Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster

by Richard Hanania

Kakistocracy is Greek for “rule by the worst people.”

Why does turning away from elite rule and institutions so often lead to corruption, insta­bility, illiberalism, and economic decline? In Kakistocracy, Richard Hanania dissects the dominant political story of our era: the global rise of populism. The United States is one among many nations shifting from a political spectrum of conservatives versus liberals to populists versus insti­tutionalists, opening the door for the least honest and competent figures to take power—and often be rewarded for failure.

Hanania is a legal scholar and political scientist by training, contributor to Project 2025, and repen­tant Trump voter. He argues that modern democracies suffer from inefficiency, special-interest domination, and incompetence. Left unchecked, he warns, these trends create dysfunction in housing, energy, health, and the economy, paving the way for corruption and creeping authoritarianism.

Despite this, populist movements, fueled by preju­dice and misinformation, rarely solve these problems and instead elevate leaders who are profoundly unqualified to govern. The result is a kakistocracy, where corruption and ineptitude become routine. Hanania’s exploration spans the globe, examining the leadership of figures including Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Viktor Orbán, as well as events in countries such as Sri Lanka, Romania, South Korea, and Argentina. He discusses the ways in which the rise of populism is related to resurgent authoritarianism and why alliances between populists in the West and authoritarians abroad are based in shared values and interests.

Drawing on political science, economics, and sociology, Kakistocracy confronts the failures of the Trump-era GOP, revealing how scams, institutional erosion, and corruption are inevitable in a party that embraces populism. It also shows why similar move­ments are on the rise around the world and investigates what elites can do to respond to populism’s more rational critiques of mainstream institutions while still fighting back against it.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History

237 pages, Hardcover

Published July 7, 2026

About the author

Richard Hanania is an American political science researcher and right-wing political commentator. He is the founder and president of the think tank Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI).

Between 2008 and the early 2010s Hanania wrote for alt-right and white supremacist publications under the pseudonym "Richard Hoste".

He is the author of Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy and The Origins of Woke. Hanania has also written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Quillette.

Reviews

[Stetson · Rating 4 out of 5]

To those who navigate public discourse by categorizing participants into neat partisan tribes, Richard Hanania will be confusing. He's a Palestinian American who grew up in the rougher neighborhoods of Chicago and never technically graduated high school but has gone on to earn a PhD and JD and connect with major public intellectuals, Tyler Cowen, Steven Pinker, and Bryan Caplan, and tech VCs, Marc Andreessen. Subsequently, he has launched himself into to public discourse by leveraging these connections while having a penchant for provocation. Some of his better known articles include "Why is Everything Liberal?", "The Based Ritual", "Women's Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas", and "Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV". He also has two prior book including The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics and Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy: How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy.

Before I get to reviewing Kakistocracy, Hanania has a history as a pseudonymous Alt-Right blogger (Richard Hoste). This is a past for which he has apologized and worldview he has since rejected, though not everyone is convinced by this proclaimed change of heart. Further, it's clear that Hanania is still roughly locatable on the right-side of American politics despite his merciless criticism of Donald Trump and the right-wing new media sphere. So whenever Democrats retake the White House or reclaim more federal power, it is likely that Hanania will snap back into a forceful critique of the political left. He's not really on anyone's team.

In Kakistocracy, Hanania develops a critique of Populism. His premise is that modern liberal democracies depend on "organic elites" to competently steward institutions under their leadership in an increasingly complex world. Populism is an unambiguous assault on an establishment of organic elites, displacing or replacing them with a charismatic figure at the front of a coalition assembled by exploiting the retrograde beliefs, short attention spans, and flimsy epistemics of the hoi polloi. The unruly masses simply cannot themselves produce organic elites and often cannot be represented effectively in a system that wished to retain its small l liberal and small d democratic qualities. Thus, when populist do accede to power, they no longer use effective methods like merit and expertise to select bureaucrats, delegation of power being unavoidable in modern societies, resulting in "rule by the worst," aka kakistocracy. Plus, the substantive limitations inherent in Populism also incentivize an authoritarian turn otherwise competing parallel institutions will crop up naturally. Hanania alleges the empirical data on government led by populists, whether of the left or right, supports this theory.

