Usually it means short-sighted policies. Short term gain for long term pain. For example, running massive deficits, printing tons of new money, and campaigning on negative polarization like "our opponents are all Nazis" tend to be common forms of left-wing populism.
Right wing populism tends to be economic protectionism that causes more problems than it solves, and political/military isolationism that runs the Chamberlain risk of ignoring/appeasing a problem until it gets so out of hand that drastic action becomes unavoidable.
Isolationism is Very Online and unpopular among normies, especially on the right. The real populism is blowing things up that belong to an unpopular dictator in a way that doesn't generate US casualties or footage of dead children.
I recall a Scott Alexander comment back when Trump bombed Syria early in his administration. It was something to the effect of, "Everyone I talked to in my weird intellectual circles, from eco-Marxists to TradCath reactionaries, thought it was a terrible idea for Trump to bomb Syria. And then it ended up being the best-polled thing he ever did."
Unfortunately I think it's not just a fringe online position that the west should just let Russia conquer Ukraine. Viveswany or however you spell his name floated it in the GOP debate.
Vivek is the Very Online candidate and what he's doing is bad politics. There has long been a small but highly visible peacenik wing in the GOP. Ron Paul tried to do this in '08 and was booed for it and had a campaign that predictably went nowhere, but if you judged based on support online, you'd think he was destined to win the primary.
If you think normie Republicans are drawn to these ways of thinking, you clearly don't know normie Republicans, but they represent almost everyone I interact with IRL. Most people don't give much thought to the rest of the world, but no one is winning their vote in a GOP primary by expressing peacenik or isolationist sentiments.
This might happen now that the US spent 10+ years provoking this war and then forced Zelenksy to avoid negotiating to accept conditions that are now impossible due to said pressure to continue this war. It's incredible to watch the pro-war crowd take the mask off and say that Ukrainians dying is all well and good since we get to kill Russians without losing American lives.
Ah yes, the old Chamberlain smear. Which has been used to smear the critics of every US intervention since WW2, most of which were terrible ideas. Also, isolationism could have prevented WW2 by having the US stay out of WW1.
I'd prefer populism over being a-political, because being a-political leads you to a Putinist Russia kind of society when there becomes no checks on the ruling elite. Populism = Democracy. A-politicism = Unchecked rule by the usurper.
I think people become interested in politics when they become unhappy with how things are arranged, just as you only take an interest in the workings of your body when it breaks down. I have never met a more apolitical people than my Japanese students and I suspect this is because they are generally happy with their lot.
Funny enough most Russians are "happy" with how things are going even now according to polls. It's just that the civic culture dies when there is a climate of apoliticism and when that happens there is no one left to challenge the dictator.
I think you have this backwards. Russians can be apolitical compared to westerners because a state strong enough to tamp down their political aspiration exists (and has for several centuries), and so they feel somewhat apathetic about politics. I think it's the authoritarianism that created the apathy and not the other way round.
I think the key is cynicism. You can be A-political because you think that both sides have good ideas and bad ones and you have more important stuff going on. Or you can be that way because you think it's all a scam and their all corrupt so why bother. Cynicism is the tool of dictators. But a society that runs exceptionally well will inevitably have lots of A-political people just because their problems just aren't that big.
Wait is Ukraine Nazi or ZOG? I'm losing track here.
>How many Jews fight in the war?
Nobody cares nerd.
>And how many Christians Slavs are PM, President, Attorney General, and Defence Minister of Ukraine?
The irony of course is that Putin, the great defender of white Christian civilization, is sending Chechen jihadis into white Christian Ukrainian villages to rape and murder.
I experience populism as an inchoate response to government screwing up and disrupting ordinary peoples' lives. E.g. in the Long Depression in the 19th century when the government created deflation (and hardship for debtors) after the inflation of the Civil War.
Populism should be a signal to the rulers: "hey, we are screwing up." But the rulers typically don't get it.
The deflation of the 19th century did not stop substantial growth in wages and economic production. That the populism of that era was not even remotely successful is indication of how overblown the "Gilded Age" meme is by post-New Deal neoleftists.
With Russia things are complicated by the fact that accurate information is hard to come by. If the people were better informed I wonder if they'd be quite so unpolitical. Or perhaps they would make a point of being better informed if they were more political, a kind of chicken-and-egg problem. But you are probably right in saying that knowing there is little you can do to change things probably does lead to political lethargy.
There is a Russian saying, "there are no happy endings in Russia". Hard to blame them given their history, but that is exactly the attitude that allows them to be shipped off to die for Putin's vanity.
Like most things it's a matter of degree. My socialist brother used to argue that the British police were just as bad as the Stasi because they too sometimes did bad things. Your question reminded me of that.
From time to time I do read Russian local and regional media. They are not big enough, so state does not care so much about them. For instance how they covered mobilization in their towns or regions. And apathy and lethargy, I would say, are best words to describe these local attitudes.
I suspect most of what I believe I believe simply because everyone else believes it and the thought of questioning it has never occurred to me. It's simply the invisible water in which I swim. Equally I have never understood how the question of why things fall occurred to Isaac Newton in the first place. Whether living a largely unexamined life is a blessing or not I can't say. However, surely the radical questioning of everything has the same effect of Daniel Dennett's 'universal acid': it burns through everything until there is no place left to stand.
