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.
This paragraph resonates for me with current events.
“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.”