Richard Hanania, the reformed populist who has discovered the worst kind of government

Richard Hanania is not the sort of intellectual one would expect to find defending the elite, experts, newspapers and universities. He was once a provocateur on the radical right; he has written under a pseudonym for white supremacist websites, espoused racist and misogynistic views and, even after renouncing some of that work, has continued to hold extreme views on race, discrimination and gender. Yet today he has become one of the most scathing critics of Trumpism. Not because he has become a progressive, but because he has come to the conclusion that populism, even when it stems from causes he supports, almost inevitably ends up producing incompetence, corruption and bad governance. The term Hanania has chosen is ‘kakistocracy’: the rule of the worst. His argument, set out in the book "Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster", is simple: populist movements are founded on a rejection of elites, expertise and the institutions that select and control knowledge. But once those filters are removed, the common sense of the people does not spontaneously emerge. Instead, the figures most adept at exploiting fears, resentments and conspiracy theories come to the fore.

Hanania knew this machine from the inside. His book "The Origins of Woke" offered the right a blueprint for using executive power to dismantle decades of diversity and anti-discrimination policies. Many of those ideas subsequently found their way into the Trump Administration’s discourse. Hanania had access to the world of Project 2025, rubbed shoulders with figures such as Marc Andreessen and was quoted by J. D. Vance. His audience is not huge, but it includes journalists, MAGA influencers and people close to power. It was precisely this experience that convinced him that individual intelligence does not protect against political stupidity. Hanania recounts seeing tech billionaires believing the very same theories spread by the most extreme accounts on X. He thought the tech right would make the conservative movement smarter. He saw the opposite happen: it was the conservative movement that made the tech right more fragile. For a long time, however, Hanania regarded Trump as the lesser of two evils. He was convinced that the Republican establishment, the officials and experts around the president, would be able to keep him in check. He even went so far as to bet tens of thousands of dollars that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would not join the government. Nine days after the election, Trump appointed him to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Hanania lost the bet, but above all, he lost his last illusion: the second wave of Trumpism would not be reined in by the adults in the room, because the adults had been thrown out of the room.

The breaking point came with the ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs in April 2025. Since then, Hanania has begun to openly argue that voting for Trump was a mistake. Not because Trump had betrayed populism, but because he was putting it into practice. Economic mismanagement, the weakening of institutions, pseudoscience, corruption and nepotism were not accidental deviations: they were the consequences of a policy built on the delegitimisation of all independent authority. The most interesting part of his analysis concerns the definition of the elite. For Hanania, they are not simply the rich or the powerful, but those who attain status through established institutions: universities, newspapers, professional organisations and research centres. These institutions may be arrogant and conformist, but they possess procedures and checks that make it more difficult to lie without consequences. When they are eliminated, the alternative is not greater freedom: it is an information market in which the winner is whoever shouts the loudest and makes the biggest promises.

Populism thrives precisely on the belief that the media, science, universities and public administrations are not merely imperfect, but intrinsically corrupt. Those who turn their backs on them end up relying on influencers, gurus and conspiracy theorists who do not adhere to standards of accuracy. At that point, even a brilliant person can lose the ability to understand the world: not because they have lost their intelligence, but because they have destroyed the tools needed to distinguish truth from falsehood. The conclusion is stark: marginalising the elites does not automatically lead to government by the common man. It can lead to the rise of demagogues capable of exploiting people’s fears. Trumpism, according to Hanania, has not merely selected mediocre leaders: it has created an environment in which mediocrity becomes a credential, ignorance a mark of authenticity, and incompetence a form of rebellion.