Book Review: Kakistocracy - by Bentham's Bulldog

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Book Review: Kakistocracy<br>Why populism leads to rule by the worst

Bentham's Bulldog<br>Jul 04, 2026

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There is a sense in which big sections of Richard Hanania’s book Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster are almost trivial. Hanania aims to illustrate that populism devolves into Kakistocracy—rule by the very worst people. In other words, Hanania argues that populist leaders tend to be morally unscrupulous, corrupt, dishonest, stupid, and in possession of every other serious vice that a leader can have. The evidence for such a thesis is overwhelming so long as one has paid attention to the goings-on in America over the course of the last few years. But Hanania’s book does a lot more than just prove this thesis—it explains both why and when it holds.<br>Hanania’s evidence for the populism to kakistocracy pipeline is both considerable and convincing. He starts by defining populism. Populist leaders are those who oppose elites and blame them for social problems. Elites, as Hanania defines them, are those in contact with long-lasting established institutions with traditional power.<br>The influence of the elites comes from their connections to those institutions. They gain status by impressing other elites. New York Times columnists are elites because they gain prestige from connection to an established journalistic outlet. Joe Rogan isn’t an elite, though he has a lot of influence, because his influence comes from connection with a mass audience, rather than with a traditional institution.<br>So what’s not to like about these populists?<br>Start with the empirical literature. On every measurable outcome, populists do worse. On average, electing a populist leader shrinks GDP by 10%. This holds across a wide range of measures of who counts as populist. The world’s economically worst-performing countries are all either war-torn African or Middle Eastern nations or Latin American countries with long-lasting populist control.<br>Populist governments expand executive authority and undermine existing institutions. Electing populist leaders is associated with an increase in corruption and democratic backsliding. Populists tend to rewrite constitutions at high rates, erode freedom of the press, and undermine civil liberties. 40% of populist leaders get charged with corruption—a fact particularly remarkable in light of their consistent remolding of the judicial process in their own image. And you shouldn’t attribute this academic opposition to populism as a byproduct of left-wing bias, given that academics find similar—and often worse—effects of left-wing populists. In addition, studies that compare places where populists won to places where populists almost won often show similar negative effects of populist leadership.<br>Yet one doesn’t need to consult studies to see how populism leads to kakistocracy. Just consider America today. Trump, the quintessential American populist, appointed RFK Junior, who holds a diverse assortment of crankish medical theories. That has not stopped him from being appointed to head HHS, where he has haphazardly dismantled research into mRNA. RFK Junior is a nice encapsulation of kakistocracy, given that he may be among the worst people on the planet to run HHS.<br>It is as if the Trump administration has been single-mindedly aiming to confirm the kakistocracy thesis. This is an administration that peddled easily debunked election lies and used them as an excuse to try to overturn the results of a fair election. Four years after Trump did this, he was elected president.<br>While Trumpism is based around the claim that traditional elites are stupid, corrupt, and immoral, Trump routinely manifests these vices to degrees that border on the infinite. As Hanania points out, despite Trump’s repeated promise to “drain the swamp,” he has been personally enriched by the presidency to a degree never before seen in history. Don Jr. founded a DC-based club with a $500,000 membership fee alongside Trump’s envoy to the Middle East and Trump’s crypto czar. When Hunter Biden was rumored to have done similarly, this dominated headlines for years on end; Trump’s son does it out in the open along with multiple high-ranking administration officials, and it barely makes the headlines.<br>Similarly, a Trump-branded real estate project in Qatar was announced weeks before Trump visited the Gulf States. Shortly after this, an Abu Dhabi-backed fund made a $2 billion business deal using the digital coins of Trump’s firms. Purchasing Trump-backed crypto allows people to easily buy leverage. And Hanania didn’t even mention a number of other instances of obvious Trump corruption—say, the fact that he was gifted a jet by Qatar! It is maddening that when a politician who has run on a platform of stamping out corruption engages in historically unprecedented corruption on a daily basis, nobody seems to care.<br>Trump has claimed repeatedly that...