Thoughts on Being Profiled in The Atlantic

The need for justifying a non-populist elite

For months, I have been in contact with Gilad Edelman, a senior editor for The Atlantic, knowing that he was working on a profile. It finally dropped today, and you can enjoy a gift link here.

Knowing this was coming was an unusual experience, and it served as a lesson in how much power journalists have to shape people’s perceptions of reality. I spent hours talking to Edelman over the phone and met him for lunch. He had also read my last two books, was very familiar with my output on Substack and X, and had conversations with friends and detractors. That’s a lot of material to work with, and no matter what he was going to have to be selective in his presentation.

But overall, I think that he did a good job of explaining my ideas and their relevance to our politics, as MAGA maintains a stronghold on the right and socialists achieve new victories on the left.

In Kakistocracy, Hanania defines populism as a fundamentally anti-elite form of politics. That is fairly standard. But unlike many scholars, who are vague on what “elite” means, Hanania provides a definition with some explanatory value. This analysis makes up the most compelling part of the book…

Hanania defines elites not as the wealthy or powerful, but as people who derive status through their connections to “established, usually long-standing” institutions. These gatekeeper institutions include universities, legacy-media publications, professional organizations, and nonprofits. Elites move up in the world by impressing other members of the elite rather than a mass audience.

Academics tend to be self-flagellating about the status of elites in society. Pierre Bourdieu, the towering French sociologist who coined the term cultural capital, was interested in how markers of elite status entrench power imbalances. The philosopher Michael Sandel (Rhodes Scholar, Harvard professor) accuses elites of hiding their privilege behind spurious claims of merit.

To Hanania, however, the key fact about elites is that they are good. Smart, highly educated people who go into professions such as journalism and academia, he writes, do so because they care more about meaning than wealth. They form communities in which people are impressed by intelligence and virtue, not fancy cars. These “meaning-maximizers” come together to establish institutions that provide public goods—arts, science, knowledge—that the free market would not deliver on its own. But they also tend to be much more socially liberal than the broader public, and use their power and prestige to advance their views on contentious social issues, which drives resentment.

Hanania’s dalliance with the tech right showed him what happens when otherwise smart people adopt an anti-elite political identity. Journalists and academics, he writes, might get some big things wrong—especially, to his mind, on race and gender—but they obey professional and ethical norms that point toward truth. A movement that rejects both elites and their norms, by contrast, will naturally succumb more easily to conspiracy theories about vaccines and stolen elections. “I was like, Oh shit—this is beyond coalitional politics, or them just playing to their base,” he told me. “This is: They are bad at acquiring knowledge, because they’ve rejected the media and they’ve rejected scientific papers and every institution. No matter how smart you are, you can’t do that and expect to know anything about the world.”

When people renounce the mainstream media, Hanania writes, they end up listening to populist sources who don’t even try to uphold standards of accuracy and objectivity: podcasters such as Candace Owens and Joe Rogan, publications such as InfoWars, right-wing X accounts such as Catturd, charismatic health gurus such as RFK Jr. Unlike elite authorities, these populist figures obtain their status via “a direct connection to a mass audience or voters,” Hanania writes. They blame elite corruption for society’s problems and cater to “attitudes, beliefs, and aesthetics that have more currency among the general public than among elites,” including xenophobia and conspiracy theories.

For example, because this profile was going to appear in The Atlantic, and I could tell that Edelman had read my work, while talking to him I at least had confidence that my views would not be grossly mischaracterized. You might think that you can take that for granted, but one thing that the right-wing echo chamber has shown over the last several years is that you can’t. Rightoids will literally write hundreds of words about my beliefs and motivations without showing any real familiarity with my work beyond a tweet they might be responding to. The same is true for much of the Bluesky crowd that hates the MSM as irredeemably fascist, though I thankfully have few interactions with them.

There are of course always ideological disagreements within a society and some baseline levels of tribalism and motivated reasoning, but we need to at least make an effort toward engaging in rational thinking and caring about empirical evidence. Populism is in essence about giving up on even trying. Most conservatives who realize that their political tribe has a problem with the truth will try to make it into a “both sides” issue, when it’s not. Oh, you say Trump lies three dozen times in a single speech, but remember when Obama mischaracterized some aspect of his health insurance plan fifteen years ago? RFK was rejected by the Democrats and became a Republican in 2024 for a reason.

Another thing Edelman got right was pointing out that if, as right-wing critics allege, I am denouncing MAGA and conspiracy theorists to win favor with the left, I’m doing a pretty bad job at it.

