Democracy and the Demagogue

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Since the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, every presidential campaign has included accusations that candidates use code words so they can appeal to antidemocratic sentiments without violating what the Princeton political scientist Tali Mendelberg has called a “norm of racial equality.” This strategy was made explicit as early as 1981, when the Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained in a radio interview that politicians, who by around 1968 could no longer use the word “nigger” to denigrate black people, turned to abstracting the issue by talking about “forced busing,” “states’ rights” and “cutting taxes.” Such terms, he said, are “totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.” Violations of this sort have surfaced as recently as 2012, when Mitt Romney faced criticism for the claim by his campaign in South Carolina that President Obama wanted to eliminate work requirements from welfare.

Liberal democratic rhetoric is supposed to unify citizens with diverse perspectives and backgrounds. Trump’s and Carson’s public speech don’t.

So far, the current presidential campaign has been different. A CNN/ORC poll from May 29-31 registered Donald Trump at 3 percent support. In his speech on June 16 announcing his candidacy, Trump made the following, now infamous, statement: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” The word “rapists” is in no sense code. It is far from an “abstract” reference to Mexican immigrants. Yet instead of being punished, he was rewarded. The next CNN/ORC poll, from June 26-28, had Trump at 12 percent, behind Jeb Bush (17 percent). A poll conducted July 22-25 had Trump leading the G.O.P. pack with 18 percent.

On Sept. 20, the Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said: “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.” He also said that Islam, as a religion, is incompatible with the Constitution. Those too are not code words; they are direct attacks on one of the country’s minority religions. In a CNN/ORC poll from Sept. 17-19, Carson had registered 14 percent, in third place, 10 points behind Trump. By the end of September, Carson’s support had risen, and his high favorability rating was not dented. [In fact, this newspaper reported today that Carson’s aides believe that his inflammatory remarks are actually helping him in the polls.]

Liberal democratic rhetoric is supposed to unify citizens with diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and make visible previously discounted perspectives (for example, the perspective of women during the struggle for women’s right to vote). Trump’s and Carson’s comments are explicitly antidemocratic. The fact that they seem to have been rewarded — at least in immediate improvements in poll standings — confronts defenders of the American political system with two questions. There once was a facade of equal respect that required political strategists to use code words to avoid accusations of violating it. What has caused it to crack? And what are the risks for our democracy? I begin with the first.

In Federalist Paper No. 10, James Madison argued that the United States had to take the form of a representative democracy, in which it sought to elect leaders who best represented the values of democracy. An election campaign is supposed to present candidates seeking to show that they have the common interests of all citizens at heart.

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Two factors have eroded the protections that representative democracy is supposed to provide. First, candidates must raise huge sums to run for office. They therefore represent the interests of their large donors. However, because it is a democracy, they must also try to make the case that they represent the common interest. They must pretend that the best interest of the multinational corporations that fund their campaigns are also the common interest.

Second, some voters do not share democratic values, and politicians must appeal to them as well. These voters are simply more attracted to a system that favors their own particular religion, race, gender or birth position. When large inequalities exist, the problem is aggravated: People tend to take out their resentment on groups they believe don’t share their way of life. Candidates must appeal to these voters while appearing not to flout democratic values. So many politicians use coded language to exploit resentment, in order to avoid the charge of excluding the opposing perspectives of other large groups.

On top of these very real pressures to engage in insincerity, there is our media culture, which fosters extreme distrust in the political class. That a majority of Republicans think the President is a Muslim underscores its profound effects.

For these reasons, our politics right now appear insincere to many voters. And they are sick of it – they crave principled, honest politicians. They want politicians to tell it like it is. And they will seek such candidates even in the absence of a clear set of values they share. But how can politicians signal that they are not hypocritical, especially when voters have grown accustomed to what seems, for both real and contrived reasons, to be a deep stratum of hypocrisy?

One way for candidates to address the widespread disgust with hypocrisy is to represent themselves as champions of democratic values. In a democratic culture, such candidates would theoretically be the most attractive. However, this is not a promising strategy in the current climate. It does not appeal to voters who reject such values. And there will be fierce competition for voters who support democratic values between candidates representing themselves as their champions. This will occur in a media environment devoted to conspiracy theories leveled against anyone claiming to represent the common interest rather than special interests. It is difficult in such a situation to represent oneself as genuinely representing the common interest.

