Trump as demagogue (American Scholar)

[MBS]

https://theamericanscholar.org/a-vacuum-at-the-center/#

Some historical perspective, by an emeritus professor at Princeton:

THE CONSEQUENCES OF DEMAGOGY
A populist may carry the day with an ill-considered or poorly crafted proposal. But any damage that populism causes often fades once the immediate crisis passes. The damage demagogy inflicts can be more long-lasting. Thoughtful analysts of political change, ancient and modern, have recognized the danger Alexander Hamilton noted in the first of The Federalist Papers:

History will teach us that … 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.

Fears of autocracy have roots reaching back to “the Great Demagogue,” as W. B. Yeats called Oliver Cromwell, and to ancient thinking about the tendency of regimes to change from one form to another. Plato discusses just such a process in the Republic. That idea is already present decades earlier in the so-called debate about constitutions in Herodotus’s Histories, where Darius, the future Persian monarch, is imagined as arguing that strife among leaders vying for first place “goes on until one of the people rises to stop such men. He therefore becomes the people’s idol, and being their idol is made their monarch” (translation by A. D. Godley). Are the fears of these political thinkers hyperbolic? Let’s hope so, but the demagogue knows how to tap sources of power often overlooked by conventional politicians. Since power is sweet, the demagogue is more likely to hoard it for himself than to relinquish it to others. The result can be a full-fledged autocracy, or the gradual attrition of the institutions and practices upon which liberty depends.
Demagogy, understood in this way, is far more dangerous than populism. It has the ability to transform itself into autocracy if one by one the institutions that resist the aggrandizement of power are eroded or destroyed. That, I believe, is what is at stake at the present moment.

For a long time, I thought of demagogy as a remote phenomenon, revealing about ancient civic life and inviting occasional comparisons and reflections on contemporary politics. The stakes, frankly, did not seem very high, nor did it matter much if one used archaic-sounding demagogy or the more modern and objective-sounding populism. The truly pressing problems, I thought, were not linguistic or even institutional, but the concentration of wealth, racial and gender equality, the need for better health care, protection of the environment, diplomacy to avoid war. Over the past year or so, however, all this has changed. If President Trump is indeed a demagogue, citizens must respond to the erosion of the institutions on which our Republic depends: a free press, an independent judiciary, free and fair elections, and, as the title of Aristophanes’s The Knights reminds us, a military that resists demagogy. If the fear of a transformation of American republicanism into autocracy is not irrational, the most pressing issue is not how closely President Trump resembles Cleon, or whether one likes or dislikes his style and actions, but how demagogy can be stopped.

[Major Nikon]

1. Political discourse in this country has been reduced to what will fit on a bumper sticker

So long as this is the case, there is no escape from demagoguery and sloganeering as such tactics will be enormously successful, particularly so when backed by monied interests who can effectively repeat those things so loudly and often that all other voices are drowned out.

[dalton99a]

2. Kick