Conversations with TylerMercatus Center at George Mason UniversityAll episodes
Richard Hanania on Conrad's Nostromo, Latin American Crime, and Populism
Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, widely considered his masterpiece, follows a fictional Latin American country torn apart by corruption and its uneasy dependence on foreign capital. Tyler and Richard Hanania picked it hoping to talk about something other than politics — a bit ironic, given Hanania's new book, Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster, is all about the stupidity of current politics. From early on, the two see the novel quite differently: Is its hero a rotten fraud or a flawed but decent man? Is Conrad quietly a classical liberal, or a tragedian who thinks every political ideology curdles into "folly and murder"? Is comparing regimes even the right way to read him at all?
The first half of the conversation stays close to the text, covering the novel's political backdrop, its deliberately scrambled timeline, the near-total absence of religion in Conrad's universe, Nostromo's own vanity and treatment of women, a close reading of the "folly and murder" passage, the Fredric Jameson claim that no Latin American author could have written this book, and their very different research methods for preparing. Then the conversation opens outward, moving through why Latin America has unusually high crime despite not being especially poor, Panama's surprising success story, Shakespeare's objective greatness, the state of media criticism after the AI boom, who on the populist right is actually worth reading, why conservative women hug and liberal women shake hands, what Hanania wants to write and learn next, and more.
Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.
Recorded June 16th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:18 - On the context of Nostromo
00:23:32 - On Nostromo's scrambled timeline
00:24:59 - On the absence of religion in Nostromo
00:27:15 - On romanticizing politics
00:30:14 - On writing about Latin America
00:34:18 - On reading Conrad's works
00:39:01 - On crime in Latin America
00:44:10 - On Shakespeare's objective greatness
00:49:05 - On the media after the AI boom
00:51:16 - On populism
01:00:00 - On what's next
01:02:30 - Outro
