The People Who Break Things
C-SPAM Distinguished Scholars Colloquium: Dr. Joseph Uscinski
April 8, 2026

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Joseph Uscinski: 

Thank you so much for having me. I was invited to come in February and because I live in Miami, I said no. So thank you for allowing me to come in April. I've never been a distinguished speaker, so I'm going to call my wife right when I'm done and tell her she might not believe me. 

So I'm going to talk about a book project that I'm working on now. We've just sent out a prospectus to publishers. We have a lot of data that I'm going to show you today. And we have a neat, theoretical argument I'm going to show to you with a bunch of little cartoons that we've been making. Thank God for AI.

This is the perfect time, I think, for me to be put in a kick circle and for everyone to go right for the crotch, because most of this isn't written up yet. So all of your comments are going to be very helpful. 

It's also the worst time for you to put me in a kick circle, because I think I got to sleep around 3 a.m. last night because my flight was a little bit late, so I may drag a little bit on questions, or word choice, or whatnot. So, cut me 10% of slack, but otherwise, go for it. 

So, I've been studying conspiracy theories for about 15 years. When I first got into it, a friend of mine knocked on my door and said, "Hey, let's do this thing." And I said, "F*** off." I said, "This is the stupidest idea. You're going to destroy my career, and it's going to be a waste of both of our times."

First of all, there's no data out there for us to use that would be publishable. And second of all, this isn't a political thing, right? You have birtherism and trutherism, and it's treated as a mental problem at this point. But it was not what it is today. Right. 

So you didn't have a ton of scholars working on it. You didn't have journalists writing about it. You didn't have news desks at major news outlets writing about conspiracy theory, misinformation. It was a very different world in 2009, 2010. 

My colleague, luckily for me, he twisted my arm for a few weeks, and eventually I succumbed. And it took us a few years to start gathering data. And now, 15 years later, we have a lot, a lot of data, to show.

But I tell the story because this wasn't something any of us were really paying attention to until the politics caught up with us. And I think it says something about who we are as academics is that we're sort of enmeshed in the establishment. We pay attention to establishment leaders and establishment opinions, and we tend to ignore the crazy stuff, particularly if we're a political scientist, because we deal with power and people who are powerful and people who are insiders.

So what I say now is if you want to know what people really think about politics, talk to your Uber driver. And you will get a very different set of opinions. You won't get the character left or right views. You will get aliens and things like, that depending on who's driving you somewhere. 

So one of the things I've been polling about for a long time is both people's propensity to view the world in conspiratorial terms, which I call conspiracy thinking, and I've also been asking questions about whether people support the use of political violence to achieve particular ends. And back when I first started polling on this, there was a small correlation, not particularly big, but it was positive. Over the last decade or so, it's gone up quite a bit over time to the point now where it's about 0.4 rather than 0.1.

So something is going on, and even though most of my work says, "Hey, most of these beliefs are sort of driven by people's underlying identities and worldviews and psychological traits. And for that reason, they're mostly stable." Something's happening at the society level that is taking people who are somewhat conspiratorial and probably making them want to do violence, for whatever reason.

And we can sort of see and feel that, in the country. So I've been thinking in this book project more about the bigger picture. What can we learn from or what have I learned from my work in conspiracy theories that I can then translate into something that's much bigger? Something about the mass opinion space and something about the last ten years of American politics that we have had to endure.

So we're all familiar with January 6th. You know, lots of high profile instances of political violence happening in ways that, you know, prior to, the Trump era just wasn't used to. And, of course, political violence occurred, but not the way it does now, and not in the organized way that it seems to happen now. And it's coming alongside a whole lot of other changes in our politics that are getting noticed, particularly by journalists, but also by academics.

So we get a whole lot of instances happening. More shootings. This is happening in Minnesota. It's happening across the country. People feel like civility is in crisis. Feels like whether we're empathetic or sympathetic to other human beings is now a political position rather than a normal human thing. 

So as a lot of journalists say, violence is here and it seems to be working. And even if we're not, directly involved or a victim of it, we're sort of feeling like we have to have it on our minds, Quite often. I know I do, just because of the work I do. A lot of the people who I study, will read my work and then be like, "Oh, we should kill him." And sometimes they email me to tell me that. 

