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"Demagoguery"
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The lost soul of the American presidency : the decline into demagoguery and the prospects for renewal
\"The American presidency is not what it once was. Elections have become a popularity contest and the president has become the ostensible mouthpiece of the American people. Stephen F. Knott contends that the presidency of popular consent, or the majoritarian presidency, was not intended by Madison, Washington, Hamilton, or almost all the key framers, but more importantly, he argues that this presidency led to precisely what Madison and Hamilton feared most: the rise of demagogic presidencies. The Lost Soul of the American Presidency traces the history of this decline in the nation's executive office that has culminated in the election of Donald Trump. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson re-founded the office and opened the door to this demagoguery, and their task was completed by a series of twentieth-century presidents, including Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon. The price of this demagogic presidency has been paid by minorities of all sorts -- racial, religious, political, and economic. The nation was thus deprived of the president's intended role as unifying head of state, and his constitutional role as neutral enforcer of the laws of the land. But we also have examples of presidents who resisted pandering to public opinion and appealed to the better angels of our nature, notably John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln, who represent the 'lost soul' of presidential leadership that we can still recover\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy
We develop and test a theory to address a puzzling pattern that has been discussed widely since the 2016 U.S. presidential election and reproduced here in a post-election survey: how can a constituency of voters find a candidate \"authentically appealing\" (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a \"lying demagogue\" (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to non-normative private prejudices)? Key to the theory are two points: (1) \"common-knowledge\" lies may be understood as flagrant violations of the norm of truth-telling; and (2) when a political system is suffering from a \"crisis of legitimacy\" (Lipset 1959) with respect to at least one political constituency, members of that constituency will be motivated to see a flagrant violator of established norms as an authentic champion of its interests. Two online vignette experiments on a simulated college election support our theory. These results demonstrate that mere partisanship is insufficient to explain sharp differences in how lying demagoguery is perceived, and that several oft-discussed factors—information access, culture, language, and gender—are not necessary for explaining such differences. Rather, for the lying demagogue to have authentic appeal, it is sufficient that one side of a social divide regards the political system as flawed or illegitimate.
Journal Article
Donald Trump
During Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy and presidency political discourse in the United States became more hateful and divisive. Threats and actual violence against groups and individuals singled out and demonized by Trump increased. The targets of his verbal attacks were most of all racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, the news media collectively and individual journalists, and well-known politicians, mostly Democrats. There was a rise in bullying incidents in schools against minority students. Assuming that aggressive rhetoric by influential political leaders affect their supporters’ words and deeds, we examined Trump’s online and offline hate speech, the rhetorical reactions of his followers, and the violent consequences suffered by their declared enemies. We found that contrary to an old children’s rhyme (“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me”) Trump’s aggressive, divisive, and dehumanizing language was seconded by his followers and inflicted directly or indirectly psychological and physical harm to Trump’s declared enemies.
Journal Article
Dangerous Demagogues and Weaponized Communication
This essay argues that we can usefully separate \"heroic demagogues\" from \"dangerous demagogues\" by whether or not the demagogue allows themselves to be held accountable for their words and actions. \"Dangerous demagoguery\" can be thought of as \"weaponized communication\" that uses words as weapons to achieve the dangerous demagogue's strategic goals. The essay examines several recent examples of dangerous demagogues using weaponized communication strategies, including conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, President Donald Trump, and Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin. Weaponized communication is a danger in any democracy as it corresponds with democratic erosion.
Journal Article
Demagoguery, Charismatic Leadership, and the Force of Habit
This essay argues that scholars who focus on demagogues rather than demagoguery are mistakenly making charismatic leadership a necessary quality of demagoguery. Instead of focusing on demagogues, we should focus on the conditions that nurture demagoguery. This essay makes the case that charismatic leadership is not necessary for demagoguery but an almost inevitable method of gaining compliance in a culture that promotes outcomes-based ethics.
Journal Article
Rhetoric's Demagogue | Demagoguery's Rhetoric: An Introduction
Despite varying understandings of who or what a demagogue is or what a demagogue does, it is little surprise that demagoguery has long occupied rhetoricians, who are of course also interested in persuasion, argument, politics, public speech, affect, emotion, ethics, deliberative discourse, and essentially all the other realms of rhetorical action touched by the demagogue. Still, after more than two and a half millennia of deliberation on the matter, rhetoricians are still grappling with demagoguery-how to define it, how to identify who engages in it, how to explain its rhetorical character and effects, how to resist it, and how to reverse it, or if it's even possible to do so. The essays in this issue advance that effort in a time when demagoguery is once again on the rise.