>I suspect most of what I believe I believe simply because everyone else believes it and the thought of questioning it has never occurred to me.
If this is the case, I'm surprised that you're reading Hanania in the first place, given his unapologetic endorsement of very unpopular (even radioactive) political positions.
There are certain things which are visible to me and I like reading what Richard Hanania writes as it makes ever more things visible. But it is precisely this frequent realisation of 'Oh, I've never really thought about that before' that makes me realise that so much of what I believe goes unexamined. I'd always assumed I disliked Scrooge until I read Michael Levin's defense of him. That was another, 'Oh, I guess I've never really thought about it' moment.
> Whether living a largely unexamined life is a blessing or not I can't say.
I think it's perfectly fine (and honorable) to examine one's (and society's) condition deeply, do your research and analyze things logically. This is what scientists like Newton have done (and do). Most people, when they have a pang of realization that they don't know much about something (or anything) simply canvass the opinions of people they see and hear (this includes randos on the internet these days). That can have deleterious effects.
I agree. I think my point was, where do you stop? For example, I am my mother's carer. Should I sit down and examine whether this is the best use of my time, whether it's a child's responsibility to look after their elderly parents and if so, how does one decide such things? Maybe not thinking about it at all and doing what feels right (i.e. doing what most others believe, or at least say they believe) is best in some cases. And it seems to me there are many similar cases in life. And it's not as if examining things can't send you astray. Look at all the unhappy, childless women in the west who would have done better to simply copy what their grandmothers did. There are a lot of bad thinkers out there and I have no reason to suppose I'm not one of them.
*Someone* has to care about politics, though. Someone will be making the policies, after all. So how do we select for those policy-makers to be not stupid and hateful like the majority of everyone is? This is an extremely difficult problem, and I think one reason why we have settled on "democracy" as the least bad option. If everyone is stupid and hateful, at least they should all get a say, as opposed to one particular stupid hateful person (or group of people) having total power.
I really love/hate Richard, he is a great troll but also one of the most interesting autists of our time.
This excellent essay, which (I think) is about how excessive politicization rots a brain (and a society), reminds me of another excellent essay I read awhile ago by Robert Abelson, "Beliefs Are Like Possessions".
Abelson calls these "beliefs" we seem to have (or claim to have inside the digital panopticon) about things we really know little about (and often can't find on a map) "distal beliefs":
"Distal beliefs seem almost useless. They are tools that don’t objectively do anything. Yet it is clear that people are expected to have them and, indeed, do have them. Given that people have distal beliefs, what do they do with them? Since reality testing does not enter into distal beliefs, what other psychological functions control the adoption, exercise, and change of such beliefs?"
Then he gets to the nutmeat (which I think helps shine a light on your brain on politics):
"One finds or adopts beliefs with personal or social appeal. Other beliefs were received in childhood before one had much say in the matter. One shows off one’s beliefs to people one thinks will appreciate them, but not to those who are likely to be critical. One is inclined to ornament beliefs from time to time, especially when communicating them to others. If anyone is critical of them, one feels attacked and responds defensively, as though one’s appearance, taste, or judgment had been called into question. One occasionally adds new beliefs to one’s collection, if they do not glaringly clash with those one already has. It is something like the accumulation of furniture. One is reluctant to change any of one’s major beliefs. They are familiar and comfortable, and a big change would upset the whole collection...
When expressive beliefs are stated, there is often the intent to imply that the belief-holder has good character and good judgment, or a highly developed moral or spiritual sense."
And here's the finale:
"Beliefs are objects which provide values to their owners. The bases for these values have little to do with the probable truth of the beliefs. This is a crucial fact both psychologically and sociopolitically. Competitions between ideologies depend substantially upon which belief system provides greater value to its proponents. The analysis of the ebb and flow of the values of various beliefs is an important connection between individual psychology and mass politics."
Politics should follow the Middle Way or observe the Golden Mean: too little may sever your connection to others, too much turns you into a drooling zealot. But, either way, for the love of God, let's stop pretending humans are "rational"!
I'm curious what the point of disliking populism is, though. Let's say a country is dominated by populists, with large margins of support. The government has anti-immigration, anti-offshoring (jobs or capital), pro-family/fertility policies. We would expect this country, with this policies, to do less well economically than it would otherwise, yes? Anyone there who would prefer to live somewhere less restrictive could just move. There'd be a boiling-off effect and the country would get poorer and more populist over time, hurting nobody.
According to Hanania, average people have sufficient mastery of economics such that their free choice in such matters (because clearly multinational corporations and the average wage slave are on equal epistemic footing here) is sacred and should never be violated, but they are far too dumb to understand political science and their preferences in this area should be heavily discounted if not ignored.
Based on the relative intelligence of economics and polisci majors, among other things, I find this questionable. In fact, most of the egregious stupidity of recent times (mass immigration, pediatric gender medicine, affirmative action, letting criminals run wild, etc.) has been broadly unpopular with the unwashed masses he despises, and would never have happened under a government that was responsive to the preferences of the people rather than elite interests.
The people may get a lot of things wrong, but they understand the real world and how it works far better than the bubble-living pseudomarxists aristocrats currently in charge. Does he really propose that people who don’t know the difference between men and women should run complex modern societies? An illiterate farm hand is wiser than this bunch.