Perhaps Hanania, who once wrote an essay titled “Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV,” decided he could sell more Substack subscriptions by catering to a progressive audience. But if that’s his strategy, he is making some counterintuitive choices along the way. Someone trying to make friends at a No Kings rally would not throw around the word retard. He would not dismiss news stories about female teachers having sex with their male students by claiming, “It’s hard to think of things more disgusting than believing a teenage male can be ‘raped’ by his teacher.” He would not write an essay arguing that “it is of course ridiculous to call Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile,” because Epstein’s underage victims were “post-pubescent.” And he would not celebrate the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down majority-minority districts under the Voting Rights Act by posting, “A great day for our democracy.”

As I’ve written before, my liberal and MSM critics, unlike the rightists, tend to get their facts right. I find strong support for my theories on the topic I know best.

While he gives a fair hearing to the ideas, Edelman seems personally not to like me very much. This paragraph is particularly obnoxious.

Hanania, who lives in San Diego, was recently in Washington to tape a podcast; we met for lunch. It was a fascinating experience, if not an entirely pleasant one. In person, Hanania comes across as socially awkward yet oozing with self-regard. During our two-hour lunch, the conversation almost never strayed from his favorite topics, which are Richard Hanania, Richard Hanania’s analysis of politics, and Richard Hanania’s place in the firmament of public intellectuals.

Yes, I talked about myself a lot … in the context of meeting a guy for the specific purpose of him writing a profile of me. He would ask questions, I would respond, sometimes he would write those responses down, and I would elaborate because that’s what we were there for. Did he want me to show more of an interest in his personal life?

I kind of feel like the personal shots were compensating for the worry that the coverage of my ideas was too sympathetic, which I’m fine with as a tradeoff. Edelman agrees with me on MAGA, and seems to fear Democrats going in their own populist direction, which he thinks they can avoid by moderating on social issues. This is how he ends the article.

The question is what to do with that analysis. Much of the American left seeks to counter Trump with a form of progressive populism that labels billionaires and oligarchs enemies of the people. Hanania’s theory of populism implies that this won’t actually win back the working class. That’s because “Oligarchy is the problem” is itself an elite belief, as the use of a word like oligarchy suggests. Blaming billionaire wealth-hoarding for America’s ills would poll very well among the nation’s anthropology departments. If Trump voters hated the super-rich, however, they probably wouldn’t have voted for Trump.

For his part, Hanania recommends that Democrats instead abandon some of the cultural positions that make them seem out of touch to many Americans. “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,” he recently wrote on Substack. The idea is to strategically moderate on certain cultural issues in order to become more palatable to mistrustful constituencies. But there is no sign that Hanania intends to take his own advice.

The fact that Edelman didn’t let his personal dislike get in the way of seeing the value in Kakistocracy and many of my Substack essays is to his credit. The ideas are what count, and the ability to separate the messenger and the message is another one of those things elites are able to do better than populists.

I take the profile as a sign that people who are horrified by MAGA and not enthused about all the DSA energy on the left are searching for something different. It’s proven a difficult task. With Vance, as Trump’s likely successor, going on Rogan and kissing up to him with novel conspiracy theories, there is little hope for a responsible or intellectually defensible right emerging in the near future. On the left, the abundance crowd has changed the conversation around housing, but their message has a technocratic tenor to it, and is struggling to answer the moral fervor with which the far left pushes for more egalitarian and anti-corporate policies, which they can portray as having a purer democratic essence.

Rightists have stories about fallen civilizational grandeur and degenerates ruining it all. The socialists paint a picture of a world in which regular people can find both meaning and physical comfort through taking on an oligarchic elite. What do classical liberals, technocrats, rational would-be reformers of institutions, and others with policy views that would actually improve the world have in terms of emotional messaging? How do they justify doing what they think is right, even to themselves, when public opinion and mass enthusiasm are against them in an age where governmental legitimacy comes almost exclusively from appeals to the popular will? A defense of Western elites that casts populism as the enemy provides one moral and intellectual framework that could potentially be useful here.

I could certainly be a more effective messenger for this project if I didn’t do stuff like hang out with Michael Tracey and join him in showing contempt for the parade of basketcases who politicians and the media insist on referring to as “Epstein survivors.” But I place too high a value on saying things that I think the world needs to hear. That said, it appears that some of my ideas are having an impact anyway, and I like to think that if our politics ever does more fully organize along a populist/anti-populist axis – and one in which the anti-populist side is able to at least hold its own – I will have played some role in that process.

And if you haven’t already, now is as good a time as ever to buy the book.

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