"But he has some good ideas"

Liberalism's affirmative action program for reactionary idiots is out of control

Richard Hanania is an idiot. Note that I did not say that he is a fascist. Hanania is also clearly a fascist, and this was obvious well before The Huffington Post exposed him as a fascist on Friday. No need to take my word for it; even conservatives like Rod Dreher saw him for what he was long ago:

…he has written enough under his own name to indicate a certain sympathy for the evil stuff…I’ve found him to be someone who says interesting things from time to time, but I have been very wary of him because he had more than a whiff of the eugenicist about him.

This is the same Rod Dreher who swears up and down that he didn’t detect any fascism molecules floating around recently outed fascist Nate Hochman (funny how this keeps happening!), so it says something when even Rod can see the swastika on the wall.

But this is a digression. I don’t believe Hanania’s utterly predictable “I’ve changed” plea anymore than I believe it coming from recently outed fascist Pedro Gonzales (funny how this keeps happening!), but it’s beside the point.

Because even if we set aside the whole “malevolent eugenecist” thing aside, the problem remains that Hanania is dumb. Really, really dumb. He is not an original thinker, he is not very knowledgable, he is not particularly articulate, he never says anything insightful. I have been paying attention to Richard Hanania for years and can safely say that I have never learned a damn thing. No one will be able to praise him in anything beyond the vaguest terms because as soon as you look at what the man actually says it’s obvious that he is just indefensibly stupid.

Here’s a typical Richard Hanania take.

Is this an imperialist take? Of course. But here’s the thing: it isn’t even smart or interesting as imperialist takes go.

Consider this claim that Russian culture has to go. What does he mean by this? Even imperialists typically concede that Russia has historically made magnificent contributions to international literature, arts, philosophy, and so on; the sophisticated take has always been to say “Tolstoy was a genius, shame about the government though.” So is this that narrative circulating among liberal MSNBC addicts these days that Russian culture is intrinsically tyrannical (perhaps because of the sinister Mongols)? Is this just the sort of lazy repetition of “West good everyone else bad” you can find high school sophomores posting on 4chan?

Search for Hanania’s elaboration on this and all you’ll find is a 500+ word metaphor involving House of Cards and then a tortured attempt to explain Russian-US international relations exclusively through a “US woke / Russia antiwoke” framework. The argument isn’t even internally consistent; he observes that Ukraine “isn’t gay enough” by Western standards either, but somehow doesn’t seem to get that this completely undercuts his argument that our international politics are just motivated by “culture war resentments.”

Some of this praise for Hanania probably comes down to contemporary pundits not understanding how to evaluate academic credentials. Hanania has a PhD in political science and likes to lean on that in his writing (“as someone who was studying international relations at the time” he writes, mid House of Cards metaphor). Look through his publications, however, and you’ll mostly just see Cold War history and pseudo-scientific “theory” writing. This isn’t some Russianist scholar; this is a polisci guy who remembered some headline news about Russian homophobia and who decided to ram it into an embarrassingly shallow culture war screed. And it’s also just typical Hanania: out of his depth and draping the smallest of intellectual fig leaves over the same old antiwoke bullshit.

So why, then, are we getting liberal commentary on Hanania that sounds like this?

I happen to agree with Yglesias that people who have reactionary beliefs and ideas can also make good points — but this does nothing to explain why we should listen to Richard Hanania in particular, who does not have good pieces and who does not make good points. I would be embarrassed to say this about him for the same reason that I would be embarrassed if someone snatched away my copy of The Financial Times and revealed that I was also reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar underneath. The man is an idiot! Being interested in what he has to say makes you an idiot, too! How do you not see this?

Part of the problem, again, is that guys like Yglesias are often blinded by even the most irrelevant credentials. Another, I suspect, is that nothing says “interesting” and “intelligent” to liberals like dark-money funding. As Jonathan Katz notes, Hanania has demonstrably been propped up by a big anonymous donor, and given his multiple Silicon Valley connections it’s not hard to guess where this is coming from.

¹

Guys like Yglesias see the media exposure and promotion that dark money buys and just can’t help but decide that whoever’s on the receiving end must have done something to earn it.

Still, it’s hard to watch people like Drehr and Yglesias praise Hanania and not see something else at work. Drehr didn’t praise Hanania as “interesting” because he had to; like Yglesias, he did it to make a show of his ability to appreciate Hanania’s merits despite his bigotry. For liberals, this is really just a backhanded way of praising yourself. I’m reminded of this classic tweet from Jeopardy contestant and infamous weirdo Arthur Chu:

Arthur didn’t say this to defend Thatcher’s honor; he said it because he wanted everyone to know what a brave principled feminist he was. So brave that he would even praise a right-wing monster for doing a girlpower. Similarly, when Yglesias says that Hanania has “written some good pieces”, what you are really supposed to take away from this is that Yglesias is a powerfully clear-eyed and intellectually rigorous intellect who can even see past overt white supremacy and grasp Hanania’s true genius.

Once you notice this kind of logic at work it does a lot to explain the reputation of guys like Hanania, and Pedro Gonzalez, and really a whole swath of the right intelligentsia. Dark money props them up as brilliant new voices, and even when they turn out to be complete morons liberals can’t help but praise them as problematic intellectuals with some good ideas.

1. Katz misses this, but the donor’s surge of initial investment in Hanania — followed by immediate disinvestment — has become a recurring pattern on the right. In November, for instance, Kathryn Joyce reported that the new neopopulist right magazine Compact “was launched with significant support from right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel…and Claremont Institute chair Tom Klingenstein.” The business strategy at work here is to find media figures that will reliably stay on-message, give them some startup money, and then let them sink or swim. This lets figures like Thiel cut costs and lets the project distance itself from him. It also paradoxically lets them exercise more discipline over these projects since cash-strapped publications want future funding.