Eric A. Posner - The Demagogues Playbook: The Battle for American Democracy from the Founders to Trump

At dawn, the night was interrupted by the growl of thirteen cannons, which brightened the dark sky and signaled the start of the momentous day. By late morning, enormous crowds filled the grounds of the Capitol. Though they came from all classes and walks of life, the people in this immense mass stood as one as they waited with barely suppressed anticipation for the appearance of their new leader.

They stood before the majestic faade of the Capitol, its design inspired by a Greek temple and the Roman Pantheon, which evoked the countrys debt to the ancient inventors of democracy and constitutional law. Standing on First Street, those on the fringes of the crowd could barely make out the figures walking out the door of the Rotunda, partly obscured by the columns of the East Portico. Moments later, a roar erupted as those at the front of the crowd recognized a figure, somberly dressed in black, surrounded by dignitaries, emerge from the building. The sound surged backward through the crowd, swelling in volume until the noise overwhelmed spectators. The very heavens were rent with the shout which greeted the long expected vision, wrote an observer. The cannons thundered again as President-elect Andrew Jackson took his seat.

The crowds were expected to disperse after the inaugural speech and the taking of the oath. But they did not. As Jackson rose to depart, well-wishers pressed through the barricades and eagerly pushed toward him from all directions. For a moment he was engulfed by the jubilant, heaving crowd. His guards, flanked on either side, ushered a path for him out of the mob, and he took flight on a white steed down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Word got around that a reception was being held at the White House, and soon huge streams of people were pouring toward it from every direction, enveloping the government buildings along the way and then the White House itself. Those lucky enough to make it into the executive mansion pushed and shoved one another, many scrambling up on furniture in their muddy boots for a glimpse of the president, who was being pressed against the wall by a mass of supporters. Servants, day laborers, prostitutes, and pickpockets struggled with foreign ambassadors and society matrons for access to the cakes and refreshments. Punches were thrown, noses bloodied, tables overturned, china smashed into a thousand pieces. As Jackson vanished within a circle of guards, White House servants lured the crowd out the doors and through the windows by removing the punch bowls from the interior to the White House lawn.

One Margaret Smith, reflecting on what she had seen, observed that ladies and gentlemen only had been expected at this Levee, not the people en masse. But it was the Peoples day, and the Peoples President, and the People would rule. God grant that one day or other, the People do not pull down all rule and rulers.

The day after Donald Trump was elected president, I received a phone call from a reporter who asked me whether Trump would become a dictator. He then told me that, as far as he was concerned, this was a Warsaw Ghetto moment. I thought his reaction was extreme. While I didnt vote for Trump, and didnt like him, I thought the reporter had lost all sense of proportion. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis in 1943 ended in the death of tens of thousands of Jews who were killed during the battle itself or murdered in concentration camps to which they were transported.

The idea that Trumps presidency would introduce authoritarian rule, or worse, received a great deal of attention. Several authors wrote books warning of such an outcome, and commentators had a field day. While one group insisted that Trump would be a dictator, another group argued that he was insane and therefore should be removed under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. And yet in some ways, this was nothing new. The slanderous claimmade by Trump, among othersthat Barack Obama was born in Kenya implied that he was not a legitimate president because of the constitutional requirement that the president be a natural-born citizen. Many Democrats argued that George W. Bush was not a legitimate president because the Supreme Court threw the 2000 election to him. The Republican Congress impeached President Bill Clinton because it believed that he had shown himself unfit for office as a result of his lies and obstruction of justice in connection with a sex scandal. Significant efforts were also made to investigate and impeach Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush because of their involvement in the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s. A decade before that, in 1974, Richard Nixon was forced to resign the presidency. Significantly, before Nixon, no president was ever forced from office, and hardly any faced serious investigations for personal wrongdoing, with the exception of Andrew Johnson, who was impeached but not removed from office in 1868. The impeachment proceedings against Trump, which began in 2019, seem hardly surprising in light of this pattern.

Something is wrong with the presidency, but what exactly? The extraordinary negative reaction to Trumps electionby conservative intellectuals as well as by liberals and Democratsreflects something more than ordinary partisan and policy disagreements. It reflects genuine fear about the vitality of our constitutional system. The sheer number of books and articles published since 2016 accusing Trump of an authoritarian, or even fascist, agenda provides evidence of this anxiety. But rather than a diagnosis, the dictatorship argument seems more like an inarticulate attempt to expressin constitutional termsan uneasiness. What actually is wrong with Trump?

A better place to start may be with another epithet that is frequently used to describe him: that he is a demagogue or a populist demagogue. While America has never experienced a dictator, it has had many populists and demagogues, so an exploration of these terms may offer insight into how they may apply to Trump. The Founders, reaching back to classical precedents, feared that their experiment in republican self-government could produce a demagogue: a charismatic leader who would gain and hold on to power by manipulating the public rather than by advancing the public good. Demagogues are often accused of populism because populism has come to mean a kind of uncontrolled mass activism that rejects deliberative, pluralistic government and the political, legal, and constitutional institutions that maintain it. Trump, who has played to the mob and attacked institutions from the judiciary to the press, may seem to embody these ideas.

The problem is that these two terms have become all-purpose political epithets, flung so frequently against so many different politicians that they have all but lost their meaning. The terms often mean a politician I dont like. As the New Deal lawyer Thurman Arnold put it:

There is no difference between the demagogue and the statesman, except on the basis of a judgment as to the desirability of the social ends and social values which move the one or the other. The man with the social values you do not like, you will call the demagogue. You will say that he appeals to emotion and not to reason. This, however, is only because reason is the respectable end of the two polar terms, reason versus emotion, and you instinctively want it to point toward your own organization.