policy outcomes. But there comes a point when the overwhelming stupidity and corruption of politics begins to insult one’s sense of dignity. For me, that limit has been reached. I don’t think that, in the long run, rule by podcasts and algorithms is the best way to achieve prosperity and advance the interests of humanity. But it would be too soulless to let that settle things alone. Standing in opposition to populism is a core part of my personal identity, as it should be for everyone involved in politics who values individuality, courage, and truth.

In the US, the unemployment rate is about 4%. In India, the government estimates an official unemployment rate of 3.1% in 2025. What a remarkable coincidence that India has four times as many people as the US, and somehow around four times as many jobs available. The coincidences don’t stop there. In the first US census in 1790, the country had about 4 million people, including slaves. Today, we have 342 million. Yet each society seems to end up with about the same number of jobs, in proportion to the population. Even countries with high official unemployment rates often have huge portions of the labor force working in the non-formal sector.

So “jobs” is not the reason some countries and societies are wealthier than others. Why, then, do people in the US enjoy much higher living standards than people in India, who are better off economically than people at the American founding, who didn’t have antibiotics, cars, indoor plumbing, air conditioning, and an endless number of modern conveniences we now take for granted?

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For those who haven’t been paying attention, here’s what’s been happening to birth rates across the world over the decades, particularly the last 15 years.

I’ve shown that birth rates are collapsing even when controlling for the fact that the world is getting wealthier.

And here’s what’s happened to socializing among young people.

The fertility crisis is in part a coupling crisis. In the United States, fertility among married couples has remained relatively stable, though this may be a statistical artefact.

One of the standard demonstrations of the ability of evolutionary psychology to help understand the world is its explanation of the rise of obesity. Once, humans lived in calorie-deprived environments. Starvation and malnourishment were real possibilities. So we evolved to gorge on calorie-dense food when it is available. We also moved around a lot, ensuring that we burned off energy. Today, food is cheap and all around us and work is often stationary, so we eat ourselves into poor health and an early grave. The mismatch between our evolutionary environment and the modern world is why people now get fat.

Countries seeing collapsing birth rates as they get wealthier is a pattern nearly as universal as them getting fatter. People sometimes blame feminism or social norms. Others point to technology, particularly iPhones, to explain more recent trends. But what if these are the wrong ways to look at the issue? It would be misguided to refer to the rise of obesity as fundamentally linked to one particular technology like the development of high-fructose corn syrup, or a cultural change. Evolution provides the most satisfying explanation. People may like high-fructose corn syrup, but if that hadn’t been invented other things would play a similar role. The more fundamental causal factor is that people seek out food that is bad for them under modern conditions.

Consider the possibility that humans evolved to seek solitude in the same way we evolved to eat calorie-dense food.

The idea that humans naturally desire to be alone might seem bizarre at first glance. Don’t we need to find friends, allies, and mates? We are social creatures, and our ancestors couldn’t survive and reproduce without other humans.

This simple story breaks down, however, when we consider what things were like across the vast majority of our evolutionary history. Imagine that for humans there is some optimal mix of socializing and solitude. It’s a bad idea to be a hermit. But there are also drawbacks to never having time alone at all. Maybe solitude allows people to think through their problems, and decompress in the midst of the pressures of life. Perhaps there’s a secret that you need to keep from your family and the members of your band, like a stash of food or something else you want to hide.

Yet man in his ancestral environment was rarely alone. Primitive humans did most things communally, including hunting, sleeping, and leisure activities. Anthropologists are increasingly skeptical of the idea that you can derive lessons about the lives of our ancestors from studying modern hunter-gatherers, and have argued that there was probably a diversity of cultures and norms among them. Regardless, taking into account this likely variation, it’s probably safe to say that there were always a lot fewer opportunities to be alone than there are today, and this is true up through the rise of agriculture and the early days of industrialization, when individuals often lived with or near large numbers of kin and depended on their local communities.

So we evolved a simple rule to go through life: “Whenever you have a chance to be alone, take it. You might not get another for a long time.” This of course coexists with other instincts, so it is not an absolute guide to behavior. But the rule did create a tendency that has become more prominent throughout history.

As societies become wealthier, innovation and economic developments cater to human preferences. Hence, we got fast food and delicious cakes sold at the supermarket, and also entertainment options that keep us in our rooms. People debate whether the iPhone is responsible for the decline in sociability and fertility. It probably is, but the question is why the iPhone has been such a successful product in the first place. In a sense, candy bars and potato chips cause obesity, but ultimately there are deep reasons in our evolutionary past why we find such foods appealing. Banning certain junk foods doesn’t help much, as people simply eat something else. The only thing that seems to work on a wide scale for people susceptible to being overweight is fiddling with our biology, hence the rise of GLP-1 drugs.

There is too much of a tendency to treat economic and technological developments as arbitrary. But they’re driven by human nature. We could have used our wealth for different purposes. Greater disposable income might have gone toward things like more social clubs and nights out on the town. For all the talk of kids being unaffordable, objectively speaking there’s never been a time in human history when it was more feasible to have large numbers of children. But we didn’t buy more children or more social experiences. Instead, we purchased solitude. You can blame Silicon Valley for making us addicted to phones in the same way you can blame food manufacturers for what they’ve done to our waistlines, but in the end the market is shaping itself around our preferences.

In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang profiles Chinese women who couldn’t wait to get out of the countryside and work in what we in the West have called “sweatshops.” They felt absolutely crushed by the social obligations and limitations put on them by their extended families as part of rural life. The women preferred the company of friends and boys they could meet. Before long, the young people of East Asia would retreat even from peer relationships and get buried in their phones. Each step is toward greater solitude. East Asians seem particularly susceptible to negative trends that are hitting practically everyone, a phenomenon I discussed here.

David Oks writes about the crushing burdens of communal norms in Africa.

The result is a constant process of redistribution from the most productive members of a kinship group to the least productive. This informal redistribution is a constant feature of life in African societies: 93 percent of Kenyan entrepreneurs agree that success in business leads to financial demands from family and friends. South Africans even have a name for the sharing obligations that define African kinship groups: “the black tax.”

This is, of course, a bad deal for the ambitious and productive within the society. But because refusal is impossible, sharing obligations lead to all sorts of attempts at obfuscation. One experiment found that rural Kenyan women were willing to pay significant sums in order to hide their income from relatives; likewise, in Cameroon, it’s common for people to pretend to be poorer than they are, and thus avoid sharing obligations, by taking out unnecessary bank loans fully collateralized by their savings.

It’s easy to see how under such conditions it would be difficult to go beyond the optimal level of solitude. Individuals should be always taking whatever privacy and alone time they can get.

Whenever I pick my kids up from school or daycare, they seem happy. They’re running around with their friends, laughing, smiling, and playing. That said, when I asked Girl last Thursday morning whether she would rather stay home for the day, she said yes. It’s like this with the other one that can talk too. Whenever the option comes up, they choose home over school. I was reflecting on this paradox while dropping them off later that morning.