Illiterate farm hands in Oaxaca believe there are three genders, as do the farm hands in the Philippines, India, Indonesia, and many other places. If you went there to explain that they are wrong would you give up and accept that populism should decide what's true? Or are there universal truths and maybe it doesn't matter if the masses believe them or not?
Well, the story of Muxes is a bit more nuanced, doesn't quite map onto Current Party Doctrine (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/23/world/americas/mexico-muxes-bathroom-debate.html) and is far less insane (it's a social role, not a denial of biological reality). But sure, the "masses" hold all kinds of inaccurate and foolish notions. I share with the Founders a very healthy skepticism of their political wisdom when mobilized by demagogues. But I also share their fear of concentrated elite power. The demise of the Roman Republic shows the danger of both of these poles and the Founders strove mightily to design a system that could avoid that fate.
In an era where digital technology massively amplifies the potential power of elites, they now represent the biggest danger to the republic, so I currently lean populist.
As for the alleged wisdom of the elites whose ranks Richard now positions himself to join, I stand with George Orwell: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool” and Bertrand Russell: “This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them." With the exception of Singapore, or possibly China (jury still out) it's hard to think of an instance where handing over all power to an unaccountable elite vanguard party has not ended in total disaster, which Richard might realize if he was aware of political history before the year 1960.
As for your argument about belief dictating reality -- that's just bizarre -- I said nothing of the sort and I don't waste time refuting claims I never made.
The great balancing act of liberal democracy: to have a state strong enough to put down striking workers, but weak enough not to attack or destroy concentrations of private wealth--the liberal dimension. Also. enough procedural mechanism to create an appearance of popular sovereignty while being able to re-launder the same narrow set of elites owned by the same narrow interest groups--the democratic dimension.
RH is interesting because at heart he starts from an essentially Marxist sociology, but his political problem is how to keep workers down and the Oligarch and their Trustifarian children up. Perhaps his next book will be on the virtues of false consciousness. He may want to make it sound prettier, but "Conservative politics historically has been great because it channels the energy of the proles into political positions contrary to their own interests" is right out of Karl Marx.
There is nothing narrow about our elites or our interest groups. Politicians come from every walk of life and there are powerful interest groups on every side of each political question. Labor unions and corporations are both interest groups that compete for political power. Claiming that they are all together working to control everything is simplistic nonsense.
I am interested in empirical models of reality that are descriptive, and the best model for American democracy is a system that is primarily responsive to the demands of the wealthy and powerful economic interests, and sometimes moderately responsive to the middle class. I think anyone who spends more than 20 minutes in Washington figures that out pretty fast, even if they aren't willing to say it.
On my planet, our Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech, which means those with the most money get to buy the most speech. This view was previously expressed by Oswald Spengler in his critique of liberal democracy, and the basis for his conclusion that liberal democracy is a sham government controlled by oligarchs. Of course, for the right person, this is a feature, not a bug. [According to Montesquieu, the Republican form of government when it decays becomes an Oligarchy. This was certainly the fate of the Roman Republic, and lead to civil wars and the formation of the Empire.]
As an aside, one of the things that is mystifying about Yarvin is his hostility to modern democracy. The problem with the libertopia dictatorship is you end up with a power base that is too narrow to pick up any real legitimacy, like the Girondists in France. You need the democratic sham with an occasional sop to the masses to keep up appearances. RH, whatever his flaws, seems to get this point which is lost on Yarvin.
The real question is whether the status quo is sustainable, and whether American society can continue to compete effectively with the competition, or whether we are slouching toward idiocracy, civil war, and imperial collapse.
So called populist ideas on trade, energy, and work not because they represent the wisdom of the masses, but rather because these policies benefit the country as a whole. Trusting in the wisdom of free markets to help the working class is a noble lie. Markets are not free. Pretending otherwise benefits the few at the expense of the country as a whole.
Communists are only the greatest murderers in history when you fail to adjust for per capita nor consider the counterfactual. Communism turned an absolutely backwater feudal state into a co-world nuclear superpower with America, communism unified several long-bickering Balkan states successfully against the aforementioned nuclear superpower, communism gave an ancient kingdom-turned-colonial-plaything the independence and time necessary to enjoy arguably the most impressive economic boom in world history, and it even turned a bunch of punji stick-setting tunnel-dwellers into a highly respectable developed economy with minimal murder at all. One can hand-wring over individual atrocities or gulags, but the same can be done with most nations in history, including certain glorious 19th century empires.
The problem isn't hatred of elites, which is justified almost by definition, but a failure to identify the material problem underlying newly formed revolutionary states. The reset button of any explosive event, literal or metaphorical, provides a new slate; what is then written isn't necessarily relevant to what was previously. There were no feudal lords to squat the ruins of post-war Germany, in stark contrast to post-civil rights Michigan in which thousands of petty administrator-speculators may hold in perpetuity five-figure tax liens on long-burned housing lots, while evicting and seizing the homes of the elderly over pocket change.
