Sunday, January 9, 2022
Demagogue: That’s what Trump is, and it matters - By Eli Merritt
https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-america-demagogue-trump-20201015-r7r42jdtpja7dkhxqr3nomkegu-story.html
If we have any hope of arresting our constitutional democracy’s descent into chaos and breakdown, we must first know exactly what struck us in the fateful year 2016. Today we are not at the end stage of our democracy. We are instead at an early crossroads where a full-blown demagogue ascended to the White House and could ascend again. Trump’s election to the presidency has exposed the single greatest vulnerability –– and most destructive force –– present in a democracy.
Aristotle breathlessly warned about it. So did Plato, Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, Edward Gibbon, Alexis de Tocqueville, the founders of the United States and Abraham Lincoln. These statesmen and political philosophers uniformly exhorted the guardians of democracy to beware demagogues. In their writings and speeches, they elaborate a golden rule of this free yet fragile form of government: that the citizens of a democracy must work together tirelessly, irrespective of political and party differences, to keep demagogues out of high office. So concerned was Aristotle about this destabilizing political personality type that he employed the term “demagogue” 29 times in his treatise “Politics,” sounding the alarm repeatedly on the baleful impact of “the intemperance of demagogues” on rational government.
In the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Founders referenced “demagogues” 21 times, frequently with respect to the dangers of a demagogue ascending to the presidency. George Mason of Virginia pronounced, rightly, that no worse evil can befall a democracy than “the mischievous influence of demagogues.”
For the same reason, Abraham Lincoln advised Americans in an 1838 speech, entitled “The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions,” to unite fiercely behind one inexorable survival strategy of constitutional democracies: the exclusion of demagogues from elected office. When such a person gains traction in politics, Lincoln counseled, “it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.” Demagogues injure democracies in two potent, long-lasting ways. First, they foster division and distrust among the people instead of unity of purpose. Demagogues do this in order to gain and retain power for personal benefit, not for the benefit of the people.
Second, and far more dangerous to a democracy, a demagogue is temperamentally wired to run roughshod over everything we hold dear in our representative government: the Constitution, Bill of Rights, impartial courts, the rule of law, institutional norms, truth-telling, and, not least, free and fair elections followed by the peaceful transfer of power.
A demagogue is compulsively driven to obtain power and popularity at all costs. There is no higher godhead or object outside the self to obey. As a result, sacred democratic institutions become, for the demagogue, vexatious obstacles to be manipulated in the relentless quest for power and self-glory.
As Alexander Hamilton said in the Constitutional Convention, demagogues “hate the controul of the Genl. Government.” Every democratic tradition and institution that stands in their way, he and other political philosophers from across the ages scream at us to understand, eventually gets neutralized.
As ancient and modern political scientists attest, a democracy cannot long survive the corroding influence particularly of demagogues in the presidential chair. They break the faith, and over time, magnificent constitutional democracies like ours degenerate into all-out demagogic democracy. Then, in later stages of decay, the people, exhausted by tumultuous demagogic government, finally submit to the stabilizing influence of authoritarianism as the lesser of two evils.
The great paradox of democracy is that the people, who possess the power, sometimes vote demagogues into office who, once there, tear apart the very system of government that elected them, stripping the people of their power.
The best way to protect against this insidious peril is through the twin instruments of political courage in democracy’s gatekeepers and the awesome power of voting.
Most immediately, we must get Trump’s political diagnosis right. He is a demagogue –– and therefore a poison to democracy. Joe Biden is not. Voters must understand that clearly. The health, and possibly survival, of our democracy depends upon it.
Merritt is a visiting scholar at Vanderbilt University, where he is researching the history and psychology of demagogues and writing a book entitled “Disunion Among Ourselves.”
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