The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Richard Hanania. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: This is the third of four of my pre-U.S presidential election episodes where I interview heterodox thinkers, people not wedded to either party on their thoughts on the election and more. The first two were with Cliff Maloney and Brett Weinstein, both of which were interesting conversations. Today’s guest is Richard Hanania. He has a PhD in political science from UCLA and a law degree from the University of Chicago. He’s currently president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, which supports and funds research on how ideology and government policy contribute to scientific, technological and social progress. Welcome, Richard.
Richard: Thank you for having me, Jim. Glad to be here.
Jim: Yeah, I think this should be an interesting conversation. I really got to know Richard’s thinking at least what a bit I have seen so far by subscribing to his Substack. I am a paid subscriber, one of the 18 or so I actually paid for. I’ve got another 35 or so that I free ride on, and by no means agree with him about everything. I do find him to be a refreshingly heterodox thinker who actually thinks about the issues and doesn’t just glom onto Tribe Red or Tribe Blue. And he also uses some quite careful analysis and some colorful languages. Regular listeners podcast, no, I like both careful analysis and colorful language. Richard is just the kind of guy I was looking for for this series.
Richard: I don’t know, colorful language sounds like I curse a lot or something. I don’t, I try to sometimes have an informal tone.
Jim: And vivid examples, things like that.
Richard: Yeah, yeah, I do do that.
Jim: Yeah.
Richard: When you say heterodox, I actually do have an article in the Substack called, Please Don’t Call Me Heterodox, so it’s fine.
Jim: You’re heterodox anyway. Fuck you.
Richard: Yeah, it happens I found. What I argued in the piece is that it often becomes an identity. People become just reflectively, whatever people are saying, they have to say the opposite and there becomes a heterodox orthodoxy. I just like to be a guy who takes on popular positions when I think they’re right and takes popular mainstream positions. People shouldn’t be afraid to sometimes do that too.
Jim: Yeah, I would describe myself the same way. I call myself heterodox, but I just try to get to the straight shit either way, right?
Richard: Yeah.
Jim: And as far as cursing goes, I’m famous for it. Some of my fans call me Salty Jim. I even did a podcast on the history of the F word one time. That was a lot of fun.
Richard: Yeah, I got to find that.
Jim: The Substack’s Worth checking out at Richard Hanania. Then he also has a Twitter feed at the same handle. He also has a recent book out, the Origins of Woke, which I have bought but I have not read yet. Well, before we hop in, there is one item of disclosure. As regular listeners know, I’m always trying to disclose things if I think they might or might not be relevant, but for the listeners to make their own decisions. Richard’s got a little bit of a controversial past. Apparently he was an alt-right troll under a pseudonym back in the old days. And there was a disclosure article in the Huffington Post in 2023 titled Richard Hanania Rising Right-Wing star wrote for White supremacist sites under pseudonym. You can get all the gory details there. I never heard of Richard Hosta, not interested in Richard Hosta. Richard Hanania has apologized for those posts and represents himself today as a small L liberal. We’re going to proceed on that basis.
Richard: Sounds good.
Jim: All right. 2020 election, don’t give quite the punchline yet who you’re going to vote for, but you’ve written quite a bit that’s quite negative about both Team Red and Team Blue. Why don’t you take a shot at Team Red first?
Richard: Okay, yeah, excellent way to structure the conversation. Yes, I mean I believe that the flaws that the media points to in Trump and his democratic appointees point to are correct. I mean, I take the conventional, this is why I’m not heterotopic in the sense that people usually think of because I think there was a coup attempt in 2020. He does deny the results of elections. He openly says he doesn’t believe in, I mean, he says, I would win California if Jesus counted the ballots. I mean, the man is just not even pretending. I mean, it’s crazy to see supporters who are like, oh, they’re trying to sanewash what he says. He’s just openly saying, I should win all 50 states and I’m going to reject anything that’s short of that. It’s clear that this is what he does. This is bad.
This is something that we should not tolerate. I think that the Republican position on abortion, I’m pro-choice, and so over the years, this has been something since the Dobbs decision came out in 2022 that has hurt Republicans a lot and I think for good reason. I think most Americans want government out of these reproductive decisions. I think there’s a lot of conspiracy thinking. A lot of this is downstream of Trump, but a lot of it is also just organic. There was this, just take one example. I mean there’s a story about a guy who just posted an anonymous thing, Microsoft Word document that claimed to be from an ABC News whistleblower, a completely anonymous account, zero evidence. It got retweeted by Marjorie Taylor Greene. Megyn Kelly covered it. She said, “We don’t know if it’s true or not,” but there was nothing there. I mean, to make it to the level of why conservative media to have something that’s literally based on nothing is quite incredible.
And so yeah, there’s this conspiratorial mindset. There’s the reproductive issues and then there’s just the Trump cult and the election denial. I mean, if you’re going to make an indictment of the Republicans, from my perspective, those would be the core of it.
Jim: And how about the negatives for you on Team Blue?
