[Promoted from the Diaries by Meteor Blades]
A few days ago, your resident historiorantologist was waiting for a flight in the southern part of our great nation. The airport had kindly provided televisions at scattered points around the holding pen, and so I was treated to Fox News – something I can't get at home in the Cave. Normally, of course, I would have found someone in charge – or someone with the remote – and made a big Stark, but since the TSA folks were already super-surly and I had only 15 minutes or so until boarding, I sat down and subjected myself to whatever IngSoc had determined were the day's talking points.
Bush good, libruls/terrists double-plus ungood, democracy has always been at war with Islam, blah, blah, blah – all the stuff I'd come to expect from my infrequent ganders at the propaganda arm of the Republican Party over the past few years – presented in an unrelenting cadence of faux populism and boot-up-the-ass-based foreign policy. It was so vile, you'd think such demagogy could have only had its genesis in contemporary society, but if you'll join me in the Cave of the Moonbat, we'll see that O'Reilly, the Oxified One, and their ilk are by no means the first loudmouth bigots to project their sputum upon the American public.
Historiorant: Many thanks to pico, who graciously hosted proceedings in the Cave last week with an outstanding piece on the history of US Immigration Law. pico also inaugurated the new Tuesday-night feature Literature for Kossacks with a diary on Edgar Lee Masters - do your homework for this week's edition by making sure you've dusted off that old college copy of The Brothers Karamazov, and show up ready to talk Dostoyevsky.
Populism With A Side of Feta
Demagogues have been an unfortunate side effect of democracy since the latter's very inception, so it's no accident that that they share the same Greek root word: δῆμος, or "people." The other part, ἄγειν, means "to lead," only not with connotations of Pericles and Alexander – this kind of leading is more that of a herder, keeping a flock moving in the same direction. Several other words often associated with demagogues also have their origin in Ancient Greece:
- Polemics – the practice of disputing ideas generally viewed as incontrovertible. Think Limbaugh denying global warming.
- Solipism – the denial of the existence of any mind other than one's own. Think The Decider.
- Tyrant – originally carried no sense of ethical judgment vis-à-vis one's rule; simply described a person who seized power in a polis and started a reign of autocracy, sometimes as a front man for a group of oligarchs. In those days, tyrannies were often popular movements that installed leaders in revolt against aristocracies and tribal theocracies; the bad connotations, like the oppressive actions in which the tyrants often engaged, didn't come 'til later.
- Sophistry – ancient: the practice of making money off one's wisdom or rhetorical skill. Think Rudy Guiliani, cashing checks for telling crowds what a 9/11 hero he is. modern: using illogical argument as a means of confusing or deceiving one's adversary. Think Tony Snow, whenever his lips are moving.
Here's one part of the Wikipedia entry on Sophists, describing a group of people so familiar it seems like we already know them:
Many of them taught their skills, apparently often for a fee. Due to the importance of such skills in the litigious social life of Athens, practitioners of such skills often commanded very high fees. The practice of taking fees, coupled with the willingness of many sophists to use their rhetorical skills to pursue unjust lawsuits, eventually led to a decline in respect for practitioners of this form of teaching and the ideas and writings associated with it.
That same sense of déjà vu carries into the modern usage of sophism, which the same article describes thus:
A sophism is a specious argument used for deceiving someone. It might be crafted to seem logical while actually being wrong, or it might use difficult words and complicated sentences to intimidate the audience into agreeing, or it might appeal to the audience's prejudices and emotions rather than logic. The goal of a sophism is often to make the audience believe the writer or speaker to be smarter than he or she actually is.
The Sophists were likely an important part of the formation of democracy in Athens, as their oratorical skills, litigious natures, and ability to subjectivize truth caused the nascent form of government to closely examine its own beliefs – but one can easily predict how subsequent generations of Sophists would fail to uphold the virtues of their progenitors, and instead focus on the quickest, if sloppiest, means to victory (think Zombie Barry Goldwater in the hands of contemporary "conservatives"). It's also easy to predict that among these ethically deficient philosophers would rise those who would pander to the masses, and use the open forum of democratic debate toward their ends. The inevitable decline and fall of a demagogue does not deter the opportunistic from riding the wave of popularity for a little longer than they should, however, and it never has.
