Demagogue

 

As we approach the culmination of Donald Trump’s third bid for the presidency, I continue to be struck by how bumbling most Americans are at properly naming a breed of politicians that has bedeviled democracies since the time of the ancient Greeks.

The latest example of this linguistic disorder is the designation of the ex-president as a “fascist” by John F. Kelly, former Marine general and former chief of staff to Trump, as well as by Vice President Kamala Harris a day later.

It is not wrong to identify fascist tendencies in Trump, such as ultranationalism, ethnocentrism, cronyism, persecution of internal enemies and comfort with violence. But these traits also qualify him for classification as a dictator, despot, autocrat and authoritarian.

So why single out “fascist,” an inflammatory charge conjuring images of 20th-century mass murderers?

A far better designation, one that sums up Trump with precision, is “demagogue.”

The ex-president is a textbook case, the most striking and astonishing example of a demagogue in U.S. history. Like the Greeks Cleon and Alcibiades and the Roman Spurius Maelius, he will be studied as a paragon of this political personality type for decades, if not centuries, to come.

Athenians coined the term “demagogue” soon after they embraced democracy because they discovered that two bedrock principles of this system — free speech and obedience to the will of the people — combined to give rise to these talented yet rancorous rhetoricians.

Originally, demagogue (dēmagōgós, literally “leader of the people”), signified a political type in Greek democracy who rallied nonelite voters to the support of causes by appealing to class prejudices and resentments. Only after decades of observation did political philosophers begin to catalogue the extraordinary dangers posed by this type.

Aristotle observed that demagogues undermine democracies in two systematic ways: through fomenting disorder and corruption, leading to overthrow by oligarchy; and through the conversion of a democracy into a tyranny by a demagogue refusing to cede power.

“Most of the ancient tyrants,” he wrote in his classic “Politics,” “were originally demagogues.”

Over time, most political thinkers adopted Aristotle’s outlook. One of them, Alexander Hamilton, warned that Americans must exclude demagogues from high political office because they are men of “dangerous ambition” who unleash “angry and malignant passions.”

In Federalist No. 1, he wrote: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”

Modern academics have refined the term. In his 1954 book “American Demagogues,” historian Reinhard Luthin defined a demagogue as “a politician skilled in oratory, flattery and invective; evasive in discussing vital issues; promising everything to everybody; appealing to the passions rather than the reason of the public; and arousing racial, religious, and class prejudices — a man whose lust for power without recourse to principle leads him to seek to become a master of the masses.”

More recently, in “The Demagogue’s Playbook,” University of Chicago law professor Eric A. Posner described a demagogue as a political actor “who obtains the support of the people through dishonesty, emotional manipulation, and the exploitation of social divisions; who targets the political elites, blaming them for everything that has gone wrong; and who tries to destroy institutions — legal, political, religious, social — and other sources of power that stand in their way.” Demagogue, he concluded, describes Trump,

Fascist, on the other hand, when applied to Trump, is sloppy at best and reckless at worst — almost certainly fueling the flames of his MAGA base and alienating swing voters.

What we know with confidence is that the ex-president is a demagogue par excellence, and in light of the history of demagogues transforming into tyrants, it’s indisputably ill-advised to restore him to the presidency.

But such matters are not for professors of political science to decide. If Trump prevails in the election, the question of what kind of leader he is will be put to a high-stakes test. We shall see with our own eyes.

-Eli Merritt, a research assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, is the author of “Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution.”

-Washington Post