What I concluded was that people having evolved to seek solitude does not mean that they don’t enjoy being around others once they’re in social situations. We’ve probably all had the experience of not feeling like going to a party or on a date, but when we get there things unfold much better than we imagined they would. People evolved to get along with others and form relationships with them, but the seeking out part is something we don’t do that much. This is why churches are valuable. The theological beliefs are in many cases secondary. The point is that religious traditions create obligations that bring people together in structured ways.

If all of this is true, what should we do? Maybe we should just accept people choosing to lie in bed and watch TV and stare at their phone all day. It’s simply them doing what they want. But again, the obesity analogy is helpful. It was difficult if not impossible to get fat throughout most of our evolutionary history. Yet people who overeat today end up with health problems and not feeling good about the results. Likewise, the rule that you should maximize solitude probably now leaves people feeling empty and alone. Moreover, low fertility is an economic and social disaster.

Pharmaceuticals are in the process of changing the trend in obesity after decades of failure when trying other things. See Scott Alexander, “Society is fixed, biology is mutable”. Perhaps we need something similar in this area? Note that people already drug themselves in order to make socializing more enjoyable. They mainly use alcohol, but every once in a while there’s a panic about some new party drug. At this point, I would be optimistic if I heard there were an uptick in young people using alcohol, cocaine, or ecstasy, though not heroin, even though it’s by far the most fun of all drugs and must be what heaven feels like. We also give people legal medications for anxiety and depression, which pushes in the opposite direction of campaigns against the abuse of illegal drugs.

At some point, societies need to get serious about collapsing fertility. The reason we couldn’t stop obesity from increasing before GLP-1 drugs was that the evolutionary impulses towards sloth and overeating are too strong. Governments believe in economic growth too, and the wealthier we got, the more difficult it became to stay in good physical shape because it just meant we had more options and could afford more food. Likewise, the desire to get fertility up is going to conflict with other things people want, namely freedom of choice and increasing options regarding how to live one’s life.

Economic incentives for having kids might help, if large enough. How could they not? But we’re also going to be constantly pushing up against the limits of human nature if we want modern people to socialize and have kids. Giving up is unacceptable. But we need to realize the enormity of the challenge. Perhaps pharmaceutical companies might look into a GLP-1-like drug for sociability. One thing government might do is encourage development in this area by preemptively announcing that something that improved sociability and the likelihood of pairing up would be covered by national health insurance plans. Once low fertility is seen as an issue of evolutionary mismatch rather than any particular innovation or idea, we might be better equipped to come up with solutions.

When it comes to other fixes, the concern just has to be getting people socializing. To worry about fertility itself is jumping too far ahead. Sex, sociability, marriage, and children rise and fall together. Movements like Haidt’s war on iPhones and calls for kids to go play outside do not seem directly related to the fertility crisis, but can have beneficial downstream effects in this area. It’s an open question whether changes in norms can be enough, or, if as with obesity, the evolutionary forces at play are too strong for anything but pharmaceutical interventions to fix the problem for large numbers of people. But the only way to find out is to support movements, intellectual trends, and market innovations that bring humans together in close physical proximity.

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 on July 7 – 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.

He would say great art does X, but AI does Y, which is why AI can’t produce great art. But how do we know we are not biased in our judgments? Maybe you just see stuff made by AI and assume it’s bad. We need blind testing, or such observations are not worth much. When Scott Alexander did this in 2024, he found that people could differentiate AI and human art 60.6% of the time, which isn’t very impressive when you consider that you would get 50% by chance. And people generally preferred AI art, which is even true for those who said they had a strong preference for works made by humans. There was also an experiment recently in which someone posted a famous Monet painting and said it was AI, and people started coming up with all kinds of reasons why it was worse than the real thing.

This indicates that if you think AI-produced work is bad, there’s a decent chance it’s all in your head.

My interest here is not in art, but in myself. Recently, following experiments by Kelsey Piper and Megan McArdle, I put approximately 500 words of my analysis of The Iliad into Claude Opus 4.7, before it was published online, and asked who it thought the author was. In incognito mode, it identified the passage as written by Richard Hanania, which is truly remarkable given how many writers there are in the world, and that it was on a topic I had never published on before.

AI can recognize my style. Does that mean it can imitate it? I decided to do an experiment to find out. I wrote two different articles, then asked Claude Opus 4.7 and ChatGPT to write their own versions of each, feeding them the topics and what arguments to make. Then for each article, I asked people on X and Substack to tell me which of the three versions of each essay was written by me, the human Richard Hanania. You can see the articles produced in the file here, with the answers on the last page.

Hananiaturing

158KB ∙ PDF file

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Below are the prompts I used.

Prompt 1:

Write an article in the style of Richard Hanania, approximately 700 words, with most paragraphs being between 2 and 4 sentences. Write in the exact way you think Richard Hanania would write it and how he would structure the arguments, given the instructions about what to say. Make it so that he could post it to his Substack without people noticing it was written by AI. Feel free to add other arguments and ideas as long as they’re the kinds of things Richard Hanania would write, just cover everything discussed in the prompt. As for the topic, note that Graham Platner is probably going to win the Senate primary in Maine after Janet Mills suspended her capaign, and how this shows that Democrats may be following Republicans down the road to populism. Mention his scandals. Note that Platner’s personal characteristics and traits make him appealing to voters, compared to his opponents. Make a comparison to the rise of Trump, who was also opposed by the GOP establishment. Platner is anti-corporate in the way Trump is anti-foreigner and anti-political correctness. Note that ultimately, populism is what the voters want, which is why it wins in an era of social media.

Prompt 2:

Write a 400-500 word brief article in the style of Richard Hanania, broken up into paragraphs of about 3-4 sentences each. The point is that it is something that can go on his Substack or Twitter, making it look indistinguishable from something he wrote himself. Note that Mancur Olson argued that once you adopt statist policies with vested interests behind them, it is difficult to go back to policies that are better for economic growth. Abundance provides a test for this, since the book has reached policymakers and has been an overwhelming success. Note Ezra Klein recently hosted a debate on housing with California gubernatorial candidates, and they tended to praise his book and accept his framing of the issue. If Democratic states and localities still can’t address the housing issue in coming years, it indicates that Olson is correct. Also, note that if abundance fails, the answer isn’t necessarily authoritarianism, but it indicates we should rethink things. Feel free to add other arguments and ideas, just cover everything discussed in the prompt and make sure that these are things Richard Hanania would say in his style.

Now, from the prompts, you can see that I’m still doing a lot. I’m telling the AI what to write about, and also telling it what opinions to hold, how to think about the issues, what comparisons to make, and what kinds of arguments to use. But there’s still a lot of room here for the writer’s touch, and the question at this point is whether the AI can match my style. If so, this would indicate that I can outsource my writing to LLMs with some basic instructions, which would be very noteworthy.