Historiorant: I know I just cited it a couple of weeks ago, but the aptness of Alexander G Rubio's diary on Alcibiades prompts me to do so again here. The guy's a Classical demagogue! ;-)
Gimme That Ole'-Time Demagoguery
Plenty of folks through history qualify as demagogues, but since ultimately this diary is supposed to be about an American Demagogue in the Golden Age of Radio, I'm going to fast-forward past the Romans and the Crusaders and the Great Khan and all those guys who must've tried to direct the course of the Aztec and Inca Empires as their worlds collapsed around them, and get straight to the British colonies in North America. Specifically, let's pick up the story in the late 1720's, when a guy named Jonathan Edwards (no relation to our John Edwards; see pics) kicked off a series of religious revivals that collectively became known as The Great Awakening.
Jonathan Edwards John Edwards
The fact that people were "awakening" carries with it the presumption that they were asleep in the first place, which brings us to one of the classic strategies used by demagogues in order to get attention: fear. (note that I'm not asserting Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, or other Great Awakeners were demagogues, as the term carries a political connotation that those guys lacked; rather, I mention them because some of the techniques they employed to "lead the people" were similar to later charisma-based mass movements in American history – u.m.)
Edwards knew his audience: 2nd and 3rd-generation Puritans, far removed from the piety of their ancestors due to the rigors of frontier life and the scattered nature of their settlements. Concerns related to simple survival, as well as long distances to the parish church, had led to a falling-off of attendance at Mass, and a corresponding lessening of the clergy/government's ability to enforce ecclesiastical discipline – but Edwards knew that nothing puts asses in seats (okay, he probably wouldn't have put it quite like that) like a little titillation, and that nothing titillates quite like fear. Accordingly, he wrote up a few sermons laden with imagery designed to provoke exactly that response – and like the folks who pre-order DVD releases like The Hills Have Eyes II, people flocked to hear his words and be scared to death by their implications:
They [the wicked] are now the objects of that very same anger and wrath of God, that is expressed in the torments of hell. And the reason why they do not go down to hell at each moment, is not because God, in whose power they are, is not then very angry with them; as he is with many miserable creatures now tormented in hell, who there feel and bear the fierceness of his wrath. Yea, God is a great deal more angry with great numbers that are now on earth: yea, doubtless, with many that are now in this congregation, who it may be are at ease, than he is with many of those who are now in the flames of hell.
[snip]
Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider's web would have to stop a falling rock. Were it not for the sovereign pleasure of God, the earth would not bear you one moment; for you are a burden to it; the creation groans with you; the creature is made subject to the bondage of your corruption, not willingly; the sun does not willingly shine upon you to give you light to serve sin and Satan; the earth does not willingly yield her increase to satisfy your lusts; nor is it willingly a stage for your wickedness to be acted upon; the air does not willingly serve you for breath to maintain the flame of life in your vitals, while you spend your life in the service of God's enemies.
