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Demagoguery and Democracy

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Patricia Roberts-Miller

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“It is not an overstatement to say that the destiny of the entire human race depends on what is going on in America today. This is a staggering reality to the rest of the world; they must feel like passengers in a supersonic jetliner who are forced to watch helplessly while a passel of drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen fight for the controls and the pilot's seat. – Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 1968”

PoliticsLeadershipDemagoguery
Book:1968: The Year that Rocked the World
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“Democracy is about disagreement, uncertainty, complexity, and making mistakes. It's about having to listen to arguments you think are obviously completely wrong; it's about being angry with other people, and their being angry with you. It's about it all taking much longer to get something passed that you think reasonable, and about taking a long time resisting some policy you think is dipshit. Democracy is about having to listen, and compromise, and it's about being wrong (and admitting it). It's about guessing - because the world is complicated - the best course of action, and trying to look at things from various perspectives, and letting people with those various perspectives participate in the conversation. Democracy is hard; demagoguery is easy.”

PoliticsDemocracyArgumentDebateAuthoritarianismDemagoguery
Book:Demagoguery and Democracy
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“We now know that slavery was indefensible, that segregation was bad, that we should not have allowed eugenicists to forcibly sterilize sixty thousand people for being 'defective,' that Japanese internment was a ghastly breach of everything that America is supposed to be, that lynching 'uppity' non-whites is unquestionably evil, that sending Jews who had managed to escape Hitler's genocide back to Germany was an appallingly unethical thing to do. All of those things happened because people were persuaded by demagoguery; but, had they seen it as demagoguery, they wouldn't have been persuaded. So, demagoguery works when (and because) we don't recognize it as such.”

DebateFascismRhetoricPersuasionAuthoritarianismDemagoguery
Book:Demagoguery and Democracy
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“We should make sure we are reading multiple points of view, especially some with which we disagree vehemently. We should try to listen to the views we find abhorrent and try to be able to summarize them in ways that are accurate. We don't do these things in order to find common ground, or discover that they aren't so bad, but because it's important to understand why people find demagoguery attractive. And if you do choose to argue with them, you'll be able to show that you know what they believe - you won't be relying on a garbled secondhand version of it.”

PoliticsArgumentDebateBiasAuthoritarianismDemagoguery
Book:Demagoguery and Democracy
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“The fact remains that America is a collective work of the imagination whose making never ends, and once that sense of collectivity and mutual respect is broken the possibilities of American-ness begin to unravel. [...] Throughout the 80s, this happened with depressing regularity on both sides of American party politics. Instead of common ground, we got demagogues. [...] Neo-conservatives who create an exaggerated bogey called multiculturalism - as though Western culture itself was ever anything but multi, living by its eclecticism, its power of successful imitation, its ability to absorb "foreign" forms and stimuli! - and pushers of political correctness who would like to see grievance elevated into automatic sanctity.”

MulticulturalismAmerican CulturePolitical CorrectnessPolarizationDemagoguery
Book:Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America
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