Richard: Yeah, I just don’t agree with them on policy. I mean as people will larder if they know already I believe in small government, I think we should have free markets and labor. I think we should have, oh, that reminds me, by the way, I forgot Republicans. Trump just hates trade. I mean, I still stick to the position that free trade is a good thing. Trump wants 10% tariffs, which I don’t think will happen. But this is another strike against him and the current Republican nominee. And so yeah, I think Democrats are in general the anti-market party. They want labor unions that can tell businesses what to do, tell people who can hire, who they can’t hire. Though a longshoremen strike recently that your listeners may have followed, basically their demand was we couldn’t have technology. America has some of the least efficient ports in the world and the union’s position is, look, if they become more efficient if we have technology, we’re going to lose our jobs.
And Kamala came down on the side, not on the side of that specifically, but on the side of longshoremen. Trump was just quiet about it. But generally Democrats are going to be the ones who are more in bed with the labor unions. They’re going to want higher taxes. They are going to be bad in many ways on free speech. I think there’s civil rights law actually matters. And this is what my book is about, it has implications for free speech issues on university campuses. I think a Republican administration will make this somewhat better. A democratic administration will make this somewhat worse. Although we don’t have COVID restrictions anymore, I think that the Republican approach of Operation Warp Speed, which Democrats doubted, but now it’s unpopular in Republican circles. It’s hard to say whether that’s a plus for Republicans or Democrats because Republicans did it without Democrats think it’s a good thing and Republicans think the vaccine is a bad thing. But I’m still-
Jim: I think that’s quite hilarious actually.
Richard: Yeah. And so I still think the Democrats, putting aside the vaccine issue, they masked children. I mean for two years out here in California, the school closures, just disastrous policies. And so yeah, that’s the core of the Democratic most issues I just simply disagree with them on. Foreign policy, I think they have a bad approach to the Middle East. I mean, I think they should be more supportive of Israel. I mean a lot of people don’t like them for being too supportive of Israel, but I think that they’re trying to micromanage the war. I think that there’s nothing good that can come out of that and we should be an ally. I mean, Israel is on our side. It’s morally right, it was attacked and the Democrats are moving away from that position.
Jim: All right. Yeah, that sounds like familiar talking points kind of things. Not identical to my own views, but similar. Let me run through the rut criticism. We’ll start with the Democratic Party since you did the Democratic Party last and then we’ll go back to the blue. One of my biggest objections to Democrats is they are the party of Oikyophobia. That’s a $10 word, but it carries 10 tons of weight. And it’s basically that the left, particularly through education, has been indoctrinating our young people to hate our culture. You can look at poll results that show that the number of kids in their twenties who express patriotism is way down. One of my favorite ones is that we look at those people who say that Jews are oppressors, unqualified, not talking about Israel, 9% for us boomers, something like 65% for people under 25. Hatred of America, hatred of the West and hatred of the Enlightenment is an unfortunate big part of Team Blue’s agenda.
Regular listeners know I hate the woke ideology, which I now call neo-tribal racism. I think the affirmative action in college admissions was a huge scandal. It also shows how elite-driven the Democrats were. 75% of Americans, including every ethnic group, were opposed to that policy. But nonetheless, we had it for 50 years. And then for Team Blue, some, not all but some really extreme climate change proposals. For instance, Bernie in his 2020 platform claimed that he would have 100% renewable energy for transportation and electrical generation, 100% by 2030. Totally nuts. I used to say only Stalin could do that. And then a friend of mine who’s an expert in alt-energy said, nah, Stalin couldn’t even have pulled it off. Only guy could have pulled it off was Pol Pot, kill 25% of the people and drop the GDP by 80%.
Richard: There wouldn’t be no energy use, right, because that’s why energy use would be a fraction of what it was. You can maybe get 100% renewable that way.
Jim: Exactly. And that thing is still up on the web, at least it was a month ago. Bernie, hundreds of millions of dollars, probably would’ve won if there hadn’t been a conspiracy to stop him. He was making literally an insane claim on climate change. Of course, the Dems have always been the party of spend, spend, spend. I’m a gun rights guy, I don’t like their Second Amendment approach. I’m a free speech guy. I don’t like their political correct driven free speech stuff, particularly on college campuses. I find their support for Hamas, and it’s not all of them, but there’s a wing of the Dems. Hamas lovers, do not like that. There’s quite a long list of things I don’t like about the Dems. With respect to the Republicans, number one or close to it is their religious extremism. I used to be a Goldwater Republican way back yonder up until 1992.
We won the Cold War. I said, no more nuts, right? Republicans always had a fair number of religious nuts and other sorts. But since about 1992, that percentage of the Republican Party’s gone up and up and up. And now we even have a non-trivial number of Christian nationalists that more or less align with the Republican Party. I hate that. Along with you, I strongly disagree with their abortion and other social issues and include the drug war. And also Republicans are very opposed to the right to die, which strikes me as cultural imperialism. And in most cases these are driven by religious values and opposed to individual liberty. While the Dems, some of them grossly overreact on climate, the Republicans underreact on climate. Vivek said, it’s a hoax. That’s bullshit. Anybody who knows the science knows that if you increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, the amount of retained energy will increase.
Now what that exactly means in terms of ramifications, it’s unknown, but lots of simulations and models and something’s going to happen. And it’s probably not good. The exact rate, we’re not sure of how much we should mitigate, how much we should cut, how much we should geo-engineer. Those are open issues, but smart people can think through and both parties are too far away from the logical trajectory to get us through to the other side. Fiscal irresponsibility. While the Dems are spend, spend, spend, the Republicans are now spend, spend, spend very slightly less and then cut taxes a huge amount so that the deficits actually grow more rapidly these days amongst Republicans than they do amongst Democrats. It’s useful to remember that the last time the budget was balanced was under Bill Clinton, and that was the first time and only time it’s been balanced in 65 years.