Alongside all of that sort of, violence, we also have changes happening at the government: cutting science, cutting the NSF, cutting the NIH, cutting the CDC, creating all sorts of chaos. So not only do we have people breaking political norms by committing violence and acting in non-normative political ways, but we have sort of a breaking of our institutions occurring at the same time, throughout the government. And this is leading to fears of fascism, authoritarianism, and, essentially people being targeted by the government for their political opinions. And we're seeing this, all around the place.

Even before Trump's second term, scholars have noticed these sorts of trends. And there have been quite a bit, quite a few books written, whether it was David Runciman or, Levitsky, writing about how our democracy is going to fall apart and eventually fall into authoritarianism, what's going to come next.

So there's a clear view out there that a lot of norms are being broken. So it's not just our institutions now, but it's been a degradation of our norms for some time. 

So the question I want to ask, is why are things breaking? Can we develop a theory to explain this? 

The first major answer that the people give: Well, it's the leaders who are doing it. Leaders get elected, and then they just start breaking stuff because they want to. And maybe it increases their power. Maybe it makes them better able to capture money for themselves or easier to get reelected. And there you see this sort of strange sight with his, his banner over there and marching troops through the city. So maybe it's the leader's fault.

On the other hand, we also hear a lot about polarization: that people are moving away from the middle. They're moving to the far left and the far right. They're adopting extreme views, and they can't seem to get along with each other anymore. And that's leading to extremism. And that's perhaps in some ways allowing politicians to exploit that for their own ends.

I think the problem I have with both of those explanations is that one, we seem to be treating the public with kid gloves, in that, the people are electing authoritarian leaders who are breaking stuff, they're consciously choosing this. And Trump was very clear. And this isn't just Trump, it's also his allies. They're very clear about what they want to do before they do it, and people vote for it.

So it's not like someone slipped on a banana peel and said, "Oh my God, I can't believe you know, I got these policies." No, they chose it purposely. And in many instances, as I'll show later with my data, they wanted these specific things. So there are people applauding it. So in many ways, what's happening is somewhat democratic. A need is being met. 

So in my mind, the role of the public is being somewhat under-theorized in our explanations of current politics. As far as polarization goes, I always come back to this guy with the furs and the horns. And people often look at him as like, "Wow, he's some far right activist." But if you look at his viewpoints, I mean, his views are all over the place.

He's kind of an eco-fascist, showed up at some Trump rallies, went to QAnon rallies. He's now suing Trump for $4 trillion because he says that he's the true president. He was also trying to get rich selling yoga pants. So the guy's not some far right conservative who's like, "I attacked the capital because I want really low taxes." He's a wackadoo who wanted to attack something and did. Right. 

Which sort of brings up the idea that parties are here to work within the system to achieve goals by winning elections. Right. They're not there to attack stuff and blow things up. It's just not what they typically do. So as far as polarization goes, it doesn't seem to provide that great of an answer, because the the people who seem to be the biggest problems don't seem to be polarized in a whole lot of ways that we would normally think about.

To give one other example of this, the person who is on trial for shooting Charlie Kirk: immediately people said, "Oh my God, he's a far left activist and maybe he was brainwashed online by trans ideology." And as it turns out, it doesn't seem like any of that happened. He didn't have a clear ideology at all. He came from a right-wing family that seemed to have voted for Trump, and he didn't have clear political goals.

So there are many things happening that seem to lack this left-right valence. But they are political nonetheless, even if they're not entirely partisan. 

So I'm trying to come up with a theory that can link our political elites to our institutions and to what the public wants, to have happen, and why they vote the way they do.

So I want to think about the sources of public support for the things that are happening now. So, for example, our institutions being, being broken by by our leaders. I also want to think about the mobilization of non-normative support. So why are leaders, instead of getting people to go out and vote, why are they getting them to go out and attack things, or to go out and fight each other in the street?

So that leads to this question of how are normal political parties being co-opted by people who would use them for non-democratic ends to do non-normative politics?

So the theory, I will demonstrate with some cartoons. So, as a political scientist, I normally start with the American voter and just basic spatial modeling. People are socialized into their left-right views. So by the time people are 30, people are on the left or they're on the right, and these identities that they have ingrained in them when they're young can be activated by political leaders to get them to turn out and vote for the party on the left or the party on the right.

