Winston Churchill once said that ‘Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.’ In the wake of what happened in Washington last week, I think this metaphor illustrates something deeper about the relationship between demagogues and their followers. Who are the tigers and why are they hungry? Riots – the voice of the unheard – clearly signify some issues within a society that if not resolved inevitably lead to the baring of teeth. Tigers only emerge from tears in the social fabric. The more the economic, social, or cultural chasm rips open, the more untamed emotions spill out of the void and the more likely it becomes that a demagogue can saddle-up and offer a solution. Steve Bannon said that ‘we got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall….This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.”
Many ancient philosophers were sceptical of democracy because it was vulnerable to the threat of demagogues. Plato argued in the Republic that because democracy must allow freedom of speech it was defenceless aginst strongmen who could make to the demos based on their fears and emotions. Joseph Goebbels said that ‘This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.’ So why is it that democracy is vulnerable to demagogues? What do demagogues offer and how might we protect against it?
Demagogues spark kindling; they appeal to the raw emotions of a primed group, stirring up feelings and offering appealingly simple solutions to what are always complicated problems. They take the hunger of the tiger and offer it rancid meat, claiming to be able to solve a problem with something simple; a lie, a wall, a conspiracy theory, a return making something great again. Demagogues offer anything that sounds appetizing to the ears of those that haven’t the time or often, frankly, the education to think deeply about the problems we face. That’s why Fascist’s offer fantasies and conspiracies; they have the appearance of being the quickest route to a solution. Hitler thrived in the chaos of the Weimar Republic offering an appealing solution to stalemate in the Reichstag, the German Parliament.
The logic of simplicity and emotion always relies on a handful of tactics. Fascists, for example, appealed to a simpler mythical and idealised past. Similarly, authoritarians are almost always anti-intellectualists who prefer ‘action’ and ‘doing’ over thinking or negotiation. The French fascist Pierre Drieu la Rochell wrote that a Fascist ‘is a type of man who rejects culture. It is a man who does not believe in ideas, and hence rejects doctrines. It is a man who only believes in acts and carries out these acts in line with a nebulous myth.’
Conspiracy theories offer easy explanations to difficult and uncomfortable truths too. They tell some ‘in-group’ that they’re being manipulated by some ‘out-group’, whether that’s the Jews, Birthirism, The Great Replacement, Pizzagate, or the stealing of an election. Easy explanations for emotional and hungry tigers that give the appearance of the world ‘making sense.’ Hannah Arednt wrote in her magisterial Origins of Totalitarianism that ‘what convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. Repetition…is only important because it convinces them of consistency in time.’
But there’s a fundamental question here. If its that simple why can’t demagogues operate all of the time? What is it that usually protects against them? Conspiracy theorists and demagogues like Hitler almost always come from the fringes, from outside of established social groups and organisations which, because of the widespread checks and balances within them, protect against information that is antithetical to the core beliefs of the group. Stable and cohesive groups and institutions simple won’t adopt simplistic short-term solutions because a large enough proportion of the membership will reject them in favour of more effective long-term response. An institution or social group has many members contributing to its economy of information, has long-term goals, has an incentive to keeping short-term solutions out, has a loose but cohesive identity that its members, whether they agree with the minutia or not, align themselves to. Typically, institutions – the Republican Part, the Democratic Party, The Washington Post, the university, Google whatever the institution – have a dynamic that balances the desires, goals, and attitudes of a hegemonic proportion of its members. In the biology of the body, this is called homeostasis – the tendency towards equilibrium – it takes something from the outside, a virus, for example, to disrupt this.
The internet has destabilised this stability of social groupings and institutions. Donald Trump created a coalition of Trumpists not through the GOP but from the outside, through his public profile and his ability to talk directly to his supporters. The Republic Party did, at first, do what they could do keep him out.