Also, the foreign policy naivete of the Republicans is a strong thread. Vance is a fine example where he has some scary ideas about Ukraine and Taiwan, right? I personally believe that if we don’t stop the authoritarians like we’ve done in the past, the authoritarians are going to continue to gain ground. And then my biggest issue with the Republicans is Donald Trump is ang piece of shit. I was fortunate in my business career to have met many of the tech CEOs of my generation, the boomers, and there was a few of them famous for their narcissism. You probably could guess who they might be. I spent hours with them. None of them hold a candle to Trump. I refer to his narcissism as all galactic and people who think he’s a fascist, no, he’s a fascist only if it’s convenient to pump up his narcissism. And that’s very dangerous.
‘Cause it basically means that Trump whisperers like Putin, et cetera, can play upon his narcissism by praising him, kissing up, et cetera. And they have an inordinate ability to actually manipulate him. He’s also a pathological liar if liar is what the right word is. Maybe he doesn’t even understand the concept of truth. That as far as he’s concerned, the purpose of words is to say what is ever convenient and useful in the short term. During the Biden-Trump debate, which certainly Biden melted down, but Trump probably had the third or fourth-worst debate session in modern history. I gave up counting at the number of just obvious lies, just things that were just on the face not true. And anybody who followed politics would know. I think the Commentariat totaled up 55 or something. I noticed at least 30. He just lies all the time. And he’s also due to his meanness and cheating and all that, his business people, he doesn’t pay them, declared bankruptcy at least four times, maybe at six. And as I said in 2015 when he first came on the scene, said, “I wouldn’t hire that guy to run the mail room at one of my companies. Why in hell would I hire him to be President of the United States?” That’s how I come out as a double hater. Now let’s go to the other side. What do you like about the two parties?
Richard: Okay. Republicans, I mean, I like the fact that they’re doing school choice on the state level. I have an article on that, that they’re basically giving resources to parents rather than to public educators. I like the tax cuts. I like the Republican states are doing very well. I have an article called 40 Years of Economic Freedom Winning, and I show that there’s been 40 years of basically GDP growth and population growth where the red states are outperforming the blue states. I mean, I don’t think that’s an accident. I think they have good on the whole more sensible policies on things like labor, on things like taxes, on things like crime and things like that. The foreign policy, I think Trump, his success in the Middle East. I think it’s still underrated by a lot. There was relative peace in the region.
I mean, Israel worked out peace deals with the UAE, one that they were working on with Sudan, one with Morocco. I mean these were historically important accomplishments. I mean, they were moving toward the Saudi deal too. And the general idea that you should regulate less and you should cut red tape. I think Operation Warp Speed was a great example of that. You mentioned Vance has some isolationist foreign policy views. That’s not that reflected within Congress yet. And Ukraine a little bit, yeah. Ukraine, they make it a little bit difficult. But Trump, I mean brags about getting aid over the finishing line for Ukraine and on the Middle East and I think on China too, the Republican Party is generally still tougher than most Democrats are. Yeah, I mean it’s pretty much the majority. I mean I think the COVID, we were outliers. The red states were outliers on freedom and not just in the US but in the developed world. And even the Third World, there was really nasty lockdowns and mask mandates for a really long time. And Republicans had a little bit of that at the beginning, but then they moved away from it pretty quickly. And that’s unquestionably to their credit.
Jim: All right. One of the things you have written about quite a bit is your views on religion, particularly with respect to its impact in policy and politics. Why don’t you tell us about those views?
Richard: Yeah, I mean I think that religion has an obviously role to play in society. It obviously gives a lot of people meaning. But yeah, the cluster of what’s called the pro-life position, which is obviously a way to classify it that makes it sound sympathetic. But I don’t think people have a right to tell other people when they can have abortions or not. I agree with you on the euthanasia and the right to die. I mean, I think that this is such a fundamental right, the right to live or die. It’s the flip side of the right to live, right? It’s like if someone could force you to live against your will indefinitely, I mean that is a huge restriction of unliberty. It causes pain and degradation. They call it dignity. I mean, they say that they’re defending the dignity of life, but there’s nothing dignified about what happens to people often at the end of their lives and did not give people the choice in this intimate area of life, like the area of reproductive health.
I think it’s just terrible. And so yeah, I think these are the main direct influences of religion on American life. I mean, it has some direct effects that are hard. Sometimes they come down on the side of liberty. A lot of people argued against mass mandates in school, for example, on the grounds that there was a religious freedom violation. Now I don’t know if that’s like in Christianity, it’s a little bit of a stretch, but there’s this general tendency to use religion as resistance to what the government is doing to you and then when the government is doing tyrannical things, that makes sense and can be a benefit for society.
Jim: Yeah, it does cut both ways. Think of the solidarity movement in Poland in the late Cold War. Kids like you probably weren’t even in diapers at the point, but it was very Catholic and a certain reactionary variety of Catholicism. Nonetheless, it provided the moral focus for the people to push back against Marxist-Leninism and was probably one of the principle things that led to the fall of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, its influence, I would argue in the Republican Party today, is becoming quite excessive.
