It Ain't Easy Being A Demagogue

I’m consistently amazed at how well scholar Victor Davis Hanson can make ancient Greek history come alive and bring it forward to today’s parallels. Recently, he did a take on demagogues going back to the fourth-century original, Cleon. He then brought it forward to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in America. The original Greek word literally means “leader of the people.”

But the great Greek comedy writers quickly turned it into its modern meaning as a person who uses jealousy of the wealthy and successful, along with appeals to the masses, to advance his personal agenda.

Domestically, the word has most frequently been used to describe figures such as William Jennings Bryan, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and Sen. Huey “Kingfish” Long. Our demagogues were pikers compared to the experts such as Adolf Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung. A certain amount of charisma is required for a successful demagogue. Hanson points out that Jimmy Carter was more than a failure as a President. He was also a failure as a demagogue. He was boring, whiny and his speechifying skills were nonexistent. It wasn’t for want of trying, however, since Carter tried to attack three-martini lunches and luxurious private yachts, but he couldn’t get people to like him enough to hate the alleged “bad guys.”

Demagogues are good at pretending to be at one with the masses, even though they are far from it. FDR constantly chastised the rich, though he was not exactly the genuine American poverty-to-prominence story that his Vice President Harry Truman was. Barack Obama is not super-rich by any means, but he certainly isn’t a poor kid who made good as he would like people to believe he is. He has carried the “log cabin myth” far beyond its former boundaries. FDR and Obama both used the rule of stirring up popular anger against “the establishment.” Both were and are members of that very establishment. Both had the ability to wield immense power, including the redistribution of wealth.

As champions of the people, demagogues who are good at it use catch-phrases and exaggerations such as using alligators and moats to keep the huddled masses out of America. They have to paint pictures of starving poor children (ignoring the obesity crisis that they address entirely separately), and evoke plutocrats flying around in private jets. The demagogue must “share our pain” produced by the evil oil companies by making sure his tires are properly inflated, his car in good tune, and getting rid of those gas-guzzling old cars in exchange for a green vehicle.

The good demagogue must prove his mettle by rejecting demagoguery—except for his own, of course. Obama damns the habits of fat-cat corporate big-wigs and bankers, while spending more time on the golf course than all our former presidents combined. He says we must all tighten our belts while taking vacations that the rest of us can only dream of. He decries the use of private corporate jets while using Air Force One as if it were his own personal taxicab (a Prius, naturally). You must remember that the demagogue is always “the other guy.”

He says things like “we must bring a gun to a knife fight,” then condemns uncivil usage among Republicans when they describe an up-in-the-air electoral locus as “a target district.” He poses as the first “post-racial” President, but uses metaphors that picture his opponents as “making the down-and-out sit in the back of the bus.” He claims to be racially-neutral because he is of mixed ancestry, yet has his hand-picked attorney general call Americans cowards on race while describing his own grandmother as “a typical white person.”

Hanson also points out a facet of the demagogic personality that I hadn’t given much thought to. He says: “The demagogue, in messianic fashion, sees himself as a lone crusader taking on special interests, again, always on ‘behalf of the people.’ Almost everything is personalized in these cosmic struggles.” Which distinguishes him from FDR, and Reagan, for that matter. FDR and Reagan both used the pronoun “I” only when it involved an act specifically charged to the presidential power itself. Obama narcissistically uses “I,” “my,” “mine” as if he were the lone occupant of the executive branch. Most recently, he tried to steal the thunder of the SEAL team that captured and killed Osama bin Laden by constantly referring to what “I” did to effect the capture.

The good demagogue must also set himself up as the only reasonable person in town. That requires setting up straw men both to the left and right of himself so that he can take the “reasoned, middle position.” Likewise, he must denigrate anyone who disagrees with him as a lesser person than he himself is. Thus, Obama recently declared himself the only adult in a roomful of children. Then he told us all to “eat our peas.”

Hanson closes his treatise with words I wish I had thought of: “What impresses about Barack Obama is his ability to take an ancient art, refine it with an Ivy League veneer, and become a new, cool version of the old Cleon.”