In Defense of Elites, with Richard Hanania

24:20Coleman Hughes:Yeah, this is a quote from the book. If your doctor makes a mistake, it doesn't mean you should replace him with an energy healer. Similarly, the New York Times reporting a story inaccurately does not mean that believing podcasts or Facebook rumors that confirmed one's biases is the way to get the truth. True, unless your podcast is Conversations with Coleman, in which case. There are high-quality podcasts, unquestionably. So now that you've sketched for us what a populist is, what an elite is as a concept, as distinguished from merely a rich person or a powerful person, what um what is the case for elites being a good thing in society what is the case that elites have made the world a better place yeah so there are you know two ways to approach the question you could approach it theoretically or empirically empirically once we've seen who the populace are once we've decided we can just look at things like economic growth the uh there's a 2023 paper in American Economic Review shows populists tend to do worse on economic growth.

25:27The left-wing populists worse than right-wing populists because left-wing populists tend to have craziest ideas on economics while right-wing populists sometimes believe in markets. But both kinds of populists tend to have worse economic growth than what you would predict. If you look at things like breakdown of democratic institutions, populists much higher odds than other forms of governments. Things like civil liberties. We have case after case of this being something that just doesn't work at a societal level. If you look at the countries that have performed worse economically in the world over the last 60 years or so, they're basically African and Middle Eastern countries that have fought wars like Libya and Syria and countries like that.

26:10And then there are Argentina and Venezuela, two countries where populism has gone further than just about anywhere else and been long-lasting, especially Argentina. They have decades and decades of populist rule. And so that's the empirical case. And then you could ask, why would we think this would be true? And I think there are good reasons to think so. For one, populists tend to rely on less informed voters. So if you have this ideal of democracy where real life is never going to approach that ideal, but you get closer to the ideal to the extent that people are informed and willing to consider issues on their own merits and thinking carefully about public issues.

26:55The populist base doesn't do that. If you look at the base of populists, they're people who tend not to follow the news that much. And if they do follow the news, they're following lower quality podcasts, of course, not like this one. They're not reading serious newspapers. They're not reading serious magazines. And I think this is one key reason why populism so often leads to corruption, because the populist base is kind of just ill-informed. They just don't know exactly what's going on. They're not observing what their political leaders are doing. And famously, they can just promise one thing and do another or switch what they're doing at any particular time.

27:37And the populist voter is more likely to go along with that just because he's less educated, he's less informed. Another thing is gatekeepers are almost always, and this is like a very kind

27:49Coleman Hughes:of a - Sorry, before you get to the second one, so to push on the first one, what happens when you get these domains of knowledge where like the more educated you get, the wronger you are about stuff, right? Like probably the average relatively uneducated proverbial uncle or grandpa is more right about certain important issues. If you're at the height of 2020, who's more likely to be right about the connection between getting rid of the police and crime going up? Your random uneducated uncle with a high school degree or your friend that has a PhD at Columbia? And there's, as you know, I don't have to tell you, there's a whole bunch of subjects like this where the more educated you educate yourself into stupidity does is that too small an effect to affect your populism your point about populism here so i agree with you that those cases exist you've written and talked about it i have too um i think these are though these are the man bites dog stories okay so we all love these stories right the elites said there's no way uh covet escaped for a lab and then they say oh maybe it did escape for a lab or they say trans women have no advantage over biological women in sports.

29:10Any person, just the easiest case. And if you go on Twitter, they love this example, right-wing people. No matter what they don't understand, they understand men and women are different, and they feel like they could just own you. They think I'm some kind of liberal elitist, and they could own me with that. Those cases unquestionably exist. A lot of my writing, a lot of my career has been spent talking about these cases. You brought up defund the police, things like that. Now, we remember these cases, and they stick in the mind, and we talk about them all the time. But if you actually look at things that elites are right about, and it's kind of boring to do this, it seems trite, but we have to do it to maintain some perspective.

29:53So I use the example, and I don't want to pick on him, but he seems like a nice guy, Joe Rogan podcast, okay? I'm using it because it's the top podcast in the country, right? I'm not using it to find some random person who's irrelevant. I'm using Joe Rogan as the alternative, the kind of people who don't listen to elites, this is who they go to for their information. And so if you think about, just don't think of your common sense uncle, think about Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan's audience, or somebody like Tucker Carlson's audience, the list of things they believe that are false that the media believes something else and the media is right on, right?

30:25So I made a list of this in the book, either Rogan, things that Rogan either endorsed or brought guests on, which basically he gave a respectful hearing to and treated as reasonable opinions. So things like vaccines are worse than the diseases they're meant to treat. A big one. If we accept that, we're going to have more death across the world than all the defunding the police you can imagine. Things like ancient lost civilizations that no archaeologists have found, but some random guy says that they had advanced technology that we haven't even recreated to this day or something. That's something that's just completely anachronistic, right?

