It’s common for people to talk about how, in our polarized world, everything gets politicized—whether you wear a mask, a red hat, if you have “impossible” burgers in your buffet. But that’s actually wrong. What’s wrong with our world right now is that everything gets depoliticized.
Instead of deliberating, arguing, negotiating, and so on about what policies we should adopt, in a culture of demagoguery, everything is about being loyal to Us and hating on Them. Demagoguery looks like political discourse—it’s about “political parties” and their candidates, after all—but it isn’t. The wide array of policy options is reduced to what the demagogue advocates and the stupid shit The Other proposes (or is doing). And the demagogue’s proposal isn’t argued at any length; it’s hyperbolically asserted to be obviously right, just as the demagogue’s own personal history is hyperbolically asserted as a long string of almost magically effective and decisive actions. The hyperbole is rhetorically important, since it gives the demagogue and their supporters the ability to deflect criticism.
When a rhetor speaks hyperbolically, they are shifting away from the issue to the rhetor’s own passionate commitment. The “issue” is no longer about the policies that might solve the problem, but the conviction of the rhetor, their complete (even irrational) loyalty to the in-group. Hyperbole is about belief, not facts. Thus, hyperbole enables the deflection of policy discourse practices—it depoliticizes political issues.
Demagoguery is all about deflection. It’s especially about deflecting rhetorical responsibilities (especially of accuracy, consistency, and fairness), and accountability (for past and future errors, failures, lies, incompetence, corruption). Hyperbole enables deflection because it is a figure of speech, much like metaphor or simile. If I say, “He got so mad he just charged in there like a tiger,” it would be weird for you to say, “He isn’t a tiger; he’s human.” You would be showing that you don’t understand how simile works.
Hyperbole enables the demagogue to make outrageous and mobilizing claims without having to provide evidence for them—in fact, if someone asks for evidence, or points out that the claims are false, that person looks petty. Hyperbole enables someone to lie without being seen as a liar. It also enables a rhetor to announce or advance extraordinary policies that are beyond criticism, because criticizing the policies would require taking them literally, and that would come across as a kind of humorless nitpicking. The demagogue offers a world of passionate commitment, clarity, triumph, and the pleasures of membership in a unified group.
To criticize the rhetor who has created that sense of immersion is to try to pull the discourse back to the uncertainty and frustration of policy argumentation, and so it’s enraging to people who enjoy the depoliticized world of politics as pep rallies.
And so that brings me to Trump’s July 26, 2022 speech at the America First Agenda Summit.
The speech is a great example of toxic populism, appealing to what the scholar of populism Paul Taggart calls “unpolitics,” and the political scientists John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse call “stealth democracy.” Taggart defines “unpolitics” as “the repudiation of politics as the process for resolving conflict” (81). Like Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, Taggart points out that many people believe that politics—that is, arguing and bargaining with people who disagree—is unnecessary. Those people (call them toxic populists) believe that there is no such thing as legitimate disagreement; for every problem there is a straightforward solution obvious to regular people. We are prevented from enacting that obvious solution by an “elite” who deliberately slow things down and obstruct problem solving in order to protect their own jobs, line their pockets, follow pointless rules, and get lost in overthinking and details. Toxic populists can be all over the political spectrum, and people can be toxic populists about non “political” problems (health, business, personal finance, institutional practices)—what’s shared is their perception that we should just stop arguing and act. We should put in place someone who will cut through the crap and get ‘er done.
In other words, we should put in place someone who will violate all the norms, the checks and balances, the restrictions; we need someone who will not listen to what anyone else has to say.
And people think that will work out well. It never has. The checks and balances are there for a reason.
But, back to the speech. Trump lies a lot in it, as he generally does, but they’re the kind of lies that his base likes. He says, for instance, that in 2020,
“we had a booming economic recovery like nobody’s seen before, the strongest and most secure border in US’s history, energy independence, and even energy dominance, historically low gas prices, as you know, no inflation, a fully rebuilt military and a country that was highly respected all over the world by other leaders, by other countries, highly respected.”