Given this framework, Hanania addresses himself to the elephant in the room: Why has Populism gained a foothold across developed nations simultaneously? Why has Trump been the singular political figure of the last decade? The obvious response would be "elite failure," but this answer presents a threat to Hanania's theory, which insists "real" elites must always and everywhere be true and good (in general). Instead, Hanania raises two alternative explanations, the salience of immigration as a political issue and changes to communication technology that advantage populist rhetoric. Unfortunately, these two ideas themselves clearly do not provides a definitive account of the success of populism given that Populism has risen in places with less immigration and has a history of success that precede the internet and smartphones (even if technology today may empower Populism). Further, the rebuttal of Hanania's rebuttal of the "elite failure" account of populism is that institutions and governments not responding quickly enough to changes in the structure of discourse and failing maintain order with respect to immigration flows and assimilation rates is itself a kind of elite failure. Moreover, Hanania doesn't really steelman the argument concerning "elite failure" or explore alternative like elite competition. To truly dismiss "elite failure," Hanania would need to provide more detail on why political parties in America have been hollowed out, why the Executive and Judicial branches have come to dominate the Legislative branch, why rates of socialization and social trust and social capital began declining prior to the revolution in information technology, and why marriage and with it fertility rates are in secular decline (I excluded mention to the "woke" takeover of institutions because Hanania's previous book argues that bureaucratic extension of Civil Rights law on the basis of "disparate impact" explains it, which again looks like a kind of elite failure to me given that this meant that organic elites purposely disrupted and degrading meritocracy in a systematic way in order to address a racial grievance, a populist concern).

Anyway, it is rare that any political theory holds together under rigorous scrutiny. Even liberal democracies themselves, as arch-liberal theorist Frank Fukuyama admits, will inevitably self-implode without certain deference to illiberal human tendencies, such as nationalism and loyalty to kin (in fact, this potentially seems like a good account for why Populism has gained a foothold, i.e. the mandarin of the world were too smug and cloistered to pay enough deference to those whose values differed from theirs despite this being a supposed hallmark of liberalism).

Fortunately, Hanania is also not intransigent with his model, He's aware that he's relying on a lot of "you know it when you see it" and nearly tautological arguments to shore up his central claim. He also has a past of being sympathetic to certain populist arguments. So, he does dedicate a chapter to exploring COVID-19 mismanagement in America. He also carves out a potential exception for populism having some utility in certain political contexts, recounting examples from Latin America. He also insists that the people who do end up leading liberal democracies do have some blindspots, namely crime and urban disorder, which can and should be addressed within the system. Beyond solving real political problems (housing under supply, crime, immigration, scientific innovation, etc), he recommends that antipopulists can regain their footing by surrendering on symbolic issues, running charismatic politicians, discarding ideas that are ridiculous on their face (the denial of sex differences), re-building a unifying and inspiring vision for society.

Hanania's recommendations are easier said than done. If the antipopulists in America were able to implement these recommendations, it would likely destroy the constituency for the national political party that is not currently led by a populist because that constituency is patched together primarily by symbolic issues, alienating ideas, and populist-type grievances. Perhaps, in the long-run, this would be better for American politics, but it would likely mean being less able to mount a vigorous opposition to Trump (whose final term is about half over) and his successor (who may or may not be as populist as Trump).

I recommend this book to those interested in our political moment and political ideas generally. Hanania presents and synthesizes research and the writing of others on questions related to populism and other active debates in our public discourse that is edifying even for readers that vigorously disagree with his particular theory and positions.

Read my extended review of Kakistocracy

[Pete · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kakistocracy : Why Populism Ends in Disaster (2026) by Richard Hanania is an interesting look at the rise of populism. Kakistocracy is a Greek word for rule by the worst.

Hanania is a writer who has a law degree from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Political Science from UCLA. He is a research fellow at the University of Texas and writes a popular substack. He now describes himself as a Classical Liberal. He is strongly pro-market and indeed was prepared to say that he wanted Trump to win in 2024. He has now dramatically changed course. The book seems to have been written because of what Hanania has thought about Trump and how his reaction to him has changed.

