Ross Douthat has a thoughtful review of Richard Hanania’s book, which is another brief against “populism” but from Hanania’s odd angle. Douthat’s problem is that Hanania lets the elites off a little too easy, citing their official or institutional commitments to truth-seeking as a kind of emblem of their greater reliability as compared with “the internet” or “podcasts” like Joe Rogan’s show.

Douthat thinks that’s not the way to reckon with how elite failure transmits itself to the rest of us, and he cites the case of population alarmist Paul Ehrlich:

Ehrlich took just one idea — . . . that rapid population growth might lead to famine or civil strife — and turned it into the basis for a fanatical theory that........

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