The Populist Revolt Against Our Cognitively Impaired Cognitive Elites

Or, There Are Very Stupid People on Both Sides

Proto-populist Paul Kersey (played by the late great Charles Bronson) in action. Source: Cannon Films

Besides being a favorite justification of totalitarians and busybodies, “The personal is political” also points to a correspondence between the individual and the collective. At its worst, mapping out this correspondence is an exercise in reductionism. Freudian psychoanalysis cannot, in fact, explain the history of civilization and its discontents. But, on the other hand, institutions are ultimately composed of people, so our psychology is indeed relevant to our political order—and vice versa. While wrong about most specifics, Freud was right that “Civilization . . . obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.” Civilizations depend on the effectiveness of the garrisons they establish within us.

On a related note,

Joseph Heath

uses psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s two-systems model of thinking to explain the rise of populism. System 1 is for fast, intuitive thinking. System 2 is for slow, analytical thinking. On the macro level, System 1 is associated with common sense, while System 2 is embodied by elite opinion. Per Heath, populists “focus on the specific issues where there is the greatest divergence between common sense and elite opinion, in order to champion the views of the people on these issues.” Insofar as the personal is political, then, populism is “a rebellion against executive function,” or, more broadly, “a rebellion against modern society, which requires the ceaseless exercise of cognitive inhibition and control.” To update Freud, it’s an attempt to overthrow the garrison that the rules-based international order has established within us, even if only by edgelording and shitposting.

Intuitively, my System 1 tells me that there’s something to Heath’s argument. What could be more populist than President Trump blowing up Venezuelan drug boats in international waters? The elites would say that he lacks legal justification and is overstepping presidential authority. But common sense dictates that if your country has a problem with drug traffickers, and also the world’s largest military, you should use that military to destroy said drug traffickers. System 1 also gets a visceral thrill not only out of the explosions themselves, but out of the outraged reactions of bleeding hearts and eggheads.¹ In the Death Wish cinematic universe, Charles Bronson enacts vigilante justice on an increasingly outlandish sequence of criminals. Notably for our present politics, he does so in Death Wish 3 (1985) as leader of a multiracial working-class coalition in a crime-ridden city where guns are banned. Peak Bronson is probably the moment when, standing in front of an American flag, he blows a gang leader out of a building with a bazooka.² If you don’t understand why they made five of these ridiculously sublime movies, you don’t understand the appeal of populism.

But though it may be easily impressed by sound and fury, System 1 isn’t stupid. Heath criticizes the public for wanting to “get tough” on crime, even though the experts favor a less punitive approach. But no less an egghead than psychologist Steven Pinker—a Harvard man, at that—agrees with the plebs. In large part, Pinker attributes America’s 1990s decline in crime to the salutary effects of mass incarceration in removing the most crime-prone men from the streets and deterring others, as well as increased and smarter policing.³ Of course, Pinker doesn’t favor extrajudicial executions on the high seas. But his statistical analysis aligns with the common-sense intuition that “Defund the police” was an invitation to anarchy. Perhaps Trump’s 2024 victory had more to do with his opponent once embracing—and never convincingly disavowing—this and other braindead progressive notions than with a generalized revolt against our cognitive elites.

Heath does note that “Elites are perfectly capable of succumbing to faddish theories (and as we have seen in recent years, they are susceptible to moral panics).” But he underplays the extent to which specific elite affronts not just to common sense, but to analytical reason, have fueled populism’s rise. To pick another glaring example, that there are two biological sexes is obvious both to the man on the street and to any self-respecting scientist. But as no less an egghead than Oxford biologist

Richard Dawkins

writes, “the only strongly discontinuous binary I can think of has weirdly become violently controversial. It is sex: male vs female. You can be cancelled, vilified, even physically threatened if you dare to suggest that an adult human must be either man or woman.” Again, perhaps Trump’s reelection was less a revolt against executive brainpower and more a reaction against the feelings-driven mass hysteria that Dawkins describes. That Trump’s opponent really did support taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens probably didn’t help matters.

The dominant issue driving populism’s success is mass migration. According to Heath, “the fact that immigration does not create unemployment, because it increases both the supply and the demand for labour, is highly unintuitive, and yet leads elites to take a much more casual view about the labour-market effects of migration than the public does.” But beyond a small libertarian minority, how many of our elites truly approach immigration in such a rationalist manner? Starting in 2015, former Chancellor Angela Merkel and her party welcomed millions of asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan into Germany for largely altruistic reasons—because “we can do this!” As intuition would suggest, the results included a strain on infrastructure and social services, an increase in crime rates, and a rise in support for anti-immigrant parties. A System 2 approach to immigration would admit the skilled workers most likely to adapt to a country’s culture, and would do so at a rate that doesn’t tear apart its social fabric. A cognitively capable elite would not simply open the floodgates to any incoming horde. In the US, President Joe Biden oversaw (or slept through) the largest immigration surge on record, with the majority of newcomers arriving illegally. Once again, we don’t need a grand theory to account for Trump’s subsequent triumph.

Now, there is a case to be made that populism has metastasized from an intuitively logical backlash against elite failures into a generalized epistemic nihilism. To pick a few examples, election denialism, vaccine skepticism, and World War II revisionism represent an anti-rational revolt against an elite consensus that happens to be correct. It’s also true that social-media companies suppressed “misinformation” to the benefit of the Biden campaign, the medical establishment misled the public during the COVID-19 pandemic, and leftists use accusations of fascism to shut down debate. But none of that justifies denying, against all evidence, that Trump lost the 2020 election, that vaccines are largely safe and effective, or that Hitler instigated the worst war in human history.

Eric Kaufmann

, an egghead of the right, has written that “The negative impulses of populism need to be reined in: we need a rational populism. Liberal institutions must learn from the populist moment, and populists need a vision for the institutions.” According to Heath’s theory, any such “rational populism” is a contradiction in terms. But just as a mentally stable person must balance both System 1 and System 2, intuitive understanding and analytical reason, so must a politically stable society.

1. Though System 2 is right to point out that the vast majority of drugs flowing into the US aren’t coming from Venezuela, and so the Trump administration likely has ulterior, regime-change motivations for the strikes.

2. A similar motif appears in the 1985 Chuck Norris vehicle Invasion U.S.A., another fine production by Israeli schlock auteurs Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus.

3. See Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011), pp. 121–24.