Richard: Yeah, I think it’s always been there. I don’t know if it’s being more excessive or less excessive. I mean the evangelicals, Trump doesn’t care about abortion and he makes this clear time and time again. But yeah, I mean there is this movement within conservatism that a lot of it’s been directed towards Trump worship. I mean there are these, I don’t know if you’ve read about the new Apostle Reformation, I think it’s called Apostleistic or something like that. But basically these people who are self-declared prophets who declare Trump, basically their leader sent by God. And so a lot of the religious stuff has been sublimated into the Trump cult. I mean, these people seem to worship Trump first and foremost more than anything. That seems to be the impact of religion on the Republican Party today.
Jim: Yeah. It’s pretty hilarious. Here’s a multi adulterer multi this and that, cheater, liar, scumbag, bully, and they think he was simply God. In fact, I posted one of my favorite memes of the year recently on Twitter and I on Twitter, I know I did on Facebook and a mailing list. And it shows God and the devil having a drink at a bar. And God is saying, that’s hilarious, Luke, as he calls him for Lucifer, that you took a lion, good son of a bitch and managed to convince everybody that I sent him. And Lucifer says, oh God, you’re making me blush. I thought that put the finger on it quite well, the idea that Trump was sent by God, what a concept. Another thing you’ve talked about is that the Republicans have become very differently than it was in the past, the party of low human capital. Could you explain what you mean by that?
Richard: Yeah, the least human capital concept is one that’s easily misunderstood. It’s not just there are intelligent educated people that are unintelligent on it. That’s part of it. There is a movement where Democrats are winning more of the college-educated [inaudible 00:21:14] Republicans are winning less of the morally uneducated. But there is an idea of human capital as I see as the natural elite within developed society. If you look at Russia, it’s a conservative society. It’s a society in many ways pro-Putin. But the biggest resistance to Putin is basically young urban people, the most educated members of society, right? Same thing with the government of Iran. There is a tendency to form for elite human capital to reject conservatism in the small sea sense, right? Just the small-minded nationalism, religious fundamentalism. And these are the people that naturally tend to populate universities, media institutions. Not that these institutions don’t have flaws, but they are fundamentally truth-seeking institutions and the media makes a lot of mistakes, but they do report to us what is going on in the world.
And academia for all its problems does produce a lot of scientific and technological innovation. And so these people are, they’re not always liberal, I mean, but they are idealistic. They are usually not small C conservative, but they can be more libertarian leaning, they can be more classical liberal. And these are the people that basically they used to be a little bit more evenly distributed between the Republicans and Democrats 10 or 20 years ago. They’ve gone completely in the direction of the Democrats. And this is primarily a Trump issue. I mean, Trump is such a magnet for low human capital and such a repulsive figure to elite human capital just because he lies all the time. He doesn’t respect his opponents. He’s just got this demeanor and this way of interacting public life openly corrupt and self-interested in. And this is what’s happened. And so everything about the Republican Party now more and more reflects that they’re a low human capital party.
The rise of conspiratorial thinking on the right, conspiracy theories are something that low human capital are into, the people who are less educated, people who either don’t have the tools or don’t have the concern with finding truth. I mean, you see these accounts with 500,000 or millions of followers on Twitter. I’ve looked for the left-wing equivalent. There are some left-wing fake news accounts, but they don’t get nearly as big and they don’t have mainstream interaction with figures in Congress like the right-wing conspiracy theorists have with people like Marjorie Taylor, Greene like Infowars. Now Alex Jones, I mean is considered just like somebody who JD Vance has praised. I mean you look at the way Tucker has gone in the last year or two. And so yeah, this is the rise of this conspiratorial worldview, the rise of this just lack of concern for truth, that lack of concern really with ethics, Jimmy. Just not caring at all that Trump lies all the time and that he openly doesn’t believe in democracy. These are all low human capital traits and it’s increasingly separating the two parties.
Jim: It’s also, I suspect, strongly related to the increased polarization, I would argue towards religion. As Voltaire famously said, if they can make you believe absurdities, they can make you commit atrocities, which I always thought was a great quote. And while the party of stupid hasn’t yet committed atrocities, it wouldn’t surprise me if they get to that at some point.
Richard: Yeah, they want to. I think that’s the hopes for the mass deportation. I mean, I think there are some things that if they could pull off, I mean Trump openly talks about jailing his political opponents. We’re not that far off from that.
Jim: All right. Now why don’t we turn the corner and show our whole cards? Now with all these negatives and some positives, where do you actually come out?
Richard: Because I agree with the Republicans on most things, I want Republicans to win most elections. To me it’s an easy decision who I want to control the Senate and the House and the state governments, right? Except there’s a few cases where I think people are particularly egregious. I think Josh Hawley is somebody who I wouldn’t support if I lived in Missouri. He’s probably going to win. Ted Cruz I think is too conspiratorial. If Ted Cruz could somehow lose and Republicans could hold the Senate, that would be good. But I usually want Republicans to win outside of those exceptions. And I overall had a semi-endorsement for Trump called hating modern conservitism while voting Republican. And the idea is they’re going to put the people on the course and the administrative agencies that are going to generally do the things that I want to be done, right?