And you can see that people are distributed along that singular dimension. Political scientists, just like journalists, almost always talk about politics along the single dimension. It's like, we got the left and the right, and we have the far left in the far right. And we got all these people somewhere in the middle. But that assumes, that we have one dimension of politics and that's all that's going to be activated. And there really isn't anything else going on in our political world.

So usually if you just have a spatial model look something like this, you might have your little politicians show up. They'll put themselves there and try to pull those people towards them, or they'll put themselves there and try to pull the red people towards them. And of course, if somebody shows up way on the far right, then they're not going to do very well because they're only going to get that guy to vote for them.

Which if we think about our politics now, there are so many people in office that we call far right or far left, in which case you have to wonder, how are they getting elected? Right? I'm sure there are some institutional reasons we could come up with, like gerrymandering or or the primary system or whatnot, but it seems strange that general elections are going to people we might call far right. It wouldn't make sense along this model.

So is left-right really the problem in our politics? So normally mainstream parties will encourage normal, normative forms of participation, you know, "Hey, go out and vote for the left candidate or the right candidate." But one thing we've we've noticed over the last 70 or 80 years is that a lot of Americans are sort of what we call ideologically innocent, right?

Most people don't have a coherent set of issue positions that they can put together to be, "Oh, they're on the left, or they're on the right, and their views are coherent." And, and they form what's called an ideology. If they have anything, often what they have is a ideological identity. Like, "I identify on the left and I identify on the right," but they might only hold a few issues on the left or a few issues on the right.And once you move beyond those, all of a sudden they might sound like the opposite side, right? 

So instead of left-right views driving a lot of people's opinions about politics, it might actually be, a rejection of the system outright. So we see this nice person here: not Republican, not Democrat, just pissed. Right? Not really taking a side, but rejecting the establishment as a whole.

So thinking about that, we are looking at a different, dimension of politics, where on the one end, people hate the establishment, and we call them anti-establishment. And on the low end, people are pro-establishment. They sort of like the system, and even if they have some, some qualms about it, they're generally happy to work through it to achieve ends.

Whereas on the high end of anti-establishment, people want to blow the system up because they just don't like the system. 

Now, we can think of the establishment in this sense as our institutions, broadly construed, whether they're in government or out of government, like our our universities. It also includes our norms and our knowledge-generating processes that support them. Right.

So instead of, politics, for some people, being a battle between elites on the left and the elites on the right, it might be a battle between us, the good people and them, the corrupt people who run everything the corrupt establishment.

Now, my concern with this is, is that, hey, it's fine to say I don't like the system somewhat and it needs to be changed at all in many ways. And that's completely normal. And a lot of people who come to that conclusion will do so and say, "Well, I want to change these things and I have a solution to make it better. I want to tear some things down, but then rebuild in these other ways."

But a lot of people just want to blow things up for the sake of blowing things up. Right? And when you are in a very wealthy, very powerful country where things aren't perfect but seem to be going pretty good, if you say wholesale, I want to throw grenades in every direction, the outcome is going to be generally pretty bad, right? Unless you are committed to rebuilding. 

So we can sort of think about socialization that is forming two questions: is that during our political socialization, we are we are socialized into where we are in the right, in the left, how far left we are, how far right we are. But we're also socialized into a separate question, which is different than, "where are we in the system?" It's do we accept the system at all? Do we like it? Right. 

So this fits very well into the American voters' funnel of causality, where people are young, they have these experiences, and then, these experiences will lead them to answer those two questions. So someone might grow up and be like, I'm on the left and I like the establishment, or I'm on the right, and I hate the establishment, right. So two separate, two separate, dimensions of thought can be coming from there. 

Now, to measure our anti-establishment orientations, we conceive of it like this. So putting together populism, Manicheanism, and conspiracism. So populism being, "It's us, the people versus corrupt, uncaring elites"; Manicheanism being a battle of good versus evil. Of course, we're on the side of good and the elites are on the side of evil. And conspiracism: The elites are secretly trying to do, terrible harm to us.

Now, you put those things together, and they're sort of all evincing the same thing: a rejection of the system and the institutions that form that system. So to be high on these attitudes is to be anti-establishment. To be low on them is to typically be supportive of the establishment. 

Now, as I will show later, this doesn't exist in a vacuum, typically. These these views tend to come with a whole lot of other psychological baggage, which is typically, negative traits. So people who tend to be really high on this tend to be high on things like narcissism, psychopathy, sadism, dogmatism. And I could go down a list of unsavory traits that come with this.

