In 1876, as corruption scandals shook the Ulysses S. Grant administration, the poet, diplomat, and founding Atlantic editor James Russell Lowell wondered where the American experiment was headed. “Is ours a ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people,’” he wrote, “or a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?”
Now there’s a $10 word for you. From the Greek kakos, for “bad,” kakistocracy means “rule by the worst.” It is in understandably wide circulation these days. President Trump engages in levels of brazen self-dealing that make the Grant administration look like a Quaker meeting. He seems preoccupied more by White House renovations than by easing inflation or negotiating a lasting peace with Iran. The people around him are hardly more impressive. To lead the nation’s public-health authorities, Trump appointed a man who believes that vaccines cause autism, speculated that COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to spare Chinese people and Jews, and claims—pretty credibly, actually—that a parasite ate part of his brain.
According to the writer Richard Hanania, the administration’s kakistocratic tendencies are symptoms of an underlying phenomenon: populism. In the bluntly titled Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster, he argues that populist backlashes around the world have empowered corrupt, feckless leaders who weaken democratic institutions and mismanage their nations’ economies. The reason this keeps happening—the reason populist movements don’t elevate public-spirited masters of statecraft—is that populism is all about rejecting elite expertise. And the expert consensus, in Hanania’s view, is usually right.
Progressive readers might nod along to that message—until they learn more about the messenger. Hanania is not the sort of person to stick a Science is real sign in his front yard. He is a deliberately provocative right-wing flamethrower who used to write pseudonymously as a white supremacist opposed to “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” Even after publicly renouncing those views, he continues to advance arguments about antidiscrimination laws (he’s against them) and statistical differences between the races (he thinks they’re meaningful) that have led critics to question the sincerity of his penitence.
A few years ago, Hanania’s work as an anti-woke Substacker and prolific Twitter troll made him a rising star on the MAGA right. He is a named contributor to Project 2025, and his book The Origins of Woke provided a detailed blueprint for rolling back DEI policies, which the Trump administration faithfully implemented.
[Tyler Austin Harper: An intellectual and a moral failure]
But just as his ideas were turning into policy, Hanania announced that he was jumping off the Trump train. As he tells it, the anti-DEI agenda was great, but the administration’s flagrant corruption and incompetence outweighed it. In April 2025, Hanania went public with his regrets, saying that he never thought Trump would actually do the wildest things he had promised. Hanania’s audience is not enormous—he has about 50,000 subscribers on Substack, mostly unpaid—but it is disproportionately influential. His roughly 200,000 X followers include prominent journalists, MAGA influencers, and the sitting vice president. His work is an object of fascination and outrage among Republican staffers in Washington, whom he mocks as belonging to “the retard party.” Beneath the puerile name-calling is a serious idea: that the malevolent ineptitude of a leader like Trump can’t be separated from the populist style that brought him to power. If Hanania is right about that, then efforts to counter MAGA with a left-wing version of populism will only worsen America’s political predicament.
The argument arrives at a moment when the national mood skews profoundly anti-establishment. The far left sees itself at war with the institutional Democratic Party. The institutional Democratic Party sees itself as standing up for the little guy. The MAGA movement is fueled by resentment toward cosmopolitan liberals, academics, and journalists. And so, by defending elites, Hanania is staking out lonely territory. “If one day there’s a populist-versus-anti-populist politics, I’ll be more firmly on one side of the debate,” Hanania told me when we first spoke, in April. “But right now, there’s not a natural home for me on either side of the political spectrum.”
At the same time, everything about Hanania exemplifies the tensions of anti-populist politics. “Trust the experts” sounds one way when it comes from, say, a school librarian and another way when it comes from a confessed former white nationalist who calls his opponents the “low human capital” coalition. As a slogan, it has always carried an implication usually left unsaid: that some members of society are brighter and more qualified than others, and the masses should defer to them. Hanania doesn’t leave that part unsaid. This makes his work uncomfortable reading. What’s especially uncomfortable is the possibility that he has a point.
Hanania was an obscure political-science postdoctoral fellow when, in 2021, he broke out with a Substack essay arguing that conservatives had misdiagnosed the problem of “Woke Capital.” Corporations made a show of cultural progressivism not because of some Marxist conspiracy, he argued, but simply because liberals care more about politics and thus exert more political influence at work.
The essay and a follow-up went viral and were cited by columnists at The New York Times and The Washington Post. This drew more attention to Hanania’s account on Twitter, as it was then called, where he posted a mix of heterodox political analysis and anti-woke commentary at all hours. Hanania soon found himself in a group chat with Marc Andreessen and dining with billionaires. J. D. Vance, still in his intellectual phase, referred to Hanania as “my friend” on a podcast and credited him with the insight that “the left loves to use power because they actually care about politics more.” Hanania set up a think tank, the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, that received $1 million in funding in 2021 from anonymous donors. (He told me that the think tank never really got off the ground, because he preferred to focus on writing rather than leading an organization. It still technically exists but does little besides publish his podcast.)
