The Free Press
When I was an editor on The New York Times opinion page, I commissioned a smart essay from the writer and historian Philip Terzian about Donald Trump’s possible precedents, figures in American politics he may resemble. The word “unprecedented” was being used to describe every aspect of Trump’s presidency. As Terzian concluded, “While unique in his way, Mr. Trump is not a president like no other, nor a threat to democracy or the constitutional order. He has roots in the American civic tradition, which is considerably more complex, and more fractious in tone, than we care to remember.”
Readers reacted strongly to this essay, sending in letters about it, one of which the Times published. The critic countered that Terzian’s argument “was a misguided and ahistorical attempt to normalize President Trump’s rhetoric and actions by comparing him to former presidents.”
With Trump’s second inauguration around the corner, I thought revisiting this argument, and reassessing the president-elect’s rhetorical strategy, would be worthwhile. I reached out to Charles Zug, assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri and author of Demagogues in American Politics (2022) to ask him where he thinks Trump’s rhetoric fits in the American political tradition. Also, don’t miss the lightning round, in which we answer the question: Is Greta Thunberg a demagogue?
The following has been edited for clarity and concision.
Adam Rubenstein: You wrote the textbook on presidential rhetoric and demagoguery. Could you define demagoguery for us? And tell us where it fits in the American political tradition?
Charles Zug: Demagoguery is unavoidably paradoxical. It’s difficult to define, even though it so clearly refers to a recognizable form of behavior. The most general kind of definition you’re likely to encounter says something like, “Demagoguery is the purposeful manipulation of peoples’ emotions and feelings for the sake of obtaining political power and using that power in vicious ways.”
In politics, you’d have to be obtuse (or gravely naive) to claim that you’ve never witnessed this kind of behavior. The rub, however, is in the last three words of that definition: If you define demagoguery as “bad” from the outset, you fashion it as a tool for partisan weaponization. No one has an incentive to own that their partisan is a demagogue; by the same token, they have every incentive to brand their partisan adversaries as demagogues.
For this reason, most people throw their hands up in frustration before they even launch a proper inquiry into the subject of demagoguery. I think it makes more sense to think of demagoguery as a morally neutral form of rhetoric, instead of defining it from the outset as “morally vicious.” This approach alleviates the need to weaponize the concept, as well as the need to guard ourselves from its weaponization by others.
AR: How did the American founders themselves conceive of, and deploy (if they did), demagoguery?
CZ: The American founders overwhelmingly spoke of demagoguery as a bad thing. They did so for different reasons. Most of the founders were unreflective elitists who simply associated demagoguery with the rabble and the petty politicians who courted the rabble’s favor. At the same time, a few of the founders were extremely intelligent, and had deeper reasons for wanting to marginalize demagoguery from the polity they were designing. For these folks, it was not primarily elitism, but rather a set of reasoned arguments about constitutionalism and the common good that induced skepticism toward demagoguery. Broadly, these founders were concerned with the routinization of demagoguery in the constitutional order. They feared that frequent use of demagoguery would put undue stress on the state, undermining, in the long run, the state’s ability to perform its basic tasks by eroding public confidence in the duly constituted offices. Their fears were not misplaced.
As for their praxis, the founders were not particularly demagogic in their own spoken public utterances on account of the constraints they faced. As Jeffrey Tulis shows in his pathbreaking book The Rhetorical Presidency, there were powerful norms in place at the time of the founding that seriously constrained how public officials engaged with popular audiences. For their parts, the founders sought to fortify and rationalize these norms during and after ratification. Consequently, most of the rhetorical vitriol they engaged in (and there was a lot, let me assure you) was expressed either privately or indirectly through sympathetic voices in the press, such as The National Gazette (the Jeffersonian outlet) or The Gazette of the United States (the Federalist outfit).
AR: To your mind, who is an effective demagogue in American politics?
CZ: American politics has generated a number of highly effective demagogues since the founding of the Constitution. In recent memory, it would be difficult to think of a more effective demagogue than Donald Trump—if by “effective” we simply mean someone who uses public speech to amass and maintain power. I can’t think of a single politician more adept at evading responsibility, undermining the credibility of his adversaries through ridicule (rather than through reasoned criticism), and recruiting followers into his own simplistic worldview of what America is and should be. He does it all through public rhetoric—repeating, relentlessly, slightly modified versions of the same kinds of attacks and evasions he has been saying for years.
AR: Would you say that Donald Trump’s rhetoric is “unprecedented”? If not, what might be some precedents?
CZ: Totally unprecedented, at least as far as U.S. presidents go. Though, I should say, it’s possible to distinguish between thoroughgoing demagogues, on the one hand, and officials who use demagoguery alongside other rhetorical tactics, on the other. The latter are free to deploy good demagoguery depending on the circumstances and their own judgement; they can toggle self-consciously between different rhetorical modes, like a contractor swapping out different tools from a tool set.
In contrast, the thoroughgoing demagogue actually sees the world in demagogic terms. Demagoguery is not a tool for them (i.e., something that is used as an instrument for the attainment of goals beyond itself). Rather, demagoguery constitutes their basic epistemic categories. Thoroughgoing demagogues get high on their own supply.
AR: What do you mean by good demagoguery and bad demagoguery? Can you give us examples?
CZ: Good and bad demagoguery can take many different forms. For example, it’s possible to explain and advocate a good cause in a demagogic manner that, regrettably, discredits that cause. It’s also possible to explain and advocate a dreadful cause in a highly persuasive demagogic manner that, regrettably, gives that cause credibility it would otherwise lack. And it’s possible to use demagoguery to build support for a good—yet unpopular or misunderstood—cause. And so on.