The problem with populism in America is that it's sold in a way that exists to pacify its listeners while enacting the exact opposite policy it claims to want. Robert Reich can go on about the rich and the need for wealth taxes, while simultaneously shutting down new housing to maintain his own property values, and self-described left-wing populists suck him off. Even nazbols like Eric Striker are pro-nimby and take the side of some of the most craven speculators as long as the entry-level populism of racial tension is satisfied. Every American populist is invested in artificial scarcity. Since full-on MAGA Communism isn't going to happen from within to overthrow the elites by force, we must look abroad with open eyes, and encourage complete demographic replacement of the boomer class that created the problem to begin with. A new America with new infrastructure and cheap housing, engineered by the Chinese, constructed by various Spanish-speaking people. It's the only way forward. Those of us in the Southwest are already enjoying the fruits of this labor, such as in Vegas and Phoenix where we build endless suburbs in the driest deserts just to escape the tyrants of the Midwest and New England.
Are you sure a reformation of the tsarist regime could not have modernized Russia eventually, sans all the murder and tyranny wrought by the communists? Russia was industrially backwards only relative to the Anglosphere, Western European countries and to some extent Japan. It would have caught up even with a moderate kind of regime, if the Bolsheviks had not seized power.
Certainly possible, and under certain hypotheticals one could even imagine the net death of a non-Stalinist USSR being substantially lower. But one can also imagine a world in which Hitler (or an equivalent) had to merely brush aside an unstable feudal 20th century Imperial Russia to secure access to Baku, and easily see how a victorious Hitler would have been more murderous than Stalin considering that Hitler's lower death count was primarily due to his much shorter regime. Even in a situation where Lenin's too-late attempted liberalization helped stabilize the global economy and reduce the desire for WW2, the motivation for industrialization, lack of strong central power, and tendency towards crime means Russia turns more India than a proper first-world market economy.
Ultimately, millions still starved under pre-communist Russia in earlier famines, and the strong majority of those killed under Stalin were killed as a direct consequence of Hitler's war (~10 million soldiers, many millions of civilians killed under occupation or siege, vs up to several million in state-directed famines (something the British imposed on the Bengalis during WW2 btw) and ~2 million max in the gulags). The real point isn't so much to say communism is a good system of economic activity or domestic government, it's overwhelmingly terrible at that, but as a highly functional mode of populism and regime change it enjoys a number of remarkable successes. A weak government can drag on for millennia and cause the invisible misery of unrealized potential, an explosive revolution at least has a chance of real improvement.
Accusations of being too rich, elite, or out of touch aren't name-calling; they're just accusations of being insulated from the consequences of your views, or being part of a minority that benefits from them while the majority does not.
Populism is just what happens when the average people are the only people left acting in their own self-interest. It's not desirable for it to win and govern, exactly, but it is desirable to scare the "elites" into doing the right thing again.
Everyone does not try to paint everyone as "elite," and just because anyone can say something does not make it equally true when everyone says it. We are talking about policies with negative externalities that you can buy your way out of with money, which is a real and specific phenomenon.
The person I have always heard rail about "elites" more than anyone was Tucker Carlson. A rich guy wearing a bow tie. The word is completely meaningless today.
Tucker Carlson does not claim he's poor or "not elite." There is nothing confusing about a person criticizing the general behaviour of a group that they themselves could be classified as a part of.
If he makes it clear that he is criticizing his own class then I would agree. But he never speaks as though he is including himself in that group, he frames it as though he is an outsider, which I find dishonest.
Well he criticizes the opinions of "the ruling class." When you criticize the opinions of a group, you're ipso facto an outsider in regard to the opinions. Everyone knows he is rich; he talks about how he sent his kids to private episcopalian schools and then suddenly realized that all these institutions around him had changed. If he pretended not to be rich, or if he implied that having money was immoral, that would be more dishonest.
1. "You can buy your way out of anything" is further to the point.
2. Imagining certain mutually exclusive policy decisions that lead to the same net result is an irrelevant thought experiment.
3. Those two thought experiments do not even work. For any given large-scale economic or industrial decision, the particulars determine the outcome. Ceasing the majority of global fossil fuel usage is elite. Building a chemical plant that saves a few dollars in disposal fees by poisoning locals in Michigan is elite. And so on. As for releasing criminals without bail, that is generally elite, because the rich indulge their magnanimous self-perceptions while releasing criminals on everyone else. In the alternative scenario, the rich gain nothing (buying your way out and being set free automatically is the same thing to them) and society, 99% of which doesn't go to jail, is better protected from criminals. For the small minority of criminals (or poor people who anticipate being wrongfully jailed), yes, that policy has ambiguous political valence, but that is quite beside the point.
The only consistent definition of “Populism” across the political divide I can find is - ‘popular opinions I don’t agree with.’
If you agree with them, it's called democracy.
Usually it means short-sighted policies. Short term gain for long term pain. For example, running massive deficits, printing tons of new money, and campaigning on negative polarization like "our opponents are all Nazis" tend to be common forms of left-wing populism.
Right wing populism tends to be economic protectionism that causes more problems than it solves, and political/military isolationism that runs the Chamberlain risk of ignoring/appeasing a problem until it gets so out of hand that drastic action becomes unavoidable.
Isolationism is Very Online and unpopular among normies, especially on the right. The real populism is blowing things up that belong to an unpopular dictator in a way that doesn't generate US casualties or footage of dead children.
I recall a Scott Alexander comment back when Trump bombed Syria early in his administration. It was something to the effect of, "Everyone I talked to in my weird intellectual circles, from eco-Marxists to TradCath reactionaries, thought it was a terrible idea for Trump to bomb Syria. And then it ended up being the best-polled thing he ever did."
