Briefly, my plaint about scholarship on demagogues has four parts, three of them described previously:
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- It’s methodologically flawed to try to distinguish demagogues from statesmen on the grounds of motives, since someone’s interpretation of a political figure’s motive is very nearly indistinguishable from their perception of that political figure as a member of the ingroup or outgroup.
- It’s methodologically flawed to try to identify the characteristics of demagoguery by looking at what characteristics are shared among political figures the rhetor doesn’t like, because that ensures there will not be any identification of ingroup demagoguery.
- If our goal is to prevent communities from getting talked into policies they will later regret, it’s a mistake to do so by trying to identify the responsible demagogues because looking for word magicians assumes what’s at stake—it assumes that communities get into bad decision-making processes because magical individuals lead them there.
- It’s methodologically flawed to try to identify demagogues by looking at politically successful and repellent figures because that focus necessarily means we’re looking only at individuals who had the political power (or luck) and identity that would enable them to gain power.
Here I’ll explain briefly what that last one means.
Access to political power has always been carefully circumscribed, and yet supposedly politically excluded groups have always found ways to participate in politics—such as antislavery women who, without a vote, sent thousands of petitions to Congress, with tremendously important impact.
Women’s groups were also important in pro-segregation political agitation, as well as pro-Nazi, despite—in both cases—their political agitation being in direct defiance of the political agenda and ideology on behalf of which they were agitating. Any excursion into the bottom half of the internet will show a lot of women and members of marginalized groups engaged in demagoguery, and they are not uncommonly agitating for their political marginalization, demagogically.
They have little or no power, and their motives are uninteresting. But, rhetors like that can have tremendous power, if there are a lot of people acting as they are. They can promote demagoguery in small groups, via their social media, in their social interactions. They can also help to ensure that criticism of their demagoguery is silenced, through boycotts, shunning, refusing to hire, firing. They can also legitimate demagoguery through approving of it explicitly or implicitly.
In fact, demagoguery is only dangerous when it’s supported by large numbers of people who will refuse to vote for political figures who deliberate or compromise, shun, fire, refuse to hire, or boycott people who aren’t sufficiently fanatical about the ingroup, refuse to testify about ingroup violence, or refuse to condemn it. Those aren’t major political figures—those are the people who create the wave that the major political figures ride.
In other words, focusing on demagogues, rather than demagoguery, is yet another way we let us off the hook.
[image from here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/06/hitler-s-killer-women-revealed-in-new-history.html]