Take the “communism in government” crisis from 1940s and 1950s America. The issue of communist infiltration of state security and intelligence agencies was a serious and complex one; it posed many tough questions, such as, “Who does and does not count as a communist? What threats, if any, do communists as such pose to American government? Is it possible for communists to do their jobs normally, or are all communists by definition bent on overthrowing the American state? Is there any merit to the communist critique of America, or is it all baseless and therefore easily dispensed with?”
Given the complexity of these questions, there are many different ways a politician who cared about the issue of communism in government could have gone about tackling it. We happen to remember Joseph McCarthy because he tackled it in the most sensationally demagogic way possible—alleging (without evidence) that the security and intelligence agencies had been infiltrated by countless communist agents, and then accusing those who dared to scrutinize him of being communists themselves!
That is the very definition of a claim that is designed to resist independent verification. Question: “How do you know John Doe is a communist?” Answer: “Only a communist would ask that question.” It sounds ludicrous, but it’s the kind of reasoning that’s attractive to fearful people.
AR: So, in your view, demagoguery can be, but isn’t necessarily, a bad thing? The ends matter.
CZ: That’s right. The task of assessing the merits of political ends is bound up with the task of assessing the quality of a rhetorical choice, a choice about whether and how to use demagoguery to explain a broader position.
Good demagogues use demagoguery to support, and enhance the attractiveness of, a reasoned argument for a good cause that is otherwise unpopular, misunderstood, or simply not known. But we cannot verify the goodness or badness of a cause without understanding the arguments in favor of its goodness or badness. Causes do not come prepackaged as “good” or “bad”; rather, we reach judgments about their goodness or badness by reasoning about the arguments and rhetoric in which they are nested. Demagoguery can be used to fortify a rigorous, intelligent, but otherwise cold and unattractive argument. Think about it: The same basic proposition takes on quite a different meaning if it’s Harry Hopkins or Harold Ickes articulating it rather than Franklin Roosevelt. For what it’s worth, FDR was a maestro when it came to integrating demagogic tactics into a rigorous, open-minded argument.
AR: When do you think Donald Trump’s rhetoric—or good or bad demagoguery—may be acceptable or even encouraged? When do you consider it to be unacceptable and to be discouraged? Can you give us examples?
CZ: Donald Trump is funny. There is no getting around it. Sometimes he means to be, typically he does not, but just is. The core of Trump’s rhetorical genius is his ability to make otherwise respectable-seeming people and things appear ridiculous. That’s what makes his humor a feature of his overall demagogic modus operandi. Politicians looking to resist, undermine, and overthrow MAGA would do well to expand their comedic repertoire in response.
They would also do well to exploit Trump’s vulnerabilities with more strategic precision. One thing I think Democrats are still learning is that the effectiveness of outrage is constrained by a pretty unforgiving emotional economy, and that a strategy of all-outrage-all-the-time renders any given instance of outrage less powerful. You need to pick your moments. Trump is constantly ridiculing people, which means sometimes he hits a target that is broadly sympathetic to most Americans. His comments about wounded combat veterans, for example. No decent person would think that such people should be objects of ridicule—and yet Trump has ridiculed them. When he does this, he is more vulnerable to a well-placed counterattack than when he ridicules, say, some senator or stuffed shirt in the State Department.
AR: How do you parse Donald Trump’s claims—to this day—that the 2020 election was “stolen,” and that his followers (which he said on January 6, 2021) should “fight like hell” over it? Where does it fit in the context of historical presidential rhetoric?
CZ: I think Trump faced a pretty stark fork in the road immediately after January 6. One path entailed acquiescing to the then-dominant interpretation, which was that the attack on the Capitol was a travesty that Trump himself bore responsibility for as sitting president. (That’s the correct interpretation, by the way—as witnessed by the fact that most of Trump’s own cronies decried the attack at the time.) That path rendered him vulnerable to prosecution, and spelled the end of his political career.
The other path entailed, to paraphrase Nietzsche, rebaptizing the viciousness of January 6 as virtuous, as a great patriotic spectacle to be celebrated rather than condemned.
American political culture is built on a symbolic tradition that glorifies violence; self-consciously or not, Trump succeeded in using his demagogic expertise to tap into that tradition. Consequently, for Trump’s supporters, January 6 is now cognizable in terms of the Boston Tea Party and the broader iconography of the American Revolution. It took Trump’s rhetoric to accomplish this. Without it, the narrative would have been solidified by Trump’s critics, together with his own supporters, who were abandoning him in droves at the time.
AR: Let’s do a lightning round: demagogue or not a demagogue? If you feel like you should explain one of these, go for it.
AR: Barack Obama.
CZ: A gifted user of demagoguery for the sake of political ends I regard as generally admirable, if not wonderful.
CZ: A brilliant orator who saw demagoguery as indispensable for rallying Britain when it seemed fully prepared to acquiesce to the fascists.
AR: Thomas Jefferson.
CZ: Not a demagogue. A provocateur and tedious blowhard in private correspondence, but exceedingly restrained and high-minded in public speech.
AR: Greta Thunberg.
CZ: A well-meaning demagogue who does not appear to have significantly helped the cause of climate change by means of her demagoguery.
AR: Bernie Sanders.
CZ: A great politician who effectively integrates demagogic tactics into a rigorous critique of unregulated capital.
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