31:03Just ancient civilizations that mainstream archaeologists don't think there's actual evidence for. Things like ESP, like mind reading, aliens, like the UFO thing, which I know some smarter people are now believing in, but I don't think there's much there, right? So the list goes on. You can get beyond Rogan. You can go on Twitter and the things that have popular support, you know, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, 9-11 trutherism, right? That's another one promoted by Tucker Carlson, another one of the top podcasters in the country. Very popular. You can look at polls, you know, a third of the people will, or 40 % of the people will endorse something like 9-11 trutherism.

31:43And so like, yes, like, you know, there are, you can list five or 10 things where really like elites are just wrong and you can go to any random guy in the street and he's going to have a better, more defensible opinion than your New York Times journalist or even your medical professor at some major university. I just don't think those are the majority of the cases. I think that's maybe 5%, 10 % of cases. And I think 90 % of the cases, the elites are right and the people who are criticizing elites are wrong.

32:14Coleman Hughes:Okay. So then you were getting back to your model of why populists tend to govern badly. Yeah. And so that was the second point. We just went over it. Gatekeepers are almost always correct. The way I put it in the book is, if someone goes, applies to Harvard Medical School to be a professor, and they're rejected, and they say, I was rejected because I had the wrong politics. Maybe that's true. Maybe one out of 100 times that's true. But 99 out of 100 times, the person did not have the work ethic or the brains or the record of accomplishment to be a Harvard Medical, you know, Harvard professor at Harvard Medical School.

32:48Most of us don't, right? And so that's like the assumption you have to start with. Like these institutions are actually doing something when they're selecting people. And so, yeah, we talk about like affirmative action, you know, we talk about these things that are unfair, absolutely, but still, they're doing something. They're not doing nothing when they are selecting people. And then the, you know, the final reason why we would probably, we would think that populism is probably not a great thing, is it's just another form of identity politics. I mean, the right things that they're against identity politics, but when people talk about 90 % of the time, and I'm an example here, I'm an exception here, but if people are talking about what elites believe and what the people believe, the assumption or the implication is elites are wrong and the regular people are correct.

33:35And just like if you do that for race, just like if you do that for sex, You know, my identity is what determines whether something is true or false or how seriously my opinion should be taken. That's a road to hell. And so, like, liberalism, at least in theory, although everyone is, of course, biased, liberalism in theory at least tries to get away from that. Populism completely embraces it. And when it gets into ethno-nationalism, when it gets to this, you know, identity politics for majorities, it's the same thing. It's doing the race thing. It's kind of mirroring the left in that way when they do it for minorities, but then also just attacking elites on the basis of class or partisanship.

34:15It's not exactly class, but basically whoever's closer to the people is correct, and that's just a terrible way to determine what is true.

34:24Coleman Hughes:Yeah, you can see it quite often in political rhetoric. Politicians will say things like, the people know that this, or the people understand. And then on the other hand, you'll have people say things like, most experts agree that blank. And that's the other side of the coin. But your point is that the most experts agree points are more often correct than the people know points. Most often, yeah. I mean, like me and you, we're smart, sophisticated guys. We can think of places where maybe we've done our own research into the topic, and we think the elite's experts are wrong. I'm not going to defer to experts in every case.

35:00But even us, like my opinion on quantum mechanics or what the interest rate should be, what interest rate the Federal Reserve should set, or chemistry or medicine, like even us, like 95 % of the time, there really is no choice other than trust the experts or just believe what you want to believe or believe whatever you heard on a podcast, right? There aren't a lot of options out there. Even us who are in the ideas business for a living cannot go out there and research every question. If I'm going to write an article on something, then I'm going to really, really dig deep. But most of the time, unlike anyone else, I have to defer to authority.

35:38So appeal to authority is generally a bad argument. I say yes, it is when you have time to actually look into something. But most of the time, we don't have time to actually look into every single topic that we might be interested in. We don't have the training to do so. and trusting the experts is probably the best we can do on average.

35:58Coleman Hughes:So I have two points to make. One is that trusting the experts is excellent on topics that aren't politicized. So you brought up quantum mechanics, not a political issue. You could just blindly copy paste mostly what a physicist is telling you about quantum mechanics and trust that it's the best state of human knowledge. And you should do that in those cases. when you get to politicize topics, whether it's gender, race, certain areas of economics, although economics less so, the quality of research goes down by orders of magnitude like instantly. Like I think just like a lot of, and I'll speak on it because it's what I've looked into the most, but a lot of research by experts on racism can be dismissed.

36:51Coleman Hughes:right? And the reason is because racism is among the most politicized subjects in America and other societies in the West. So isn't there a big distinction to be made there? You should just blindly trust the experts on non-political, non-politicized subjects, but blindingly trusting the experts is not really a good strategy outside of that. I would never say blindly. You still have to have like a common sense kind of antenna up, right? I agree with most of that. Some things are obviously politicized, you know, race, gender, like the things where they're censoring people, people seem to be canceled for their opinions, probably a good indication that there's heavy politicization going on.

37:36You know, part of the problem though is there will often be disputes about what actually is politicized. So anti-vaxxers, if you talk to them, will tell you this is all politicized. They want you to believe that vaccines, maybe there's a conspiracy theory. Oh, they'll say it's more like pharma.

