Quotes and sources for Demagoguery and “too much democracy”

Quotes
Sullivan, Andrew. “Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic.” New York. May 1, 2016.
“As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise.” (New York May 1, 2016)

Sulllivan: “For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. [….] Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom run of the culture as well. A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to ‘check his privilege’ by students at Ivy League colleges.”

Moe, Terry M., and William G. Howell. Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency. Princeton U P. 2025).
“To say that [Patrick] Buchanan paved the way for Trump is an understatement. Everything about Buchanan’s approach to politics anticipated what Trump […] would say and do. Almost none of Trump’s public presentation was original. [Buchanan] pushed for an “America First” approach to policy, one that looked skeptically upon free markets and globalization, supported protectionism, opposed interventionism and democracy-building overseas, and stepped back from America’s commitments to the United Nations, NATO, and the World Trade Organization. He insisted that America was locked in a battle for the soul of the nation and that “we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.”41 He saw a nation in moral decay and advocated a greater public role for religion, for “Judeo-Christian values,” and our Western heritage. He vilified diversity and cast himself as an unapologetic guardian of whiteness and white identity. He opposed affirmative action and civil rights legislation. He saw immigration as perhaps the greatest danger of all—to jobs, but more importantly to white culture and its traditions. He spoke of “an invasion of the country” that needed to be stopped in its tracks. To do that, he proposed a wall at the Mexican border, an end to birthright citizenship, and a five-year moratorium on all (including legal) immigration.” (169)

Benkler, Yochai, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. Network propaganda: Manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics. Oxford University Press, 2018.
“By the 2016 election cycle American right-leaning audiences had been exposed for two decades on television (and nearly three on radio) to a propagandist mass media outlet built on feeding its viewers with news that fit and reinforced their world view while constantly pointing fingers at all other media sources as biased. The strategy paid off for Fox in producing an immensely loyal viewership, and for the Republican Party with a core of support highly resilient to the vicissitudes of real-world failure or transient political winds.” (324)

Bratich, Jack Z. “The people and the public: cyber-demagoguery and populism as war.” Mapping Populism, eds. Ron, Amit, and Majia Nadesan. Routledge (2020): 42-54.
“Guidance via cyber-demagoguery is performed by algorithm, by crowdsourced peer suspicion, and by design choices. Media subjects, rather than participating in shaping the objectives, are recruited for harmony, alignment, and a shared definition of the situation with those who govern. While cyber-demagoguery doesn’t have a central charismatic leader, the nexus that guides it is nonetheless centrist in its aims” (50).

Huntington, Samuel, “The United States.” Crisis of Democracy. Trilateral Commission, 1975: 59-163. (Description of the 1960s (an era of “too much democracy”):
“The challenging of the authority of established political, social, and economic institutions, increased popular participation in and control over those institutions, a reaction against the concentration of power in the executive branch of the federal government and in favor of the reassertion of the power of Congress and of state and local government, renewed commitment to the idea of equality on the part of intellectuals and other elites, the emergence of ‘public interest’ lobbying groups, increased concern for the rights of and provision of opportunities for minorities and women to participate in the po9lity and economy, and a pervasive criticism of those who possessed or were even thought to possess excessive power or wealth.” (59-60; 1975)

McKean, Benjamin. “Populism, pluralism, and the ordinary.” Mapping Populism, eds. Ron, Amit, and Majia Nadesan. Routledge (2020): 85-95.
“In the United States and Europe, claims to speak for ‘ordinary people’ have often implicitly or explicitly meant ‘white people’ [and] many political parties have been rewarded at the ballot box for portraying themselves as the voice of a virtuous white people betrayed by predominantly white elites allied with people of color and immigrants, who are portrayed as outsiders unfairly draining resources.” (85)

References (not quoted)

Gould, Eric D. “Torn apart? The impact of manufacturing employment decline on black and white Americans.” Review of Economics and Statistics 103.4 (2021): 770-785.

Hartelius, Johanna. The Rhetoric of Expertise (Lexington 2011)

Huntington, Samuel. “The special case of Mexican immigration.” The American Enterprise 11.8 (2000).

Laclau, Ernesto. On populist reason. Verso, 2005.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How democracies die. Crown, 2019.

Lewis, Ronald L. Black coal miners in America: Race, class, and community conflict, 1780-1980. University Press of Kentucky, 1987.

Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. The breakdown of democratic regimes. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.