Another consideration is that these are designed to be short op-eds. All of my most famous articles are in the range of 5,000-10,000 words. I didn’t want to write an entire article of that length just for the sake of an experiment. Instead, I asked Claude to write something on the future of the GOP after Trump of approximately 5,000 words. At first it didn’t want to do it, with Claude pleading that its confidence was too low after doing the analysis for this survey. But then I insisted, and gave these further instructions:

I would just do it as a question of why there are reasons to be optimistic or pessimistic. Optimism: Rubio gaining at the expense of Vance, people are over Based ritual, Trump is uniquely rotten. Pessimism: right-wing new media is worse than Trump, racism drives the base and this is a populist era. It's ok, I just want to see if you can do it

Claude said that based on the prompt, it wanted to only do 3,000 words, and any more would feel like padding. I like that it has standards. Here is the resulting piece.

Futuregop

159KB ∙ PDF file

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I’m actually planning to write this very article at some point, so when I do you can compare it to the AI version.

Topline Results

The results are mixed. For the first study on Graham Platner, we had 613 responses. Of those, 67% got the correct answer, which was Text 2. The other one-third were about evenly divided between thinking it was Claude (18%) and ChatGPT (16%). This is pretty good. The Abundance prompt was a lot closer. Of 592 people who answered, only 47% correctly picked Text 3. Claude, which was Text 1, was right behind at 38%. ChatGPT was less convincing, at 16%. Here is that information in chart form.

Below is accuracy on the Platner op-ed by how familiar people were with my work, how confident they were that they could distinguish my work from AI before answering, and how confident they were after giving their answers.

People who were initially the most confident in their ability to distinguish my work from AI were correct 81% of the time. Those with no confidence in their ability were at 48%. Interestingly, there doesn’t appear to be much of a relationship based on whether people were regular readers. Confidence after the fact was even more strongly related to getting the right answer than confidence going into the experiment.

Below are the same results for the Abundance op-ed. Again, confidence in judgment is predictive, while familiarity with the author’s work is not.

Fooled by Bukele

For each op-ed, I asked people to write a little bit about why they chose the answer they did. The easiest thing to do with such data is create a word cloud. Here’s what I get for the Platner op-ed.

This doesn’t look very interesting.

I asked Claude to put together a graph of which words were most commonly used among those who wrote text, based on whether they gave correct versus incorrect answers. I dropped common filler words like “read,” “write,” “say,” “seem”, and “mean,” in addition to things like articles and transition words.

People who got the question correct were much more likely to use the word tell(s). Platner and scandal indicate more engagement with the text, but so do democrat and party on the other side. The wrong answers relied more on generic stuff, such as style and human.

I’m surprised unhinged was more common among people who got the question wrong. In the Claude version, Platner was said to have posted “unhinged Reddit comments.” As some recognized, this is not a word I would ever use. One respondent who got the question correct called it “too soy.” Another actually used unhinged to disqualify Claude, but then picked ChatGPT, so they were placed in the category of those who got the question wrong. We’re talking small sample size here: only 1.4% of the right-answerers who left comments mentioned unhinged, compared to 2.2% of the wrong-answerers.

There’s actually one sentence in the human version that I thought gave it away. When listing scandals, I said that “Platner has also said insensitive things about women who make sexual assault allegations, statements that generally don’t bother me but would usually pose a problem in a Democratic primary.” It’s hard to imagine AI digressing to tell you that it thinks women who accuse men of sexual assault are often lying sluts. According to one respondent, “Hanania has to insert little flags about how unwoke he is in all his articles.” Someone else said that such an opinion wouldn’t get past safety filters. I almost thought of taking that part out, but then decided against it since I wasn’t trying to fool people but wanted to see how good AI is under real conditions.

Here’s one reader who I think honed in on what was important:

I’m leaning 2 because of Hanania-esque insights like “Populism is mainly an aesthetic phenomenon” and “Platner has also said insensitive things about women who make sexual assault allegations, statements that generally don’t bother me but would usually pose a problem in a Democratic primary.” 1 seems more AI because of statements like “Schumer is reduced to issuing supportive statements ten minutes after Mills withdraws, pretending he was on board the whole time. He wasn’t.” The “he wasn’t” is redundant and seems unusual to over-emphasize. All the paragraphs seem to end in a similar way, unusual from the way he normally writes. Also “This template wins because it is psychologically satisfying and because, in both cases, it is partially true.” I don’t think Hanania would ever say this sort of populist thought was partially true. Also, the em-dashes are a tell, as well as the incorrect use a semicolon.

One person who got the wrong answer wrote that “‘substitute math teacher having a stroke’ is too politically incorrect and funny to be written by an AI.” Well it was! That’s a good joke. I googled the phrase “math teacher having a stroke” and did not get a single result. Claude made up that phrase on its own and applied it to Bernie Sanders, and I think it fits very well. One of the best examples I’ve seen of AI being genuinely funny.

Below is the same analysis as above for the Abundance op-ed. First, the word cloud.

Unsurprisingly, not much useful here. But things get very interesting in the next chart.

People who got the answer correct focused on unions. I hate organized labor, and always portray them in a negative light and point to them when I need an example of bad kinds of policies. Calmatters is another one. The ChatGPT op-ed cited that website twice in a pretty mechanical way, which people picked up on as unnatural.

For readers who got the question wrong, the four most overrepresented words were “cope,” “bukele,” “salvador,” and “prior.” These are terms that appear in the Claude version, which 38% of people chose. Here is the relevant text from that op-ed.

This matters because much of the discourse on the right has converged on a kind of soft authoritarianism as the answer to liberal democratic dysfunction. The argument goes that proceduralism is downstream of vetocracy, vetocracy is downstream of democratic accountability to mobilized minorities, and therefore you need a strongman to break things. I think this is mostly cope, and the El Salvador comparisons are usually made by people who couldn’t name three Salvadoran cabinet ministers.

But if abundance fails on its home turf, the people making these arguments deserve a more serious hearing than they currently get. It doesn’t follow that Bukele is the answer, or that we should import some half-understood version of Singapore.

Overall, 32 people mentioned the word “bukele” or “salvador.” Only 10 (31%) of those people got the question right, compared to 22 (69%) who got it wrong. You shouldn’t be surprised by Claude thinking that I would reference Bukele. It’s read my articles.

One thing I found entertaining here is the reference to “people who couldn’t name three Salvadoran cabinet ministers.” I don’t know a single Salvadoran cabinet minister! Here we see the AI version of me insulting the real person, as a blowhard who writes about things without knowing what he’s talking about. But I think it’s enough to look at the data and read about the crime crackdown; whether Bukele’s justice minister is named Jorge Ramos or Jesus Gonzalez isn’t all that important. I appreciate the spirit of the insult, but I think Claude is insulting people over the wrong thing.

Here’s one respondent who incorrectly guessed Claude was the human.

The dismissive attitude toward advocates for authoritarianism when he uses “cope,” or when he casts doubts about their level of familiarity with the model authoritarian systems they point to as examples, implicitly questioning their intelligence, is also characteristic of Richard’s style and consistent with his opinions about Conservatives and reactionaries.

Boomers Can’t Tell AI

Ideology has no consistent effect on accuracy. Just over 90% of respondents were male, among those who picked one of the two human sexes. On the first op-ed, the sexes were about equal in discernment: 67% of men got the answer right, and 64% of women. However, on the Abundance op-ed, 61% of women got the right answer, compared to 46% of men. While the female sample is small (n=44), the result is borderline significant (p = .06) in chi-square test of independence, and slightly more significant in a logistics regression controlling for age (p = .03).