Unfortunately I think it's not just a fringe online position that the west should just let Russia conquer Ukraine. Viveswany or however you spell his name floated it in the GOP debate.
Vivek is the Very Online candidate and what he's doing is bad politics. There has long been a small but highly visible peacenik wing in the GOP. Ron Paul tried to do this in '08 and was booed for it and had a campaign that predictably went nowhere, but if you judged based on support online, you'd think he was destined to win the primary.
If you think normie Republicans are drawn to these ways of thinking, you clearly don't know normie Republicans, but they represent almost everyone I interact with IRL. Most people don't give much thought to the rest of the world, but no one is winning their vote in a GOP primary by expressing peacenik or isolationist sentiments.
"...should just let Russia conquer Ukraine."
This might happen now that the US spent 10+ years provoking this war and then forced Zelenksy to avoid negotiating to accept conditions that are now impossible due to said pressure to continue this war. It's incredible to watch the pro-war crowd take the mask off and say that Ukrainians dying is all well and good since we get to kill Russians without losing American lives.
found the populist I guess
Ah yes, the old Chamberlain smear. Which has been used to smear the critics of every US intervention since WW2, most of which were terrible ideas. Also, isolationism could have prevented WW2 by having the US stay out of WW1.
WWI isolationism would not have prevented WWII
Yes, because people are too lazy to look up what words mean before they use them.
In the context of this blog it means "deeply held beliefs of déclassé white people"
If populism was so bad then why is it so popular?
Why is chocolate so popular?
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
I'd prefer populism over being a-political, because being a-political leads you to a Putinist Russia kind of society when there becomes no checks on the ruling elite. Populism = Democracy. A-politicism = Unchecked rule by the usurper.
I think people become interested in politics when they become unhappy with how things are arranged, just as you only take an interest in the workings of your body when it breaks down. I have never met a more apolitical people than my Japanese students and I suspect this is because they are generally happy with their lot.
Funny enough most Russians are "happy" with how things are going even now according to polls. It's just that the civic culture dies when there is a climate of apoliticism and when that happens there is no one left to challenge the dictator.
Not really. Russia just needs better elites. The Russian people being apolitical is probably the best part of the Russian system.
Every country would be better if it had better rlites
I think you have this backwards. Russians can be apolitical compared to westerners because a state strong enough to tamp down their political aspiration exists (and has for several centuries), and so they feel somewhat apathetic about politics. I think it's the authoritarianism that created the apathy and not the other way round.
I think the key is cynicism. You can be A-political because you think that both sides have good ideas and bad ones and you have more important stuff going on. Or you can be that way because you think it's all a scam and their all corrupt so why bother. Cynicism is the tool of dictators. But a society that runs exceptionally well will inevitably have lots of A-political people just because their problems just aren't that big.
Nothings says saving your people from Zionist rape like throwing hundreds of thousands into a meat grinder next door.
>masturbated your circumcised cock
You think about male genitalia often. Are you in denial about something?
>rape of Russia by international Zionists.
Putin is doing a fine job of raping Russia himself. There is no need for the Jews to step in.
>Quit pretending you do not know of honour
Nerd alert!
>international Zionism
I thought you loved race based nationalism?
> the American Empire
Based
>the eventual destruction of your country.
You do realize Russia has had several revolutions in just the past century right? Russia is the opposite of stable.
Another reference to penis. Is that all you ever think about? How tempted are you to give one a little toot?
How many medications are you on?
Correct Putin does hate Christian Europeans which is why he is trying to wipe so many of them out as we speak.
Hold up a mirror
I am an agent of ZOG and JDIF. Tremble at my high IQ and high income!
I'm actually a filthy goy. I just find it funny how paranoid you are.
>western cuckoldry
Projection alert
>a government occupied by Jews from the top down
Wait is Ukraine Nazi or ZOG? I'm losing track here.
>How many Jews fight in the war?
Nobody cares nerd.
>And how many Christians Slavs are PM, President, Attorney General, and Defence Minister of Ukraine?
The irony of course is that Putin, the great defender of white Christian civilization, is sending Chechen jihadis into white Christian Ukrainian villages to rape and murder.
Is it news to you that Putin is very pro-Islam (just like Hitler) and is has used jihadis in Ukraine?
How many whites has Putin caused to be slain in his war?
I experience populism as an inchoate response to government screwing up and disrupting ordinary peoples' lives. E.g. in the Long Depression in the 19th century when the government created deflation (and hardship for debtors) after the inflation of the Civil War.
Populism should be a signal to the rulers: "hey, we are screwing up." But the rulers typically don't get it.
The deflation of the 19th century did not stop substantial growth in wages and economic production. That the populism of that era was not even remotely successful is indication of how overblown the "Gilded Age" meme is by post-New Deal neoleftists.
With Russia things are complicated by the fact that accurate information is hard to come by. If the people were better informed I wonder if they'd be quite so unpolitical. Or perhaps they would make a point of being better informed if they were more political, a kind of chicken-and-egg problem. But you are probably right in saying that knowing there is little you can do to change things probably does lead to political lethargy.
There is a Russian saying, "there are no happy endings in Russia". Hard to blame them given their history, but that is exactly the attitude that allows them to be shipped off to die for Putin's vanity.
How easy is accurate information to come by here?
Like most things it's a matter of degree. My socialist brother used to argue that the British police were just as bad as the Stasi because they too sometimes did bad things. Your question reminded me of that.