Populism is a bit like the term ‘Neoliberalism’ in that it is often applied to any electoral outcome that people don’t like. However, populism can be better defined. Hanania defines it as government by people who say the current rulers are corrupt and that they will provide better government. Populists also dislike intellectual and established elites. Right wing populists are usually nativists while left wing Populists typically reject market economics. Populists of different types often reject standard knowledge in various fields. Hanania believes that market rejection makes people much poorer. Populists such as Chavez in Venezuela demonstrate this.

The book first defines Hanania’s own theory of populists. This is largely that populists blame the elites for the problems in society and tend to hold more traditional views. Then Hanania has a chapter on how the alternative to the elites is rule by the Worst. The book then explores how the internet has removed gatekeepers on information and how this has fed populism. Hanania then explores the frequent overlap between populism and authoritarianism. The book then looks at how there are solutions to some of the problems that populists talk about with existing elite frameworks. YIMBYism for reducing house prices for example. Hanania then writes about how during Covid-19 the elites in many places acted terribly. Hanania also looks at some interesting populists like Alberto Fujimori in Peru and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Finally Hanania provides a synthesis of his thoughts on populism.

Much of the book refers to Donald Trump. It is surprising that a country as rich as the US would turn to a populist. Populists tend to come to power more often in places where things are going poorly. The US’s very strong two party culture is more vulnerable to populists. Once Trump had captured the nomination of the Republican Party most in the party backed him. Trump has showmanship and charisma but is exceptionally unprincipled. He was also lucky in facing mostly poor Democrat opponents. Had the Democrats had a proper Primary in 2024 and Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro been their candidate there is a much better chance that they would have won.

Hanania’s writing about populists in South America is interesting. He makes the point that many of the problems of the region are due to Peronist type populists. However, Fujimori in Peru is an example of a populist who fought hard against the Shining Path and who also largely respected markets. Despite considerable corruption Peru benefited from his rule. In El Salvador Bukele took radical steps to stop criminal gangs and has reduced crime dramatically. Hanania makes the point that in the West market reforms and respect for law are made sacrosanct but that public order is not. In some cases really high crime may make radical solutions worthwhile. Hanania does acknowledge serious human rights abuses have been committed by both. But Hanania suggests that in facing violent criminal gangs and Marxist fighters they may be justified.

This is similar to the point that elites lost respect during Covid for deceiving the public on public health announcements, keeping schools closed longer than was justified and having long lockdowns. In making these points Hanania is making the case that if the elites really fail then populism and anti-elite positions may have some merit.

He proposes in general that populists have little place in well run developed countries but may, under certain circumstances be of some use in poorer countries. Here the elites may be extractive and a populist may be useful in overcoming a bad equilibrium of extractive institutions or major public disorder.

The book doesn’t explore the disagreement within elites much. It is acknowledged but downplayed. As an example, US Universities now tend to be places where affirmative action is strongly supported as is the idea that children should be able to transition their sex. Also at Universities mainstream economics is rejected outside the economics department. Meanwhile in business elites standard economics would be accepted, affirmative action rejected and opinions on trans issue would be very different. This matters because Hanania has a tendency to treat the elites as a coherent block.

Kakistocracy is a good book. It’s worth reading for a critique of populism from a classical liberal viewpoint. It made me think through where populism may have a role and the problems that it brings. It doesn’t provide a complete, coherent theory of populism. But such a thing probably isn’t possible.

[Sebastian 14 1 9 18 · Rating 3 out of 5]

The right wing case for sensible center leftism

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a bit biased because I’m a fan of the author’s provocative writing on Twitter/X (which is part of why I picked up the book).
A few of my favorite things about Hanania and this book:
• He carefully combines research across several fields to explain why populism emerges and why it generally produces poor outcomes.
• He is intellectually honest in arguing that contemporary right-wing populism is often driven by poor epistemics, conspiratorial thinking, and anti-intellectualism. (This is one reason I consider Hanania one of the few true conservative intellectuals today.)
• He has a strong understanding of econometrics and uses it to present robust findings from relevant studies.
This is a high-quality book on contemporary politics that feels more like reading a serious long-form investigation than the pop politics or pop science you'd find in an airport bookstore. It's definitely not fluff.

