Ross Douthat has a thoughtful review of Richard Hanania’s book, which is another brief against “populism” but from Hanania’s odd angle. Douthat’s problem is that Hanania lets the elites off a little too easy, citing their official or institutional commitments to truth-seeking as a kind of emblem of their greater reliability as compared with “the internet” or “podcasts” like Joe Rogan’s show.
Douthat thinks that’s not the way to reckon with how elite failure transmits itself to the rest of us, and he cites the case of population alarmist Paul Ehrlich:
Ehrlich took just one 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.
I think that’s roughly right. Elites have to be judged by an elite standard, and amateurs by an amateur one. And mostly, they are. It’s on this sliding scale that Rogan looks pretty good because of his skepticism about wearing surgical masks during Covid. This is a skepticism that Anthony Fauci shared, but he denied it in public or talked around it as “the sort of thing that reminds us what to do.”