From time to time I do read Russian local and regional media. They are not big enough, so state does not care so much about them. For instance how they covered mobilization in their towns or regions. And apathy and lethargy, I would say, are best words to describe these local attitudes.
I suspect most of what I believe I believe simply because everyone else believes it and the thought of questioning it has never occurred to me. It's simply the invisible water in which I swim. Equally I have never understood how the question of why things fall occurred to Isaac Newton in the first place. Whether living a largely unexamined life is a blessing or not I can't say. However, surely the radical questioning of everything has the same effect of Daniel Dennett's 'universal acid': it burns through everything until there is no place left to stand.
>I suspect most of what I believe I believe simply because everyone else believes it and the thought of questioning it has never occurred to me.
If this is the case, I'm surprised that you're reading Hanania in the first place, given his unapologetic endorsement of very unpopular (even radioactive) political positions.
There are certain things which are visible to me and I like reading what Richard Hanania writes as it makes ever more things visible. But it is precisely this frequent realisation of 'Oh, I've never really thought about that before' that makes me realise that so much of what I believe goes unexamined. I'd always assumed I disliked Scrooge until I read Michael Levin's defense of him. That was another, 'Oh, I guess I've never really thought about it' moment.
In all things, balance.
> Whether living a largely unexamined life is a blessing or not I can't say.
I think it's perfectly fine (and honorable) to examine one's (and society's) condition deeply, do your research and analyze things logically. This is what scientists like Newton have done (and do). Most people, when they have a pang of realization that they don't know much about something (or anything) simply canvass the opinions of people they see and hear (this includes randos on the internet these days). That can have deleterious effects.
I agree. I think my point was, where do you stop? For example, I am my mother's carer. Should I sit down and examine whether this is the best use of my time, whether it's a child's responsibility to look after their elderly parents and if so, how does one decide such things? Maybe not thinking about it at all and doing what feels right (i.e. doing what most others believe, or at least say they believe) is best in some cases. And it seems to me there are many similar cases in life. And it's not as if examining things can't send you astray. Look at all the unhappy, childless women in the west who would have done better to simply copy what their grandmothers did. There are a lot of bad thinkers out there and I have no reason to suppose I'm not one of them.
*Someone* has to care about politics, though. Someone will be making the policies, after all. So how do we select for those policy-makers to be not stupid and hateful like the majority of everyone is? This is an extremely difficult problem, and I think one reason why we have settled on "democracy" as the least bad option. If everyone is stupid and hateful, at least they should all get a say, as opposed to one particular stupid hateful person (or group of people) having total power.
The least bad option is a democracy with a strictly limited franchise.
I really love/hate Richard, he is a great troll but also one of the most interesting autists of our time.
This excellent essay, which (I think) is about how excessive politicization rots a brain (and a society), reminds me of another excellent essay I read awhile ago by Robert Abelson, "Beliefs Are Like Possessions".
Abelson calls these "beliefs" we seem to have (or claim to have inside the digital panopticon) about things we really know little about (and often can't find on a map) "distal beliefs":
"Distal beliefs seem almost useless. They are tools that don’t objectively do anything. Yet it is clear that people are expected to have them and, indeed, do have them. Given that people have distal beliefs, what do they do with them? Since reality testing does not enter into distal beliefs, what other psychological functions control the adoption, exercise, and change of such beliefs?"
Then he gets to the nutmeat (which I think helps shine a light on your brain on politics):
"One finds or adopts beliefs with personal or social appeal. Other beliefs were received in childhood before one had much say in the matter. One shows off one’s beliefs to people one thinks will appreciate them, but not to those who are likely to be critical. One is inclined to ornament beliefs from time to time, especially when communicating them to others. If anyone is critical of them, one feels attacked and responds defensively, as though one’s appearance, taste, or judgment had been called into question. One occasionally adds new beliefs to one’s collection, if they do not glaringly clash with those one already has. It is something like the accumulation of furniture. One is reluctant to change any of one’s major beliefs. They are familiar and comfortable, and a big change would upset the whole collection...
When expressive beliefs are stated, there is often the intent to imply that the belief-holder has good character and good judgment, or a highly developed moral or spiritual sense."
And here's the finale:
"Beliefs are objects which provide values to their owners. The bases for these values have little to do with the probable truth of the beliefs. This is a crucial fact both psychologically and sociopolitically. Competitions between ideologies depend substantially upon which belief system provides greater value to its proponents. The analysis of the ebb and flow of the values of various beliefs is an important connection between individual psychology and mass politics."
Politics should follow the Middle Way or observe the Golden Mean: too little may sever your connection to others, too much turns you into a drooling zealot. But, either way, for the love of God, let's stop pretending humans are "rational"!
I'm curious what the point of disliking populism is, though. Let's say a country is dominated by populists, with large margins of support. The government has anti-immigration, anti-offshoring (jobs or capital), pro-family/fertility policies. We would expect this country, with this policies, to do less well economically than it would otherwise, yes? Anyone there who would prefer to live somewhere less restrictive could just move. There'd be a boiling-off effect and the country would get poorer and more populist over time, hurting nobody.
Why would this be bad?
It would be bad for me, because it would force me to move.
You literally described North Korea.
