Monday, October 05, 2015

The Donald Trump Bubble Shows There is a Significant Market for a Demagogue


Today there is a market for a demagogue - someone whose entire appeal is polarizing, uncivil, personally vilifying, and policy-less. The demagogue's message is "you are weak, but I will make us strong again." 

There are always demagogues in the political market.  Usually the governing parties are able to shut them out by appealing to the majority who want government to govern according to law.  Governing parties then debate policies that appeal to their separate constituencies and reach some compromise.


Now, though, one of the governing parties has created a dangerous opening for demagogues to infiltrate and take over their party structure.  By running on a platform of "government is the problem" for a generation, one party has invited to cuckoos to lay their eggs in the party nest.  And now the eggs are hatching and demanding to be fed.

1 comment:

Mac said...

One of the reasons that the demagogue is successful is that he or she resonates with the people. Hitler is a fine example. When Wilson and the Congress chose isolationism and let the Brits and the Fro....French impose a brutal, humiliating, devastating "peace" on the Germans in 1919, the seeds were planted for Hitler. The audience for Hitler was the vast numbers of German soldiers who remembered that they were never beaten of the battlefield. Their Generals did not surrender; it was the bureaucrats and "statesmen", who, at the urging of the bankers and merchants, agreed to an armistice--a term of art that means that both sides stop shooting and stand in place until a peace treaty can be worked out. Instead, the Allies treated the armistice as a surrender, occupied Germany and looted it. Hitler was able to demagogue the Communists, the merchant class which he personified as the "Jewish merchant war profiteering class", and the politicians in Berlin; the rest is history.

The inflammatory language from Trump that causes most of us to cringe is just the sugar coating for the core gut feeling by many Americans that the intelligentsia, the East and West Coast liberals, and the leaders of the Democrat party have abandoned middle America in favor of their base--criminal aliens and the beneficiaries of a bread and circuses welfare system that started with LBJ's so-called Great Society. The Democrats don't want to fix that because it allows them to demagogue the demagogue. As a result 2010 and 2014 happen and the Dems are stunned