Demagogues in Democracies

Demagogues have been a serious problem in democracies for millennia. Those who practice equal self-rule in rural settings have known for centuries that many party politicians do not fight for democracy but for their narrow party interests. So they keep their distance when political party hacks come to town right before elections. In ancient Athenian democracy, social elites like Plato and Aristotle feared democracy because it surely threatens the wealth and privilege of ruling elites (and their advisors, such as Aristotle). 

The ancient Greeks also feared demagogues. By not limiting their own ambitions for power and authority, the demagogue was criticized in Athenian democracy for hubris, the failure to limit their narrow, personal interests. The honest orator works to transform the will of the citizens to serve the best interests of the political body. The demagogue fails to regulate the self and serves only his own interests.

This problem in the U.S. did not begin with Donald Trump. Republican Party success in the early twenty-first century at limiting access to the ballot box undermined democratic ideals, such as equality and objective reason. In his award-winning analysis of methods used by demagogues in liberal democracies, How Propoganda Works (2016), Yale University philosopher Jason Stanley focuses on Republican success at appealing to voter fears despite the absence of voter fraud. Fear short circuits reason, and is a favorite weapon of demagogues.

This type of demagogue is particularly deceptive in electoral democracies. Liberal governments prohibit propaganda, and they do not train their citizens to track and reject demagoguery, so citizens generally do not recognize deceptive speech (or Twitter) as a threat that undermines democratic practices.

Using fear is not a partisan problem. Demagogues using fear in the War on Terror may be found in the both major political parties in the U.S. Both President Bush of the Republican Party and President Obama of the Democratic Party wielded fear in their campaigns against terrorism. Party leaders have done the same in England, France, Spain, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and other electoral democracies that are actively involved in the War on Terror.

Fear itself is not a threat to democracy. The use of fear to weaken democratic practices is what threatens democracies, according to Stanley’s How Propoganda Works.

So wartime is particularly risky for democracies. War is when security may seem more important than democratic principles. In these times the balancing of security with basic rights, security with equality, security with open debate, and other balancing acts central to liberal democracy can easily collapse. And in The Forever War, as one senior official called it, means that the War on Terror will continue to be a long-term threat to liberal democracy.

The collapse of openness in democracy and the turn towards authoritarian rule is also a long-standing problem for democracies. Some have argued that the struggle between openness and authoritarianism, democracy’s Other, is the central conflict of democratic practices.  Others have argued that the battle of openness to difference against the closure of centralized authoritarianism is the central struggle for democracy for the United States in the twenty-first century.

There are many ways to defend democracy in an age of demagogues. As a long-established problem, much work has been devoted to fighting their deception, their power, and their speech. We can draw on these resources in the U.S. and other sites where democracy is overrun by demagogues. There is much work to do.

The Rule of Law and the Magna Carta

Critics of assumptions that we live under the rule of law have come into fashion suddenly, with the 800^th anniversary of the Magna Carta this month. Nicholas Vincent of the University of East Anglia called the myth of “an English-speaking people, freedom-loving people who’ve lived with a degree of liberty and under a rule of law for 800 years “a load of tripe,” among other pungent criticisms. But where were these commentators when the British and the U.S. unloaded the weapons of rendition on detainees in the War on Terror or detention without trial on immigrants? Why is this discussion of the history of the rule of law occurring with little or no reference to the current crisis of the rule of law?

Justice Under the Law?

Two debates over justice that threaten to destabilize the neoliberal state have broken out in recent days. In the United States, legislators have objected to the threatened federal government use of drones to kill U.S. citizens while on U.S. territory. In Egypt, a court verdict contested by various participants in the Arab Spring revolution was issued in the midst of a police strike.  For both debates a central question remains: whether legislative and court systems will be able to limit the reach of the President, a time-honored defense against abuse of power by sovereign authorities and strategy promoting justice in the exercise of government power.

Other Sovereignties

Subaltern populations achieve autonomy in many ways under globalization and the War on Terror. Their sites of autonomy rarely come to global public awareness, but when they do they are shaped by the terms under which they make sense to largely bourgeois, news-viewing and academic readers and viewers.  What other terms and logics might be useful for understanding subaltern autonomy?

Subaltern Democracies 2 Come

Democracy has multiple lineages beyond that of the European Enlightenment, lineages which include collective practices of accountability and ethics of indigenous groups and subalterns past and present. As globalization and the War on Terror spread their destruction across the globe, democratic collectivities have come under siege in many ways, and are responding with their survival at stake. Those in the global north may learn from these responses about forms of democracy that have much to teach the world about possible futures for democracy.

Subaltern ways of surviving under the War on Terror have gone virtually without mention in news reporting, despite the claim to protect rural and urban women and those with little formal education by the nations behind the World War Without End. Indigenous governance areas are at the center of the War on Terror, from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan to indigenous struggles over sovereignty in the Trans-Sahel region of North Africa. At the same time the claims to democratic governance in territory conquered by invasion, such as Hamid Karzai’s administration in Afghanistan, have only very tentative relations to full-fledged representative structures of classic European political analysis.

Indigenous group responses to globalization are often founded in democratic governance, like the Zapatistas in Mexico and the Karen of Thailand, the Republic of Lakotah in the United States and the Noongar in Australia. As a spokesperson for the Zapatista movement put it, “Collective work, democratic thinking, and subjection to the decisions of the majority are more than just traditions in indigenous zones. They have been the only means of survival, resistance, dignity, and defiance.” Yet their democratic practices may take forms that our European-derived notions of democracy would not recognize as legitimate or useful; rethinking the limits and politics of that recognition is one main goal of this blog.

At Democracies 2 Come we take seriously the possibility that subalterns living under the War on Terror and globalization may have something to contribute to the global understanding of democracy and freedom, dignity and justice. By taking them seriously as agents capable of intelligent analyses and democratically organized constructive responses to the War on Terror and globalization, we may move beyond seeing them only in terms of the status of victims needing rescue by foreign nations, multinational organizations like the IMF and the United Nations, micro-lending development schemes, and NGOs. Rural women and men with little schooling have much to say about economics and the War and its democratic claims in its many, many conflict zones, from Afghanistan to Yemen and regions beyond centralized national control.