Journal Article
NA ZAČETKU IN KONCU DEMOKRACIJE JE (BILA) BESEDA: O POLITOLOGIJI IN KOMUNIKOLOGIJI
Povzetek. Aristotel je ob Politiki napisal Retoriko, da bi pomagal rešiti atensko demokracijo pred demagogijo. Podobno je dva tisoč let kasneje Harold Lasswell ob politični znanosti (politologiji), ki odgovarja na vprašanja, »kdo dobi kaj, kdaj in kako«, postavil komunikacijsko znanost (komunikologijo), ki odgovarja na vprašanja, »kdo pravi kaj, po katerem kanalu, komu in s kakšnim učinkom«, v ponovno obrambo demokracije pred demagogijo. Danes stojimo pred podobnim izzivom. Pluralizacija medijskega ustvarjanja in personalizacija medijske porabe ogrožata vzdržnost skupnosti, imenovane polis, politične skupnosti, v kateri in o kateri lahko komuniciramo, ker nam je skupna in si jo delimo (lat. communis → communicatio). Ključni pojmi: politologija, komunikologija, strateško komuniciranje, demokracija, demagogija, hiperdemokracija, hipermediatizacija
Journal Article
Ancient Demagoguery and Contemporary Populism: Conceptual Analogies and Differences in Historical Perspective
The association between contemporary populism and demagoguery is frequent, both in academic literature and political debate. However, the scholarly attention devoted to the latter is considerably less than that given to the former. This is a peculiar situation considering that demagoguery has been a primary concern for political thinkers since classical Greece. Even when not explicitly discussed, the question of demagoguery was an underlying concern framing discussions on pivotal themes like political leadership, public rhetoric, tensions between oligarchic and popular factions, and the nature of the best regime. This raises the question of how historical conceptions of demagoguery align with contemporary theories of populism and whether relevant differences between them can deepen our understanding of both phenomena. The first part of the article reconstructs the classical conception of demagoguery focusing on its treatment by two of its most influential theorists, Plato and Aristotle. For them, demagoguery was a corrupted political form in which popular power turns into tyranny under unprincipled leaders exacerbating divisions between popular and oligarchic factions. Building on this historical analysis, the second part of the article compares the ancient conception of demagoguery and contemporary theories of populism focusing on the three primary aspects around which the current debate revolves: ideology, political style, and institutions and forms of organization.
Journal Article
The Blood of Patriots: Symbolic Violence and \The West\
This article considers how demagoguery gives meaning to violence by providing a symbolic, expressive outlet for resentment resulting from real or felt precarity. This rhetorical process redirects frustrations away from the entities and sociopolitical structures responsible for creating precarity and toward a scapegoat. Rather than examining demagoguery as rhetoric produced by an individual rhetor or consumed by an audience of the masses, the author explores the \"meso-level\" of demagogic discourse: the organizations called into existence and motivated by individuals' shared identification with a symbolic struggle against an imagined Other. This phenomenon is illustrated through a close reading of the Proud Boys, a multinational fraternal organization that uses an aesthetic of libertarianism to advance a fascist politic.
Journal Article
Excluding Emotions: The Performative Function of Populism
Populists are often excluded from political life on the basis that they are too emotional. Both social movements as well as political parties who are labelled as populist are accused of using demagoguery and manipulation in order to attract support and new membership. Often, these critiques emanate from the political establishment, creating a division between emotional and rational actors in politics. In this article, I argue that instead of seeing populism as a nominal or ordinal category, we should look at how the term itself has performative properties. The article is interested in how populism as a concept is used as a tool for exclusion, and how being ‘too emotional’ is used as justification for excluding certain actors. This article first contends that this perspective is endemic to political and social theory, and has long been utilised to marginalise women, non-Europeans, or young people. Second, the article demonstrates how this perspective also pervades much of contemporary studies on populism, which do not sufficiently recognise the political implications of employing a strict divide between emotion and reason. Third, the article further contends that by using a Laclauian framework which sees politics as equal to hegemony as equal to populism, one can conclude that populist actors are no different from other political actors; emotions and affects are always central to any political identity. Instead, the division between emotional and rational in politics serves to sediments exclusionary practices against newcomers and challengers of the status quo. I conclude by using the Laclauian framework, focus can be turned to the performative function of populism, and its political implications.
Journal Article