Demagogue

I thought I might take a moment to recommend a new book from my colleague Michael Signer. The title is Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from its Worst Enemies. I read it several months ago and found it to be a very subtle and interesting historical and philosophical treatment of the subject. At the time, though, I was somewhat skeptical of Mike’s argument about the relevance of all this to the present day. Not that it was entirely irrelevant, but it seemed to me that demagogues in the modern world—Hugo Chavez, Muqtada Sadr—though perhaps at times in the headlines are actually a pretty marginal phenomenon.

I think the return of major economic problems around the world really calls that idea into question. The United States has the good fortune to be stumbling economically from a pretty high position on the totem pole. We could fall quite a bit and Americans would still be extremely well off by global or historical standards. But there are billions of people in developing countries such as India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, etc. who have mostly raised themselves out of the world of subsistence poverty but not nearly so far out as to be able to whether an economic collapse without enormous absolute poverty. You could easily imagine democratic governance breaking down in these places and demagogues playing a major role in that. Meanwhile, in the United States we’re witnessing an increasingly assertive Rush Limbaugh really shift out of his role as entertainer and communicator and more-and-more into the role of mass-movement leader. It’s . . . strange. Needless to say, those late-breaking developments didn’t make it into the book. But in my view they give it a renewed resonance and urgency.

At any rate it’s recently been the subject of a TPM Cafe Book Club discussion that’s worth checking out, as is the book itself.