And that is acknowledging every bad thing we said about Republicans and about Trump in particular. In the end, I’m still a small government guy who believes that economic growth and technological progress is the most important thing. And especially I think with the influence of Elon Musk and these tech guys, the influence on the right, I think that’s the Republican Party. I still have to go with Trump, although it pains me. I am filling out my ballot here in California. I have it, I put a post-it on Twitter today that physically it’s hard for me to pencil in Trump. I still haven’t done it yet. I filled out all the entire ballot as of right now except for the presidential race and I’ll probably force myself to do it at some point, but it’s difficult.
Jim: And we listed the double hater list that I have and they’re pretty strong. These are things I believe in pretty strongly that lead me to hate both parties. And in fact, regular listeners know I got involved with the no labels movement in the hope of crystallizing a third centrist, sane alternative. It sputtered for various reasons, but we may be able to revive it. We shall see. But at the end of the day, I have to say that I will almost certainly vote for Harris on the grounds of the ugly, nasty culture of the Republicans that we talked about, the party of stupid and particularly the nature of Donald Trump. You’re hiring a person to do a job and as I said earlier, I would not hire someone, if he was his real honest self in an interview, I would not hire him to run my mail room of eight people in one of my companies.
Why would I hire a dishonest, mean-spirited, probably at this point mentally diminished character for the most important job in the world? In terms of specific issues, I do agree with you that I do certainly trust the Republicans to do a better job on attempting to restrain the bureaucratic state. I really am annoyed that Republicans couldn’t have nominated someone like DeSantis. I would’ve voted for DeSantis with some level of enthusiasm. But on the other hand, this other stuff I think pushes the other way. And then two specific issues that I think are probably the two biggest issues that will impact the next four years. One is Ukraine. I do not trust Trump and Vance with respect to Ukraine. God knows what kind of deal Trump will try to cut with Putin to show that, oh, I got the war finished in one day. Yeah, yeah. And he’s a wheeler dealer.
He might actually do it, but what the hell is he going to give away? And then climate. Well, at the end of the day, both parties are wrong. I think I would prefer a little bit too aggressive attack on climate and utterly unacceptable immoral genocidal to say that climate is a hoax and that we should do nothing about it. I also have not voted yet. We have early voting in Virginia and my wife and I were talking about it. We’ll probably hold off to actually voting in person on election day, fun thing to do we haven’t done it in a while. And so I still have a little window open to be convinced, and one of the reasons I did these conversations, which I think three out of four will come down on the side of Trump is because maybe they’ll convince me, but if I had to vote today, there is no doubt that when I add everything up, including the culture issues in particular, probably have to vote for Harris.
Richard: Yeah, I respect that. I mean, I understand Trump having this guy leading the country, it’s just bad. I mean, it’s aesthetically bad. It’s morally bad. It’s spiritually bad. I mean, he’s such a flawed human being. You cannot stress it enough. I mean you really cannot. And people say there’s Trump derangement syndrome. I mean no, an objective recounting of this man’s flaws will reveal him to be by far the worst person in public life. I just think people have to be completely blind. It’s not to arrange it. I think the objective truth about what Trump is is just clear. I mean, I’ll say that defending my position, which I’m not that passionate about because I just see your argument so clearly and I really understand it, is that most of the work of the government is not done by the president. He’s going to appoint probably hundreds of judges, the next president, maybe a few Supreme Court justices who are going to be there for life.
He’s going to appoint thousands of people to government positions. Trump is not going to know what they’re doing 99.9% of the time. And so it’s still the same case for DeSantis and Trump. You say you would enthusiastically support DeSantis, 99% of people they employ, probably 90% maybe of people of they hire will probably be doing relatively similar things. Now there’s a few things on Trump where he’d want to prosecute his opponents and such. I can imagine him having more toadies that are more loyal toadies as using loyalty as a criterion for government appointment in a way that DeSantis would not, at least not in the same way, but basically they’ll appoint the exact same judges and they’re going to appoint most of the same government officials. And then on Ukraine., I mean Trump has always in his heart, I think been pro-Putin, but he did not act like that in the first administration.
He still brags about it too, about being the ones to give lethal aid to Ukraine while Obama wouldn’t. They brought some countries, they brought North Macedonia, I think, into NATO. The Republicans always push for high levels of military spending. What they’re going to do on Ukraine, I really don’t know. But if he appointed Bolton and Pompeo. I mean, who’s Trump going to appoint this time? He could wake up and he could just listen to Vance and he could try to sell it to Ukraine. I don’t think that’s impossible, but at the same time, we could just see him behaving like he did in the first term, which was not taking an anti-Ukraine position. Yeah, that’s at least up in the air. I don’t think that necessarily, even though he likes Putin in his heart, I don’t think that that will necessarily be reflected in policy.
Jim: You mentioned John Bolton who was a very solid defense oriented thinker and writer and had senior position in the Trump administration. He has come out excoriating Trump and that he would never vote for Trump and that he is not trustworthy on issues like Ukraine and Taiwan. This was a guy who was sitting right there in the National Security Council and saw Trump up close and personal for a few years. I think I might put a little bit more weight on Bolton’s views on him than some Commentariat like you or I who were looking at it from a distance.