In some ways, Hanania is a quintessential populist success story. In an earlier era, his ideas might never have reached a wide audience. He used social media and Substack to bypass traditional publishing gatekeepers. And his own background illustrates why gatekeepers are valuable. In 2023, a HuffPost investigation revealed that he had written articles for white-supremacist websites in the early 2010s, when he was in his 20s, under a pseudonym. As “Richard Hoste,” Hanania had advocated for forced sterilization of people with low intelligence, declared that Hispanics “don’t have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation,” and hailed Sarah Palin for driving “the ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite absolutely mad.”
After the exposé, Hanania posted an essay titled “Why I Used to Suck, and (Hopefully) No Longer Do,” admitting his past as Richard Hoste and claiming that he felt “self-loathing towards my previous life” as a white nationalist. Today, his writing overflows with contempt for people he considers to be racists and xenophobes. The same people who insist on the towering importance of IQ scores want America to shut its doors to even the most gifted, highly educated immigrants from Asia and Africa—a position that he argues can be explained only by racism. “This is the platonic idea of what prejudice looks like,” he told me. “If we’re not attracting talented people to America, if we don’t think that’s beneficial, what are we even doing here?”
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. “I’d like to have a big enough audience that I could say basically anything, and people will read it and pay attention to it,” he said at one point. “And I think I’m getting closer to that.”
By his own account, Hanania remains “really right wing on most policy issues.” Years after his career as a white supremacist supposedly ended, he wrote, “We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people” to bring down crime rates. Even in “Why I Used to Suck,” Hanania defended “acknowledging statistical differences between races.” His views on gender are similarly extreme. His second-most-read Substack post—“Women’s Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas”—concluded that “a world that valued truth and objectivity over feelings would have fewer female executives, senators, and journalists, but be better for everyone.”
[Adam Serwer: Richard Hanania and the allure of racial pseudoscience]
In The Origins of Woke, published not long after the HuffPost expose, Hanania took aim at decades’ worth of civil-rights law. His central claim was that “wokeness” was the product of law, not culture. This meant that the next Republican administration could undo much of what the right hated—race-conscious hiring, diversity bureaucracy, sexual-harassment policies—through a few specific executive actions. That’s exactly what Trump did when he returned to power last year.
The book combined a genuine insight about policy change with an alarmist account of the scope of DEI and anti-harassment law. “The legal system has created vague rules covering practically all aspects of human interaction,” Hanania writes. At no point does he seriously entertain the possibility that such rules serve any useful purpose. Some people, he writes, just have a preference for being around members of their own ethnicity or gender, or for “sexually charged jokes” in the workplace, and the government shouldn’t try to interfere with that. “The beauty of markets,” he maintains, is that workers are free to choose a workplace based on their individual taste for diversity or discrimination.
Such ideas about the wonders of the free market are fairly standard within libertarian-conservative circles. (The blurbs for Kakistocracy include praise from the libertarian George Mason University economists Tyler Cowen and Bryan Caplan.) And they help explain Hanania’s appeal among Trump-curious tech barons who believe that diversity policies and political correctness have gotten in the way of a pure meritocracy.
At first, Hanania told me, he was flattered that such accomplished people were paying attention to him. In an essay titled “Understanding the Tech Right,” he gave the movement its name and hypothesized that it might come to exert “more intellectual leadership over the conservative movement.” But the more he got to know its members, the more disillusioned he became. These men were rich and intelligent, yet they struggled to distinguish between truth and fiction. Hanania was dismayed to learn that people like Andreessen seemed to believe whatever they read from right-wing X accounts. “Because these guys are so successful and so smart, we think they must have access to the best sources of information,” he explained to me. “I can tell you: There’s a high portion of them in group chats all day saying the exact same things, a little more extreme or unfiltered, that they’re saying online.” Instead of the Tech Right making the conservative movement smarter, the conservative movement seemed to be making the Tech Right dumber.
Even as Hanania’s misgivings grew, he still considered the GOP the lesser of two evils, because it was friendlier to free-market capitalism. Heading into the 2024 election, Hanania maintained that Trump would be constrained by the people around him, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary. During an Election Day livestream, Hanania said that if he thought Trump was actually going to appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to a Cabinet position, he would have voted for Kamala Harris. “I think the Republican Party is basically run by a lot of corporate lobbyists,” he said, “and to a large extent people who are saner than the people you see on Fox News and on Twitter.” He was so confident, he told me, that he wagered tens of thousands of dollars on Polymarket that Kennedy would not get a Cabinet position. Nine days later, on November 14, Trump nominated Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Senate confirmed him in February. Hanania lost a lot of money.