37:52Coleman Hughes:Yeah. Pharma manipulation and industrial complexes. There's a kind of conspiracy theory, but with the COVID vaccine, sometimes they think it's ideological. And so if you say, well, trust the experts when things are not politicized, well, how do you know what is politicized? It's a step backwards where you have to actually, you know you have to make that decision at some point well i mean you can look at what people fight about people don't fight about nuclear physics they fight about anything that's fought about vaccines again people do fight yeah it's now politicized it wasn't 10 years ago but yeah it is now politicized yeah i i think it is but i still think vaccines i see what you mean yeah i still think you should still trust the experts is your point yeah and the only way you know in that case like you have to cut i did spend a lot of time looking into the covid vaccines and anti-vaxxers, so I feel confident in saying this.

38:41But yeah, I mean, you're right. I mean, I think you're right. I think there are a category of things where we know they're politicized. Nobody on earth, nobody with the most passing familiarity with American culture or elite culture will deny racism is a very, very political issue, right? Sex, LGBT issues, We got that. I think though, be careful when people, because people are going to use that. They're going to say, all these other issues, X, Y, Z, oh, why are they hiding the aliens because this is politicized, right? Or why are they lying to us about vaccines? So you have to be careful not to apply that too broadly.

39:22Coleman Hughes:I would argue those things are just obviously less politicized in my view. But my second point is, how does someone come to be a fan of a Richard Hanania or a Coleman Hughes, it seems to enter that door, you have to be willing to not trust the experts on certain issues. So for instance, if you're discovering someone like me making critiques of wokeness, Black Lives Matter, and defund the police circa 2019 or 2020 when I'm coming up, you have to be someone that does not trust what the experts are telling you on all of these subjects, because I was mostly contra the expert consensus on whether those were good movements for Black people, good movements for the country, right?

40:15Coleman Hughes:And so by definition, the audience that reaches me has a certain willingness to buck expertise and does not have a trust the experts mentality so going back sorry to interrupt but going to back to blm and defunding the police like i don't think if you polled criminologists uh at any point a majority would have said defund the police and you will have less crime i don't think even most journalists you know would have said that i don't think there was like a new york times op-ed or something it was a prestigious there was one called defund the police there was a new york times op-ed literally said titled defund the police okay in that case yeah i'll defer to you on that um yeah, I mean, the expert, you know, but even that the New York Times is not experts in criminology, necessarily.

40:59It was a prestige. It was a prestige thing. But yeah, I mean, continue. I think you're, I think you're onto something.

41:04Coleman Hughes:So whether it's experts, so there's a slight confusion, which is that like, true experts are almost by definition, it's like a no true Scotsman thing. Like if you're a Marxist, then you're not really an expert on economics, right? Because like, Marxism is so clearly refuted so at some level circularly the experts always have like the truly right opinion but the people that are viewed as elites on and and experts in quotation marks on any given issue based on the prestige economy um like they are the people that all my fans were comfortable ignoring in order to say i actually i actually read an article by this 25 year old kid who said something really smart.

41:50Coleman Hughes:And, you know, it kind of refuted everything Jamel Bowie or whoever, whatever actually prestigious person was saying on the issue. And then there becomes a paradox because once you have that audience cultivated, and then you turn to that audience and you say, well, on this other issue, you should just trust the experts. There's an inevitable rub there because of the selection effect of who they are. And to be clear, I'm not actually disagreeing that trustee experts is the right point of view on many issues. I think you and I would probably agree 80, 90 % on what those issues are. But there is a contradiction in terms of how the audience for people like us gets created.

42:34Coleman Hughes:And it's true also of someone like Sam Harris or whatever it's like. People came to Sam Harris because they were like, the experts on jihadism are telling me it has nothing to do with religious doctrine. But I found this really smart guy that was pointing to the link between religious doctrine and jihadist violence. And he makes more sense to me than the experts. So you cultivate an audience that specifically is okay not trusting experts. And then later when you tell them to trust the experts on something, they revolt. It doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong to tell them, but it explains a kind of paradox at the heart of what we do, right?

43:10Yeah. I mean, we have to be able to strike this balance and do a few different things at one time. I think you're right. I think what you've described is kind of the process of how people become skeptical of mainstream institutions and in many cases go insane. go insane. And this is why we've seen it. We've seen people who started out maybe as reasonable critics of wokeness just really go off the deep end. And it's kind of hard. It's like a train where you need to have enough skepticism and independence of thought to say the experts or what the prestige media or what the establishment is telling me is wrong.

43:50But then you have to kind of stop there and not overgeneralize from what you've learned about trans women in sports or something which just drives you crazy because they are so obviously wrong and what they believe is so obviously crazy, right? And so, yeah, I mean, that's why life is hard. I wouldn't advocate for, although it's better than the ultimate. I'm going to have to choose between a person just being a person who trusts everything they read in the newspaper or their doctor tells them or somebody who believes nothing they read in the newspaper or their doctor tells them. I'll say believe everything is better than believe nothing, you'll be right more often than the person who believes nothing.