Richard: Yeah. I think what was the number, 43 out of 46 or Something? 40 out of 43 of people who served under him are not supporting Trump.
Jim: Against him.
Richard: What an amazing record. I mean, that is just incredible.
Jim: I know somebody that knows somebody that knows Steve. I know somebody who knows Steve Bannon reasonably well and Bannon confessed to him privately that in his opinion, Trump is dumb as a bag of hammers and that it’s all just showbiz and shtick. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it’s certainly possible. And the other thing you mentioned is the Hinchman issue. This is another of my major concerns. Last time he made the mistake from his perspective of surrounding himself with adults, the Mattises and the Kellys and Tillerson, et cetera. Even Jeff Sessions an honorable guy as it turned out, and he learned his lesson that he can’t be Trump if he has honorable people as his associates. I suspect we’re going to see people like Stephen Miller have big roles in the coming administration. And while I am not of the Trump derangement syndrome type to think that Trump’s the second coming of Hitler, in fact, my model of Trump is it’s all about the narcissism and he doesn’t actually have any strong beliefs, but he has got himself an audience of low information, low human capital people.
And he will perform to get their accolades. If you use that lens, you’re almost always right about what Trump will do. On the other hand, this new cadre of Trump disciples, some of them are pretty smart. Vance, very smart and talented guy, and there’s several other ones. Some people that wrote the 2025 agenda document. Some quite accomplished, quite smart people. And so I do not believe January 6th was a coup attempt other than the minds of a few retarded three percenters and proud boys, but we do have to put a lot of negative on Trump for not taking any action for two or three hours to call off these people and fortuitously probably [inaudible 00:34:34].
Richard: Well, it was before the January 6th. It was the fake electors plot. I mean it was the pressuring Mike Pence. I think that’s, when I say coup, I would say it’s a coup, but January 6th is just a part of it, right? It’s everything he was doing.
Jim: Yeah. I will say everything after December 14th, his behavior after December 14th was when the Electoral College voted. Everything after that I think is essentially disqualifying for him for elected office. Unprecedented in American history. We’ve never had anybody and his own advisors, his own attorney general told him there was no merit to the case and yet to this day, he maintains “I was robbed.” And he said, “Oh, I probably won 45 states in 2020.” I mean, he’s just deranged, etc. You want that guy?
Richard: Yeah. I mean it’s a good argument that I’m not going to give you. I’m not going to say anything against it for Trump personally. Now I don’t think he’s going to be able to pull it off again. I will say that. We might want to punish him, but we also might want to think about the concern might be he might try to do it again and I think he couldn’t do it when he was in office, right? He’s going to try to, if he loses in 2024 in the next couple of weeks, he’s going to say it’s all fake. He’s probably going to push his lawsuits. It didn’t succeed in 2020. Political Magazine has a very long and detailed story of how we could try to actually overthrow the results of the election and he has to do a lot. I mean there’s a lot of guardrails there and some of them have been put in by Congress and signed by Biden in the years since to fortify the election.
Yeah, it’s going to be difficult to do it again. I don’t think he stays in 2028. I mean I think that he’s sold by then anyway, and there’s this hard constitutional rule that says you can’t serve more than two terms. Somebody brought up in one of my articles, someone in the replies brought up a possibility that he tries to stage a coup for his preferred candidate in 2028. I don’t think Trump takes risks for another person. He just doesn’t care enough to do that. And yeah, he’s going to try to persecute his enemies. I mean he’s going to try. It’s unfortunate. It’s unfortunate, it’s bad. The Republican voters are bad for selecting this guy. It is what it is at this point.
Jim: Yeah, I’m with you that I think his chances of being able to overturn the 2024 election’s about zippo, it’s like Pearl Harbor. You can get away with it once or 9/11, get away with it once, but trying to get away with it twice, the Dems will be well-prepared and not just the Dems but the institutionalist Republicans. There’s no chance. Unfortunately, at least from my perspective, I officially announced yesterday or day before, I forget which, that I believe Trump’s going to win. I’ve been looking at the data and in fact I just submitted an article to Politico, which lays out a very detailed analysis of the wasted vote phenomenon on the democratic side. The Democrats have a huge issue in that in 2020, they won California by two million votes. They won New York by five million votes, California they won by five million, New York two million and several states by a million including Massachusetts, Maryland, Illinois, and maybe one other.
The biggest number of wasted votes in the Republicans was actually in Tennessee, surprisingly enough, 704,000. And I’ve done a whole bunch of simulation and I take the view that unless Harris wins by 3.25% of the popular vote or more, she’s not likely to win the election. And she’s currently running in the real clear politics consensus poll at about 1%. And I would just also say that the zeitgeist and the vibe seems to be going in Trump’s direction. Harris has not shown herself to be a strong leader, vapid. Waltz, nice guy. But again, is he a serious guy? Is he a high human capital guy? I’d say no. And so I think a fair number of the low information voters are just pattern matching. I go, we got vapid and in midland talent over here and he’s an asshole, but he’s a talent on this side, right? He’ll be my bully. And so I went on the record and said, I am now accepting bets at even money for Trump, which hitherto fore, I have not. I don’t think the issue is him trying to overturn 2024 elections, but what he and his henchmen will do when they get into power.
