Kakistocracy

“American elites are and have been greatly underrated. Whatever their flaws, we turn away from them at our peril. Populism, in turn, is a danger. Richard Hanania’s Kakistocracy makes this case better than anyone else and provides a fresh new perspective on what is happening in America and the rest of the world today.” –Tyler Cowen

“Richard Hanania is the world’s greatest living essayist. While I’m personally deeply prone to both-sidesism, he’s gradually convinced me that modern-day populists are objectively worse than the elite midwits they’re replacing. Kakistocracy–‘rule by the worst’–defends this thesis with grim aplomb.” – Bryan Caplan

“Richard Hanania has written a bracing examination of the populist age. Rejecting both romantic defenses of ‘the people’ and reflexive elite self-congratulation, Kakistocracy is a serious, data-grounded account of why movements that begin as corrections to genuine elite failures often end in something worse than what they replaced.” – Rob Henderson

“Only the man who helped create the online right could diagnose it this ruthlessly. Hanania shows how the fringe left accelerated the worst tendencies of the right, while the rest of us can only watch in horror. The result is a painfully accurate diagnosis of everything stale and deadening in American politics.” – Brianna Wu

Richard Hanania is a Research Fellow at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. Richard’s academic interests include nuclear policy, American grand strategy, political psychology, the politics of the Middle East, and international law. He also uses statistical modeling and text analysis in order to investigate the behavior of international organizations. Among other journals, his work has appeared in International Studies Quarterly and the Journal of Cold War Studies.

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