Demagoguery and Democracy by Patricia Roberts-Miller

Author:Patricia Roberts-Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2017-05-15T19:18:38+00:00

VI.

A Culture of Demagoguery

Demagoguery depoliticizes politics, in that it says we don’t have to argue policies, and can just rouse ourselves to new levels of commitment to us and purify our community or nation of them. It says that we are in such a desperate situation that we can no longer afford them the same treatment we want for us. But demagoguery rarely starts by calling for the literal extermination of the out-group.16

Demagoguery isn’t a disease or infection; it’s more like algae in a pond. Algae can be benign—in small amounts, even helpful. But if the conditions of the pond are such that the algae begins to crowd out other kinds of pond life and ecological processes, then it creates an environment in which nothing but algae can thrive, and so more algae leads to yet more. That’s what demagoguery can do, create an environment of more and more demagoguery. Then, for people competing for media markets, consumers, voters, and so on, demagoguery is likely to be the more effective rhetorical strategy, and more rhetors will choose it. And rhetors have to out-demagogue each other to get attention, buyers, voters.

Weimar Germany (the world in which the Nazis rose) had a lot of problems—intermittently high inflation, high unemployment, a highly factionalized media (much of which promoted racist conspiracy theories), and a government hamstrung by political parties that, making a virtue of fanatical commitment to purity, demonized the normal politics of compromise, deliberation, and argumentation. Those were serious problems, and none of them were going to go away on their own. It’s generally argued that World War I was a consequence of nationalism, militarism, and wishful thinking. There were, therefore, multiple causes of Germany’s woes—but Hitler never talked about those causes. Instead of trying to reduce factionalism, nationalism, militarism, and wishful thinking, or come up with economic solutions, Hitler argued that all of Germany’s problems, especially its having lost the war, but including its current economic ones, could be traced to two real problems: a weakness of will and the presence of alien bodies. Germany needed, he said, more fanatical factionalism, nationalism, militarism, and wishful thinking, which it could achieve by purifying itself of them.

He wasn’t the only one to blame Germany’s problems on them, although there was some disagreement as to who they were. For the Bolsheviks it was capitalists and liberals; for fascists it was Bolsheviks (who were mysteriously interchangeable with Jews) and liberals; for many Christians the problem was the Jews; for others it was union leaders; and the Sinti and Roma were commonly characterized as degraded and criminal. There wasn’t much agreement in Weimar political discourse, but there was nearly perfect agreement that the problem was the presence of a bad sort of person. The “ill” part of the policy argument was truncated to them. Hitler may be the most famous example of a German rhetor who engaged in this kind of demagoguery, but he didn’t invent it.

This kind of rhetoric is the first step on what the

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