The Pulitzer prize winning journalist Walter Lippmann discussed this in his 1922 book Public Opinion. ‘Nowhere’ he wrote, ‘does the machine disappear. Nowhere is the idyllic theory of democracy realized. Certainly not in trades unions, nor in socialist parties, nor in communist governments. There is an inner circle, surrounded by concentric circles which fade out gradually into the disinterested or uninterested rank and file.’ He said that ‘the better the institutions, the more all interests concerned are formally represented, the more issues are disentangled, the more objective criteria are introduced, the more perfectly an affair can be presented as news.’
The internet has fractured us into a deluge of interlocking and competing movements, identities, and social groups competing for digital and physical space. This is the threat of the internet; that it leaves us more open to demagogues who can bypass the gatekeepers of traditional institutions. “The republican principle,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers “does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests.” To the contrary, he said, when “the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests, to withstand the temporary delusion…. conduct of this kind has saved the people from very fatal consequences of their own mistakes.” If a coalition of interests cannot offer a dominant and convincing solution to the problems of the status quo, then the public sphere will fracture into an ungovernable block of competing interests. In this climate, like in Weimar Germany, demagogues will emerge on tigers.
An institution, social group or coalition of interests does not necessarily have to be a political party, it can also simply be a consistent set of ideas, a movement, or a consensus. However, if progressives don’t organise in some way around a cohesive set of beliefs that can appeal to the majority of voters, then the tigers will continue to be drawn to demagogues, short-term solutions, and conspiracy.
We’re at the beginning of a tumultuous moment in history. Power is shifting away from America while the internet is continuing to upend the way we do everything. The historian Greg Grandin wrote in 2016 that Trump is a response to the decline of the American Empire. When Obama was elected in 2008, he wrote ‘the safety valve of empire closed, gummed up by the catastrophic war in Iraq combined with the 2008 financial crisis….Because Obama came to power in the ruins of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, empire [was] no longer able to dilute the passions, satisfy the interests, and unify the divisions.’
Reactionary conservatism and fascistic authoritarianism are always a response to moments like this, periods that are fertile soil for demagogic solutions, and I don’t think what’s coming in the post-Trump era will be much prettier than what we’ve seen so far. In short, if you believe there’s a problem – the collapse of the neoliberal and neoconservative consensuses on either side of the fence, increasing inequality and alienation, etc. – then you should believe in building a coalition that can offer a solution.
In an article for the Atlantic, the sociologist Zeynep Tufeki points to a difference between Trump and his fellow right-wing populists around the world – Erdogan, Bolsanaro, Orban; they’re better politicians than him. Trump is good at many things – being a TV star, appealing rhetoric, rallying, social media – but being a disciplined and hardworking politician is not one of them. He doesn’t even seem to want the job. In contrast, leaders like Erdogan in Turkey and Orban in Hungry win election after election; they’re determined and effective politicians. Fast-forward to 2024. What do the Republicans do? The stage is set for a more ‘talented’ Trumpism – someone without the lazy flaws, the thin-skin, the outburst, the firing of person after person. An authoritarian that actually knows what they’re doing in office.
Frankly, I think America is on course for a bleak few decades. A malignant type of ‘liberty’ stripped of nuance is so entrenched in American political life – through the constitution, through corporate culture and special interests lobbying in Washington –that it’s almost impossible to imagine American politics descending into some type of increasing authoritarianism to preserve this ‘liberty’ of the individual at some point. The only possible solution to this is for the left to form a hegemonic bloc dominant and cohesive enough to counter it. What that might be is too early to tell. But organising around a basic and coherent set of principles is fundamental. Infighting and moral rigidity are not. If a coherent manifesto of change isn’t put forward by the left then the tigers will only become hungrier.
SOURCES:
Zeynep Tufekci, America’s Next Authoritarian Will Be Much More Competent, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/trump-proved-authoritarians-can-get-elected-america/617023/
https://zeynep.substack.com/p/beating-trump-was-the-easy-part
J Justin Gustainis, Demagoguery and Political Rhetoric: A Review of the Literature
Walter Lippman, Public Opinion
Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works