Even Under Populism, Elite Failure Is Still a Problem

When Paul Ehrlich, the noted overpopulation doom-monger, passed away last winter, his death inspired the online controversialist Richard Hanania to go back and read some of Ehrlich’s original writings on the “population bomb.” What Hanania discovered, he wrote, was that Ehrlich was actually worse than the quotes and clips often plucked by his critics would suggest. He was profoundly hostile to human progress, “misanthropic” at every turn, always ready with “blueprints” that would make both rich and poor countries poorer and committed to “an entire system” of thought “in which human life was constantly denigrated and devalued.”

Grimmer still was Ehrlich’s position in the intellectual and cultural firmament. He “was not some guy in his room putting out diatribes,” Hanania wrote. “He was a professor at Stanford, a highly decorated scientist and one of the most prominent public intellectuals of his generation.”

This analysis is correct and indeed could be taken further: Ehrlich wasn’t just prominent; his ideas were also profoundly influential, shaping population control policies that in the short term yielded horrifying human rights abuses in countries like India and China, and in the longer run pushed East Asia down a path to potentially catastrophic population decline.

But I was especially interested in the critique as a counterpoint to Hanania’s recent intellectual project, which has culminated in his new book “Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster,” a critique of Trumpian governance and a defense of elite wisdom and capacity.

Briefs against populism are hardly in short supply, but Hanania’s case is notable because it comes from a very unlikely source — a prominent critic of wokeness and D.E.I. with a past as a pseudonymous white nationalist, who turned on Trumpism at exactly the moment when he seemed poised to become one of its most influential voices, while remaining too right-wing and deliberately abrasive to remake himself as a liberal in good standing. (I recommend Gilad Edelman’s Atlantic profile of Hanania for more on his evolution.)

That unusual background yields an anti-populism that can be more perceptive than versions on offer from the center-left and left. As a foe of socialism, Hanania has a clearer view than some left-wingers of how much rightist and leftist forms of populism can converge in their misgovernment. As a critic of liberalism, he has a more nuanced take on the relationship between populism, democracy and authoritarianism than anti-Trump centrists who envision a stark choice between establishment politics and fascism.

There is also a lot of merit to the story Hanania wants to tell about the second Trump administration, in which the elite faction that he hoped would be maximally influential — the “tech right,” a term he coined to describe the Silicon Valley elites who moved rightward in response to wokeness — was either captured or overwhelmed by populist tendencies toward corruption, cronyism and conspiracism.

But in building its case against populism, Hanania’s book doesn’t offer a clear enough sense of how and why elite governance goes wrong. Having converted away from right-wing anti-elitism, he wants to argue that elites — academic, legal, journalistic, scientific — are far more committed to truth-seeking than the less-educated masses, more “meaning driven” and less purely self-interested, much less inclined to the kind of conspiratorial and magical thinking that often runs rampant in populist spaces.

When elite institutions are working well, this may be true. But when they fail, it isn’t just because they don’t live up to these aspirations. The aspirations themselves, the quest for truth and meaning, also yield a set of elite-specific temptations — an impulse to prioritize intellectual systems and ideological theories over everyday experience, to use intelligence and rhetoric as a shield against reality, to confuse truth-seeking credentials with truth itself.

Consider, by way of example, the difference between Paul Ehrlich and Joe Rogan. Hanania is hard on Rogan, treating him as the embodiment of populist anti-intellectualism, contemptuously listing all the ideas given a respectful hearing on his show — from ancient cities below the pyramids to anti-vaccine theories to 9/11 trutherism to psychic phenomena — that “are rejected by virtually all academics and experts in the relevant fields.”

This is fair enough. But it’s also fair to say that Rogan and much of his audience seem to hold this range of wacky and paranoid ideas together in a jumble, considering them as theories and possibilities, without building a rigorous or zealous system around their precepts.

By contrast, Ehrlich took just one idea — a much more respectable one, the idea that rapid population growth might lead to famine or civil strife — and turned it into the basis for a fanatical theory that licensed tyrannical government behavior on the grounds of a putative emergency. And because he did so while speaking the language of academic truth-seeking and technical expertise, he was able to persuade individuals, institutions and governments to conflate his misanthropy with science, reason and progress — which only a clueless populist or a religious fanatic could possibly oppose.

That pattern of elite misgovernment is an extremely common one. It defined left-wing politics in the Covid era, when bad ideas emanated from academia and were laundered through other credentialed institutions, and met their only real resistance from the less-educated, less-elite portions of the Democratic coalition. And crucially it still operates in the right-wing coalition and the second Trump administration, notwithstanding populism’s apparent dominance.

For instance, the struggles of the Department of Government Efficiency partially reflect a populist unwillingness to listen to credentialed experts about the sheer difficulty of budget cutting. But the belief that a group of high-I.Q. outsiders can come in and remake a complex system is itself a characteristic elite temptation, a right-wing version of the progressive faith in ivory-tower experts. It’s too simple to say that Elon Musk struggled in Washington because he embraced populist paranoia; he also struggled because he thought that his own forms of truth-seeking, so successful in business, were adequate to dealing with a very different world.

Or take the Trump administration’s current difficulties in escaping from a stalemated conflict in Iran. Was the Iran war the great desire of Rogan’s audience, the work of an addled fact-free populist media ecosystem, the fruit of giving too many administration jobs to hacks? Not really. The voices in Trump’s coalition who were supportive of the war included members of the pre-Trump G.O.P. elite and think-tankers who had been making the case for intervention for years. The voices raised in opposition often belonged to the populist wing, including some of its most paranoid factions. And while he quickly soured on the conflict, one of the initially pro-war voices was Richard Hanania, overcome with temporary optimism about the ability of the American military to remake the world.

The takeaway from this experience is not that populist governance is desirable; it clearly fails in many of the ways that Hanania describes. But recognizing those failures shouldn’t make us suddenly naïve about elite failure, which persists even under populist conditions, and retains its distinctive power to dress hubris in the garments of wisdom and tempt smart people into folly.