According to Hanania, average people have sufficient mastery of economics such that their free choice in such matters (because clearly multinational corporations and the average wage slave are on equal epistemic footing here) is sacred and should never be violated, but they are far too dumb to understand political science and their preferences in this area should be heavily discounted if not ignored.
Based on the relative intelligence of economics and polisci majors, among other things, I find this questionable. In fact, most of the egregious stupidity of recent times (mass immigration, pediatric gender medicine, affirmative action, letting criminals run wild, etc.) has been broadly unpopular with the unwashed masses he despises, and would never have happened under a government that was responsive to the preferences of the people rather than elite interests.
The people may get a lot of things wrong, but they understand the real world and how it works far better than the bubble-living pseudomarxists aristocrats currently in charge. Does he really propose that people who don’t know the difference between men and women should run complex modern societies? An illiterate farm hand is wiser than this bunch.
Illiterate farm hands in Oaxaca believe there are three genders, as do the farm hands in the Philippines, India, Indonesia, and many other places. If you went there to explain that they are wrong would you give up and accept that populism should decide what's true? Or are there universal truths and maybe it doesn't matter if the masses believe them or not?
Well, the story of Muxes is a bit more nuanced, doesn't quite map onto Current Party Doctrine (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/23/world/americas/mexico-muxes-bathroom-debate.html) and is far less insane (it's a social role, not a denial of biological reality). But sure, the "masses" hold all kinds of inaccurate and foolish notions. I share with the Founders a very healthy skepticism of their political wisdom when mobilized by demagogues. But I also share their fear of concentrated elite power. The demise of the Roman Republic shows the danger of both of these poles and the Founders strove mightily to design a system that could avoid that fate.
In an era where digital technology massively amplifies the potential power of elites, they now represent the biggest danger to the republic, so I currently lean populist.
As for the alleged wisdom of the elites whose ranks Richard now positions himself to join, I stand with George Orwell: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool” and Bertrand Russell: “This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them." With the exception of Singapore, or possibly China (jury still out) it's hard to think of an instance where handing over all power to an unaccountable elite vanguard party has not ended in total disaster, which Richard might realize if he was aware of political history before the year 1960.
As for your argument about belief dictating reality -- that's just bizarre -- I said nothing of the sort and I don't waste time refuting claims I never made.
The great balancing act of liberal democracy: to have a state strong enough to put down striking workers, but weak enough not to attack or destroy concentrations of private wealth--the liberal dimension. Also. enough procedural mechanism to create an appearance of popular sovereignty while being able to re-launder the same narrow set of elites owned by the same narrow interest groups--the democratic dimension.
RH is interesting because at heart he starts from an essentially Marxist sociology, but his political problem is how to keep workers down and the Oligarch and their Trustifarian children up. Perhaps his next book will be on the virtues of false consciousness. He may want to make it sound prettier, but "Conservative politics historically has been great because it channels the energy of the proles into political positions contrary to their own interests" is right out of Karl Marx.
Well it sounds bad when *you* say it.
There is nothing narrow about our elites or our interest groups. Politicians come from every walk of life and there are powerful interest groups on every side of each political question. Labor unions and corporations are both interest groups that compete for political power. Claiming that they are all together working to control everything is simplistic nonsense.
What planet are you from?
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
I am interested in empirical models of reality that are descriptive, and the best model for American democracy is a system that is primarily responsive to the demands of the wealthy and powerful economic interests, and sometimes moderately responsive to the middle class. I think anyone who spends more than 20 minutes in Washington figures that out pretty fast, even if they aren't willing to say it.
On my planet, our Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech, which means those with the most money get to buy the most speech. This view was previously expressed by Oswald Spengler in his critique of liberal democracy, and the basis for his conclusion that liberal democracy is a sham government controlled by oligarchs. Of course, for the right person, this is a feature, not a bug. [According to Montesquieu, the Republican form of government when it decays becomes an Oligarchy. This was certainly the fate of the Roman Republic, and lead to civil wars and the formation of the Empire.]
As an aside, one of the things that is mystifying about Yarvin is his hostility to modern democracy. The problem with the libertopia dictatorship is you end up with a power base that is too narrow to pick up any real legitimacy, like the Girondists in France. You need the democratic sham with an occasional sop to the masses to keep up appearances. RH, whatever his flaws, seems to get this point which is lost on Yarvin.
The real question is whether the status quo is sustainable, and whether American society can continue to compete effectively with the competition, or whether we are slouching toward idiocracy, civil war, and imperial collapse.
So called populist ideas on trade, energy, and work not because they represent the wisdom of the masses, but rather because these policies benefit the country as a whole. Trusting in the wisdom of free markets to help the working class is a noble lie. Markets are not free. Pretending otherwise benefits the few at the expense of the country as a whole.
Debating each of these ideas individually on their merits makes sense. I think what RH is trying to say is that popular and true are different.
Communists are only the greatest murderers in history when you fail to adjust for per capita nor consider the counterfactual. Communism turned an absolutely backwater feudal state into a co-world nuclear superpower with America, communism unified several long-bickering Balkan states successfully against the aforementioned nuclear superpower, communism gave an ancient kingdom-turned-colonial-plaything the independence and time necessary to enjoy arguably the most impressive economic boom in world history, and it even turned a bunch of punji stick-setting tunnel-dwellers into a highly respectable developed economy with minimal murder at all. One can hand-wring over individual atrocities or gulags, but the same can be done with most nations in history, including certain glorious 19th century empires.