I suspect my female fans are an unusually smart (and stunning, brave, etc) group of women. Here is the age breakdown.

75% of people under 25 got the Platner op-ed correct, compared to 30% of those 55-64, and 17% of those 65 and up. Basically, people 55 and over, which had a sample size of 41, were doing worse than chance! On the Abundance op-ed, there’s a 19-point difference between <25 (43%) and 65+ (22%). But the results are a bit random in between. The best performing groups were 25-34 and 35-44, which both got it at the rate of 51%.

This led me to wonder whether Boomers know that they’re bad at this. I had Claude do a regression to see whether age predicts getting the answer right when confidence is controlled for. In a regression model including both pre- and post-answer confidence, the effect of age barely shrinks on the Platner op-ed (p < .001). See the charts below.

Among those 45 and over with the highest levels of pre-answer confidence (4 or 5) before they read the texts, only 40% got the right answer. Meanwhile, among those under 30 with the lowest confidence levels (1 or 2), 63% got the answer right. Here’s post-answer confidence, where the results are similar. Those 45 and over who felt good about their guess still did worse than younger people.

While confidence does decrease slightly with age, old people were worse at distinguishing the human-written Platner op-ed from the AI at every level of confidence.

For the Abundance op-ed, the effect of age disappears when we control for both pre- and post-answer confidence. Old people still do worse than young people, but the results don’t reach statistical significance (p = .19). I’m convinced this is a sample size issue, and I’m confident that we would’ve gotten the same result as the Platner op-ed for Abundance if more people took the survey. See the charts below.

Apparently, in the era of AI, there are a lot of delusional old people out there! They can’t tell fact from fiction, but in many cases have unwarranted confidence in their ability to do so. This seems like a very bad combination, and indicates that the elderly will be falling for a lot of scams over the next few decades, in the same way they fall for non-AI internet and telemarketing scams. My readers are probably more sophisticated than most. Then again, I did advertise this survey on X, so maybe some regular MAGAs ended up taking it.

Maybe the high ability of young people is a case for optimism, as they’ll from now on always be growing up in environments saturated with AI, and perhaps they will pick up the ability to tell what’s real subconsciously in the same way people learn their native language.

I Am Not an AI, but Need AI to Prove It

What does this all tell us? The Abundance op-ed shows that Claude can already pretty much write my essays, at least enough to fool all but the most sophisticated readers. There was only an 8-point difference between the human version and Claude version. Note that I didn’t ask for Claude to give me five different versions and pick the best one, or edit the resulting piece to remove tells. I simply gave the instructions, and went with the first thing that popped out.

I’m testing my own readers here. Now imagine someone who isn’t yet known for writing. They have a choice between writing their own essays, or telling ChatGPT to do it. At this point, Claude is good enough that people can basically outsource their writing to it without most humans being able to tell that they did so.

Except for one thing. Before doing this experiment, I did not know there was a platform called Pangram that can detect AI writing.1 I put all the texts into the program, and it got everything completely correct. It identified the four AI essays as 100% AI written, and the two human essays as 100% human written, all with high confidence.

So my fans can barely tell my writing from that of Claude, but another AI can. My individuality is still there. It just can’t be detected by other humans, only the machines. There’s a beautiful irony here. No, I can’t be replaced by AI. How do I know this? Because AI told me.

It’ll be interesting in the coming years to see what happens in the arms race between AI writing ability and AI plagiarism detection software. My guess is that AI writing ability has to win. What exactly rules out the possibility that it can write just as well as I can? There should come a point where it is indistinguishable.

Or maybe not? It feels like this article by David Oks is relevant here. He notes that AIs tend to have weird quirks. ChatGPT 5.1 was obsessed with goblins. It would look for reasons to introduce that word into texts that had nothing to do with it. Eventually, ChatGPT 5.5 came with instructions to “never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.” Such quirks emerge spontaneously. Pangram might simply be picking up on them, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax. Does Pangram only work until the next fix comes along? Or is there a deeper principle here that makes it accurate?

A lot actually depends on which side wins the arms race. If AI writing ability surpasses AI detection software, then every new writer will be suspected of not having written their own work. Those of us who already have reputations will be grandfathered in. Everyone already understands that I know how to write, so I’ve got nothing to prove. But in the past, writing ability was seen as a proxy for whether someone’s ideas were worth listening to, and that will be gone.

What will people rely on instead? Probably credentials, more so than they do now. Writing that is anonymous or by people who have not achieved some measure of success in the real world will always be treated with suspicion, making it difficult to begin a career as an author without already building a reputation for something else. At least among more knowledgeable audiences. You might be able to continually fool older and less sophisticated content consumers for a long time before nearly everyone realizes how good LLMs are at composing text.

If AI detection software wins the arms race, in contrast, it will become the norm for readers to put texts through it. People will know that there’s a way to distinguish non-human writing, so one can build a reputation as an author who produces compelling work, as long as it passes the relevant tests.

I asked ChatGPT and Claude, and they say that AI generation will probably win. The LLMs bring up some good points, like you can just edit texts produced by AI to remove the tells. For this experiment, I didn’t do this, but I surely could’ve fooled more people if I did, and maybe Pangram itself. As LLMs get better, the distinction between AI and human writing approaches zero, which means AI-detection becomes less possible even in theory.

It’s not yet impossible to become a new writer from out of nowhere. David Oks, who I just cited, is someone I recently discovered, and I always assumed his work is legitimate. But just to be sure, I did now drop the first 650 words of his last article into Pangram, and it checks out. Nonetheless, given that my own fans can barely tell the difference between my work and Claude better than chance, the days of original writing being taken for granted as the norm are almost certainly coming to an end.

I’m not too upset about this. As I said, I’m being grandfathered into this new era. I’m just happy to have been here to contribute to the formation of the machine God.

Technology will for the most part make us better able to discover, analyze, and express ideas, which is why I have come out in favor of all writers AI-maxxing. A downside here is the broken signal of writing ability indicating that a person is good at thinking. In order to get attention in the future, you’ll need proper credentials or a proven track record for people to listen to you. This serves to exclude some aspiring writers, but they’ll have plenty of other tools to make their voice heard, and the negative effects of the broken signal will be more than compensated for by other factors pushing in the direction of gains in human knowledge.

As for what we consider writing that is good or aesthetically pleasing, there will always be some signals that code text as machine written or somehow “nonhuman,” and such work will be stigmatized, even if the standards are arbitrary, like the idea that em dashes are bad. Liberals decided “people of color” was fine but “colored people” was offensive, and there’s no particularly good reason for this. Tastemakers will always look down on LLMs even more than they look down on regular Republicans.

Increasingly, women are getting plastic surgery, hormones, and other treatments, and looking better into middle age. Most of us don’t care. I think writing is going to be like that. The works of authors will be the products of some combination of natural talent and how well they use the tools available to them. In theory, we could live in a world of AI punditry where humans are completely out of the loop as producers, but there won’t be a demand for that, as reading an author is a (para)social experience. There will still be human writers for the same reason that humans will always have other jobs to do. As society becomes wealthier, we can better indulge our preference for interactions with creatures like ourselves. AI will do more and more of the thinking and writing, but the end result will be many more human thinkers and writers.

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 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.

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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.

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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.

1

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.)

Read more

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.

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.

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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.

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.

If you spend time on social media, you will see that it is very common for people to accuse their political opponents of lying. Especially when the target is smart, you’ll often hear criticisms along the lines of “no way he believes this.” And it is true that smart people sometimes say crazy things. It is very easy to assume that they are seeking some material or social advantage when they purport to believe in irrational ideas. Maybe a politician is trying to win an election, or an influencer is attempting to gain a larger audience.

Yet if you understand Trivers’ theory of self-deception, you see that the question “Does this person really believe this or are they grifting?” is usually meaningless. Or at the very least it needs to be more precisely defined before we put forward an answer.

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Regardless of what really happened, when the story is mistold, it is held up as a demonstration of Eastern wisdom, reflecting the Chinese propensity to take a very long view of history. Simple Westerners only think about immediate impacts; much wiser Oriental leaders take a wait-and-see approach and then draw more lasting lessons.

Yet the alleged Chinese perspective is really dumb. The further away we get from the French Revolution, the less certain its impacts become. Did the French Revolution cause Bolshevism? Or maybe we can say that the nationalism it fostered in fact brought down the Soviet Union? Do we stop and judge in 1943 or 1991? Things will look very different depending on which year we choose. You can make a good historical argument that the French Revolution caused Napoleon. But to get from that event to World War I, there are too many uncertainties to come up with any kind of reasonable counterfactual.

I’ve been thinking about this fake piece of Chinese wisdom while participating in the discussion about Venezuela. Right now, it looks like things are going well. I remember what the debates were like two months ago, and if anyone told you that soon Delcy Rodriguez would welcome back foreign investors, reform energy laws toward American preferences, amnesty or release large numbers of prisoners, and be kissing up to Trump on social media and yucking it up with Doug Burgum, they would’ve said you were dreaming. Moreover, public opinion polling shows that Venezuelans overwhelmingly support the raid. Any American leader would’ve taken that over the status quo ante. For that reason, I’m ready to declare Venezuela a success. On Iran, I’ll continue to reserve judgment until at least a few more months.

This reminds me of a debate scholars have had over the generations about the role Christianity has played in the history of the world. Sometimes you’ll hear writers argue that the faith is responsible for all good things that have happened in Western civilization over the last few centuries. I’ve always found this odd, since as Christianity took over Europe, living standards and the state of technological development plummeted, as explained by Bryan Ward-Perkins in The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. By his estimate, things did not begin to recover until well into the Middle Ages. Are we to grant Christianity a thousand-year mulligan from the time of Constantine’s conversion? I don’t know how you can skip how bad things got after Rome collapsed, but then give Christianity credit for what came later.

You can write very entertaining books about why Christianity was responsible for modern science and the Industrial Revolution, they can sound convincing to smart people, and I’ve read and enjoyed many of them myself. They might even be true. But I think that a question like “Would the world be better or worse off if Christianity never existed?” is way too complex to be addressed by mere mortals.

It’s funny because if you read Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he tells a story that takes the opposite view of many moderns (check out my 2020 thread). During the Enlightenment, intellectuals believed that Christian superstition ruined ancient civilization. Like all writers, Gibbon was reflecting the prejudices of his time, and it seems as if the kinds of academics who write books about Christianity now are either believers or have a cultural affinity toward the faith. Today we know that Gibbon made a lot of stuff up, and needless to say modern historians have access to more archives and better methods, and are a lot more careful with their facts. But in the centuries since The Decline and Fall, I don’t think that they’ve figured out how to adequately engage in a two-millennium counterfactual. Scholars now have more confirmation that life did actually get worse for most people after the fall of Rome, and this obviously supports Gibbon’s theory better than those of his modern counterparts.

Judging the Maduro Raid

What will Venezuela be like in five years? I don’t know. But even if it turns out terribly, we will have no counterfactual regarding what would have happened had Maduro remained in power. It seems to me that opponents of intervention are doing the following:

1. When things seem to be going well, assert that it’s too soon to say anything.

2. Wait for bad things to happen, and then declare them the result of the American intervention.

At some point, something bad will happen in Venezuela or elsewhere in the world. Anti-interventionists will then stand up and say “I told you so.” Even if bad things happen outside of Venezuela, they will be able to blame the fracturing of international norms or somehow tie it back to Maduro’s arrest, ignoring the fact that wars and violations of international law have always been regular occurrences.

In the weeks after Maduro was seized, the value of the Venezuelan stock market skyrocketed 260%. Some argue that liquidity was low, but tens of billions of dollars isn’t exactly nothing, and I put a lot of weight on this piece of data. In The Midas Paradox, Scott Sumner judges the wisdom of US policy up to and throughout the Great Depression based on the immediate movements of the stock market, and other indicators like bond and foreign exchange markets. If FDR announced a change in policy and the stock market went down, for example, he doesn’t care if it ended up rising six months down the line. The theory behind this idea is that people with skin in the game take into account all foreseeable circumstances at the time an event occurs, and what happens later can always be better explained by more proximate causes. I prefer this approach because otherwise you can just come up with any story you want about the wisdom of various economic policies.

What happens to the relevant stock exchanges after a foreign policy event is just one data point. We can look at others too. In the case of Venezuela, the country is economically and politically freer than it was a few months ago, and has a more plausible path to good governance. People ask when there will be a free and fair election, and the question isn’t whether this is likely, but whether it is more or less likely than in an alternative timeline where Maduro stayed in power. The signals on Venezuela are not mixed. They’re all pointing in the same direction and the operation is over, and for those reasons it is not too early to say that interventionists have been vindicated.

Judging the War with Iran

I’m willing to accept the other side of this coin, and say that the fact that the stock market went down after the war with Iran started is an indication that Trump made a mistake. On the first day of trading after the bombing began, the S&P 500 was about flat. I’ll make the argument harder for myself and take the state of the S&P 500 two trading days after the war started, down about 2%, since that’s maybe about how much time it took to fully understand the initial scope and aim of the intervention.

Of course, we all knew that the stock market would fall if we started bombing Iran, so that can’t be the full story. But the magnitude matters a lot. And we simply can’t wait an indefinite amount of time to judge the wisdom of the intervention.

Unfortunately, it looks as if the odds that the Iranian regime will fall by the end of 2026 are the same as they were at the start of the war. Yet, right when the war was launched, the chances skyrocketed from 36% to a high of 61%. We had a few weeks of elevated chances of regime change, before the market settled back to the baseline.

So in retrospect, the Trump administration did increase the chances that the regime would fall. It’s looking the same as before now, but that should not have much influence on how we see the original decision to pull the trigger. That is, unless you think that the fact that war was seen as a credible option was why the baseline odds of regime change were so high, and maybe the war was necessary for the threat ever to have been credible, and also to maintain more pressure on the regime going forward. This would argue in favor of a more hawkish approach. At the same time, a similar logic can force us to say that we’re underestimating the economic damage of the war, since markets had already priced in the cost of conflict before the bombing began. Maybe the stock market lost 2%, but it was already 1% lower than it otherwise would have been just because we know Trump was going to attack Iran. I hope that these two ways of taking the previous policy into account balance one another out, since they point in opposite directions regarding whether the war was a good decision.

Anyway, we can begin by saying that on the plus side we have a twenty-five-percentage-point increase in the probability of a regime change and a weakened Iran as a consolation prize, balanced against a 2% loss of the stock market, which means approximately $1.2 trillion in value destroyed. But the stock market does not cover the extent of economic damage. That $1.2 trillion is in corporate profits, and corporate profits make up about 10% of GDP. So we might at first glance consider multiplying the $1.2 trillion by ten, but it’s doubtful that the war will impact all sectors and forms of output equally. I’m going to multiply the effect by six times, and get $7.2 trillion in economic damage in terms of expected present value.

But I’m a global citizen, and will take a global perspective. According to one estimate, as of March 9, about $6 trillion in equities value was lost globally since the start of the war. It’s hard to know whether to attribute this all to the conflict, but let’s do so anyway. We can again multiply this by 6, and end up with a grand total of $36 trillion in global economic damages.

I’m not going to count the direct costs of the war in terms of money spent, since this is negligible compared to the overall economic effect. We have to throw in Iranian and American casualties, but these aren’t particularly high if we convert them into monetary terms. Let’s put the statistical value of life at $10 million, and assume this war has killed 3,000 people. Both of these estimates are way too high, and multiplying them we only get about $30 billion. Once again, this is a rounding error. Iranian infrastructure and real estate are likewise not that valuable in the grand scheme of things. The impacts on the global economy as reflected in equity markets are the costs you should be thinking about in this conflict.

If we stop the tape today, the question boils down to this: Was $36 trillion in lost value worth a twenty-five-percentage point increase in regime change, and a weaker Iran regardless? Another way to look at it is whether it would be worth $144 trillion for a 100% chance of regime change in Iran. Since $144 trillion is greater than the entire yearly GDP of the world, we have to say no, especially since there’s no guarantee regime change would work out well. As mentioned, I also think that Iran’s offensive capabilities being wiped out and many of its leaders killed should be considered pluses and placed on the ledger. But even with that, it’s hard to see how you end up with a benefit that is worth losing that much in economic costs.

We’re still early here, though, and we don’t know which way this will go. With the Maduro raid, I’m comfortable saying that it is “over” – anything that happens from now will be the result of more proximate causes. But when it comes to war with Iran, we’re still in the opening stages of the conflict. The ultimate outcome can be anything from a quick finish that limits the economic damage and sends indicators back to where they were, just with a weakened Iran, to stagflation and a global recession. The bulk of the cost of the war is from economic damage, and most of the economic damage is coming from the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. So if the Trump administration can figure out how to open it through force, which some have argued is doable, global equities will recover and you get the benefits of a weaker Iran at low cost even if the war continues.

All of this is to say that I’m fine with continuing to wait. We can have a rule: in the first few months or so after an action is taken, if all the indicators are either positive or negative, then a move was either clearly justified or a mistake. When the record is mixed, like here, or things are still early, you can reserve judgment. You usually can’t call a war a failure if it’s only been going on for a few weeks and much about its trajectory remains up in the air, but a raid that is carried out and only seems to have positive results within the next few months can be declared a success.

What I won’t do on Iran, however, is simply wait indefinitely until I can say that the war was a good idea. If Iran looks to be in worse shape and not getting better and the world is more unstable in say a year with a weaker economy, I will declare that the war was wrong. But if things look good in one year and bad in two years, I will still say that the war was a good decision. The one-year limit is arbitrary, and one can argue that maybe it should be two months, or six months. In all honesty, circumstances will provide various moments as candidates for when we can judge the outcome of the war.

Regardless, the point is that your time horizon here should be short. Definitely not on the order of several years or decades, and certainly not generations or centuries, as implied in the fake version of the Zhou Enlai quote. I’m inclined to say that the ultimate impact of the Iran War should be judged probably by the point that either the Strait of Hormuz is opened, or it is clear that the closure is going to last at least long enough to justify the initial drop in equities – at which point equities should drop even further and it won’t even be a close call.

Of course, there has to be some allowance for freak events that might occur. If Iran gets hit with a major asteroid in six months and it devolves into anarchy immediately after, and things looked to be going well before that point in time, I will not blame that on the war.

So we have an immediate verdict on Venezuela, which is that it was a good move. On Iran, we got a slight decrease in the stock market, a substantial increase in odds of regime change, the decline of Iran as a threat, and perhaps $36 trillion in global financial losses. Looks bad, but the market might yet recover.

You can imagine scenarios where the Iran war would’ve clearly been a mistake at this point. Let’s say that the stock market dropped 12% in the immediate aftermath of the beginning of the bombing, as what happened in the days after “Liberation Day” tariffs were announced, and the odds of regime change only went up 10%. In that case the war would’ve been a disaster. It’s also possible that casualties could’ve been so high that this would have been a major consideration in the analysis, but it’s looking doubtful that we’ll get to that point.

Speaking of Liberation Day, the fact that the market responded so negatively to Trump’s tariffs should be taken as indisputable evidence that protectionism is stupid. The stock market’s reaction to Liberation Day was more negative than to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the current war with Iran. Yes, the market ended up recovering, but this was clearly tied to Trump backing off, and we consistently see how each piece of news on tariffs either sends equities up or down in predictable ways consistent with standard economic theories. Again, if the stock market dropped by a similar amount after Trump and Israel attacked Iran, it would be enough to declare the war a failure. If someone is still defending Trump’s views on trade at this point, you should think much less of them.

You may ask what about blowback? The beauty of trusting markets is that this should be factored into prices. If, due to the war with Iran, we should expect to see more wars and terrorist attacks, then equity markets will consider that. Markets don’t fully take into account the potential human costs of more wars. But if those become more likely, we now have relevant prediction markets, and we should see movement there. In my experience, wars tend not to impact unrelated markets all that much, indicating that most models of the world that believe in second- and third-order effects of foreign policy decisions aren’t very well founded.

Summarizing My Method

In conclusion, my method for judging the wisdom of any foreign policy action is the following:

1. Decide what you care about first.

2. Reserve judgment if the initial decision is still unfolding.

3. Look for short-term market proxies for the things you care about.

4. Try to factor in the best you can things you care about without good market proxies, through, for example, cost-benefit analysis using the statistical value of life.

5. Feel free to disagree with market proxies, but you need to start with them and let them guide you (Out of intellectual humility, I will very rarely disagree with market proxies).

6. Maybe after 5-20 years you can do a more meaningful retrospective, but the judgment window has to close at some point. You can declare Napoleon as the result of the French Revolution but not anything after Napoleon.

There are several weaknesses of this method. Number 2 poses particular problems, since the course of events often doesn’t give you a clean cut-off point. I’m tempted to draw the line here and say that the market reaction, and the fact that the odds of regime change are flat, are enough to declare the Iran War a failure. But again, this is early, and you have to leave open the possibility that it ends soon and markets rally. We should be spending our time looking for proxies and thinking about when is the right time to judge the initial decision to go to war; not sitting around and trying to just guess what the world looks like one or two years from now.

What all this demonstrates is that, even when outsourcing your thinking to markets, contemplating the wisdom of foreign policy decisions is still a complex undertaking. But without using markets as guideposts, we’re completely lost. There are a hundred objections one can make to my methodology, and I’m not saying that you’re going to get a mathematically precise answer to every foreign policy question. But the methodology does impose some limits, and I think it’s the best that we can do. Even if you have a range of a, say, 1-3% drop in equity markets depending on what date you use to judge, that is at least a bounded estimate. Normal foreign policy discourse is fuzzy and provides few lessons, while the market-based approach reliant on immediate impacts is still fuzzy but allows you to glimpse the outlines of causal paths that can be taken and added to a repository of knowledge.

Regarding 5, people can of course say the market is getting things wrong. But whenever analysts doubt market indicators, the burden of proof is always on them to show why they know better than the aggregate estimates that are calculated based on the decisions of all those who have money on the line. Anyone who can consistently beat the market will get very rich, and you should be skeptical of any individual who claims that ability.

According to Casey, I’ve been documenting the Groyperization and human capital decline of the conservative movement and predicting that it will accelerate. The worse things get, the more I can feel like a genius.

There is certainly something there. I do like feeling smart and being right about things. I’ve been disgusted with the right, and constantly harp on how a movement this divorced from good epistemological practices and knowledge-producing institutions is on the road to hell. Facebook rumors and social media algorithms are powerful on both sides, but on the left, this is at least balanced by a substantial number of people in the coalition who are educated, informed, and read serious newspapers and magazines, meaning that they know something about current events and are exposed to the views of smart people who have thought carefully about issues.

Conservatives don’t read real news, and neither do young people. So young conservatives represent a place on the Venn diagram where you will find some of the most poorly-informed voters out there. They are the perfect demographic to be taken in by grifters. A recent New York Times profile of Fishback supporters provides insights on this. One of them is a 20-year-old who had his political awakening when Kanye West published a list “of names of Jewish people who are in control of banking systems and stuff like that.” This kid feels helpless when researching Epstein conspiracy theories online, and says he can’t distinguish what is real from what is AI, but is glad to have Fishback as someone who can serve as a guide to understanding how the world works.

All of this is to say that if I were designing a candidate in a lab to test my theory that the right is in deep trouble, I couldn’t come up with anything better than James Fishback. I first saw him pop up as a social media troll who would defend obvious nonsense like Trump’s tariffs or advocate for DOGE dividend checks. It turned out he had been sued by the financial firm he was employed by for making up a fake position for himself to attract outside clients and stealing their confidential information before reinventing himself as a MAGA influencer. His former firm won a judgment of $229,000 against him for unpaid loans, and he separately settled the other suit by admitting to the theft and agreeing to cover their legal fees.

After a short stint praising Bari Weiss, writing for the Free Press, defending Israel, and trying to be a more mainstream Republican, he’s basically run as a Groyper candidate, complaining about H1B visas and “goyslop” being served in college cafeterias. Fishback refers to his black opponent, Byron Donalds, as “By’rone,” calls him a DEI candidate, and mocks him in Ebonics. While all populists complain about foreigners, Fishback takes things a step further, denouncing the idea of Americans from other states being able to move to Florida and sell their products there. Fishback at one point promised to take a 23andMe test, presumably to show his Groyper fans that he’s not Jewish, but now claims that the company never got back to him.

As reporters have dug in, they’ve discovered more unflattering things about his past, like the fact that he misrepresented himself as a DOGE adviser. When he was in his Bari Weiss phase, Fishback started a right-wing equivalent of the National Speech and Debate Association, and ended up moving in with a high-school student he met through that endeavor after she turned 18, because of course he did. She later tried to get a restraining order against him, again because of course this is how these things go.

In his short time in public life, Fishback has had so many scandals, red flags, and entertaining anecdotes that any profile of him has to be selective in which ones to bring up. He has a Trump-like quality of being so shameless, and so constantly outrageous across so many dimensions, that it simply overwhelms any ability to critique or judge, and in the end creates a bemused if grudging respect even among his critics. I summarized some of the details included in just one ABC News story in the tweet below.

One of Fishback’s latest spats involves him accusing Waffle House of banning him from their restaurants for being opposed to Israel. To make all this even more entertaining, according to reporting by the Free Press, he’s probably not even eligible to be governor of Florida.

A disillusioned Fishback campaign staffer recently leaked some texts to Will Sommer, writing at The Bulwark, in which the conversation revolves around the candidate’s couch being repossessed. The texts also indicate that he wore a fancy watch to a deposition, and that when the attorneys for his creditors suggested he should hand it over, Fishback claimed to have lost it. His ongoing legal battles involve Fishback trying to argue that the Tesla he drives around actually belongs to his dad, so he shouldn’t have to hand it over to his old firm, and needing to appear in court on April 1 to explain why he shouldn’t be held in contempt for not sharing documents that would help his creditors seize his assets.

My take when Fishback started running was that he might represent something that was coming down the line, but it was too early for him to be a real candidate. Donalds had name recognition and the Trump endorsement. Then I started seeing Fishback interacting with crowds of young people. Large crowds don’t always mean you’re going to win, but in a gubernatorial primary, the ability to go viral and get people to show up in person to see you isn’t nothing. The more I watched, the more I had to admit, the guy has real talent as a communicator.

The X account of the University of Florida College Republicans informs me that at their recent Fishback event, they had an estimated 500 people, out of around 600 RSVPs. This blows away the 180 who came to a Byron Donalds rally on the same campus, and 250 who showed up to see Charlie Kirk last year. Though Don Jr apparently beat them all with 800 in 2019. All the non-Fishback estimates come from the campus paper, The Florida Alligator.

After noticing the crowds, the next step was seeing a few profiles of Fishback in the right-wing press that were much more sympathetic than I expected. Here’s a piece by Nikos Mohammadi in UnHerd that treats the racism as an unfortunate distraction from what is portrayed as a sensible economic populist message, rather than the whole key to Fishback’s appeal. The Spectator asks whether he is “the right’s answer to Zohran Mamdani.” Fishback has also gotten a respectful interview in The American Conservative. On X, that magazine has become something of a Fishback booster account.

These pieces really annoyed me, and I ended up arguing with the author of the UnHerd article on X. From my perspective, it is a mistake to consider Fishback’s economic policies and Groyperism separately. If you ask Goebbels his economic policy and he says “we need to get Jews out of banking, medicine, the trades, etc.” you don’t just say well he’s racist but also has some economically populist views. The economic opinions are just part of the scapegoating. Same with the guy who’s posting online about how much he dislikes Indians and then talks about the effects of H1Bs on wages. While you may be able to treat the economic positions of leftists on their own terms, for racists who are clearly looking to blame foreigners and non-white people for problems anyway, their economic views are a natural outgrowth of their bigotry.

Seeing the ways in which the populist right-wing press is willing to look past Fishback’s flaws was an important indicator, but I still thought we needed some polling. In the last few weeks, we finally got some. While a few months ago he wasn’t even being asked about, now, according to a University of North Florida survey, if we assume Casey DeSantis isn’t going to run, Fishback is in a distant second place at 6%, behind Donalds at 31%. Among 18-34-year-olds, those percentages are reversed, with Fishback beating Donalds, 32% to 8%. Granted, the sample size for the younger group is only 39 people but, according to ChatGPT’s calculations, that gives us a 95% confidence interval of Fishback being at somewhere between 17% and 47% among that demographic. It also says that we can be 99% sure that he’s actually leading Donalds among young people. People make a mistake in thinking that a small sample size means data is worthless. It just gives you wide error bars, but if one candidate’s measured advantage over his opponent is large enough, that can make up for that fact and you can be confident about who is in the lead.

In other words, Fishback’s advantage is so substantial among young people that, if this poll accurately sampled 18-34-year-old GOP voters in Florida – a nontrivial assumption – even with a small sample size we can be nearly sure that he’s winning that group. Moreover, among those 35-54, the sample size is 121, and Fishback is still at 11%, consistent with the finding for the younger age group.

The New York Times has a page that collects different polls in political races. Among those that meet their criteria for “selected pollsters,” the University of North Florida survey mentioned above, covering February 16-20, is the only one conducted on the Florida Republican gubernatorial primary since early January. Something called the James Madison Institute sponsored a non-select poll that ran from February 13-16, and it had Fishback at 3% overall, and 9% among 18-34 year-olds. This is obviously much different from the UNF survey, so if we take the two polls together and just average them, we get Fishback at maybe 5% overall, and 20% among the youngest Republicans.

Whatever Fishback’s true level of support among the youth is, it’s still early, and undecideds are in the range of 40-50%, meaning that people aren’t really paying attention to the campaign. Donalds isn’t the only grown-up candidate in the race, as it also includes Jay Collins, the current lieutenant governor, and Paul Renner, a former speaker of the state House. If Donalds falters, then, it doesn’t necessarily have to be Fishback who fills the void.

So right now, we’ve got one front runner, two serious candidates, and Fishback and potentially Casey DeSantis as wildcards.

Could Fishback actually win? Why not? Donalds is a stiff who sucks at talking. Fishback, people used to say, is running an “online campaign.” At some point we all need to learn that online is where much of life happens these days. It’s become clear that Fishback doesn’t just go viral and participate in Twitter Spaces; you also see him going viral through actually doing events and meeting with large groups of young people. He’s even got groupies. What else do you need to consider the Fishback candidacy real? He hasn’t had enough time to turn his online attention into a lot of support among voters, except among the 18-34-year-old demographic, which is most online and so probably most exposed to his message. But I don’t think that older Republican voters are necessarily going to be immune to Fishback’s charms when they see more of him.

The UF College Republicans X account informs me that around 80% of their members are supporting Fishback. This indicates that he’s particularly popular among young Republicans with the highest level of interest in the race. Usually, political parties follow the lead of their more active members, which is another reason to be bullish on Fishback.

“Ah, but surely the Republican primary voter will reject a lying, scandal-plagued, smooth-talking conman whose shortcomings keep being exposed by the mainstream media!” If we’ve learned one lesson from the last decade, it’s that such a person is exactly who Republican voters want. And although Trump is exceptional, it doesn’t mean that GOP voters can’t see aspects of what they like about him in other candidates. Fishback has reached the youth first. Maybe there’s a boomer wall that will stop him from going any further. Or maybe this is now just a party that wants candidates who will take racist populism as far as possible and show them a good time.

Polymarket has Fishback at 10%. This is down from him hovering above 15% in early February. I was not surprised when he reached his highest point, as novelty candidates tend to have surges in prediction markets. This happened with Casey Putsch running against Vivek in the Ohio primaries, though he’s proved to be much less plausible as a candidate than Fishback.

What I’m actually surprised about is that Fishback is lower than he was back when he wasn’t showing up in the polling at all. Now, he’s somewhere between second and fourth place in the few polls we have, and with a lot more buzz. For him to stay at 10% puts a lot of faith in the Republican primary voter, and his ability to behave responsibly when it is time to vote. I don’t know if Fishback is too low; I’d say he’s about rightly priced. But again, Donalds is boring, and there’s a lot of time for him to flounder. I would put Donalds closer to 65%, hold Fishback at 10%, and buy Collins, Renner, and DeSantis.

Regardless of what happens in the Florida gubernatorial primary – again, Fishback may not even be eligible! – I think we’ve seen enough to understand that Trump wasn’t a one-off. The conservative movement is now stacked with blowhards, racists, and conmen from top to bottom. If you can entertain a crowd, you’re in the running, and bigotry is part of the fun. Those who would object are lame, and probably closet libs. It’s telling that in one X space, Fishback told a guy to go join the Democratic Party if he did not like the way he talked about “By’rone.” The Based Ritual doesn’t always demand that you actively be racist, but one thing it doesn’t tolerate is objecting to racism.

So do I actually want Fishback and Fuentes to win, so I can say I was right about everything? Trust me, if there were ever a primary between Fuentes and Ben Shapiro, I would give my vote to Shapiro. But yeah, I can’t deny there is a smug satisfaction in watching everything I’ve prophesied come true. And if the alternative to Groyperism is a more “moderate” right-wing populism that hates markets anyway, wants to keep all the brown people out, and just refuses to scapegoat Jews like it does every other minority group, then Fishback can perhaps play a role in running the GOP into the ground and helping something better emerge after it goes through a necessary rebuilding.

Whether or not Fishback ends up winning, I see little to indicate that he doesn’t represent the future of American conservatism. Young Republicans and newer entrants are, compared to older members of the party, less consistently conservative and more open both to left-wing ideas and explicit racism. A decade of Trumpist domination over the GOP has accelerated human capital polarization between the two parties, and the full consequences of that shift are yet to play out. As conservatives who are more educated and have higher levels of media literacy die off or leave the party, those who are left behind or actively enter the Trumpian GOP are those more likely to get behind scammers and bigots. Fishback’s performance in the gubernatorial race will help tell us how far along we are in the GOP’s transition to a more populist and racist party, but the ultimate destination is the same.

As young conservatives grow older, I doubt they’ll discover the merits of the MSM, and they are probably going to be less likely to meet the most important milestones of previous generations, namely getting married and having kids, which are often said to have a moderating effect on individuals’ political attitudes. This means that it would not be unreasonable to expect that the quality of Republican politicians and influencers will just continue to get worse indefinitely. Figures like Fishback should become a regular part of our politics.

Fishback’s sympathetic coverage in the populist-leaning right-wing press is a sign of how even the most odious figures will come to be normalized by the mainstream and relatively intellectual parts of the new conservative coalition. In some ways, this is ideological. Some right-wing writers want Republicans to become more economically statist and skeptical of Israel, and they look past Fishback’s flaws because they agree with him on these issues. But to get behind a character this bad is about more than ideological alignment; it’s a reminder of how populism involves a degradation of all moral and intellectual standards.