Pundits on both the left and the right accuse Donald Trump of being a demagogue. Whether or not one agrees with that particular diagnosis, it’s gratifying to see a variety of voices worrying about the dangers of demagoguery. Self-government demands rationality, realism, and restraint–all virtues that a demagogue slanders as vices. However, defeating demagoguery over the long term will require more than eloquent denunciations of rabble-rousing. To fight demagoguery, we will have to look beyond the demagogues themselves, who are often as much a symptom as a cause of a fevered body politic.
In his 1838 essay collection, The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper offered the “demagogue” and the “doctrinaire” as complementary antagonists. For Cooper, the demagogue elevates popular whims over individual rights and the claims of reason. Preying upon popular sentiments in order to benefit himself, the demagogue panders to and manipulates public passions, fears, and anxieties.
The “doctrinaire” might differ from the demagogue but is, in Cooper’s opinion, just as injurious. The doctrinaire “affirms a disinterestedness and purity in education and manners, when exposed to the corruption of power, that all experience refutes.” Cooper portrayed the doctrinaire as a “theorist of the old school,” who “clings to opinions that are purely the issue of arbitrary facts, ages after the facts themselves have ceased to exist.” While the demagogue declares that the will of the people is infallible, the doctrinaire clings to a narrow policy vision that fetishizes old solutions to old problems. If the demagogue’s vice is a distorted attention to current sentiments, the doctrinaire’s is a haughty indifference to them.
According to Cooper, the demagogue and doctrinaire “provoke each other’s excesses,” and it’s easy to see why. If a nation’s governing elites prefer their private idols to the public’s challenges, the public will more be inclined to support anyone who at least pretends to listen to them. Looking out of their manicured citadels at a mob led by a hair-on-fire tribune, princely doctrinaires might be inclined to become even more dismissive of public demands. A vicious cycle commences, as demagogues grow even more outrageous and doctrinaires tut even more self-righteously.
Tellingly, responsibility begins with response; a key duty of authority is to be responsive to events. The doctrinaire falls short of this important obligation. He confuses enduring principles with policies that are the applications of these principles. He makes a dogma out of old facts and uses slogans as intellectual swaddling clothes. If the demagogue appeals to the resentments of the masses, the doctrinaire appeals to the narcissism of the powerful, assuring them that what truly afflicts a troubled nation is an ungrateful public.
Doctrinaire impulses have clearly created an opening for Donald Trump’s candidacy and help explain why some of his opponents have responded to his rise with either paralysis or fruitless scorn. Rather than taking Trump seriously as a rival, many of his major opponents assumed that he would somehow self-destruct. The conventional wisdom around Trump’s campaign has lurched from one soon-disproved truism to another: he would never run, he would fizzle out, he would win no more states than Pat Buchanan, winnowing the field would destroy him, attack ads would crush him, and, if rival candidates would just muster the courage, they could cut him down to size with personal insults.
While Trump has profited from myths about political process, a stubborn intransigence on policy has made the rise of a Trump-like figure even more likely. For a number of years now, a defining characteristic of the American political dynamic has been the apportioning and deflecting of blame. People can share successes—even opposing political parties can do that—but blame is often radioactive in partisan politics. Outside of a few sectors, there has been a lot of blame to go around. GDP growth has fallen well below the averages of the 20th century, and U.S. Census data finds that the inflation-adjusted median household income peaked in 1999. Yet, for many contemporary doctrinaires, stagnant wages are simply an economic fact (or at most a talking point). Economic hollowing out is accepted as part of the “new normal,” while efforts to redress this hollowing out through challenging certain reigning paradigms are attacked as unfocused bitterness. Debacles abroad and the rise of the new intolerance at home all speak to the shortcomings of the governing elite.
In the Obama years, Democrats have offered a policy vision of doubling down on identity politics while expanding the welfare state in order to mitigate the effects of an extended economic stagnation. Regardless of whether Bernie Sanders’ policies would actually address some of the real challenges facing our nation, his insurgent candidacy has been fueled by a palpable sense by many on the left that President Obama’s bureaucratic progressivism has failed to live up to its own tenets.
Meanwhile, Republicans have struggled to advance policies that will reach out to, and address the concerns of, anxious Americans. Disco died over thirty years ago, but some Republicans remain wedded to policies formulated when Donna Summer ruled the pop charts. Some on the right have been tempted to retreat to the comfortable orthodoxies of trade deals, entitlement reform, and capital-gains tax-cuts, but it is far from clear that a majority coalition can be built on that policy trinity alone. Trump’s rise has hammered home the fact that many Republicans and Republican-leaning independents dissent from the Beltway orthodoxies on matters such as trade, immigration, and entitlements. Whether or not all of these dissents can be accommodated within a conservative worldview, surely some of them can be adapted into a mode of conservative political reform.
In terms of policy, Ted Cruz has probably done more than his top-tier presidential rivals to try to respond to Donald Trump’s rise. The Texas senator has now come out in opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and has called for reform of guest-worker programs (in 2013, advocated quintupling the number of H-1B visas). Not content with just attacking Trump or aping some of his language, Cruz advanced policy positions that appeal to voters who otherwise might be leaning toward Trump. Perhaps not coincidentally, he is the only remaining not-Trump who actually has a chance of catching The Donald in the delegate count.
Cruz’s example is instructive here. Conservatives can channel certain populist policy impulses while remaining true to key principles. Moreover, this policy alliance can pay electoral dividends. The GOP could go in a number of directions in the wake of Trump’s disruptive candidacy, but it will likely have a hard time uniting and forming a majority coalition if it does not seek to harness some of the forces driving this disruption. This adaptation does not require, of course, the surrendering of essential principles about limited government, individual rights, and a proactive foreign policy. But it does demand the use of imagination and prudence to explore how such principles could be advanced in our current moment.
In order to fight demagoguery, the false comforts of doctrinaire thinking will have to be abandoned. A growing number of elected Republicans have spoken thoughtfully about policy innovation and the need to confront the problems of the present, but they will not be able to offer a forward-looking conservatism by running on warmed-over proposals from the 1980s and 1990s. Vague invocations of generational change, Ronald Reagan, or Jack Kemp will not by themselves constitute an effective mode of policy reform, either. Concrete, specific policies will have to be offered that actually address the forces of economic stagnation and civic disintegration. Republicans are in a good position to offer these proposals, but they will have to make them in a forthright, clear, and honest way. A flawed response to developments after the Reagan years has kept the Republican party from achieving a durable presidential majority since 1992, and the party risks a serious split if it cannot adapt to the new challenges of the twenty-first century. By embracing reforms that encourage economic opportunity, defend national sovereignty, and lessen the toxin of identity politics, Republicans can improve their chances of winning the White House and strengthen the nation as a whole. Responsiveness neutralizes the demagogue’s napalm.