Richard: Yeah. The prediction markets are giving Trump about a 60%, 55, 60. It was 50/50, close to 50 for a while. Someone take it at even odds, they can get better odds. They can go to the prediction market if they believe in Kamala and pay 40 cents on the dollar.
Jim: Yeah, I always like an overlay. I never bet on an honest bet. I always want to [inaudible 00:39:20].
Richard: You just want to, yeah.
Jim: Last time I won thousands of dollars on the 2024 election, even amazing the number of retards that gave me thousand dollars bets that Trump would win in 2020 and he actually came closer than I thought he would.
Richard: Yeah, yeah. Very close, yeah.
Jim: But nonetheless, I won thousands of dollars. Anyone that wants to try to take my money back, hit me up.
Richard: Yeah. Yeah, I think the market is probably close to correct. Who knows? I mean, I just posted this thing from the New York Times where if the polls are off like they are in 2020, Trump takes every swing states. If they’re off like they were in 2022, Kamala takes every swing state except Georgia. You just need two points in either direction. This thing can be a blah in terms of electoral college in either direction. We just don’t know. I never had an election in my lifetime where I felt less certain of what was going to happen. I mean I was wrong in 2016. Most of us thought Trump was going to lose, but we still had confidence that there was a clear favorite. 2020, I thought Biden would win. Most people thought Biden would win, but Trump came close. This one, I’m just not surprised either way. I mean it could be either direction and it could be sizable in either direction. I just don’t know.
Jim: In essence, it was a coin flip. It wouldn’t shock me by any means if Kamala won, but at this point there’s enough signal for me to say, I’ll take bets on the other side. What do you think happens to our country under a Trump administration?
Richard: The US has been doing great economically. There’s just a big economist feature on the US and just the last 40 years really, our recoveries from COVID and our recoveries from the financial crisis, we’ve done much better than all developed countries. I think that would continue under a Trump presidency. Some people think that it’ll be like 2016 and they wonder about the cultural effect. Really woken us took off after Trump won and many people believe, and I’m with them, that Trump had a role to play in that. Just the backlash to this guy was so extreme that it turned the country in that direction. I don’t think that happens twice. I think that maybe I’ll write about this, but I think that the way political trends work is things get old. There just is a trendiness and you can’t just keep screeching about the same thing for 10 years. Trump came down the escalator in 2015, he was running for president, 2016 he won.
Now we’re all the way in 2024. I don’t think you keep that energy for a decade. People were still thinking about, Trump was still at the center of our news even when he wasn’t president. And so maybe this is wishful thinking, and maybe I might not write an article on this. I think that there is going to be a detachment from politics. We’ve gone through eras when there’s been less interest in politics culturally and when there’s been more interest. I think that the 1990s, for example, the culture was really depoliticized even into the two thousands, then that changed around 2010, 2012. I think we are going back to a place where politics is boring. You have these micro niche communities of right-wing podcasters and left-wing women and left-wing establishment institutions. But I think in the wider culture, politics will be less.
Politics will be a less part of our culture. It’s not going to be like you tune into the Grammys. A couple of years ago, you turn into the Grammys and it’s all about politics, right? I think there’s going to be a lot less of that. And when it does pop up, it’ll be individual issues like abortion. This is probably what it was 20 or 30 years ago where they’d be like, oh, something would catch on. Oh, sexual harassment is a major thing. This was the early 1990s. We have to talk about sexual harassment. We have to talk about women’s issues. They pop up individually, but there’s not this woke thing where it’s this matrix of oppression. Oh, now we got to talk about Blacks and women and LGBT all at the same time. I think that really in either direction, I think if Trump wins, that’s what happens.
And if Kamala wins, I think the cultural forces are interesting because you’re still going to have Elon Musk and you’re still going to have Twitter. And I think Nate Silver’s book, he talks about the village versus the river, basically roughly referencing the media and the elites versus more Silicon Valley guys, although that’s not exactly the distinction, but our idea would be this dispute between these techish libertarian conservative elites and the federal government and the mainstream legacy media institution to the Democratic Party. I think that becomes the headline in our politics personified through Elon Musk fighting the regulatory state, which is going to be trying to do stuff to him and then he’s going to be fighting back and using Twitter for that purpose and his status within the Republican Party and as a cultural figure. That’s actually going to be, I think, very interesting. That’s actually the more interesting. I think check out or we move into this new place, which is, and even that, but even that politics will be less important. I’m taking 2016 to 2020 as the peak of political influence in our culture. I don’t think we get back there.
Jim: Interesting to see. Now, I agree with you that the nineties was a time when people disengaged from politics, but for good reason, the economy was good throughout the whole from ’92 onward, the Soviet Union and its allies had collapsed. The US was the absolute hegemon of the world. There was a big piece of dividend from cutting defense spending. We balanced the budget. Things were good and you didn’t need to worry too much about politics. But that’s quite different than the way we are now where we have a global near peer. It may soon to be peer and maybe even soon to be post peer adversary in China. We have a major land war in Europe to change boundaries contra to the World War II post-war settlement, which said thou shalt not change boundaries by force. And both parties are so guilty on this whistling past the graveyard, the debt burden continues to rise, continues to go up. And how long they can continue to spin the plates with fancy monetary tricks, I don’t know.
