Francis Bacon and Max Weber Weigh In
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| Lewis C. Levin, by Rembrandt Peale (1834). |
Demagogues have been around for quite a while. We owe the word, which translates pretty well as "rabble rouser," to the ancient Greeks, who had their share. One of them was named Alcibiades. He will always be remembered as the fellow who talked the Athenians into something called the Sicilian Expedition, which turned out to be kind of the ancient Greek version of America's Vietnam war.
(Alcibiades may also have been involved in something called the Desecration of the Herms. Herms were statues to the god Hermes, the messenger of the gods. He also protected travelers, and Athens had set up many roadside Herms. These fellows invariably were blessed with impressive erect penises. One night, shortly before the Sicilian Expedition began, some person or persons went around and cut off almost all the penises. Alcibiades was suspected of involvement, but not charged. Eventually he was charged with a related crime and called home from the war zone in Sicily to stand trial, at which point Alcibiades defected to Sparta, which would be a bit like an American general defecting to Russia during the height of the Cold War. Who actually did the crime remains a mystery. A 2,400-year-old mystery. Talk about a cold case.)
At any rate, demagogues seem to be a regular feature of democracies, something like a car radio - you don't really need it, but it always seems to be there, ready to blab in your ear. And, after their careers are over, demagogues almost always wind up with a very bad press. Indeed, demagogues as a group are generally viewed as a very poor sort of people.
Bacon and Weber
Recently I was browsing through John Aubrey's Brief Lives, something I had been intending to do for thirty or forty years, but never quite gotten to. As I leafed through the pages, I came across the entry for Francis Bacon (1561-1626). It turned out that Bacon had written an essay on the greatness of cities. I had never heard of it. I thought it sounded interesting, and I found it under the title "Of True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates." Here's what he has to say about demagogues.
"The speech of Themistocles the Athenian, which was haughty and arrogant, in taking so much to himself, had been a grave and wise observation and censure, applied at large to others. Desired at a feast to touch a lute, he said, He could not fiddle, but yet he could make a small town, a great city. These words (holpen a little with a metaphor) may express two differing abilities, in those that deal in business of estate. For if a true survey be taken of counsellors and statesmen, there may be found (though rarely) those which can make a small state great, and yet cannot fiddle; as on the other side, there will be found a great many, that can fiddle very cunningly, but yet are so far from being able to make a small state great, as their gift lieth the other way; to bring a great and flourishing estate, to ruin and decay. And certainly whose degenerate arts and shifts, whereby many counsellors and governors gain both favor with their masters, and estimation with the vulgar, deserve no better name than fiddling; being things rather pleasing for the time, and graceful to themselves only, than tending to the weal and advancement of the state which they serve."
Around the time I was leafing through John Aubrey, my son sent me an essay by the great German historian and sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920). It's called "Politics as a Vocation" and was originally delivered as a speech in 1918. In it Weber gives his view of the demagogue.
"For ultimately there are only two kinds of deadly sins in the field of politics: lack of objectivity and—often but not always identical with it—irresponsibility. Vanity, the need personally to stand in the foreground as clearly as possible, strongly tempts the politician to commit one or both of these sins. This is more truly the case as the demagogue is compelled to count upon ‘effect.’ He therefore is constantly in danger of becoming an actor as well as taking lightly the responsibility for the outcome of his actions and of being concerned merely with the ‘impression’ he makes. His lack of objectivity tempts him to strive for the glamorous semblance of power rather than for actual power. His irresponsibility, however, suggests that he enjoy power merely for power’s sake without a substantive purpose. Although, or rather just because, power is the unavoidable means, and striving for power is one of the driving forces of all politics, there is no more harmful distortion of political force than the parvenu-like braggart with power, and the vain self-reflection in the feeling of power, and in general every worship of power per se. The mere ‘power politician’ may get strong effects, but actually his work leads nowhere and is senseless."
On one issue, I'm afraid I have to part company with these two august gentlemen (Bacon was Lord Chancellor of England and, in his spare time, one of the founders of the modern scientific method; Weber was a founder of the discipline of sociology).
The Tools of Rhetoric
Both Bacon and Weber appear to set up a dichotomy between demagogues and statesmen. I don't think there is a clean dichotomy; I think there's more a spectrum, and in a democracy any politician is somewhere on that spectrum.
