A Chat with Richard Hanania
We discuss his book on American politics, and how the political sausage is made in democracies
I started to read Richard Hanania’s “The Origins of Woke” soon after I finished with a book on the surprising influence of postmodern theorists on modern Western thought on politics, written by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. I was shocked by how well the two books, and their main subjects, fit.
As a centrist, politically, as well as reader and admirer of Slovenia’s Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek, I’m well-acquainted with the leftist explanation of how political correctness and its woke evolution came about (to summarize grossly and unfairly: as a co-option of leftist intellectuals by Big Capital, giving in on social progress in exchange for unrestricted neoliberal capitalism). However, I was definitely lacking a rightist or right-of-center view. I now have it, and I must say I find it very intriguing, and that it’s helping me shape my own ideas about empires and their footprints.
Long-time readers know I very much care about empires. I’ve written long and hard about how Uruk/Iraq, China, Assyria and Hatti evolved into massive multicultural empires encompassing numberless tribes and ethnicities. More recently, I’ve written about the growth of the smaller, and less diverse but just as interesting and influential, bloc-empires created by both Athens and Sparta. I’m also in the process of describing how the Roman and Hellenistic Empires came to be.
To a large extent, the United States is the closest thing we have to those old empires. It can be defined as an empire, of sorts, definitely closer to the Athenian model than that of, say, Uruk’s Sargon. That’s why its internal functioning is of interest not only to Americans, but to everyone who cares about history or contemporary events.
I’ve often said that my approach to history owes much to the economic theory of price-making: I look closer, and in more detail, to states that are “price-makers,” those that have the ability (and willingness) to affect events in others, than those that are “price-takers.”
To understand this analogy, think of a giant retailer like Gap or Amazon, and how it can set price policies to compete with rivals, by deciding to lower prices on shoes or whatever to corner that market. Now, compare that with a small shoe store run by some guy or lady in a mall. The giant retailer is the price-maker here, it can bankrupt the small store without even noticing; the small store is the price-taker: in any price war, it must take its lead from the giant that can easily put it out of business.
The US definitely is a price-maker. Countries like Spain (where I was born) and Singapore (where I lived for years) are price-takers, at least at this point in time.
My full chat with Richard is below the paywall, but I’d like to highlight some of the bits that I believe may be most relevant (if you want to know the dirty little details about how I ended up being a protected minority in the State of Colorado, that’s for paid subscribers only).
First, I’d also like to highlight just how nice and decent Richard is. Seeing that I was having technical trouble to record our chat, he did it on his end, and sent me the final product. That’s classy, guys. If you’ve seen Richard’s posts or podcasts in the past, you may get the idea that he’s a brilliant dude, yes, but sometimes a bit too direct, a bit too blunt for some people’s taste. Well, he’s actually really kind in person, I can testify to that. You can (and should) sign up for his newsletter below:
At one point in the chat, we compared the modern US with ancient China. As you guys know, I’ve written a lot about ancient China. In particular, I asked Richard about his view of how China’s explosive growth from a small state in the upper course of the Yellow River — in the process becoming a sort of ancient Asian melting pot — compares with the similar expansion of the Twelve Colonies, from overseas English oddities into a new melting pot. (I described the Chinese process here.)
Richard’s view is that the analogy only works for the modern US to some extent. The US has big, visible racial differences that ancient China lacked, since it combines people from multiple continents. Still, Richard added, “I think for most Americans race is not a huge factor”. He went on:
“This is for most Americans of most backgrounds. I mean, you can go, go, if you pay attention to America politics, go look at people on the right, go look at people on the left. You will see all kinds of people from all kinds of colors and ethnic backgrounds arguing the right -wing position or the left -wing position. I mean, America is very, and people who've lived overseas know this, influential, the culture is very broad.”
A similar comparison with China’s old bureaucracy, with its tradition of examinations and career paths for scholars (their very first, very primitive shape is described here) who often ended up at odds with emperors and doing their own thing doesn’t quite work, Richard said. This is because the US bureaucracy is perhaps less independent than many, both in the Right and the Left, believe, he argues.
This is a key point, actually, in Richard’s book, and is one that I’m not sure has been sufficiently appreciated by reviewers. A very powerful, common rightist critique of the US modern political evolution is that the system is fundamentally unfair and even mendacious if the bureaucracy works against the stated wishes of elected politicians, instead of implementing the platforms they were elected on.
That is what, many argue, happened during the recent Donald Trump presidency, with the rise of a “resistance” inside the bureaucracy that thwarted the often amateurish attempts at policymaking of various Trump appointees and the president himself. I mean, the resistance sort of confessed:
However, one of Richard’s central arguments in the book is that this hasn’t been, historically speaking, a significant factor influencing policy. The Origins of the Woke goes to great lengths to explain how many gender- and race-based policies were implemented against the wish of majorities in the electorate, yes, but with broad bipartisan support — or at least a significant degree of Republican acceptance for such policies. A possible exception to this rule, Richard argues, is the Nixon administration:
Nixon really was sort of under the radar regarding what they were doing. By the 1980s when Reagan comes in, the conservatives have started to reinforce the right wing of the Republican Party. And Reagan appoints people who are conservative on affirmative action at these other civil rights issues. He wants to do stuff, but the Republican Party was not with him yet. So it wasn't the mandarins in the bureaucracy, it was the elected representatives. And so the Republican elite was divided and there were real battles. There was Reagan veto, something called Supple Rights Restoration Act was actually very, very important, which I go to for reasons in my book. They override his veto. And so, in Congress, there was a sort of bipartisan elite consensus in favor of deference to the civil rights lobby.
That was the 1980s, however, and things have changed, Richard added:
Now that wouldn't happen today because the Republican Party has shifted to the right. There is a Republican perspective on these things that is unified and not just on civil rights law, but on all kinds of things. So if Reagan was around today trying to do the same things, he would face a completely different situation from the scenario when he had a Republican Congress, or even an evenly divided Congress that he couldn't overrule, because they were working together: Republicans and Democrats were working together.
The way Richard sees it (and I concur) the fundamental problem with Pluckrose’s and Lindsay’s excellent book is that the central idea that a bunch of French and German professors from the 1950s and 1960s burrowed their way into the American psyche by injecting postmodern pseudo-Marxist notions into the excitable youth is fundamentally absurd. As Richard writes, very eloquently, “the government mandates came first, and the ideology came later.”
That is, indeed, one of the reasons why The Origins of Woke is a fundamentally optimistic book. Richard is a great believer in American democracy; he valiantly resisted my efforts to compare recent trends with the naked populism of the era of Pericles in classical Athens that I’ve discussed in the recent past:
Richard’s book is a great explainer of how activists, lawyers and politicians, sometimes for selfish reasons and sometimes out of a real wish to do good, created a series of policies that over time evolved into some of the, to be frank, excesses of political correctness that we have come to label as the “woke” movement. Few people like those excesses (that’s what opinion polls say, at any rate) so whoever reads Richard book will come out enlightened about how all this came to be, and also hopeful that the worst may already be behind us.
So, here’s the full chat in video for paying subscribers:
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