44:28But if we're trying to cultivate a more sophisticated citizenry or a more sophisticated audience, there has to be a way to say, yes, there are things where common sense and red flags of politicization and some smart people you trust doing their own research coming to a different conclusion. You have to be open to that. At the same time, not overgeneralize where you think the way to achieve knowledge is to just listen to random people who sound convincing and don't have any connection to institutions. You and I started out with no connection to institutions. Why should anyone listen to us? Well, we produce work and people can read it and it seems reasonable and we're legitimized by other smart people.

45:12That's part of it. Smart people have us as podcast guests or sign our work. You need these signals. These signals are useful. And just striking the balance between being skeptical enough and not just kind of losing your mind. That's the challenge. That's why, you know, that's the difference between me in 2021 and now I'm wanting telling people in 2026. I think to a large extent, the wokeness stuff, a lot of these things, these trans issues, a lot of the stuff on policing, at least intellectually, those battles have been won or we're winning those battles, right? I think at this particular point in history, we're suffering from too much cynicism and too much doubt and too much kind of listening to anti-establishment voices.

45:51Coleman Hughes:Right. Okay. So I want to ask you a little more about populism because you have, I think, a chapter devoted to what explains the rise of populism all around the world. So we've established what an elite is, what populism is. You've given three or four reasons why populism tends to lead to bad governance, there is now the further question of what has led to the rise in populism all around the world in the past 15 years or so. There are various different theories. Maybe you can give me the theories that you think are wrong and the theory you ultimately think is right. Okay. Yeah. So from like, if you're listening to populists themselves, The most popular theory is that it's some kind of reasonable reaction to things elites have gotten wrong.

46:42Now, without question, elites do get some things wrong. The question is, can it explain the last 20, 30 years of when we see populism really on the rise? from like, I think any objective perspective, I think in America in particular, we live pretty well. I mean, our economy has done very well. We're beating every other advanced nation in the world. Americans have, you know, civil liberties compared to like any other point in history, right? We had slavery, we had Jim Crow, we had, you know, restrictions on women. People, you know, like people talk about forever wars, the number of people dying in wars in America, very low by historical perspective.

47:22I think if an alien were coming to earth and they were studying America and Europe the last 20, 30 years, they would say, these are the best-run societies in human history. A lot of problems, but I mean, look at everything else that's happened, right? And so I don't think some kind of objective elite failure can explain it. I don't think even subjective, what people think goes that far, because there's some polling data I cite where you can ask people how much they agree with various populist-sounding ideas, like the elites or the rich hold people back. There are too many immigrants in this country, the things that populists say.

47:58And there seems to be no correlation between the populist attitudes in a population and how successful populists are in the political sphere. Wow, that's really surprising. Yeah. So if you ask these questions, the rich don't care about us, the people in media are out for themselves, they don't care about truth. Ask people those questions like America, Canada, Switzerland, Belgium. They look similar. There's a few percentage points between each of them. And the countries that dislike immigration the most aren't necessarily the ones who have the strongest anti-immigration parties. And so there's something else going on.

48:37I think the thing that's kind of like the fertility rate, when something is kind of universal, it's happening everywhere, regardless of the society you're looking at and it's happening across the world, you look for some kind of technological change. And I think that basically the big one here is communications technology, the rise of, first of all, there was the era of 24-hour cable news, and then the internet and social media. And so there's a lot of data on the rise of 24-hour cable news. There's some papers I cite in the book where people watching, they start getting Fox News in the 1990s and the other stations, CNN and MSNBC, they'd been around, CNN in particular, but they became more culturally focused over time.

49:22And the number of people basically saying that a culture war issue was the top issue just went up, just went up. And you could trace it to how easy it was to watch Fox News in a particular area. Because it's kind of a complicated thing, but it's very clever, where some cable stations will have it like lower on the channel order and some of them will have it higher and people watch it more when it's lower on the channel and so like places where it's lower you know they have they have people care more about cultural issues so it starts so funny

49:50Coleman Hughes:because they're just they're just going up yeah back in the day just going two three four five seven yeah exactly and then they stop on a story about how m &ms have this you know they're no longer stilettos now because libs are trying to destroy it they're too sexy or not sexy enough you can be You can be mad either way. You can be mad either way. It kind of changes over time. And so you do see that. I mean, you do see like culture wars, like I think 2000, 2004 in particular, where gay marriage was rising up as an issue and Bush ran against it. That was something new. First it was these social issues, abortion, gay marriage.

50:26And then it becomes immigration, the next 10 years, 15 years, great awokening, right? Wokeness becomes cultural issues come to dominate on the left. So you have 24-hour cable news, then Twitter comes along. It seems to just put it into overdrive. Great Awokening begins around 2011, 2010, according to Zach Goldberg and his work. Same time, Twitter really starts to take off, so the kind of timing matches up very well. And I think just kind of like a common sense understanding of these things and just kind of like looking at what's going on. It's interesting that if you go back 20 years ago and you look at polls from the time, like was 9-11 an inside job?

