Yes, We Did Tell You How Bad This Would Be
The Trump disaster wasn’t unforeseeable. It was inevitable—and we said so, over and over again.
by Ben Cohen
Richard Hanania is one of the more provocative figures to emerge from the intellectual corners of the post-Trump right. A political scientist with Ivy League credentials and a growing following, Hanania has positioned himself as a sharp contrarian critic of liberal orthodoxy and an influential voice in conservative circles. But his ascent has been shadowed by controversy—not least his early pseudonymous writings for white nationalist publications (which he later disavowed).
More recently, Hanania has styled himself as a heterodox thinker, challenging identity politics and championing civil rights rollback through a wonky, technocratic lens. Yet for all his supposed foresight, Hanania got one of the biggest calls of the last decade disastrously wrong: Donald Trump.
In a recent article titled “Kakistocracy as a Natural Result of Populism,” Hanania offers a belated mea culpa for his support, an admission that rings hollow for those of us who, from the beginning, tried to warn him exactly how bad it would be:…
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