So to think about this as, as two separate dimensions of opinion. So typically if the anti-establishment dimension is not activated by our political leaders or by our parties, it's going to be largely uncorrelated with left-right politics. Right. And that leaves us with four quadrants, right, sort of an anti-establishment left and anti-establishment right, pro-establishment left, pro-establishment right.

So you could be in any of those four. So mainstream politics in America, then, is largely taking place on the lower 50% of this of this diagram. And that makes sense if you're a mainstream politician. Because those are the voters who are most likely to turn out to vote because they like the system and they want to participate in normative ways, including voting. The people up on the top, they're much less likely to turn out, because normally they're not getting candidates who are singing their tune and two, they don't trust the system, so why go and vote in it?

So, we've put together a model that goes in five phases. So there's our little politician fella. So you can imagine the first phase if you want to, if you want to engage in anti-establishment politics, is to show up and position yourself based on who you are in one of the upper quadrants.

You can do this on the right or the left. And here we just have the example on the, on the right. So you can imagine a politician who can't succeed, in a situation where maybe they're not going to be able to get enough votes on the lower quadrant to be able to get a nomination or to win. They might want to position themselves that way. That way, they're at least motivating some of those people in the upper quadrant there to come and turn out for them. 

And then they might use anti system cues to attract voters to them and say, hey, I don't trust the establishment and I'm going to fight the establishment and I'm going to fight for you.

And those sorts of cues might get those people, on their side and get them to turn out and to donate to them. 

Now, this is most likely to work for outsider candidates. If Jeb Bush showed up and said, "I'm going to run as an outsider," probably not going to work too well. If Hillary Clinton did that, certainly not going to work.

But for a Donald Trump, that would certainly work, because he is indeed an outsider to the political system, or at least he was when he initially got in. 

In phase two, politicians start to pull on that dimension. They start deploying more and more rhetorical attacks against the against the establishment, and they essentially try to bend that dimension into their, into their side, such that they're getting more and more people in the middle or potentially even on the left, to join their coalition, essentially making that coalition bigger over time.

Phase three is institutionalization, where the politicians have started to pull on the anti-establishment dimension. Because they are giving out so much anti-establishment cues in their rhetoric, it's actually making the people on their side at least superficially anti-establishment in their views. So now that dimension is now bending upward over time.

So what we would expect to see is that over time, we're going to see these dimensions start to get correlated as this process plays out. 

Now, I'm trying to keep this simple by just showing the behavior of one politician. But obviously there's another party involved here, and they can be engaging in their own, their own strategy here. So one might be the politician in the bottom left sort of pulling, establishment, right wing voters towards, towards them.

So a recursive relationship is going to start to develop. So as more citizens with high levels of anti-establishment sentiment start participating within this coalition, politicians are going to develop a greater incentive to deploy more and more of it over time, because now that's their coalition. That's what they want. That's going to get them to turn out to vote.

And as a consequence of this, you're going to get a decrease in the quality of political leadership over time. And part of the reason for that is if you have to keep placating a strongly anti-establishment coalition, you have to get more and more outsiders. Inherently, outsiders are going to be less and less experienced over time. And we're going to go from politicians who might have deployed some of this rhetoric cynically, to people who are perhaps true believers and aren't doing it as a campaign ploy, but but really want to blow stuff up.

So because of that, government will start to fail in some respects, because this class of leaders are just going to break things and they're not going to be particularly good at building them, given the demands of the new coalition they've put together and given their own, inability to get things done, because they're they're not particularly well experienced.

Phase four is expansion. Now you've got the politician reaching deeper and deeper and deeper into the anti-establishment left, and trying to get this, big coalition together and essentially trying to capture three quarters of the play space there. Right. The upper two quadrants and the bottom right quadrant. 

Now, as a consequence of that, the party is going to lose a lot of its traditional ideology, because now you have a whole bunch of people from the left, a bunch of people from the right, and the only thing that's sort of holding them together is a dislike of the political establishment. 

So we start to see, more and more failures from government because of this, and we start to see the party start to show cracks, because there's nothing to really agree on at that point except to attack more and more institutions.

And because of that, their inexperience is going to start to show. So, you know, there have been several studies on: how do populists fare once in office? And the answer is: usually pretty terribly. They don't do that well. And that's essentially what happens here until you get to phase five, which is fracture, where things start to blow up.

