I have thought lately about how demagogues attain their place. They manage to appeal to our basest instincts while employing our loftiest rhetoric, they delude us with our own delusions and drive us forward by appealing to our basest fears.
What may be considered both a liberal and a conservative canard is formulating an argument that "YOU" are part of an oppressed and beleaguered group of people with whom the speaker identifies. The land and its wealth do not really belong to you until it is you, specifically, who have some kind of ownership in it. You become representative of the whole and the demagogue speaks in such a way as to make the appeal, you feel, directly to you.
He or she proposes to be the fractal image of the whole by example and, if you will, presents himself or herself as a kind of enacted parable to embody those down and out qualities you feel in yourself even while rising steadily through whatever cutthroat measures he or she deems fit to use in ascendency. Cue some smug axiom that you should be thankful for all the little people because it was over them you crawled to get to the top. It sounds cute to say when you're not crushing opposition a la Tianneman Square or Krystalnacht. Everyone who rises to the level of being able to crush someone else's reputation is able to employ the rhetoric of the underdog.
That alpha dog so revel in selling themselves as underdogs regardless of their cause should make us all the more skeptical about its deployment. It is the smartest of smart weapons in rhetoric because it seems so patently dumb! It is the sort of glorious assertion that can appeal to trust fund liberals who believe they should bring some kind of socialist utopia to it just as it can appeal to wage slave conservatives who think that if they just make the case that their overpaid bosses be allowed to speculate with investor capital that that will bring real freedom to them. I, obviously, look with no small amount of suspicion on both directions for using this sort of rhetorical device.
Yet, I suppose, in a sad sort of way it isn't hard to suggest that a great way for a demagogue to become a demagogue is to appeal to young men, particularly because young men who have been stymied or thwarted professionally and sexually are so ready to cast about for something, anything, that can help them attain what they desire. Indeed, anyone who can help them galvanize their desires into what feels like an acceptable outlet becomes a hero no matter how checkered or even dark that person's history and personality may be.
We exonerate our favorite demagogues because through them we exonerate ourselves. This will not do. We should not exonerate the screeds and abuses and harm done by our warriors, whatever those causes and whomever those single combat combatants might be, simply because it helps us to feel we are on the right side. One of the great enemies of integrity manifests in special pleading. If you excuse in your hero rhetoric that you would damn in another, if you excuse in your pet champion what you decry in your self-appointed foe then you've lost the battle in moral terms. This is why I have for years been persuaded that Jesus was crucified by the vote of a bipartisan committee. Neither Democrats nor Republicans would have allowed Him to live. The "Christian nation" would have crucified Christ faster than Israel did and for lesser reasons.
Yet I am immensely grateful to have been born in the United States and to have benefited from the almost limitless beauty of the culture it has embraced. I am pleased that I am able to so thoroughly study works by Shostakovich who lived in a nation Reagan called an evil empire. I am grateful to live in a land where people have developed the internet and mass communication and art in ways that are amazing. The ugliest appeals appeal to our longing for beauty and say that if you just make this sacrifice that beauty can be yours.
The line of a demagogue could be easily summed up in a line from Michael Bay's first Transformers movie, "No sacrifice, no glory." The question can easily become then, "what sacrifice?" and then "what glory?" It may be instructive to ask these questions in another way, "Whose sacRIFICe?" and "For whose glory?" If you sacrifice yourself for your own glory what is left of you to share in that glory? If you sacrifice others for your own glory then you have made a sacrifice of others and what good have you accomplished?
We must recognize the demagogue in ourselves before we can repudiate the demagogue outside us. This doesn't mean that we cannot or should not want the things that tempt us to encourage the demagogue within and without. Satan tempted Jesus to make stones into bread because Jesus was hungry. Christ repudiated the path of the demagogue for our sake. Christ accomplished on our behalf what we continually fail to achieve for ourselves, a sacrifice that revealed His glory. Our sacrifices frequently reveal our shame even in the midst of the things we are most proud of. Our sacrifices reveal our idols. Our sacrifices reveal whom other than Yahweh we value even as we claim to do His will. After all, those who killed Christ and the apostles were, as Jesus warned the disciples, certain that in so doing they were doing God a favor!
God through Ezekiel rebuked shepherds whose ultimate goal was to feed themselves off the flock He appointed them over. It is not merely shepherds who seek to feed themselves and not others. If you go into service amongst God's people seeking to gain something prepare for the bitterest of disappointments. John who said "he must become greater and greater while I must become less and less", even he struggled in the end and asked, "Are you the one we are seeking or should we seek another?" It was to John through his own messengers that Jesus said "blessed is the one who does not take offense at me". Many of us struggle even to muster up the curiosity to ask. John went to his death having the answer that Christ gave him.
Christ is not the demagogue we can turn to so that we may exonerate our own desires and dreams. He is the one who asks us to fail for the sake of the success only He can give us. Who ever loves his life will lose it but whoever hates his life for the sake of Christ will gain it. Certainly as someone who keeps trying to find work this is not merely an abstraction to me. I fail every week I fail to write a cover letter and resume that gets anyone even slightly interested in calling me in for an interview. I do not know what the future holds and the dread of a disastrous future looms more prominently than disappointments of the past.
A demagogue is the sort of person who can sense this general malaise amongst many and capitalize on it. He or she can step into this anxiety and say "If you follow where I am going you will reach the promised land." For young men this temptation is uniquely strong because, it seems to me, we have a job market and have had a job market in which people struggle to find work and where many professions no longer seem to even have a place. It has been ever thus but every generation is bound to feel profoundly lonely in the moment when the moment strikes them. You apply for jobs that other people get, maybe foreigners, maybe people that you are certain can't even be legal citizens. They might be, you can't know for sure.
It is into this sense of anxiety of wanting SOMEONE to be to blame so that you don't feel like you bear the weight of your own failure yourself, that a demagogue becomes useful. It is perhaps the case that were demagogues not volunteering for the position we should have to go nominate them against their wills on the basis of their compelling talent! We can blame the demagogue after the fact for being one ... but do we count ourselves responsible for basking in his or her light? Do we see in him or her the mirror that their vice holds up to ourselves? Does he or she even need to be OUR demagogue to reveal this lack of charity in us?
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