But at the end of the day, that one is going to eventually push the country into a deep corner. In fact, we’re already at the point where the interest on our debt is only slightly less than the total receipts of individual income tax. Think about that in terms of a constraint. I think I would disagree. It’s possible that culturally it could happen, but I would disagree that it’s anything like the nineties where for good reason people didn’t really give two shits about politics. Further back to the woke issue, I would say it is one of the reasons I’m willing to roll the dice with the Dems probably in that I’m pretty closely involved with some of the woke stuff with respect to universities in particular, co-founder at something called the MIT Free Speech Alliance. And I’ve been associated with the American Alumni Free Speech Alliance, etc.
And I would say that the tide turned around 2021 and that the other interesting thing is actually being out there and talking to people at the grassroots level in universities, the actual wokesters in universities was probably never more than 15 or 20%, but they seized the high ground and the controls through the HR process and in the administration, and they managed to intimidate another 45% or 50%. You had a 65, 70% effective working supermajority for wokery in academia, but mostly via fear. And now that peak woke has crested, more and more people are saying, fuck them people. And I think that at some point we’ll see a place where their effective fear plus core is below 50%. Then you may see an explosive decompression in wokery in universities. One I know best, but perhaps in media in the not-for-profit world as well. That’s one of the reasons, frankly, I’m more willing to take a risk with the Dems this time than otherwise. If we’re still on the upswing of wokery, I’m not sure that I would.
Richard: Yeah. But politics matters too. I mean the Democrats, when they get into positions of power, it’s not just if you’re worried about the universities, it’s not just the cultural impact. It’s that a lot of this comes directly from civil rights law. A lot of the Title IX stuff that pushed these kangaroo courts of young men accused of sexual harassment or sexual assault in the early 2010s, that as I showed in my book was caused pretty directly by the Obama administration. The Obama administration really put pressure on schools to do stuff like this, telling them to hire these Title IX coordinators and so forth. Even the process of in the long run universities collecting data on race and sex and having these soft quotas. Originally that pressure came from the Nixon administration, then the universities eventually became as crazy as we see today. Republicans are going to be better on civil rights law. And so the wokeness and the culture, it’s hard to predict. I think that the wokeness in universities is perhaps more important because it has an influence on our freedom of speech, the scientific process, discovery, our ability to speak freely and learn new things about the world. Democrats are unquestionably worse on that. And so that’s also something to consider.
Jim: Yeah, I think they are worse, but they’re getting less worse probably. And the Republicans are getting worse in attempting to defund climate research, telling people what research you can do with respect to research in reproductive technology.
Richard: I don’t know, I haven’t seen a lot of that.
Jim: Not a lot, but it’s more than there was 10 years ago, 20 years ago when Republicans were full on for science. But one of the things that’s coming out of the polling data is quite interesting, which is young men are swinging towards Trump in a pretty major way. One poll actually showed that Trump might actually win a majority, bear majority, but a majority or a strong number in young men. While the young women have moved even further in the democratic direction, but not nearly enough to make up for the young men moving in the other direction. Do you have any insights on what’s going on as a cultural analyst and a political thinker that’s producing this result? And first, you believe it’s true, and two, if you do, what do you think is causing it?
Richard: I think it’s true to some extent. I haven’t done enough research to know to what degree. I think that some of it, an underrated explanation that Matthew Palacios has brought up is the parties are just more polarized on issues, and men and women just disagree on many different issues. And so as the parties become more polarized and Republicans are clearly identified with conservative positions and Democrats with liberal positions, you will get a gender gap. It doesn’t have to be specifically anything related to sex. I mean except to the extent that policy areas are related to sex. There is that. I think the abortion issue is important. I don’t know if women are indeed more pro-choice at this point, but it’s an intensity of feeling that I think is very important that I think it points to female identity as they approach the voting booth.
I think that the rise of the internet has been a big thing. Like males find male entertainment like Rogan and Andrew Tate, whatever you think of these people, they’re often crazy, but they’re the entertainment that men are into. And now there’s this big market for content directly targeted at men. And Trump is trying to reach these podcasts. And these podcasts have huge audience, and they’re not that political. They’re not as mobilized. Young men are not going to vote as much as young women. It is there and it does create a vibe of young men being a little bit more conservative. I think Elon Musk, there’s a Wall Street Journal story on Elon Musk and how they’re coming out to see him in Pennsylvania. He’s seen as a masculine hero because of the things he’s accomplished and his dreams for humanity and him throwing in his lot in with Trump I think influences that too. And so, yeah, there is just these issues unrelated to sex, but there is this rise of this bro culture, the rise of this attitudinal differences between the parties that probably goes most of the way explaining the gender gap.
Jim: All righty. Well, I want to thank Richard Hanania for coming on the Jim Rutt show and having a very civil conversation, even though at the margin at least we probably disagree, but it sounded like on the big center, the meaty part, we probably mostly agreed.
Richard: We have a pretty similar outlook, Jim. I think our disagreements are relatively minor. Even though we end up on different sides of the election, I mean, we’re still, it’s…
Jim: Enlightenment guys, small L liberals, right?
Richard: Exactly.
Jim: And actually try to think through the issues rather than just grab onto a team uniform. I’m team red, I’m team blue, blah, blah, blah. I hate that shit.
Richard: Yeah, likewise.
Jim: All righty, well thank you again. Wonderful conversation.