When I leave reviews, I like to include a few of my favorite quotes from the book:

“Millions will watch professional sports or reality television for fun. Almost nobody finds pleasure in reading think tank reports on the history of innovation or an empirical analysis of what predicts higher housing costs. This is why the tabloid press tends to be more inclined to support populist candidates and causes throughout the world. The same audience that wants sensationalist journalism and celebrity gossip lines up behind influencers and politicians who provide the highest entertainment value.”

“We should see more in the way of fragmentation, the blending of news and opinion, the decline of gatekeepers, and, with progress in AI especially, customizable content in which it becomes increasingly difficult for many people, particularly the misinformed and cognitively limited, to differentiate fact from fiction....Trying to convince people that they are wrong through books or comprehensive essays will therefore have a limited effect on the typical Orbán or Trump supporter.”

“Regardless of what we think about providing support to Ukraine, the Western reaction to the conflict shows that elites still believe in something. They are not Nietzsche’s last men, willing to go to war with cake designers who out of religious conviction refuse to become active participants in a homosexual wedding but no one else. The Ukraine conflict has proved that modern people are, like the American Founders, willing to fight and die for freedom, and elites in the West have the moral certitude to unapologetically take the side of liberty in a foreign struggle.”

[Matt Berkowitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is quite simply the best book I’ve read that was released in 2026 at the time of this writing. Provocatively written and persuasively argued, Hanania makes the case that populist leaders and figures in general tend to produce worse outcomes—economically, in terms of human flourishing, and in terms of producing reliable information.

Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for the rest of the book defining populists (and populism) in contrast to elites (or what Hanania calls organic elite). Hanania gets his definitions largely from the empirical literature but lays out somewhat more expansive definitions. Whereas elites are people whose status comes from established institutions and from the approval of other elites rather than a mass audience, populism portrays these elites as corrupt, self-interested, and out of touch. Populists elevate attitudes and cultural preferences that are more common outside elite circles, and reward figures who derive status directly from voters, consumers, or followers rather than institutional gatekeepers. While this is sensible, Hanania acknowledges the imprecision in this definition and uses a more descriptive definition of populism in the sense of common usage. Remarkably, when independent raters across the political spectrum rank or identify people as populists, there is high inter-rater reliability, providing some degree of certainty that people are identifying populism as roughly the same thing (“I know it when I see it”).

Hanania cites research showing that populism generally leads to worse outcomes than standard elites—and this holds for both left- and right-leaning populists, with left-wing populists leading to somewhat worse economic outcomes to their more economically illiterate ideas on balance. But Hanania mostly targets right-wing populists in the book given their prominence in the present moment—in the US and globally.

Moreover, Hanania cites polls showing how the current political divide in the US is ultimately between the uneducated/uninformed (Trump voters) and the more informed (non-Trump voters). While research like this is in danger of being biased, the same patterns were not nearly as pronounced as in 2019, showing that the past 7 years of Republican culture has drifted more and more towards an informational bubble that favours conspiracy thinking and general informational illiteracy.

On this point, Hanania cites research examining whether conspiratorial thinking is more prevalent on the political left or right. Earlier studies often selected roughly equal numbers of conspiracy theories expected to appeal to each side and then found similar levels of belief. But that approach risks circularity: the apparent balance may simply reflect how the researchers chose the questions. Hanania therefore favours studies that instead examined the ten most widely shared true and false stories on Twitter during various weeks and compared belief across political groups. Those results suggested a much clearer asymmetry: people on the right were substantially more likely to believe the most prominent false stories and less likely to believe the true ones.