51:08Did the government have something to do with it? If you ask people, do vaccines cause autism? These were always popular views. You would always get 20, 30, 40 % of the public saying yes, okay? But these views had zero representation, not a single member of Congress, not a single governor, not a single presidential candidate would say vaccines cause autism or the 9-11 was an inside job. And you would be canceled from respectable society if you took those positions. Now those positions, it's becoming more democratic in a sense, because now those people, that 20, 30, 40 % of the population, whatever it is in a particular case, they have representation.

51:44And we see maybe 20 % of, we're getting to the point where maybe 25 % of Congress is some form of anti-vaxxers, probably still underrepresented compared to the general public.

51:53Coleman Hughes:So can you explain how that mechanism works? How does social media, Twitter, Facebook, presumably, create, like, change the institution or the feedback mechanisms between politicians and the public so that a politician can win on that view that has always held purchase? Like, why couldn't they win on that view in 2002? And why can they now? How does it work? Yeah, if you look at the history, like, you know, you look at someone like Pat Buchanan, who tried to kind of run a Trumpist campaign in the 1990s and early 2000s. The point is you couldn't really get your message out. Like there was a legitimization.

52:36There was gatekeepers, right? They call them gatekeepers for a reason. You wanted to get your message out in 1990 or 2000. You had to be covered on the evening news. Maybe you wrote a book or something, which had to go through a mainstream publisher. Maybe you were written about in magazines. talk radio starts to break that firewall and you see kind of this populism rising on the right. But now you really do have an actual marketplace of ideas. So if Trump comes along and he's more anti-immigration and more conspiratorial and more hostile to the libs and kind of more entertaining than all other Republicans, you can just go straight to Trump's Twitter back in 2016.

53:16You can go to the podcast you like that's going to give you the opinion of that person. I think in 2005, I think about what's changed politically, 1995, 2005 when I was growing up, and now. I think that it's become, you can be into politics now no matter what your views are, you will find something that reflects those views. And so these people have a voice now. If you just think of like, it's not just, I believe in 9-11 trutherism, and therefore I can elect a member of Congress. Somebody could run on that, but that person is going to be ignored by the mainstream media. They're not going to get donors.

53:58They're going to be treated as a crank. They're not going to be able to just tweet directly. They're not just going to be able to go on large podcasts. They're going to be sympathetic to them. There needs to be kind of an informational environment where these people have something more of like an equal shot where their views that are rejected by the elites don't get them gatekept, don't get them isolated and kept out of power. And I think that's what happened. Every kind of movement in communications technology in the last 34 years, not everyone, but the major ones, cable news, podcasts, internet, social media, have been in the direction of greater democratization of the public square.

54:41Coleman Hughes:So is there also a difference between elites and populists with respect to simple stylistic things like how you speak, how you dress, and if so, why? Why is that important? Yeah, I mean, I think populists, they are how you speak, how you dress. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's kind of the rambunctious kind of combative style is like almost central to the definition of populism. And I think it's like the way that certain views are underrepresented among elites, like the ones we talked about, certain styles or aesthetic things, aesthetic kind of ways of just going about in the world are underrepresented among elites.

55:28So a politician 20, 30 years ago, So they're probably someone who's from the upper class or assimilated towards the upper class. They speak in complete sentences. They don't engage in ad hominems usually. They don't attack their opponents. They don't just say crazy things. Usually there's some kind of – there is a class thing here. And populism is one of those things where one of the aspects of populism is that basically some people like, you know, the monster truck rally. Some people like professional wrestling. Some people like the UFC, you know, on the White House lawn, right? These things are represented and the populists are giving them that.

56:06They're giving the people who want a show, who want some entertainment, who find kind of elite culture too stuffy or maybe they would say inauthentic. They're giving them what they want.

56:17Coleman Hughes:okay i want to ask you some questions about your your actually your first book your first book is called what's it called public choice theory and the illusion of grand strategy yes that you're going way back with that one yeah so it's it's uh effectively a book about why we make the military decisions that we do right and so i imagine you have a view about whether the military industrial complex is a real thing, what those concepts mean properly understood and how that sort of like, how that, because obviously this interfaces interestingly with your new book, because one of the more commonly held beliefs among populists and their audience is that industry runs America's military choices.

57:12Coleman Hughes:And we get into wars because the people at Raytheon need to make money. They have lobbyists that shape the opinions of our security state, and they are all too eager to get us involved in wars as a result that then we're down to the financial benefit of the people at Raytheon who live in a revolving door. Many of the people in our security establishment find cushy jobs at such companies soon after their departure from public service and so forth. So to what extent is that true? And how do you fit that into your kind of like experts tend to be right framework? Yeah. So I talk a little bit about this in the book.

57:55I had actually a paper with Max Abrams many years ago where we polled actual experts in foreign policy, and we saw what they thought. And going back to the point about whether experts ever believed that defunding the police was a good idea, foreign policy experts tended to be a lot less hawkish than kind of the D.C. establishment. And so, yeah, a lot of the think tanks, a lot of the kind of environments, the intellectual elite in Washington is either somehow indirectly funded by weapons manufacturers, although I think that's easy to exaggerate. I think a lot of it is actually people who have an ideological stake in American foreign policy, or in a lot of cases, it's actually foreign governments who are very good at lobbying.