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Enfield, Connecticut, 8 July 1741, via ccel.org
Yikes. Makes one glad all we have to contend with is al-Qaeda. Yet Edwards' preaching (which was, by most accounts, kind of dry, logical, and boring) inspired an odd type of conversion, with folks barking and speaking in tongues and that sort of thing in a very public act of being "awoken." They later came to believe that a public profession of conversion was something expected of the Elect (those pre-destined to go attend God in Heaven), and so to ensure themselves a place in the Lord's eternal retinue, they came in droves to listen to sermons and to be frightened back into line. Nowadays, of course, we'd probably describe this as being "born again," and then as now, a feeling took hold that any yahoo with the literacy skills requisite to read the Bible could rightly interpret the Will of God for the rest of us. It seems that ole' conservative ability to selectively hear what they wanted to hear was at work back in Edwards' day, too:
What Edwards said in these sermons was pure Calvinism. "You can't control salvation." But Puritans heard him say, "if you try, God will aid your salvation." Here's one example. Jonathan Edwards talked about "Pressing into the Kingdom". "It was," he said, "not a thing impossible." By that, Edwards was referred to God's power to save whomever he pleases. But what the Puritans heard was there was a chance they could achieve election. Phrases like "It is in your power to use means of grace" and "One can strive against corruption" were similarly misunderstood. Edwards wanted to make the point that salvation ultimately is in the hands of God, and that he empowers the elect to resist evil. But people heard something else. And they responded to what they viewed as an invitation to seek after salvation.
Lecture Four - The Great Awakening, via wfu.edu
Edwards later fell from grace over a controversy surrounding some of his parishioners getting a hold of a book on obstetrics, but by then, the brimstone torch of Awakening had been passed to men like George Whitefield, the "Great Itinerant" who popularized the notion that the grace of salvation trumped all the petty ecclesiastical and doctrinal differences between the various sects of Christianity. Since our 21st-century Pope has essentially re-branded all Protestant denominations as heretical, one can imagine how the "old light" leaders of the 1700s regarded guys like Whitefield.
He was certainly a better demagogue than Edwards. An actor by training, he had one of those booming British baritone voices that was so powerful, it's said that he once converted a man by preaching three miles distant. It's a damn shame tape recorders hadn't been invented yet; one of the most common stories you hear about Whitefield is that he could pronounce the word "Mesopotamia" in such a way that it would bring an audience to tears. And he was so good with the collection basket that even a rational Enlightenment deist like Ben "a penny saved is a penny earned" Franklin confessed to having his pockets picked by the charisma of George Whitefield.
I mention all this about the Great Awakening not because I believe it was an essential stepping stone to the American Revolution (I don't), but because of the wide appeal of its charismatic leaders across an enormous stratum of American colonial society. It was the first mass popular movement in our history, the first platform to give a guy with a stump a message a chance to sway the doings of society as a whole. The Great Awakening established evangelism and the first glimmers of public education and abolitionism, even as its leaders coyly "attributed it entirely to God's inscrutable grace."
Tune In, Turn On, Hate
America produced plenty of folks with demagoguish tendencies over the years – one might examine the career of Aaron Burr for some examples, or squeeze an analogy or two out of the Jackson/Van Buren/Calhoun/Clay era – but even though a guy once declared himself Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, we don't really get to the classic, foaming-at-the-microphone type of demagogue until, well, after microphones get invented.
Weird Historical Sidenote: Norton I was a prominent, if bizarre, leader of men for a couple of decades in the late 19th century. Once, when an overzealous cop arrested his majesty for being insane, the Chief of Police apologized to the monarch, ordered him released, and commanded his force to salute his majesty whenever they saw him on the street. He was also invited to inspect the new capitol at Sacramento during its gala opening, was recognized by the Census taker in 1870 as holding the occupation "emperor," and once threatened to banish the Grand Hotel if rooms were not provided for him.
Norton I issued many proclamations over his 20-year reign, and had many more issued in his name by pranksters and scared newspaper editors who wanted political cover for controversial ideas – hell, writers like Mark Twain even eulogized his dog. In point of fact, a careful examination of the imperial decrees of Norton I clearly shows that the Republican and Democratic parties have been outside the rule of law since the year the transcontinental railroad was completed – see pic.
Consumer culture followed hard on the heels of the development of the radio and large-scale newspaper circulation, and it was the marriage of the microphone and the ethical black hole that is advertising that allowed for the rise of the classic demagogue. These guys, transmitting their bile to a nation paralyzed by Depression and somewhat limited in its entertainment options, pioneered the rhetorical sewers down which O'Reilly, Limbaugh, and their merry band of neocons would later trudge. One, in particular, is worthy of note, since he was, for a few years, able to sway the politics of the nation without ever holding elective office.
