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.
Tag: demagoguery and democracy
Demagoguery is not specific to democracies
Every once in a while I find myself arguing with people about an apparently pedantic, but actually very important, point about demagoguery. People I respect and think are very smart insist that demagoguery is a condition unique to democracy.
I think that this argument comes from several sources. One is Mortimer Adler, who argued that the Athenian empire collapsed because of “too much democracy.” (It didn’t.) Another is sloppy inference from morphemes. Demagoguery and democracy share the “dem” after all.
Although pedantic, this argument is also really troubling, in that it implies that the solution to demagoguery is to abandon democracy, and/or that only the masses are susceptible to demagoguery, a solution that also implies some degree of authoritarianism.
It’s not only pedantic, but wrong.
Were Adler right, then the elites in Athens would have been right in their decisions, and the problems would have come from bad decisions on the part of the “demes” (the small landowners). Alcibiades was elite; he was a jerk out for himself. There’s no reason to think he was only supported by the small landowners. And that term—the demes, small landowners–is the linguistic source of demagoguery and democracy. Demagogues were leaders of the small landowners—the demes. Democracy is a system that includes them.
Alcibiades was an example of what was toxic in Athenian democracy, but his success had nothing to do with too much inclusion. It was about too much factionalism on the part of oligarchs and demes.
What happened is that what had been a neutral term for the leader of a political party (the demes) became a term for an unscrupulous rhetor, largely as a consequence of anti-democratic elitists like Plato and Plutarch.
Thucydides used the term in a neutral way, meaning the leader of the party of the demes. So, his use of the term is like someone saying “the leading Libertarian” or “the leader of the Republicans.” His hero Pericles was a leader of the demes, a demagogue. One of his villains, Cleon, was a leader of the demes, a demagogue. Alcibiades was a disaster, and not a leader of the demes, and another disastrous leader, Nikias, was not a demagogue.
What made Cleon, Alcibiades, and Nikias disastrous leaders wasn’t that they were demagogues (only Cleon was) but that they didn’t have Pericles’ combination of good judgment and rhetorical skill. Thucydides wasn’t making a point about democracy, but about rhetoric and judgment.
Aristotle (whose understanding of demagoguery is pretty interesting) says that a demagogue—that is, a populist politician—can gain power when the rich so oppress the poor that the poor are desperate. Then, the rich get worried about the agitation of the poor and so support a tyrant. And democracy ends.
Plato and Plutarch both took up the issue of demagoguery, and both were profoundly elitist, thinking that the demes should have no part in politics. Plutarch’s narrative about politics was that there are two groups: the rich (basically reasonable) and the poor (completely driven by emotions). Poor people are basically irrational, and easily roused to authoritarianism. A good government gives more power to the rich, but also gives the poor a way to express their concerns that the rich can consider. (This is a misunderstanding of what happened in Athens, by the way.)
The Founders were strongly influenced by Plutarch. And, therefore, their ideal was not the Athenian democracy, but the Roman republic. They believed the republic solved the problem of rich v. poor. And they knew that the Roman republic had its demagogues. So even the Founders understood that demagoguery was not just a problem of democracies—it arose in republics.
Thomas Hobbes translated Thucydides because he was worried about the presence and damage of demagogues, and he lived in a monarchy. His horror of demagoguery was the consequence of his seeing the devastation created by the Thirty Years War and the English Civil Wars, neither of which happened in a democracy or republic.
It would be difficult to claim that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not demagoguery, and it was created under an authoritarian monarchy. Hitler’s rhetoric began in the conditions of democracy, and remained the same under fascism. Did he stop being a demagogue March 24, 1933 when he became dictator? Stalin’s rhetoric (not a democracy) is exactly like Father Charles Coughlin (democracy). But only Coughlin’s is demagoguery? If people have the same rhetorical strategies, shouldn’t we characterize their rhetoric with the same term?
Insisting that demagoguery is a condition of democracy means that we say that the Founders and Hobbes were wrong to worry about it, that Hitler stopped being a demagogue March 24, 1933, that neither Castro nor Stalin ever engaged in it, that there was never demagoguery about Jews, Slavs, Africans, and…well, this list is way too long, except in democracies.
Really? Is that a claim anyone wants to defend? That the rhetoric that blamed Jews for the plague was not demagoguery? Even if it was exactly like the demagoguery during the Weimar democracy that blamed them for Germans losing the Great War? So, exactly the same rhetoric is not the same just because of the governmental system under which it happened?
Pedantic much?
Demagoguery is not a form of rhetoric that only arises in democracies.