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Demagogues in American Politics

Autor Charles U. Zug
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 21 noi 2022
While demagoguery is traditionally regarded as destabilizing and dangerous, this book shows how it can also be used to advance the common good. Most of us think that demagoguery is, by definition, bad. Relatedly, scholars almost invariably treat demagoguery as a divisive practice that appeals to what is worst in an audience at the expense of what is best for the public good. In Demagogues in American Politics, Charles U. Zug offers a historical analysis of the role of demagoguery in the American political system. Challenging the conventional wisdom, he argues that demagoguery is not an inherently bad form of leadership. Whereas classical thinkers had believed that demagoguery was always a threat to political order, the most sophisticated founders of the American Constitution-inspired by Enlightenment political philosophy-recognized that demagoguery, though dangerous, could be recruited by the Constitution to improve the political system. Through case studies drawn from the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court, this book argues that demagogic leadership can be deployed by public officials to advance the aspirations of constitutional democracy.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780197651957
ISBN-10: 019765195X
Pagini: 224
Ilustrații: 1 b/w halftone
Dimensiuni: 237 x 157 x 16 mm
Greutate: 0.3 kg
Editura: Oxford University Press
Colecția OUP USA
Locul publicării:New York, United States

Recenzii

While a theoretical exploration of demagoguery may seem too esoteric to bother with, it is actually essential for an understanding on how the former president (DT) managed to whip up an insurrection that saw the Capitol itself under siege. It is easy to see the overt causes and effects, which is the purview of the Justice Department as they imprison the seditionists, but ignoring the undercurrents that allowed it to happen is a sure path to a worse disaster in the future. A close reading of this book will help lead the way to avert that.
Weren't demagogues the great enemies of constitutional order? In the thirty-plus years I've held to this view I've never had occasion to question it until I read Charles Zug's Demagogues in American Politics, a book by turns audacious, well-researched, well-written, and deeply engaging not only on points with which the reader might agree, but especially where the reader disagrees. In some ways, the mark of a truly interesting book is that the reader's reactions start with 'that can't be right' and end with 'maybe everything I thought was wrong.' The book is challenging in all the best ways.
Reconciling democratic politics with passions and rhetoric, even with demagoguery, is an arduous and courageous task, especially at a time when, as in ours, the populist leadership proves to be very attractive to the public with unpleasant consequences to say the least. Charles U. Zug fulfills this task brilliantly and demonstrates that, as the ancients also thought, democracy is not necessarily in contrast with demagoguery, nor politics with passions.
Charles Zug surprises readers on every page. Demagoguery is supposed to be simply 'bad'-at odds with the spirit of the Constitution and stable democracy. But things are not so simple, Zug argues. Demagoguery, or the skills that leaders use to be popular, can help or hurt democracy, depending on how it is used. And the Founders understood this. They sought not to eliminate it but to channel it to help make constitutional government popular. Zug works out his argument with original reinterpretations of demagogues good and bad throughout American history-including some, like Daniel Shays, who as the purported leader of 'Shay's Rebellion' was not, Zug shows, a demagogue at all. This will be a classic, not only for those who want to understand demagoguery, but for all those interested in political rhetoric.
In the book, Zug wams of a boomerang effect in attacking demagoguery. Paradoxically, an understanding of democratic politics that regards demagoguery as necessarily evil, as a practice to be castigated whenever it occurs and ultimately banished from the community, becomes the cause of the very thing it wishes to obliterate.
Fascinating study.
A powerful and incisive contribution to our collective capacity to understand and judge demagoguery...Zug brings the lenses of American political development, constitutionalism, and political thought to bear on this form of leadership. His book overturns conventional wisdom by contending that not only can demagoguery be compatible with liberal democracy, at times it may be necessary to realize the Constitution's ends.
An original and striking argument about a traditionally reviled form of political leadership and rhetoric [...] This book is undoubtedly one of the most sophisticated and nuanced treatments of demagoguery available. Zug's theoretical framework helps us delineate the features and preconditions of good and bad demagogues and compels us to take seriously leaders' institutional obligations [...] His thesis is both hard to refute and urgent: demagoguery is not an oddity or a perversion of American politics but an endemic feature of our republic and one that can potentially invigorate our national discourse and constitutional politics. He treats his subjects with a welcome generosity.
After decades of little attention to the subject, the end of the Trump presidency brought on a windfall of new work on demagogues and demagoguery in American politics. Among those new works, Charles Zug's Demagogues in American Politics stands out. Demagogues makes an excellent and compelling contribution to the growing literature on American demagoguery by pushing us to question the basic assumptions underlying our commitment to rhetorical norms and inviting us to reexamine the empirical evidence behind the cases that have been central to our prior understandings.
Demagogues in American Politics is an engaging and useful argument for one way of distinguishing harmful from beneficial demagoguery. Zug provides a way of thinking about democratic deliberation in terms of roles and responsibilities, terms that are likely to lead to much more useful disagreements about how we should disagree.

Notă biografică

Charles U. Zug is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs. Previously he taught at Williams College. Before earning his Ph.D. in Government at The University of Texas at Austin, he graduated from St. John's College in Annapolis. He was born and raised in Washington State.