Henry Griffin/AP Photo
Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy (center) talks with aides Roy Cohn (right) and Francis Carr (seated) during the Army-McCarthy hearings, on June 15, 1954.
The Open Mind explores the world of ideas across politics, media, science, technology, and the arts. The American Prospect is republishing this excerpt.
Alexander Heffner: One of the chroniclers of Donald Trump’s recent campaign rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania said that his speech was one of his ugliest and most troubling performances. One of the things he said that I think was pernicious in particular was, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if he became a dictator. He points to the media when he says that, the cameras in the crowd, and says he’s just saying that to toy with them. So he’s masking a wannabe authoritarianism.
Has it ever happened before in your study of rhetoric to mask a willful, an eager demagoguery in a kind of comedy, because he’s serious about wanting to be president for life and he’s only perhaps joking to lighten the mood, but we know what he means?
Patricia Roberts-Miller: One of the characteristics of demagoguery is that people engaged in it are very careful to make sure that they can’t be really held accountable for exactly what they said. And so that’s why they’ll often engage in what amounts to trolling or joking.
Heffner: Based on your knowledge of history from the American experience, but really more broadly, when do those jokes become reality?
Roberts-Miller: They become reality when the person making them has power. So people can engage in that kind of refusal to be accountable in the way that people troll on the internet. And if, people make a certain kind of argument on the Internet and if they get called on it, they’ll say, I was just making a joke, you can’t take a joke? But they’re just some jerk on the Internet as opposed to someone who has the authority to make these sorts of things happen. You know, Huey Long was famous for that kind of thing. For instance, Theodore Bilbo was as well, Joe McCarthy continually backed off of his claims.
Heffner: In the American example now, you have a president whose rhetoric resembles maybe one or two presidents in the past, but not very many. I would say maybe Andrew Johnson and Andrew Jackson; Are there historical examples in America of how we averted course from the framing of demagoguery of our own presidents?
Roberts-Miller: Well, JFK engaged in a lot of demagoguery and a lot of “us versus them,” but it wasn’t Americans who were “them.” It was cold war rhetoric. It was us as Americans unified against the Soviet Union and against communism. There have been other presidents who engaged in that kind of us versus them. What is troubling about Trump is that he’s talking about a them that is Americans, that it’s just people who happen to disagree. And that’s profoundly and fundamentally anti-democratic.
Heffner: Could you expect the demagoguery rhetorically to get worse than it is now? And if so, what are you watching for?
Roberts-Miller: Well, let me go back to something that you were saying about someone like McCarthy. We’ve often had people who were maybe one or two steps away from the presidency who are engaged in demagoguery.
It’s often a strategy that presidents had, that the vice president would be the one who’d be engaged in the more extreme kind of rhetoric. That’s what Bush did with Cheney. But this is the first time I think that there has been someone whose demagoguery, the president is engaged in that level of demagoguery.
Heffner: The political party to which he belongs is unconcerned about the escalation of the rhetoric. At one point, spontaneously or incrementally, there’s going to be a direct consequence of that rhetoric that leads to blood being on Trump’s hands.
Roberts-Miller: When demagoguery gets drawn back, it’s because people say that this is too much. And typically it’s in-group: McCarthy got called out by fellow Republicans. That’s what finally put an end to what he was doing. Roosevelt got called out by fellow Democrats when he was really trying to pack the Supreme Court and do something that was extraordinarily authoritarian and very anti-democratic. The words have to get to a point that, that in-group people will call him out.
But this is the first time I think that there has been someone whose demagoguery, the president is engaged in that level of demagoguery.
Heffner: Was that a technique used by the World War II era authoritarians to mask their actual objectives in a, in a kind of comedy or humor? I don’t recall Hitler and Mussolini or Franco really injecting a lot of comedy into their routines.
Roberts-Miller: They did.
Heffner: They did?
Roberts-Miller: It’s a kind where you don’t know if they’re kidding or not. I’m kind of fascinated by the way that humor works in demagoguery because for one thing, as I said, it gives, it enables people to be unaccountable. I crawl around dark corners on the internet and argue with jerks and they do that all the time, you know, and the second that they get called out and you, and you prove that beyond reasonable doubt, they are completely and totally fabricating information, that’s when they’ll say jokes on you. I was kidding. But the, so it’s always a kick-down humor.
The humor is always jokes on you. That’s what Hitler did. If you listen to some of his speeches, the audience is laughing. And one of the most famous is a 1939 speech about Roosevelt, in response to Roosevelt’s attempt to bring peace and to find some way to kind of resolve things.
The audience is laughing the whole time and it’s completely that kind of satire. With Hitler he said very clearly, very early on in “Mein Kampf” exactly what he was going to do. And people didn’t take it seriously because they thought it was that kind of hyperbole in which he often engaged. And hyperbole has also a way of evading, enabling you to evade any kind of accountability.
Heffner: The foreseeable backstop is the 2020 election. If the Democrats did prevail in the Electoral College and it’s indisputable, then it may be Republicans, because you say it has to be in-group who would have to speak up then because his inclination might be to ignore the will of the people or ignore the will of the Electoral College.
Roberts-Miller: Here’s the thing to remember when he wanted to hold the G-20 summit at one of his hotels, Republicans balked. So there is a line, and they’ve stopped him, so he can be stopped and I think they would stop him at that point.
Heffner: It’s been my stipulation that the only person who can defeat Donald Trump in 2020 is one who is both genuinely combative and genuinely conciliatory. Who is most prepared rhetorically to counter Trump?
Roberts-Miller: I don’t actually think there’s only one candidate who can beat him. A lot of different strategies will work with him, but also think, in the same way that I think there’s a weird way in which Trump is not the problem. The problem is our culture of demagoguery that enables somebody like Trump to thrive and succeed that the solution is not going to be which of the candidates we pick. The solution is going to be what voters do.
Heffner: I disagree with you. I think that the voters, while they’re not soulless or emotionless creatures, they require certain signals and because those normal signals have been decapitated, there are certain social and political cues that have to be put forward. You’re basically saying that the rhetoric of the candidate who opposes Trump can be normal rhetoric of a politician. And I’m saying I think it requires some distinctive qualities.
Roberts-Miller: I don’t think so because, because it’s ultimately, it’s what that person’s rhetoric is. It’s how that rhetoric gets disseminated and mediated— what people choose to consume.