Because at this point there's nothing to agree on. And these people can't get along with each other because one, they can't agree and two, they don't have the psychological characteristics to agree with each other or to get along or to cooperate in ways that would lead to a lasting, coalition.

So here are the empirics. So, in 2016, we see some evidence. Well, let me let me start with this saying: Political scientists sort of got caught on their heels in 2016, where we just weren't measuring so much of the things that we could have been measuring. So Trump shows up, he starts activating all sorts of stuff in the populace, and we were like, it's not like Romney was doing this. So we didn't feel like we needed to do it. 

But we had to catch up over time. So, unfortunately, prior to after Trump gets really popular, we don't start measuring a lot of the things we should have been. So some of what I'm going to show you is catching up over time, even though I do have some earlier data points that we sort of have to jerry-rig as best we can to make our time series work.

So if you go back to 2016, you see Hillary positioning herself there, Bernie sort of positioning himself there. Everybody and their uncle getting in on that quadrant. And then Donald Trump sort of positioning himself there. A lot of people get upset and say, "How dare you put Bernie up there and equate him to Trump?" I don't, they are both anti-establishment people. I mean, they both were very clear. I'm running against the establishment. 

Trump did a whole bunch of other things that probably went far beyond any sort of Bernie rhetoric. So that's sort of the playing field that we saw on how people were positioning themselves. By 2019, when we started running all of these items on national surveys, what we start to find at that point is a two dimensional solution.

So at the top there, we have standard measures of partisanship ideology and feelings towards the two parties, which seem to form one factor. And then we have our conspiracism, Manicheanism, and populism, which form a separate factor. And they're not really correlated very well. They form two unique dimensions of opinion in 2019 and 2020, even a few years into the the Trump first term.

When we start saying what is anti-establishment sentiment correlated with, as I presaged a little while ago, it's correlated with things like dogmatism, the psychological need for chaos — which is like, I would like the world to be blown up so we can start fresh. If I see a flower, I want to smash it. Left-wing authoritarianism, paranoia, right-wing authoritarianism, dark tetrad traits, which is psychopathy, Machiavellianism, sadism, perceived victimhood - Like feeling like you're a victim even though you might not really be one. Being an argumentative person and distrust government. 

I can go on and on with other psychological traits that we've measured. But pretty much anything that's dark or considered unsavory as a psychological trait is positively correlated with anti-establishment. 

When we ask people if they support violence, that's correlated with anti-establishment, as is engaging in interpersonal conflict to settle disagreements. People who say that they have engaged in political violence in the last year, also correlated with it, as is the willingness to intentionally share information they know was false online. And anti-establishment is negatively correlated with having gotten vaccinated for Covid.

People who are anti-establishment are supportive of QAnon and Proud Boys, but not supportive at this point of Antifa. I will say early in our first two polls in 2019 and 20, anti-establishment was correlated with Antifa. But it's not, it's not anymore. It's in fact negative at this point. And that could be because of changing political dynamics.

When we ask people: do parties work for the establishment? That's highly correlated with being anti-establishment. Is your tap water safe? Negatively correlated with being anti-establishment. Do you trust science? Negatively correlated. Are you satisfied with democracy? Negatively correlated.

In terms of conspiracy theories, anti-establishment is a very strong predictor. So people believing elections are often rigged, that government elites and Hollywood elites are orchestrating a massive sex trafficking ring. The dangers of vaccines are being hidden by the medical establishment. And that Holocaust casualties have been exaggerated. That's just a sampling, but I could show you 50 more conspiracy theories that are positively correlated.

In terms of family and mental health, people who are anti-establishment - a little bit more likely, not very much, though, to come from, religious families. A very small correlation with having been diagnosed with mental illness in the past and a family history of psychological problems. So those aren't particularly large, but we wouldn't expect them to be, very big.

In terms of support for candidates, anti-establishment is - and this is in 2020 - positively correlated with support for both Trump and Sanders. You see the big coefficients are for left-right, which is the dotted line, which is what we would expect for both. But we do get positive lines for anti-establishment for both of those candidates.

Same thing a year later, when Joe Biden becomes the nominee. And this is just the anti-establishment results, again, positive for Donald Trump. So as you become more anti-establishment, you like Trump more; as you become more anti-establishment, you like Biden less. 