Father Charles Coughlin was a Canadian-born Catholic priest who broadcasted a radio show out of a studio in Detroit. CBS carried the weekly program for free from 1926 until 1931, afterwhich Coughlin paid for his own airtime through a national network of listeners. At the height of his power, fully one-third of the nation might be tuned in to Coughlin's broadcast, with numbers in the 40 million range. He was a strong supporter of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1932 elections, and went on to be so supportive of the New Deal in the early days that it was he who coined the term "Roosevelt or ruin." In those early days, he saw himself and FDR as cut from the same cloth, as it were – Coughlin always considered himself a reformer, but when FDR's vision of reform turned out to be different than the good padre's, the priest began criticizing the New Deal.
He was powerful enough that the turn concerned the White House and its allies: No less an American Catholic than Joseph Kennedy described him as "a dangerous proposition" as early as 1933. Perceiving creeping communism and the scheming designs of Jews everywhere, he stepped up his attacks on the New Deal and announced his support of Louisiana rabble-rouser (and, some say, demagogue in his own right) Huey P. Long. When the Kingfish was assassinated in 1935, Coughlin threw his support to third-party candidate William Lemke in 1936. The Church half-heartedly intervened as Coughlin went further toward the deep end, and he briefly shut down his broadcast when his preferred candidate gathered only 1/10th the votes Coughlin had demanded of his flock.
When he returned to the airwaves, Coughlin had shed any pretense that he wasn't a bigot: He openly supported the governments of Hitler and Mussolini, and he began blaming the Depression on "an international conspiracy of Jewish bankers." And that wasn't all – on 27 November, 1938, he presaged Bushian revisionist history by declaring "There can be no doubt that the Russian Revolution ... was launched and fomented by distinctively Jewish influence."
Coughlin's plummet into the morass of conservative thought led him to the same place it leads all those who remain "intellectually honest" in their pursuit of the essential greed at the heart of all conservative ideals. He founded a magazine called Social Justice, in which he reprinted the polemical hit Protocols of the Elders of Zion, claimed the atheism promulgated by Marx was in fact a Jewish conspiracy, and apparently gave the Ann Coulter-plagiarism treatment to a speech by Joseph Goebbels. Two weeks after Kristallnacht, in 1938, Coughlin claimed the Jews brought it upon themselves because "Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted."
That turned out to be the final straw for officials in at least a few radio stations. In New York, WINS and WMCA gave him the full-on Imus, while other stations in New York and Chicago refused to air his show without a pre-approved script. Predictably (just look at Fox News and the "media won't report on the good news in Iraq" meme), fascist sympathizers around the world hailed Coughlin as a hero – "America is Not Allowed to Hear the Truth" was one German newspaper headline from the time – and in New York on December 18, 1938, he rallied a couple of thousand of his supporters to march in opposition to the new asylum laws, which were meant to provide entry to Europeans fleeing Hitler's oppression.
Now, I'm not saying that Bill O'Reilly's position on leaving would-be unlawful immigrants to die in the desert bears any resemblance to a bunch of Irish Catholic nativist street thug bigots trying to deny refuge to refugees, but something the latter said – "Send Jews back where they came from in leaky boats!" – made me think of him anyway. Dunno why another of Coughlin's enterprises, a group known as the Christian Front, makes me think of O'Reilly, either – all they were planning to do was kill Jews, communists, and about a dozen Congressmen, then establish, according to J. Edgar Hoover, "a dictatorship, similar to the Hitler dictatorship in Germany." True demagogues rarely dream small.