58:47And so, yeah, American foreign policy is kind of a unique and interesting thing in that most Americans do not have any direct experience with it, right? And so we are just kind of so like information, and they usually don't prioritize it outside of, you know, in voting or whatever, outside of an unusual circumstance. And it doesn't, you know, it's even ideologically, it's not what most Americans who are ideological care about. And so we are like really, really dependent on the informational environment. And another thing about foreign policy is it's hard to develop real expertise like vaccines, medicine.

59:22You can do randomized control trials. You could see whether this medicine works or that vaccine works or whatever. Even social science, economics, there's tons and tons of data you can look at. There are experiments people use. Foreign policy, like I have a PhD in political science with a focus on international relations. The expertise is a very, very limited use because there's so many different parts. It's inherently unpredictable, right? It's inherently underpredictable. It's a very complex system. I think during the British Empire, people would develop actual expertise in regions of the world.

1:00:02Somebody would know the Arab tribes or they would know a part of India very, very well. We tend not to do that as much. International relations people, experts, are kind of generalists for the most part. And I think that is just like, what even is expertise in international relations?

1:00:19Coleman Hughes:Our National Security Council doesn't have one area expert on each? They probably do. I mean, but even like when that paper I talked about when we pulled the experts, we even asked like people, are you an expert in the Middle East or Iran or something? And then we'd ask, do you speak Arabic or Farsi? And a huge portion, I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head now, but a huge portion of them did not even speak the language of the country they were experts in. They were, I don't know, reading reports of activist groups. I don't know exactly what they're doing to be experts. Reading the newspaper, I mean, I'm an expert in these foreign countries in that case.

1:00:55Coleman Hughes:Well, you actually speak a little Arabic, right? I speak a little Arabic, yeah. I mean, I wouldn't consider myself an expert in the region by any means. And yeah, whether in theory you could develop expertise in international relations is an interesting question. In practice, I don't think anything we do as a society actually gives you expertise that makes your opinion that much better than a random educated person who's following the news. And I think Phil Tetlock, his research on who's good at predicting things, I think he found that, right? A lot of it was geopolitical focus, whether these experts knew more than – they tended to do better.

1:01:34Like, the experts would do better than, like, just a random person who knew nothing. But if you compare them to, like, an educated person who just follows the news and tries to predict things, they were about equal if my recollection of Tetlock's work is correct. So yeah, international relations, kind of geopolitics is kind of a very interesting place where even the definition of expertise can be contested.

1:01:57Coleman Hughes:So it's easy to find examples of left-wing populism in Latin America. There are a dime a dozen. And I think most of the examples of left-wing populism you've talked about in the podcast come from Latin America. Are there left-wing populists in America? Who are they? Could you name them or think of them? and do you think there is a prospect for popular and successful left-wing politicians at the national level in America? Yeah, so the question of populism's relationship to the ideological spectrum, there's a researcher named Lawrence Gunther who I cite in the book, and basically what he finds is, like I say populism is not about ideas mostly, it's not completely not about ideas.

1:02:40Like on immigration in particular, what Gunther finds is that he looked at polls of Europeans and then European politicians, right? And the European politicians and the masses had about similar views on economics, similar views on social issues. Immigration and crime were the big ones, where the elites were just way, way to the left of where the voters are. And so that's part of the reason why we have right-wing populism. It's that the right-wing views on crime and immigration in particular are just underrepresented. So most in the Western world, most populists, anti-elites, they tend to be right-wing.

1:03:19There are left-wing populists, but there's not this gap. Left-wing populists tend to focus on economics. There's not this as large of gap in economic views between the elites and the masses. So there's just not a lot of market space for them. In the American context, like, yes, there are left-wing populists. I'd say Bernie Sanders is clearly a populist. Graham Plattner is clearly a populist. You know, they have this aspect, you know, they're not the first choice of the Democratic Party by far. You know, Chuck Schubert endorsed Graham Plattner's opponents. Bernie Sanders, his followers are always accusing the Democrats of stacking the field against him in the primaries or rigging the election.

1:03:59So these are not establishment people. They do divide the world into us and them. They don't focus on social issues or, well, they do focus a little bit on social issues, but it's not about immigration is not their main focus or social issues is not their main focus. It's economics, right? And there is an audience for that. Whether that has a prospect of succeeding, it's the question of the next five, 10 years of the American left, what direction it's going. You've seen these parallel rises. You've seen this rebranded neoliberalism as I see the abundance movement. You see that very successfully.

1:04:39You see California governor, governor of New York, citing Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's work. At the same time, you see these people with their roots in DSA, people like Mamdani, people like Graham Plattner rising up and having political success. So whether there'll be a synthesis or whether one side will win, that's kind of the battle of the next five years in the Democratic Party. As a matter of prospects, I will say compared to the conservatives, what liberals have is they do actually have a real establishment. So even if you go back before Trump in 2016. If you look at the 2012 primary on the Republican side, it was wild.