And that seemed to be one of the other dynamics of the 2020 election. It wasn't just left versus right. It was establishment versus anti-establishment. We tend to find, when we give our respondents feeling thermometers for both parties, the anti-establishment people are less likely to like either party, whereas establishment people are more likely to like the parties.

In 2024, we ran some surveys asking people: Who are you going to vote for in the primary? And we found that anti-establishment people were more likely to like Trump, RFK Jr and Ron DeSantis, but they were less likely to like Nikki Haley, Harris and Biden. 

Now, we also put Ronald Reagan on there. Obviously, he wasn't running for the nomination, but we wanted to see how would Reagan fare in this new Republican Party. And the answer is anti-establishment people don't like Reagan. They're sort of breaking away from that old Reagan coalition from the 1980s.

We asked this at the same time in the summer of 2024: do you want to spend more money or less money on these various policy areas? So we gave people a whole list. So anti-establishment people were more likely to want to spend money stopping election fraud. So Trump is doing exactly what they want him to do by passing the SAVE Act.

But they want to spend less money on education, scientific research, foreign aid, and the CDC. Now, this is summer of 2024, and these issues weren't even that big at that time. And this is, you know, nine months before he actually instituted all of this stuff. 

In terms of, let's say, Russia-Ukraine, anti-establishment people are likely to think that the pictures coming out of Ukraine showing that apartment buildings are being blown up and children are being killed, are fake. Anti-establishment people are more likely to think that Putin is justified in attacking Ukraine, and they are more likely to like Putin on our Vladimir Putin feelings thermometer.

The dimensions are now converging. So whereas they used to be somewhat orthogonal to each other 6 or 7 years ago, those correlations have gone from just about zero to almost 0.4 in the last few years. And if you want to compare: it's not a question of are people becoming that much more anti-establishment over time - which is the top line - that's largely flat. What's happening instead is that it's just that the people who are anti-establishment are becoming more on the right and the people who are on the right are becoming more anti-establishment.

Now, we've tried to drill down into both of those processes, and I think a year and a half ago, we ran a three-wave survey trying to look at who's moving where over the course of a summer. What we found during the summer of 2024 was that it was more establishment Republicans were becoming more anti-establishment at that point.

In terms of voting for Trump in 2020 - and this is us asking retrospectively in 2022 - this is kind of profound. If you go from being very pro-establishment to being very anti-establishment, you're almost at a 50% chance of voting for Trump. And this is holding all other variables, including ideology and partisanship at their means.

Which means, if you're something like, a leaning Democrat and you're anti-establishment, there's a 50% chance you might vote for Trump. We have a similar result for voting for the House Republican candidate, meaning that if you're anti-establishment, you're more likely to vote for the Republican. 

To put this in a specific policy area, the correlation between being anti-vax and being anti-establishment has stayed flat over time from 2022 to 2024. But the relationship between left-right and being anti-vax has gone from being just about zero to being 0.5 at this point. 

So we're starting not just to see anti-establishment people move over, but they're expressing specific views now, such that, you know, when I started studying conspiracy theories, people would say, Oh, it's the right, it's the right." And I'd be like, "No, it's not really." And they'd be like, "But all these right wing people are anti-vaxxers." And I say, "No, a lot of it's on the left." 

But that has changed since Covid, since now, so much of it has moved into into the right. 

You can look at this another way, with Trump and Biden feeling thermometers, which we ran over time. And you can start to see that anti-establishment wasn't doing much, when we first started this. But over time, as Trump had fewer institutional constraints on him and became much more anti-establishment - particularly while he was out of office, with his rhetoric - anti-establishment became a much bigger predictor for support for him. And it became a much more negative predictor for support for Biden, even though - and you see on the far panel from me - being a Republican or a Democrat, it's pretty flat, and it does exactly what we would expect in terms of predicting support for the two of them.

So in terms of what's changed, because of these dynamics, we started to see in 2020 all sorts of people who would not have run for national office before get into the ring, because they say, "Oh, Trump is President. Now is my time." So I think there was a count of around 90 QAnon supporters who ran for Congress. I think only two out of the 91 - one has now left, which was Marjorie Taylor Greene - but Boebert is still there. 

By 2024, the Republican Party had largely changed, and Trump's anti-establishment views have been largely institutionalized throughout the party. And it was just a different set of people. And even people who were pro-establishment before began adopting anti-establishment talking points.