Ironically enough, Hanania doesn’t follow his own “generally trust elites” heuristic adequately. In Chapter 6, which is probably the weakest chapter in the book, Hanania tackles various topics related to Covid-19. Hanania argues that a rational portfolio of political view with respect to Covid was to be very pro-vaccine but generally anti-NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) such as lockdowns, arguing that the relatively-open Sweden fared well compared to most European nations—but he failed to note that Sweden fared substantially worse than culturally and demographically similar Norway and Denmark who were more lockdown-heavy, as judged by the excess deaths method (Our World in Data link; select Sweden, Denmark and Norway for a comparison). He also calls the controversial Great Barrington Declaration (GBD)—which ineptly argued for focused protection of the most vulnerable—“directionally correct”. Experts of all stripes criticized the GBD on numerous fronts, including advancing an incoherent sense of herd immunity, the infeasibility of shielding the “vulnerable” from the disease when the virus is running rampant throughout the rest of society, and other fatal flaws. Later in Chapter 6, he gives credence to the lab-leak theory of Covid-19 (that it escaped from a lab). To be fair, he doesn’t actually endorse it, but he does focus on attempts to suppress taking it seriously, while failing to mention that the weight of evidence clearly favours a zoonotic origin. I guess he didn’t look too deeply into this issue, which is always surprising and disheartening when one attempts to write a serious book (see for example the excellent book by Philip Markolin, Lab-Leak Fever. Hanania should take his own advice seriously and actually try to figure out what the consensus of expert opinion thinks about the issues he eschews expert opinion on.

The previous paragraph makes the book seem more flawed than it was when such sections are a minuscule part of the book. Regardless, I wanted to include some criticism amidst my overall praise.
One way to avoid this trap is to reframe the overall Hanania makes: in general, we are better off deferring to the scientific consensus or consensus of expert of opinion on a question than we are trying to “do our own research”—regardless of how smart we are. Taking this weight of evidence is almost always going to lead to a better answer if we have little or no expertise in a subject. Yet heterodox thinkers, populists, grifters, etc., often swim in waters that inflate their confidence in their own abilities to come to a more reliable answer than the consensus of experts. But I digress…

Hanania has written a timely book. Institutional trust is eroding—sometimes for good reason, as when Trump guts institutions by placing cranks in charge, but often for reasons that are vastly exaggerated. In this environment, we need to resist populist epistemology and place greater, though not uncritical, trust in the careful processes through which experts and institutions generate knowledge.

[Abe Niederhauser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard Hanania has had an unusual political history. From 2008-2011, he wrote anonymously for white-nationalist and alt-right websites, espousing views he has since renounced. In 2024, he reluctantly supported Trump but soon came to regret the decision. Now he is an outspoken critic of right-wing populism while retaining many of his conservative views.

Kakistocracy is a Greek word meaning “rule by the worst people,” which Hanania argues is where populism generally leads. While there are plenty of misguided populist ideas on both the left and the right, this book primarily focuses on the contemporary right and the MAGA movement.

What I found most interesting was his examination of various right-wing populist talking points, separating legitimate concerns from claims that are exaggerated, unsupported, or simply false. He isn’t dismissive of those valid concerns. Instead, he takes them seriously while asking whether the populists’ proposed solutions actually hold up. More often than not, they do not.

[mark propp · Rating 3 out of 5]

richard is a good lad who says sensible things about many topics. if only we had more like him, really.

his previous book was really valuable. i truly learned a lot from it.

this one, thought, left me wondering why it wasn't a magazine article or a substack post. i'm sure he's written articles & posts about the topic. i just don't see the value in taking a point that can be made in 3k words & making me spend 8-10 hours reading it instead.

this is something i would say about almost every non-fiction book. i'm not really singling our guy out. most things are too long. movies are too long. and i've read too many books & walked away thinking 'this could have been distilled into an editorial and i would have gotten it in 10 minutes, not 10 hours.'

[Igor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked that the author doesn't explicitly 'Take sides' and tries to look at everyone through some kind of objective performance perspective. Author's opinions on Russia were actually, surprisingly NOT cringey - which, for an American who can't even pronounce Russian names correctly, is quite an achievement.

What I didn't like is that I listened to this as an audiobook and author has some kind of speech impediment? It didn't hurt comprehension but I kind of felt bad for the author because it seemed that it was hard for him to narrate it.

[Peter Timperman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Timely, grounded, and practical but I wish Hanania was more ambitious with this book. Lots of good tactical political science.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

im antipo

it means antipopulist