The problem isn't hatred of elites, which is justified almost by definition, but a failure to identify the material problem underlying newly formed revolutionary states. The reset button of any explosive event, literal or metaphorical, provides a new slate; what is then written isn't necessarily relevant to what was previously. There were no feudal lords to squat the ruins of post-war Germany, in stark contrast to post-civil rights Michigan in which thousands of petty administrator-speculators may hold in perpetuity five-figure tax liens on long-burned housing lots, while evicting and seizing the homes of the elderly over pocket change.
The problem with populism in America is that it's sold in a way that exists to pacify its listeners while enacting the exact opposite policy it claims to want. Robert Reich can go on about the rich and the need for wealth taxes, while simultaneously shutting down new housing to maintain his own property values, and self-described left-wing populists suck him off. Even nazbols like Eric Striker are pro-nimby and take the side of some of the most craven speculators as long as the entry-level populism of racial tension is satisfied. Every American populist is invested in artificial scarcity. Since full-on MAGA Communism isn't going to happen from within to overthrow the elites by force, we must look abroad with open eyes, and encourage complete demographic replacement of the boomer class that created the problem to begin with. A new America with new infrastructure and cheap housing, engineered by the Chinese, constructed by various Spanish-speaking people. It's the only way forward. Those of us in the Southwest are already enjoying the fruits of this labor, such as in Vegas and Phoenix where we build endless suburbs in the driest deserts just to escape the tyrants of the Midwest and New England.
Are you sure a reformation of the tsarist regime could not have modernized Russia eventually, sans all the murder and tyranny wrought by the communists? Russia was industrially backwards only relative to the Anglosphere, Western European countries and to some extent Japan. It would have caught up even with a moderate kind of regime, if the Bolsheviks had not seized power.
Certainly possible, and under certain hypotheticals one could even imagine the net death of a non-Stalinist USSR being substantially lower. But one can also imagine a world in which Hitler (or an equivalent) had to merely brush aside an unstable feudal 20th century Imperial Russia to secure access to Baku, and easily see how a victorious Hitler would have been more murderous than Stalin considering that Hitler's lower death count was primarily due to his much shorter regime. Even in a situation where Lenin's too-late attempted liberalization helped stabilize the global economy and reduce the desire for WW2, the motivation for industrialization, lack of strong central power, and tendency towards crime means Russia turns more India than a proper first-world market economy.
Ultimately, millions still starved under pre-communist Russia in earlier famines, and the strong majority of those killed under Stalin were killed as a direct consequence of Hitler's war (~10 million soldiers, many millions of civilians killed under occupation or siege, vs up to several million in state-directed famines (something the British imposed on the Bengalis during WW2 btw) and ~2 million max in the gulags). The real point isn't so much to say communism is a good system of economic activity or domestic government, it's overwhelmingly terrible at that, but as a highly functional mode of populism and regime change it enjoys a number of remarkable successes. A weak government can drag on for millennia and cause the invisible misery of unrealized potential, an explosive revolution at least has a chance of real improvement.
Or if their politics agrees with mine ... 😉🙂
Accusations of being too rich, elite, or out of touch aren't name-calling; they're just accusations of being insulated from the consequences of your views, or being part of a minority that benefits from them while the majority does not.
Populism is just what happens when the average people are the only people left acting in their own self-interest. It's not desirable for it to win and govern, exactly, but it is desirable to scare the "elites" into doing the right thing again.
Hasn't been working so far though.
Everyone does not try to paint everyone as "elite," and just because anyone can say something does not make it equally true when everyone says it. We are talking about policies with negative externalities that you can buy your way out of with money, which is a real and specific phenomenon.
The person I have always heard rail about "elites" more than anyone was Tucker Carlson. A rich guy wearing a bow tie. The word is completely meaningless today.
Tucker Carlson does not claim he's poor or "not elite." There is nothing confusing about a person criticizing the general behaviour of a group that they themselves could be classified as a part of.
If he makes it clear that he is criticizing his own class then I would agree. But he never speaks as though he is including himself in that group, he frames it as though he is an outsider, which I find dishonest.
Well he criticizes the opinions of "the ruling class." When you criticize the opinions of a group, you're ipso facto an outsider in regard to the opinions. Everyone knows he is rich; he talks about how he sent his kids to private episcopalian schools and then suddenly realized that all these institutions around him had changed. If he pretended not to be rich, or if he implied that having money was immoral, that would be more dishonest.
This is sophistry.
1. "You can buy your way out of anything" is further to the point.
2. Imagining certain mutually exclusive policy decisions that lead to the same net result is an irrelevant thought experiment.
3. Those two thought experiments do not even work. For any given large-scale economic or industrial decision, the particulars determine the outcome. Ceasing the majority of global fossil fuel usage is elite. Building a chemical plant that saves a few dollars in disposal fees by poisoning locals in Michigan is elite. And so on. As for releasing criminals without bail, that is generally elite, because the rich indulge their magnanimous self-perceptions while releasing criminals on everyone else. In the alternative scenario, the rich gain nothing (buying your way out and being set free automatically is the same thing to them) and society, 99% of which doesn't go to jail, is better protected from criminals. For the small minority of criminals (or poor people who anticipate being wrongfully jailed), yes, that policy has ambiguous political valence, but that is quite beside the point.