And what we've seen in the last year, I'm sure we're all aware of, is an agenda focused on smashing institutions. And that includes our epistemological bodies like universities and data gathering agencies and whatnot. 

And we see people like this saying, "Now is my time." I heard a rumor he's working for ICE. I haven't been able to verify that yet or not. But he did mention running for for office.

Which brings me to to to Bobby Kennedy, which is an interesting case, because if we were only thinking about politics in terms of a single left-right dimension, it would make no sense whatsoever that Trump would be pulling in RFK or Tulsi Gabbard into his coalition. Wouldn't make any sense.

Right? But once you get into a two dimensional space, it starts to make perfect sense because, they are ideologically allied with Trump in the sense that they don't like the establishment. Perhaps not on anything else, though. 

But also what's happening is that these people are wildly unqualified for their positions, and I don't think there's a better place you can see that than with Bobby Kennedy and the people he's put into the CDC. 

So there's a couple paradoxes that come from both our findings and our theory. And one is that, while it is democratic for people who are anti-establishment to show up and start voting, whereas they might not have before, the weird thing is that they start voting for things that eventually become anti-democratic. Because they start undermining institutions, which opens up the door for authoritarianism.

For anti-establishment citizens, they reject elite actors, they don't like the elite. But they're just simply trading out one set of elites for another set of elites. And what makes that even worse is that they have to put up with elites who are far more likely to break rules and norms in ways that the previous elites never would have. 

So now they have a set of elites who are largely unconstrained, by the things that should hopefully keep, you know, keep them from being corrupt and authoritarian.

So here are some deep thoughts. Are we talking about people who, on one hand, just slipped on a banana peel and, you know, they're otherwise good people with good views, but they've been fed misinformation and conspiracy theories, and now they're sort of adopted a bunch of, you know, anti-democratic, anti-institutional beliefs? 

I think for some people, these are people who are bad. They're carrying a lot of very bad personality traits with them. And now that they've been activated into politics and made into the nucleus of a coalition, they're acting the way that they have acted in their personal lives - and that is with a wanton disregard for the the well-being of other people. 

I've also been thinking a lot about Cass Sunstein's idea of crippled epistemologies. He wrote one of the first papers on conspiracy theory 16 years ago, and he said that people who believe this stuff, they have an epistemology that's sort of broken, and it doesn't really make sense, because they're adopting ideas that are so bizarre and poorly evidenced. 

This was largely panned by most of the people in the conspiracy space, but given recent events, a lot of people are coming back to this idea that you have people, at least the core of a coalition, who have a shattered way of thinking about the world - in a way that defies the norms of, you know, typical epistemologies.

I've also been thinking about at what point can we no longer trust our epistemological institutions? You know, people have always asked me, "How do you know what's a conspiracy theory and what's conspiracy?" And I say, well, typically, you know, the short answer is: We rely on our institutions who study things to tell us what's true, and they won't always get it right, but, you know, that's the best we have. 

But if our institutions are being hollowed out and the people in them are being replaced with lackeys, at what point do we become like Russia - where it's like, you know, "Here's our new Sputnik vaccine. It works great." Are you going to trust them? And the answer is no, probably not. Right.

And that's what we that's what we see happening now. Trump doesn't like the BLS jobs number. You fire that person because he's in the deep state, right? Well, the next jobs number comes out. It's not good either. Well, we gotta fire them. I guess they're in the deeper state, right? So at what point do we wind up in a place where it's like, we just can't trust the numbers coming from from government anymore?

And then another question is, how do we rebuild and safeguard after this? And I'll leave that as an open question, but I could provide some ideas. 

So to conclude, partisanship and ideology, and even extreme versions of those, they're not necessarily good, and they have they're their unintended consequences, but they might not be the biggest culprits. We can understand some of the dynamics of what's happening in our politics now, if we look at anti-establishment politics. In many ways, we've sort of ignored this style of politics because we often always focused on left-right, left-right. But there's a whole nother world of opinions out there that we tend not to pay attention to. And I think Trump did. And that was sort of his trick.

But the consequence of this is that when you activate some anti-establishment people, they bring a lot of baggage with them. And that is non-normative personality traits that can lead to non-normative behaviors and potentially destructive policy demands. 

So with that, thank you.