Think about it this way. In a democracy the people need to be convinced, and great orators such as Demosthenes or Cicero used the same rhetorical tools as the demagogues. Aristotle wrote a book on rhetoric, where he defined the basic tasks of the speaker as ethos, pathos, and logos. Underlying this structure was an important insight, which may sound obvious: Aristotle thought that people were more emotional than rational. So he counseled the speaker to enlist his listeners' emotions as a primary task. This is called pathos. Of course, many people like to think of themselves as primarily rational, and so Aristotle also counseled the speaker to lay out a cogent decision tree, one that would allow a listener to say to himself that he was deciding the matter at hand in a logical, objective way. This is called logos. Finally, or really first of all, Aristotle said the speaker's bedrock task was to get listeners to like him and to trust him, so they would be comfortable and receptive to his emotional and rational appeals, and inclined to do what he said. This is called ethos.
Ethos, pathos, logos. Remember that, and think about it the next time you're listening to a speech, or a lecture, or a sermon.
Many people, including many intellectuals, are repelled by the classical rhetorical model, and I think this leads to a generalized contempt for people who practice the craft of politics. Ideas should sell themselves. Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.
Well, no. That's not the way it works.
The difference between a demagogue and a statesman is not the tools, it is the ends to which the tools are put. Perhaps it's time to offer a definition of the term demagogue: An orator who uses his powers for evil.
Controlling Outcomes - Or Not
Of course, this being politics, even the best intentions can lead to a bad end. Demosthenes urged the Athenians to oppose the power of Macedon, and a fellow named Alexander the Great. It seems fair to say things didn't go very well, either for Athens or for Demosthenes, who wound up taking poison to avoid being executed.
Cicero wound up on the losing side in the civil wars that turned Rome from a republic into an empire. The Second Triumvirate proscribed him and sent a squad of soldiers, headed by a tribune and a centurion, to arrest him at one of his summer houses. Cicero almost escaped, but his pursuers caught up with him. The centurion cut off his head and his hands; these were brought back to Rome, where they were displayed on the rostra, or speaker's platform, in the forum.
Politics ain't beanbag.
American Demagogues
To my mind, the recently departed occupant of the White House is an extreme example of a demagogue. These pure demagogues are actually rather rare - most politicians at least have a smidgen of interest in the common weal. But while he is extreme, he is not unique, even in America.
In the twentieth century, just to look at the headliners, we had Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, and George Wallace. They each had their moment in the sun, but in the end the road was rocky for them. Long was assassinated, and McCarthy drank himself to death.
Things went a bit better for Wallace. An assassin's bullet put him in a wheelchair in 1972, but he continued to serve as governor of Alabama, off and on, until 1987. When he died in 1998, the Washington Post ran an obituary that ended this way: "The sad fact is that from first to last, despite the sound and the fury of Wallace's campaigning, little changed for the good in Alabama with his help. Throughout all his years in office, Alabama rated near the bottom of the states in per capita income, welfare, and spending on schools and pupils."
Inciting Riots in Philadelphia
My favorite American demagogue hails from the nineteenth century. He is the little-known Lewis Levin (1808-1860), America's first Jewish Congressman. (The basic documentation on Levin may be found in a journal article from 1960. For a recent story, see this one in Salon.)
Levin was born and grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and, after an itinerant period, he wound up in Philadelphia, where he became a leader of what would be known as the Know-Nothings. He proved quite adept at inciting riots during 1844, a hard year in Philly, and rode the anti-immigrant tide into Congress (1845-1851). As time passed, his behavior became increasingly erratic, and eventually he was committed to Philadelphia's insane asylum, where he died in 1860.
My friend Greg Cukor suggested I look into Levin back in 2013, and I did so. [ went to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. I went to Laurel Hill Cemetery and reviewed the file related to the plot where he is buried. In the end I decided I did not have very much in the way of new information, and I did have a number of questions that I was unable to answer. (Example: Several people are buried in the plot, which is rather large. Why are they there?)
So I set Lewis Levin aside, but I remained fascinated by him. And I'm glad he found a home in this story.
A note about terminology. I don't like the words orator and statesman. I've searched for a gender-neutral term to replace statesman, and not found one. And orator strikes me as pompous, and almost archaic. Rhetor, meaning a practitioner of rhetoric, strikes me as obsolete. I do have a personal favorite - englottogastor. I wrote a story about it back in 2013. Just about nobody has heard of this word, which cuts into its usefulness in communications.
See also A Cure for Anger and Greed Is Not Good. It Is a Mortal Sin.
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