He doesn’t even try to give the numbers that would support any of his claims, probably because there aren’t any. Every single claim is untrue. But it would look like humorless nitpicking to point out what’s wrong with each one, and involve explanations and require thinking. I’ll point out just one. In 2020, the pro-Trump media was engaging in alarmism about the southern border of the US, using “invasion” rhetoric (they’ve been doing this every election year for some time). Here’s one example. So, either Trump was lying in 2022, or he and supporting media were lying in 2020.
When it’s pointed out to Trump supporters that he lies, they tend to respond in one of two ways. The most common is, “All politicians lie; I just care about whether they get things done.” The second most common, in my experience, is, “Well, here’s a lie that Biden said.” The second is just deflection, but the first is more interesting. It looks pragmatic and reasonable, but it’s neither. If Trump lies about everything, and his media repeats his lies, how do you know whether he’s really getting things done? The only way to know is to step out of the pro-Trump bubble, and check the numbers, but I have yet to meet a Trump supporter who will even look at any information from sources anything less than fanatically supportive of him.
So, what they’re actually saying is, “I like Trump lies.” As I said, that’s neither pragmatic nor reasonable.
The most concerning aspect of toxic populism—regardless of where on the political spectrum it is—is the always implicit and sometimes explicit authoritarianism. “Authoritarian” is one of those words that people use to mean nothing more than “someone who is trying to make me do something I don’t want to do.” It’s always solipsistic; there are no in-group authoritarians—our leaders are decisive, but theirs are authoritarian. That’s a useless way to think about authoritarianism.
Authoritarian regimes are ones in which “no channels exist for opposition to contest legally for executive power” (Levitsky et al. 7); and there’s reason to believe that Trump is openly advocating a version of it: “competitive authoritarianism.” But I’m more interested in authoritarianism as an ideology. Authoritarian ideology is best understood as at one end of a continuum with pluralism on the other side. Imagine a person who is a dog lover—the more authoritarian they are, the more they will believe that everyone should be forced to love dogs, and that people who don’t love dogs should be exterminated or at least expelled. The more pluralist they are, the more they will believe that not loving dogs is also a legitimate position, and that it’s actively good to have people who disagree about dogs.
The more authoritarian someone is, the harder it is for them to understand what it means not to be authoritarian. They can’t imagine having a belief or behaving a particular way without forcing others to share that belief and behave that way—they think that’s how everyone thinks. For instance, authoritarian “complementarians” understand allowing “gay marriage” to be forcing people into such marriages—that they don’t want such a marriage must mean not letting anyone have it. A pluralist complementarian would believe that their marriage is complementary, but not everyone wants that kind of marriage or should be forced into it.
Authoritarians never see themselves as authoritarian, because they think they’re forcing people to do what’s right, and authoritarianism is forcing people to do what’s wrong. So, when it comes to political authoritarianism, they think that bypassing all the constitutional checks and balances in favor of an authority forcing his (it’s almost always “his”) will on everyone is a great idea.
And that’s what Trump is advocating—no constraints, on police officers (13-19), prosecutors, and, most of all, on himself:
“To drain the swamp and root out the deep state, we need to make it much easier to fire rogue bureaucrats who are deliberately undermining democracy, or at a minimum just want to keep their jobs. They want to hold onto their jobs. (01:09:28)
Congress should pass historic reforms, empowering the president to ensure that any bureaucrat who is corrupt, incompetent, or unnecessary for the job can be told, did you ever hear this? You’re fired? Get out. You’re fired. Have to do it. [inaudible 01:09:49]. Washington will be an entirely different place.“
What he wants, and what a GOP Congress will give him, is the power to fire any person in government who tries to hold him accountable.
That’s authoritarianism. That’s dangerous.