1:05:23I mean, you had these novelty candidates. You had these people like Herman Cain and Michelle Bachman, like rising in the polls, leading. It was, you know, it was a reality show, right? Centorum, Huckabee. It was like, it was a kind of crazy free for all. The Republicans already were like, you know, were already into populism, the Tea Party movement. And by 2016, the party was just ripe for Trump's taking, right? These people like Never Trump versus National Review, at that point, they didn't have much influence in the first place, which is why they couldn't stop him. On the left, like these people who are not populist, who are left-wing, you know, like New York Times columnists, like there's big sub-stackers, big media outlets, they're still there and they have reach and they have intellectual prestige, right?

1:06:07So this populism is this force. There is this actual kind of grassroots support on the left for left-wing populist ideas. And then there is this establishment that they're going to kind of run into. And whether one side co-ops the other or which side wins, I don't know. It's yet to be seen. But this is the thing to watch on the left.

1:06:25Coleman Hughes:And why is it that populism skews more right-wing? I mean, you explain that the divide on immigration and crime is big, and that leaves an opening for populist candidates. But is there something inherently more right-wing about populism, or is it just a historical accident? At this moment, there happens to be this big gap. Yeah. I mean, I think that the idea that elites are more liberal on race and sexuality and issues like that, I've written some articles on this, and I've looked into some data. It's practically a universal thing. I looked at like, you know, 20, 30 different countries and in each case or almost each case, more educated, more educated people were more like in favor of gay marriage, more liberal on, you know, welcoming like who is part of the nation.

1:07:18So I do think there is something inherent there where like smart, ambitious people like move to big cities and are open-minded and are tolerant of different groups. Now you get like wokeness, you get to like OD on that. You can go too far. But I do think that like in general, elites are more liberal on these issues.

1:07:36Coleman Hughes:Is that a personality, a side effect of personality, like higher in openness to experience or something? Yeah. Yeah. And I'd say intelligence too. I mean, that's less politically correct to say, but like a lot of the kind of, you know, racism and sexism is often very, very dumb. I think it was, we've seen, you know, anyone can browse Twitter for five minutes and see that. The left-wing populism, it's had a history. It's been in Latin America. I think that's probably historically what has happened is economic governance, economic policy has become more left-wing. We've had a rise in the welfare state.

1:08:12There's no aristocratic privilege in Western countries anymore. There is redistribution, there are regulations. and it seems like we've kind of reached the, you know, we've kind of reached the equilibrium. Maybe when people are very, very poor, it's easier to get them worked out about, you know, the rich elites. There's a, there's a sub-research showing that basically as Western countries became wealthier over the second half of the 20th century, they became wealthier and political party platforms tended to focus more on social issues and less on economic issues because, you know, people were wealthy.

1:08:45They were, they were fighting over expressive values. Mm-hmm. And so, like, that's why maybe in the third world, in developing countries, you will see more economic populism, and that's why you see less of it in Western countries, and we're still fighting these culture war issues. Okay.

1:09:00Coleman Hughes:So, something that maybe not as many people know about you is that you're Palestinian and Jordanian. You've written about Israel and the war in Gaza. Is there any window or vantage point that your heritage gives you there? Or are you effectively feel you're no different than someone you're reading articles trying to make sense of it from afar? Yeah, I think that I'm mostly reading, thinking, coming up with my own ideas. But everyone's background is going to affect kind of how they see the world, how they see political issues. I think that populism in particular, I think just knowing people from the Middle East and knowing immigrants to America, it's kind of given me a perspective on what actually is.

1:09:52It made Western elites seem like strange people because I look at regular America. Most people I grew up with, their parents didn't have college degrees. It was working, middle, working class. And then I think about the people who came from the Middle East, a lot of similarities there. And I think actually the elites I've been around when I've been around places like Columbia and UCLA and dealing with people in the media, I think that they are actually different and interesting. And that's probably influenced how I think about these issues. I think you're asking about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and Middle Eastern politics maybe more specifically.

1:10:33Yeah, my view is it's hard for—I just said that the American working class and Middle Easterners are the same in some ways, but they're also very, very different. And one way that they're very, very different is it's hard for, I think, Westerners to understand the kind of overwhelming social conformity that there are in these societies. So, you'll say, you know, people will look at, you know, Israel and Hamas and they will say, well, not all Palestinians support Hamas. You know, I'm sure it's not 100%. You know, or they'll say, you know, this is, you know, they'll try to like talk about like, oh, we have to give these people in the society more of a chance than these people.

1:11:10And I think what a lot of people thought or said, like, there is a lot more kind of social homogeneity in these societies and what people believe than there are in Western countries. And probably being, like, involved in a war zone, involved in an active conflict is probably going to up that to the nth degree. We see that in our own society when there is conflict or when there is a foreign threat. So, yeah, I mean, it does have some influence. You know, you never want to be one of those people who says, you know, my background gives me some expertise. You always want to ground what you believe in kind of facts and empirical arguments everyone can understand.

