michael-signer-demagogue.thumbnail.JPG

Demagogue: The Fight To Save Democracy From Its Worst Enemies.

The problem of demagogues – political figures who fashion themselves as leaders of the masses and who will go to almost any extreme to hold and expand their power — is one that has stalked democracy from its very beginnings. It is one generated by the tension at the very heart of democracy – if political power is invested in, and derived from the will of the people, how to protect against leaders who stir up the people’s passions for their own destructive ends? In this book, an impressive work of philosophy and political science that is both rigorous and accessible, writer, analyst, and current candidate for Lt. Governor of Virginia Michael Signer explores the problem of the demagogue from the ancient Greeks down to the present day.  

Signer defines the demagogue – from the Greek “leader” (agogos) of “the people” (demos) –according to four rules: “(1) They fashion themselves as a man or a woman of the common people, as opposed to the elites; (2) their politics depends on a powerful, visceral connection with the people that dramatically transcends ordinary political popularity; (3) They manipulate this connection, and the raging popularity it affords, for their own benefit and ambition; (4) they threaten or outright break established rules of conduct, and even the law.” Huey Long, Muqtada al-Sadr, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, and of course Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler are among the figures analyzed by the author, who suggests that “these political leaders are players in a drama much larger than themselves: The struggle of democracy to survive.” 

Signer begins by looking at the different ways in which Plato and Aristotle perceived and proposed to deal with the problem of demagogues. Plato proposed to create and strictly maintain an elite class of “Guardians,” who would be conditioned from birth to rule over the people. Aristotle, on the other hand, believed in the ability of the people to learn to resist the demagogue. In Signers interpretation, “the demagogue is the product of the people, and only the people can stop him.” 

These differing views of the role that the people could and should rightly play in their own governance were mirrored in the creation of our own American republic, with leaders such as Alexander Hamilton and James Madison presenting the masses as something to be protected against, with Thomas Jefferson championing the innate ability of the people to cultivate the habits effective self-governance. In this, Signer comes down on the side of Jefferson. “There’s a reason America has not seen a national-level demagogue seriously threaten the Constitution,” he writes. “Most Americans…will tell you that they are wary of strong men, of the accumulation of power in single leaders, and of the kinds of mass waves of emotions perpetuated by demagogues. These basic, often unnoticed, second-nature attitudes and beliefs among Americans have served as the ultimate barrier to demagogues.” 

The cultivation of a constitutional conscience, then, is one way of managing and protecting against the demagogue. In a particularly compelling chapter on the contemporary struggle for democracy, Signer explores the role that neocons such as Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan – whom he distinguishes from neoconservatives, intellectuals such as Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol who moved rightward from Trotskyism to conservatism, but whose ideas remained anchored in the real world – played in promoting the Iraq war on the idea that the United States could, with little difficulty, remove its regime and install a democracy in its place. Events have, of course, proven them disastrously wrong. Signer locates the source of their error in the fact that the neocons, despite their public praise for democracy, envisioned a new order for Iraq in which the Iraqi people themselves were almost entirely absent – acted upon by elites carrying out the theories of the neocons, in service of the American imperium.  Signer traces the influence on the neocons of the philosopher Leo Strauss, who himself dealt with the problem of the demagogue by suggesting that the people should be guided toward right behavior through “noble lies” told to them by trained elites.  

Discussing the idea of American exceptionalism, Signer closes with an argument in favor of American “exemplarism.” In an interview that I conducted with Mike shortly after his book was released, he defined this as America “draw[ing] other nations to us through moral conduct, and through our pursuit of a world of rules which everybody would abide by, and through our generosity, and through talking to and communicating with the peoples of the world.” This is distinct from what Signer terms “vulgar exceptionalism,” which is “when America starts viewing ourselves as an exception to the moral rules and the legal culture that governs the world community of which we’re a part, and we say we should be different, we don’t have to play by everybody else’s rules.” 

In light of the events of the past few weeks, the debate about government secrecy and torture, Signer’s book couldn’t come at a better time. The Bush-Cheney administration is one that sought, perhaps more than any other in American history, to remove the people from the process of government. A key question raised in the last few weeks is whether the Bush administration’s stunning arrogation of power to the executive branch was only a detour in America’s progression toward greater freedom (a “hiccup” as Signer calls the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798) or whether it represented a more serious challenge to American values. A recent poll showing that some 70% of Americans believe that torture is permissible in some cases underlines the salience of this issue for our democracy. 

Michael Signer is with us tonight to discuss his book.