But there is a way a politician could appear to be honest and nonhypocritical without having to vie against other candidates pursing the same strategy: by standing for division and conflict without apology. Such a candidate might openly side with Christians over Muslims or atheists, or native-born Americans over immigrants, or whites over blacks, or the rich over the poor. In short, one could signal honesty by openly and explicitly rejecting what are presumed to be sacrosanct political values.

Such politicians would be a breath of fresh air in a political culture that seems dominated by real and imagined hypocrisy. They would be especially compelling if they demonstrated their supposed honesty and sincerity by explicitly targeting groups that are disliked by the voters they seek to attract. Such open rejection of democratic values would be taken as political bravery, as a signal of sincerity.

The desire for politicians who are sincere explains not only the strategic value of demagoguery (and hence the campaign choices of candidates like Trump who may not in fact believe their own demagogic bombast). It also explains the desire for politicians who will not compromise or bend; that is, it explains the attraction of the “true conservatives” of the Tea Party movement. It is often said that governing is the art of compromise. But this is not a statement about governing; it is rather about the values of democracy. Legislating in the common interest means not confusing one’s own values with the common values. It requires giving equal weight to values that one does not share. But too often, commitment to this principle appears weak – a failure to stand by one’s principles.

When voters are so concerned about authenticity, it obscures the fact that commitment to the common interest is a strength, not a weakness. Such a commitment requires more strength, not less, than commitment to almost any other value one can imagine (including for example the values of one’s particular religion). It is much easier to declare that one’s own interests are all that matters. Giving equal weight to a very different perspective requires considerably more strength than simply ignoring it.

Willingness to compromise is a natural expression of a commitment to equal respect. What we are seeing in both Congress and the presidential campaign is a yearning for politicians who reject commitment to the democratic value of equal respect. (This value requires particular attention to the voices of those not at the top of the social and economic ladder – the voices of the wealthy and powerful have far too long been given outsize weight in American politics.) And this brings us to our second question, about the risks to our democracy.

Since candidates who reject equal respect win office by explicitly flouting democratic values, there is no reason to think that, once in office, they will suddenly embrace them. There is no reason to think that any democratic value, such as free and fair elections, will be safe from them. We can expect such politicians to engage in undemocratic practices like voter suppression and gerrymandering, all in the service of protecting the perspectives of their voters. For this reason, one might think, a healthy democracy would ban antidemocratic speech from politics. For example, the first amendment to India’s constitution does not guarantee free speech; rather it restricts it to prevent its abuse.

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There is however an excellent argument that it is not possible to prevent politicians in a democracy from endorsing antidemocratic attitudes. A chief value of democracy is liberty. Liberty is the freedom for all to pursue their own paths; the common interests are to be found where these diverse paths intersect. But liberty centrally includes freedom of political speech. One might legitimately wonder whether a society that bans antidemocratic speech in the political realm is genuinely a democracy. We cannot force politicians to commit to protecting democratic values by restricting their democratic freedoms, chief among them the freedom of speech.

In Book VIII of “The Republic,” Plato is clear-eyed about these perils for democracy. He worries that a “towering despot” will inevitably rise in any democracy to exploit its freedoms and seize power by fomenting fear of some group and representing himself as the protector of the people against that fear. It is for this reason that Plato declares democracy the most likely system to end in tyranny. Plato’s prediction is most dramatically exhibited by Weimar Germany. But more mundane recent examples of his description of democracy’s breakdown and descent into tyranny exist to varying degrees in the cases of Hungary and Russia. The fragmentation of equal respect is a clear alarm for the United States. We must heed it by categorically rejecting politicians who seek to gain office by exploiting the mistaken belief that democratic values are weaknesses.

Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, “How Propaganda Works.”

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Correction: October 13, 2015
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the political scientist who coined the phrase "the norm of racial equality." It is Tali Mendelberg, not Mendelburg.