What finally pushed Hanania over the edge was Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement, in April 2025. Until then, he said, “I still could have maybe been convinced that Trump was the better choice.” No more. “For those asking: yes, voting for Trump was a mistake,” he posted on X.
Of all people, Hanania should have known that the second Trump administration would be readier to execute the president’s agenda than the first had been. After all, he had helped develop the plans. Did Hanania conclude, therefore, that he should temper the confidence of his assertions? Quite the contrary. His error, he wrote, was that “I just did not take my own ideas about the awfulness of Trump and MAGA seriously enough.”
Populist leaders around the world seem to have certain recurring traits: managing the economy poorly, undermining institutions, embracing quack science, and reveling in corruption. Perhaps, Hanania concluded, these commonalities were not coincidental.
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, which is written in a kind of structureless, hybrid blogger-academic style, and otherwise tends to bog down in confusing digressions.
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.
[Joseph Heath: The populist revolt against cognitive elites]
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. This explains a dynamic that has driven liberals crazy for the past decade: how Trump, a billionaire two-term president who was born into immense wealth, can nonetheless be considered a populist, rather than an elite himself. Trump rejects elites and is rejected by them. He traffics in outlandish conspiracy theories and revels in low-brow aesthetics. He built his reputation not by winning over the staff of The New York Review of Books but by performing the role of playboy and real-estate mogul for television cameras and the New York Post. He became a bona fide celebrity by starring in a network reality-TV show. And he entered politics by humiliating establishment Republicans while thrilling rank-and-file Republican voters.
Hanania argues that populist regimes tend to govern poorly regardless of ideology. (He notes, for example, that Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, on the right, downplayed COVID and warned against getting vaccinated, while Mexico’s leftist-populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, brought unlicensed traditional healers into the public-health system.) The reason, Hanania explains, is the quality of the people who succeed in a populist system. They attract “a certain type of voter and media consumer, characterized by their being, relative to elites, prejudiced, conspiratorial, and misinformed. The people who take advantage of such tendencies of the public tend to be the least suited to rule.” When elites are marginalized, in other words, what you get is not rule by the common man. What you get is rule by demagogues and grifters who appeal to the common man’s worst impulses.
Hanania appreciates that there’s a certain irony to his position. Here’s a guy who wrote a whole book about the horrors of wokeness. Now he’s defending the media and university professors? “Psychologically, what might be going on is I’m reacting to whoever I’m around,” he told me. “I was in academia, and so I went crazy about wokeness. I was like, These people are nuts. And then I became a right-wing anti-woke intellectual. And I’m like, Wait a minute—these people are worse!”
Some of Hanania’s critics think that he’s just hungry for attention. A Trump-administration official who has known Hanania for years, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk to the press, is in two different group chats with a rule against sharing anything written by Hanania. “They think it’s trolling, or a nakedly cynical exploitation of credulous establishment liberals who are just desperate for people to hate Trump alongside them,” the official told me.
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.”
[Gilad Edelman: What Chris Murphy learned from the new right]
If there is a gene that makes humans not want to offend one another, Hanania seems to have been born without it. He admits that he is reflexively polemical, and he has learned that needling people is the fastest way to get attention. He can’t resist posting sarcastic takes on X that inevitably anger people who think he’s being sincere. Recently, he commented on a post about how fatherhood lowers testosterone and boosts empathy. “Who the hell would take that tradeoff?” he asked. In reality, Hanania would: He is married with three young children.
Because Hanania critiques the right in terms that appall the left, he has made enemies on both sides. “Please tell him I loathe him even more than Kamala, because for some reason I really do and I want him to know,” Tucker Carlson texted a mutual acquaintance of his and Hanania’s in 2024. (A screenshot of the message accordingly made its way to Hanania and, eventually, to me.) More recently, Carlson told me in a text message that Hanania was “literally beneath contempt, which is to say not even worth attacking.” Other critics feel less restraint. “I just think he’s totally revolting in every way,” the left-wing writer John Ganz told me. “His ideas about minorities, about women, are absolutely horrifying and completely anti-human.”
And yet even some of Hanania’s most passionate detractors admit some grudging appreciation. David Austin Walsh, a progressive writer and historian, told me, “I fucking hate him; I think he’s a scumbag, and you can quote me on that.” But, he added, “I think, bizarrely enough, that he and I probably share the same broad overall analysis of the American right.”
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 post The Anti-Populist appeared first on The Atlantic.