1:11:44But, you know, of course, it does influence how I think.

1:11:47Coleman Hughes:And I think, which one of your parents is from Christian, Palestinian? Yeah, my dad's Greek Orthodox and my mom is Catholic. I wonder about the role of religion there in the conflict, if that gives you any, if you haven't thought about that at all. I had Oren Kessler on the podcast who wrote a great book, 1936, about the Arab revolt in the late 30s. And I asked him whether there were any examples he found in all his research of Christian Palestinians participating in terrorist attacks against the British, Jews, etc. And I believe he said he had found none. And he was a pretty exhaustive account of that revolt.

1:12:29Coleman Hughes:And it's interesting there is a case study because to the extent that Palestinians have legit grievances against the British, and they do from that era certainly have grievances, you would expect the violence to be distributed among Christian Palestinians as well, which were, you know, 10-15 % of the population or something, but you don't see that. Yeah, that is a good point. In the second half of the 20th century, there was this Christian Palestinian who was the leader of some kind of terrorist group. It was officially a Marxist group, but it was under the umbrella of Palestinian resistance. So there was a time when Christians in the Middle East—actually, Christians in the Middle East had been overrepresented in Baathism, in kind of these secular, nationalistic, pro-Palestinian ideologies.

1:13:23Michelle Aflac is the intellectual behind Baathism. It attracted minorities, you know, like Bashar al-Assad's regime, the Alawites in Syria. And, you know, Christians tended to be more supportive of that regime than Sunni Arabs were. And yeah, so there was this, like, Arab nationalism that kind of encompassed, like, different kinds of Arabs, different kinds and Middle Easterners. But on the broad scheme of things, you're right. You do see Christian Arabs are more likely to just have moved away from the Middle East and gone on with their lives, which is better for them and better for their descendants than fighting forever.

1:14:04You see that in the American occupation in Iraq. There were no suicide bombings by Christians. It was a Sunni insurgency first, and the Sunnis and the Shiites started fighting, and then Christians were ultimately victimized. You see that in Lebanon. I mean, when Israel invaded Lebanon in the late 1970s, 1980s, they wanted to install a Christian government because they thought it would be friendlier to Israel, even though it was the same ethnic group. And if you know something about Christian Arabs and Muslims, they speak the same language. They eat the same food. Kind of their family practices and how they see family and their attitudes towards sexuality and marriage and child rearing are very, very similar.

1:14:46Like you will actually, like you can meet them and not tell who's a Christian or who's a Muslim unless you're seeing somebody wearing a hijab or something like that. And so, yeah, I think that the role of Islam and you mentioned Sam Harris, I mean, I think he's right to point this out. It absolutely is significant.

1:15:03Coleman Hughes:Okay, final question. This goes back to the beginning of our conversation about your long intellectual journey. um you know as someone who had a window into what it is like to be a disgruntled angry young man and has made a journey to um i understand you know first of all being very successful seemingly well adjusted i'd like to say so i think so i'm right that you have a family right i have a family so you've checked all the boxes of what i think makes a good life as a man, and you've come on that journey from a less healthy place, what advice do you have for a young man that you could call it incel or not, incel adjacent, angry, alt-right, whatever label you want to use that paints the picture?

1:15:59Coleman Hughes:What's your most honest, genuine, and helpful advice that you could give such a person? Yeah, I mean, I've always believed that victimhood, kind of self-pity, these are spiritually, intellectually poisoned. And I think that a lot of kind of crazy politics comes from people not realizing that their anger is internal and extrapolating out to the rest of the world and getting angry about something in the world from a broad historical perspective. Not that you could have suffered from affirmative action or something, you might have been a victim of a crime, whatever. You're an American living in 2026.

1:16:39Most people listening to this are probably middle class or higher. Your life is pretty good from an objective perspective. There's nothing, you know, you get into masculinity. There's nothing masculine about exaggerating your problems, whining about them, seeing yourself as a victim. So like, if you are angry, it's probably something personal. And something I always believed in, and something that I practiced is actually self-improvement, like reflecting on who you are, kind of what you're doing wrong, learning to socialize. Like some of us, it takes more effort or it took more work than others to be able to do that.

1:17:14Learn. You have to be honest about what's bothering you. If you feel some kind of discontent in the world, what is the ultimate source of that? And if you do find yourself getting into these, quote unquote, red pill, politics or white identitarianism or whatever it may be. You don't have to listen to Abraham X. Kendi or something. You can listen to me. You can listen to Coleman. There's a lot in that worldview that is just as false as the things that you think you are rebelling against. So victimhood is a cancer. Focus on self-improvement and just keep an open mind and actually try to seek truth rather than rejecting a certain community, people you feel resentful for and then just falling into a rabbit hole which is also going to lead you in a bad direction

1:18:03Coleman Hughes:all right richard hanania the book is cacistocracy there's a lot in there we didn't get to thank you so much for coming on my show thanks coleman really enjoyed it