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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sasha Polakow-Suransky's review in the National, September 26, 2009
Before he became world famous for putting forth his theory of a "clash of civilisations", the political scientist Samuel Huntington was known for his work on the processes of democratisation. In his 1991 book The Third Wave, Huntington traced the expansion of democratic freedoms in Europe after the upheavals of 1848 through their demise at the hands of fascist dictators in the 1930s, the post-Second World War wave of democratisation in the Third World that ended in the brutal African and Latin American dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s and, finally, a third wave that reached its height at the end of the Cold War.
In his new book, Michael Signer - a fellow at the Center for American Progress, political scientist, lawyer and current candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia - argues that Huntington's third wave is giving way to a tide of strongmen who take advantage of democratic elections to consolidate their own power.
Signer is not alone in worrying that the spread of democracy, if not properly conceived, is potentially dangerous. The Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria's 2003 book, The Future of Freedom, examined the dilemma posed by "illiberal democracies", which go through the motions of holding elections but do not govern by liberal, constitutional principles; the Yale law professor Amy Chua's 2003 book, World on Fire, warned that rapid democratisation in socioeconomically polarised societies could encourage the rise of tyrants who channel popular anger toward economically dominant minority groups, such as whites in Zimbabwe or Bolivia; more recently, the Stanford University political scientist Larry Diamond wrote of a "democratic recession". As nascent democracies are cannibalised by corrupt, predatory governments, Diamond argues, they fail to become anything more than states that happen to allow citizens to vote. