Kakistocracy as a Natural Result of Populism

The problem with anti-establishment politics

The mad man has done it. He’s stopped listening to anyone who isn’t a complete sycophant or the market, and enacted a tariff policy more extreme than we would have seen under what most thought was the worst case scenario. The formula of “reciprocity” being used is so stupid I approach the topic with awe, and have an almost superstitious feeling that if I even describe it I’ll somehow become stupider myself, though you can read about it here. I don’t think this ship can correct course. The Trump movement has been selecting for loyalty to Trump above all else, and we’re seeing the results. As Vice President Vance said during his trip to Greenland, “we can’t just ignore the president’s desires.”

Trump is not only wrecking the economy, but it’s notable how the people around him and his base are relatively muted. On a vote to end Canadian tariffs, only four Republican senators joined Democrats in rebuking Trump, even though many more certainly know better. The effort will go nowhere in the House, even though it would likely be in Republicans’ interest to take a stand and try to force the president to take a less self-destructive path. Maybe not in the interests of individual members though, since GOP voters still love Trump above all else and reward and punish GOP officials on that basis alone, and we will likely need to see serious consequences for the economy if that has any hope of changing.

As unique as Trump is, however, I think that there’s a broader lesson here about the dangers of populist governance. Shortly before the election, Noah Smith wrote that “Trumpism is kakistocracy.” The word “kakistocracy” means rule by those least suited to govern. His argument, similar to one I’ve made before, is that Trump only cares about loyalty, and a movement that prioritizes loyalty to a single extremely flawed man is going to facilitate the worst people rising to the top. Practically every high-ranking official in Trump’s first term ended up hating the man and saying so officially, with the only exceptions being those who ended up in legal jeopardy. Decent people have principles beyond “seek power” or “kiss up to Trump,” which means that they are unlikely to remain in good standing with MAGA.

I think he’s right about the Trump movement, but what’s happening here has precedents abroad, and it is well worth thinking about the larger pattern we are seeing across the globe. The important thing is that, whether we are talking about the US or some other country, political leaders or media figures, individuals and organizations that can be characterized as populist are uniquely ill suited to have political and social power for consistent reasons.

Recall my definition of populism as a movement that blames elites for social problems, champions aesthetics and values more common among the masses than elites, and “assigns status to individuals based on a direct connection to a mass audience or voters, rather than success within established institutions.” It is not simply the case that Trump is less competent and more dishonest and corrupt than other politicians. Populist podcast hosts like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Joe Rogan provide much worse informational content than establishment news outlets. They may be more entertaining to more people, which is why they have such large audiences in the first place, but they are worse according to any defensible journalistic standard one might hold. Similarly, you’re on average much better off listening to the American Medical Association’s guidance than a doctor who simply has a large social media following.

We don’t have to speculate here, as we can look at the records of populists abroad. There’s a large body of political science research showing that populism leads to worse outcomes. Hong Kong academic Dong Zang uses a cross-national dataset of 155 countries from 1960 to 2020 and finds a switch to a populist leader is associated with an increase in executive corruption, with the problem becoming worse the longer populists are in power. I’m not completely sold on a study like this, as it relies on a database that is built on the opinions of experts, which can be biased. Measuring corruption cross-nationally is difficult, especially since the entire concept is sort of fuzzy, leaders take pains to hide it, and perceptions must depend on the efforts put towards uncovering it.

Finding data on economic outcomes, however, is more straightforward and the results are unambiguous. A 2023 paper by Funke et al. published in the American Economic Review showed that between 1900 and 2020, populist rule is associated with 10% lower GDP per capita after 15 years compared to a plausible counterfactual. The authors don’t use the exact same definition of populism that I do, but note that “there seems to be more disagreement on the definition of populism in the literature than on who the populist leaders actually are.” What this means is that while the question of how we define populism might have some theoretical significance, practically, an approach of “I know it when I see it” is good enough because a wide range of observers agree on which leaders qualify.

Cross-national empirical research should usually be taken with a grain of salt, but since economic growth is a pretty straightforward variable, and there is a remarkable level of consensus among scholars about which leaders should be called populist, there aren’t too many assumptions we have to make in an analysis like this. In Trump’s second term, we are seeing in particularly vivid form how a populist leader can wreck the economy and degrade institutions, making the results even more believable. Funke et al. published their paper after the first Trump term, in which the economy was pretty good until covid, but the second administration has shown what happens when a populist leader is no longer surrounded by establishment figures and is allowed to completely indulge in his own instincts.

Interestingly, populists having bad economic outcomes is true for leaders of both the right and left, even though the latter are worse.

Given that left-wing and right-wing populists often pursue different policies, this is evidence that something about populism in its very essence makes it bad for growth. Funke et al. also note a decline in institutional quality as a result of populist governance.

Another negative characteristic we might note here is the connection between populist leaders and pseudoscientific or anti-scientific views. The most obvious recent example is the rise of MAHA within MAGA. But Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro dismissed the coronavirus as a “little flu” and then disparaged the vaccines developed to fight the disease. From the other side of the political spectrum, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador brought traditional healers into the medical system.

In other words, populist leaders tend to be bad at managing the economy, bad for institutions, anti-science, and corrupt. Other than the part on the economy, it’s difficult to establish these things through cross-national data analysis, but the idea that populists are worse on a wide range of seemingly unrelated measures is supported by a large amount of information one can glean from observing the experiences of nations across the world. In the American context, we see this in an extreme form, where MAGA has embraced election denial, conspiracy theories, and constant lying as a way of life.

I don’t think that this is all a big coincidence. Rather, I believe that there is a logical relationship between populism and kakistocracy.

A Less Informed Political Base

At its best, democracy works by providing feedback to leaders. Government adopts an irrational policy, the market has a reaction, and officials hopefully take that information into account. If a politician runs on an anti-corruption platform but then ends up being more corrupt than his predecessors, that should be discrediting and cost him support.

Yet this entire process requires voters to be connected to reality. If they’re in a fake news bubble, then even the most obvious failures will go unpunished. There have always been a lot of uninformed people who are reflexively partisan. Yet the most successful populist movements in the West overwhelmingly rely on uneducated voters. With some notable exceptions, the general pattern holds across much of the rest of the world. The reigns of Chavez and Maduro have been characterized by concentrated support for the government among the poor, as was that of Bolivian President Evo Morales, whose program appealed disproportionately to rural indigenous communities.

The problem with a less educated support base is that it simply has a less accurate understanding of the world. In fact, I think the problem is much worse than a simple analysis of voting patterns by educational attainment would suggest. Populists not only often fail to appeal to college graduates as a broad class, but they do particularly poorly among the small slice of the public that is the most informed about policy and current events, like journalists and academics.

One of my favorite fun facts from the 2024 presidential election is reflected in the chart below, which I put together based on numbers from Data for Progress. It shows that even when you control for education level, how much someone followed the race was negatively correlated with support for Trump in 2024. In fact, among college voters in particular, the voting gap between those who paid a lot of attention to the election and those who paid little attention was much larger than that between college and non-college educated voters. This dovetails with completely separate surveys showing that conservatives don’t read serious sources of information. One shouldn’t actually need surveys for this, as we can simply look at the almost total absence of popular right-leaning newspapers and magazines with high journalistic and intellectual standards.

Politicians that have a less educated base can make bad decisions and suffer fewer consequences for them. The fact that Trump is personally responsible through his tariffs policy for current economic woes is obvious to any informed observer, but might not be to an uninformed one. Trump’s base has lower cognitive ability and less interest in politics anyway, so they are probably less likely to be shaken out of their partisan stupor by empirical reality. No one can deny that leftists are also often partisan in their thinking. But that partisanship is tempered by access to and a willingness to accept accurate sources of information. The New York Times is simply more likely to challenge the biases of its audience than Catturd, Elon Musk, or Fox News, and liberals are more likely to trust and accept real news than conservatives are.

Conservatives argue that the media and Democratic establishment were in denial about Biden’s cognitive state throughout most of 2024. This is true, and shows that mainstream institutions have flaws. But what it doesn’t show is that conservatives would have acted better if the shoe were on the other foot and Trump was the one who was clearly senile. These are the people who try to pass laws to do things like name an airport after Trump, put Trump on Mount Rushmore, and create a $250 bill just to put Trump’s face on it. Democrats did eventually come together and coordinate to remove Biden from the ticket when his flaws became too obvious, while it seems doubtful that Trump could do or say anything at this point to cause a similar outcome on the right.

A better way to see the difference between the sides is to do apples-to-apples comparisons. Take polling. Trump and his supporters regularly dismiss bad polling news as fake, with the president actually having gone as far as suing a pollster whose result he didn’t like. In general, liberals take polling data at face value, and those who wanted to kick Biden to the curb after his disastrous debate performance relied heavily on what the numbers said. Nancy Pelosi told the president that the data showed he couldn’t beat Trump in November. When Biden replied he had seen other polling, Pelosi demanded that he put White House aide Mike Donilon on the phone to talk about it. When one contrasts what happened here to reports about conversations around Trump, what is notable is a willingness to challenge the leader of the party, along with the fact that this was a reality based discussion. Polling is often wrong, but you’ll get closer to truth functioning as a movement that assumes that the experts are doing the best they can rather than as one that believes any information it doesn’t like is part of a conspiracy. Republicans do not simply reject polling about future election results; they to this day deny the clear outcome of 2020.

In addition to being bad for punishing leaders for poor economic choices, poor access to information allows populist leaders to be more corrupt. We can begin by assuming, whether or not the idea is accurate, that populist and non-populist voters are equally intolerant of corruption. However, a politician can always claim that he is not corrupt, or that anything he has done pales in comparison to the misdeeds of his opposition. If everyone can do this, how can anyone ever be held responsible for corruption? Every allegation simply turns into a political football.

Populists have their base among the common people, rather than institutions. Yet the masses are going to be less informed than individuals like journalists, academics, and the heads of NGOs. Even when non-populists are biased, then, they usually are informed enough to understand that there can sometimes be legitimate scandals that implicate their own side. If your base is less educated and informed, however, you can simply tell blatant lies and get away with it.

The thing about the “anti-establishment” case for Trump is that for every accusation he makes against elites, he is personally worse. There is nothing any politician has done in our lifetime that compares to the great Trump memecoin heist, and the Truth Social IPO scam is hardly better. While Republicans spent years accusing Hunter Biden of profiting off his father’s name, they found nothing implicating the president himself in these activities despite years of investigations and access to his son’s private laptop. While the Republicans were freaking out about Hunter, the Trump kids were in the process of opening Trump Towers in foreign countries throughout his first term. Just last month, it was announced that the Trump Organization would be working on a multibillion dollar development project in Vietnam. Biden eventually pardoned his son and officials that Trump promised to prosecute, while Trump pardons rich guys who donate to his campaign without even attempting to provide a justification as to why. In February, the SEC halted an investigation into a Chinese crypto entrepreneur after he put $75 million into Trump’s scam coin. It’s gotten to the point that whenever a politician of either party gets into legal trouble, they start kissing up to Trump knowing that it might get them a pardon.

You sometimes hear people say that they like Trump because they’ve been lied to by Democrats or the press. Joe Rogan, for example, said he was radicalized by misrepresentations made by Tim Walz about his military background: “You’re telling me you don’t care if someone is a liar?” He ended up endorsing Trump, which is sort of like being fed up with religious intolerance and therefore becoming a fan of bin Laden. If you are someone who hates lies, there should be nobody in public life that you find more unbearable than Trump, except perhaps Elon Musk. I have every reason to believe that Rogan and his fans are sincere when they say they recoil from dishonesty. They’re just not plugged into accurate sources of information, and so are poorly equipped to judge who they should be mad at. Or alternatively, they’re simply engaging in motivated reasoning, but being this biased becomes more difficult the more one knows about the world.

The same is true when you hear someone say they sympathize with Trump because they oppose the politicization of the justice system. Trump appointed an FBI Director whose entire claim to fame is worshipping Trump and promising to prosecute his enemies. The fact that the Biden administration charged Trump with crimes seems bad unless you’re informed enough to know he was guilty of them. Biden had to wait until the end of his term to pardon his son and family members because he knew there would be a backlash to doing so. Trump comes into office and pardons or commutes the sentence of everyone who kisses up to him or gives him money from the beginning, fully understanding that his base simply doesn’t care. Part of this is I think the result of ethical polarization, in which Republicans are just less moral at this point – a natural result of a decade of Trump pushing everyone with principles out of the coalition. But much of this is simply an uninformed base not knowing all that much, and therefore finding it easier to default to partisan cheerleading.

Gatekeepers Are Usually Right

Recall that populism brings to power those who cannot get into influential positions through winning the admiration of other elites. James Comey and Chris Wray became heads of the FBI because they had stellar academic and professional records, gaining the approval of everyone from the admissions offices of elite colleges to the press to the vast majority of the members of the US Senate. They could have been elevated to their position under a president of either party. Kash Patel, in contrast, has only achieved distinction in his life because of his outsized talent in kissing up to Trump, and would not have been selected to run the FBI under any other leader.

Populists say that elites exclude them from institutions because they are corrupt and afraid of genuine reformers. In some cases that might be true. Yet when ideas and individuals are excluded from institutions, it is usually for a good reason. Kash Patel is not accomplished or ethical enough to have a top-level position in federal law enforcement in a well-functioning society. Elites should be very proud that, at least until recently, the system they built kept guys who hawk anti-vaccine supplements out of positions of power and influence.

We often focus on instances where elites reject ideas that turn out to be at least arguably correct. It is common to see discussions of universities or media outlets excluding or disparaging positions like opposition to DEI, skepticism over the claims of trans activists, or belief that covid leaked from a Chinese lab. In those instances, elite institutions can reasonably be criticized for having dismissed ideas they should have taken more seriously. That said, we must not lose sight of the fact that most of the time gatekeepers push people or ideas away, the establishment is right and the rebels are wrong.

Here’s a partial list of ideas that are rejected by mainstream academics and journalists, but have been promoted or gotten respectable hearings on the Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast in the country, over the last few years: there is an ancient city beneath the Giza pyramids; HIV does not cause AIDS; there were ancient human civilizations that predated recorded history; 9/11 may have been a government operation; mind reading is real; covid vaccines are more dangerous than the disease itself; and humans became more susceptible to polio due to vaccination. If you are mad at academia because you think it is too woke on issues related to race and gender, note that it also excludes believers in telepathy, ghosts, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, flat Earth theory, reptilian overlords, chemtrails, Bigfoot, astrology as science, Holocaust denial, moon landing hoax theories, homeopathy, and spirit channeling of the dead. Of course, the most common reason institutions reject people is lack of intelligence and work ethic.

The mistake of populists is to go from “Gatekeepers are wrong about X and Y” to “We shouldn’t have gatekeepers.” One may support Trump because you feel like he tells the truth about something the media is lying about. The problem is that the man is not the leader of a movement that is temperamentally or intellectually inclined to think carefully about where the establishment is right and where it is wrong. Rather, they’re just people who don’t trust doctors, scientists, journalists, or anyone who seems smart and might tell them something they don’t want to hear. I was deeply disillusioned watching RFK come into the Trump coalition, as this seemed to be a new kind of stupidity that was unrelated to the ways in which the MAGA movement has always been stupid. Yet in retrospect it made sense. The common thread here is antagonism towards elites.

In April 2021, Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, widely considered a populist leader, announced a ban on the importation of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, aiming to transition his country towards organic farming. The result was runaway inflation, mass hunger, and economic catastrophe. Gotabaya came to power mostly on a message of economic growth and national security, yet his crank views on farming were what ended up being the main story of his presidency. Populist leaders will often go in bizarre directions once they’re in power. It’s difficult to predict exactly what they’ll do wrong, but history indicates that those who reject mainstream sources of information and open to outsider ideas will find a way to screw things up. Michael Huemer’s case against Trump made a similar point here, focusing on the attempted coup of 2020, and what it indicated about what else the man might do if he came back to power.

All of this means you should think very carefully about signing on to an anti-establishment movement just because you disagree with the establishment on some things. If you attack elites and their institutions, it’s very unlikely that this will only mean empowering people who agree with you on where they have gone wrong. Tear down the gates in a system that is working relatively well, and you will get liars, morons, grifters, and cranks of all stripes. If a few sensible voices that would otherwise have been censored benefit, they will be a tiny minority. You might find Joe Rogan to be better than the NYT on the trans question, but Rogan’s status rising at the expense of the mainstream media makes the culture dumber on almost every other topic, and any politician who is more plugged in to podcasts than newspapers is likely to make unforeseen mistakes.

Populism as an Identity Based Movement

The final reason why there is a strong connection between populism and kakistocracy is that populism is an identity based movement, meaning the identity of a speaker or leader matters more than their ideas. Most reasonable observers were not shocked to learn that the Black Lives Matter movement ended up being dominated by grifters. Academic fraud and other kinds of ethical shortcomings are common among identity obsessed movements influenced by far left ideas on race and gender. The main reason for this is that the easiest thing in the world to do is to mobilize people based on identity, and when a movement legitimizes such an approach it creates room for scammers to rise to the top.

Populism divides the world between virtuous masses and corrupt elites. Its right-wing varieties usually have an implicit ethnonationalist basis. As long as someone says the right words about who the good or bad guys are, they can get ahead in the movement. Blaming others for problems provides ready scapegoats when things go wrong. Maduro talks of “economic war” to distract from the fact that socialism has failed in his country like it has everywhere else. While market-friendly liberals like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson advocate for building more to deal with the housing affordability crisis, they are opposed by populists on the left who want to pretend like corporations and landlords are the problem, as JD Vance blames illegal immigrants for driving up prices. Populists across the political spectrum are united in needing to blame others, and they begin with a narrative they are interested in pushing rather than a dispassionate analysis of facts.

Prejudice towards outgroups is one of the most powerful forces in politics, and responsible leaders avoid relying on it as a strategy. Meanwhile, Trump tells his supporters that immigrants are committing lots of crime and trade involves other nations ripping us off. It doesn’t matter that immigrant crime is objectively low, and practically all economists see trade in positive sum terms. If something makes foreigners look bad and contributes to a victimization narrative, it feels good and therefore must be true. Rightists also attack domestic and global elites. Meanwhile, left-wing populist leaders blame capitalists and foreign actors, particularly the United States, for economic difficulties.

Lee Kuan Yew famously said that in a multiracial democracy, people vote for their ethnic or religious group. This is indeed a general trend, but when leaders lean too much into identity, we understand that this poisons discourse and thought, which is why we call them demagogues. In the US, ethnopolitics is more acceptable for blacks than any other group, and blacks tend to elect extremely corrupt politicians. As of late 2009, all active ethics probes in the House of Representatives were into the behavior of black members, which led to charges of racism. Since 2019 alone, the black mayors of New York City, Baltimore, and Jackson have been indicted for corruption related charges.

Trumpism can be seen as identity politics for alienated white people. It is not a coincidence that the right has been becoming more accepting of corruption at the same time it has become implicitly ethnonationalist. Morality based movements care about the ethical standards of politicians and more intellectually inclined movements care about ideas. Populism is about blaming others for problems, so it has less mental energy to put towards policing the behavior of members of its own movement. Often, it makes tribalism into a virtue.

Election denial and trying to steal elections while accusing one’s opponents of doing the same is another hallmark of populism. After Bolsonaro lost his reelection bid in 2022, his supporters, seemingly inspired by January 6, urged the military to intervene and ransacked government buildings throughout the capital, with former top officials eventually being charged with attempting to stage a coup. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has taken several anti-democratic steps over the years, and his government recently arrested the mayor of Istanbul, a major opposition figure. Populists lack the same commitments to democratic procedures and norms that other political leaders have.

Populism as Another Axis of Politics

When I said I would vote Trump in 2024, I was clear eyed about the human capital problem on the right. I just thought that the basic ideological basis of conservatism – free markets, individual rights, tough on crime and foreign adversaries – was sound and enough of it was left over to make even a Republican president this personally flawed a better option.

Yet I was expecting something of a repeat of the first administration, with Trump restrained by traditional conservative ideas, personnel, and institutions. As it turned out, the old Reagan coalition was becoming increasingly hollow, replaced by Trump worship, online edgelordism, and late arriving scammers like crypto bros and MAHA. The signs were there, and I talked extensively about how Trump was becoming something of a cult leader with few checks on his whims and desires. But I must’ve thought that maybe Jared Kushner would just wait until he fell asleep around noon and then start making all the right calls. Or that it would be Elon, but that Elon was a smart guy with libertarian views instead of someone whose brain had been completely melted by right-wing internet slop.

The problem in the end though wasn’t just Trump as an individual, even though he is quite awful, but the entire idea of anti-establishment politics. We now have a great deal of empirical evidence showing that populism simply does not work, whether in its right or left-wing form.

There may be exceptions. I think that the Milei experiment is working out pretty well so far, as is Bukele. The Milei phenomenon seems like a kind of freak event, with the populist style having brought to the forefront a nerd who is into Austrian economics. Perhaps you have to thoroughly destroy your country with socialism for someone like that to have mass appeal. Bukele’s policies have worked in terms of lowering crime in a country that started out as a war zone. But him opening up his prison camps to people Trump deported is a worrying sign to say the least, as are some of the things he’s been saying about what he wants to do about the high prices of goods. Bukele did a great job in making El Salvador safer, but the jury is still out on how all of this ends.

All of this might indicate that populism can make sense as a short term option in a country where elites have failed in some kind of spectacular way. We’ve seen the broad pattern of less educated voters supporting populist leaders who are less competent, more corrupt, more conspiratorial, more anti-science, and less ethical – all to varying degrees – in the US, UK, France, and Germany. Particularly where institutions have been working well, a movement facing universal hostility from them is usually a bad sign.

In practical terms, I think that people should judge politicians and movements not only according to ideology, but a populist-nonpopulist axis. The story of the latter half of the Trump era is the rise of the Dale Gribble voter and the national GOP going far down the populist end of the spectrum. The results are being seen in the collapse of the stock market, and the harm being done to the rule of law and our scientific institutions. Let this be a warning to other countries that might be tempted to take a similar path, and provide lessons for how we decide to move forward once the Trump era ends.