The Fall of Father O'Reilly Coughlin
Once riled up, it can take America a little while to settle down, but when we do, we generally arrive at the correct conclusions and do the right thing. Not even Republicans (well, most of them, anyway) advocate a return to slavery, for example; and despite the occasional Malkinapologist, most of us view the internment of the Nisei during the Second World War with abhorrence. Same thing happens when Americans fall under the spell of demagogues – it can take a while before the bloviater overplays his hand and does something stupid, but eventually he will, and eventually he will receive his comeuppance by being rendered irrelevant.
Sometimes this happens because the bullshit simply wears thin and people start to see through it. You can see this in Rush Limbaugh's career: the upward arc in the early 90s, when he had a TV show and we were all supposed to call Gingrich "Mr. Newt," then the heady days of cheerleading the Blowjob Impeachment, the installment of the present occupant of the White House, and the Oxicontin-fueled blast during the early days of the Neverending War, and finally to where he is today, a burned-out husk of a man, relegated to making excuses and running defense for any number of catastrophes and calamities that now define his brand of conservatism. Other times, though, the effect is more precipitous – witness the Fall of Imus, or the Mocking of Tucker.
Still, each of those examples relies on the people subjected to the propaganda to become aware of it – to spit out the Kool-Aid, if you will. There have been other times when the government has used its power of regulation to stifle its critics, and such was certainly the case with Father Coughlin. He did face competition – a Unitarian minister named Walton Cole lashed out against his growing anti-Semitism – but he enjoyed the support of Detroit's bishop, the only guy with the authority under Church law to make him stop. FDR finally went after his licensing, claiming that since First Amendment rights were not applicable to broadcasting (since the radio spectrum was a "limited national resource"), Coughlin was not entitled to a broadcast permit.
They played cat-and-mouse for a few years, with Coughlin responding to the ever-tightening noose as best he could, by buying airtime and having his speeches played on records instead of live broadcasts. It strained his resources and his organization, and his legion of critics were waiting for just such an opportunity. When he came out against the repeal of some of the Neutrality Acts, the government moved to curtail the presence of voices sympathetic to the enemy with a new round of regulations. Manuscripts were demanded in advance; stations out of compliance with a directive to severely limit the sale of radio time to controversial figures faced losing their licenses.
Essentially shut out of his version of the EIB Network, Coughlin turned to his Limbaugh Letter. In the September 23, 1939 (three weeks after the war began), edition of Social Justice, Coughlin explained that he'd been run off the air by powers beyond his control, then started printing the text of his speeches, secure in the knowledge even FDR's government would recognize the right of free speech as applied to the written word. It did – FDR made no attempt to shut down Coughlin's presses – but he didn't see it as being in the government's interest to allow Coughlin to use the postal system to subvert his administration's policies (it helps to remember here that FDR was sometimes accused of being a demagogue and a tyrant himself; he did, after all, rationalize the camps at Manzanar and elsewhere). The Post Office refused to deliver his screeds, and after the Pearl Harbor attack, he and the other America-First isolationists were seen as sympathetic to the enemy. In much the same way that Bill O'Reilly lost a few more viewers when he pined for a terrorist attack on our own cities, Coughlin's base eroded away. By the time he achieved Glen Beck-level percentages, he was put out to pasture by the Church. In 1942, a new bishop ordered him back to parish duty, and he remained the pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower until his retirement in 1966. Though he continued to write anti-Commie pamphlets for the rest of his life, he refused interviews up to his death in 1979, at the age of 88.
Historiorant:
Well, I see by the sand in the hourglass that it's already a half-hour past my normal posting time, so I'll dispense with the editorializing and get right to the HTML shredder. I will leave you with a couple of questions and prompts, however, for your demagogic consideration:
What is the state of demagogy today? How is this illustrated by the O'Reilly/Jet Blue affair?
Name and discuss some other great demagogues from (American) history.
Describe some of the more egregious examples of sophistry, solipsism, illogic, and other rhetorical flourishes and tricks you've seen used by demagogues.
Historically hip entrances to the Cave of the Moonbat can be found at Daily Kos, Progressive Historians, and Never In Our Names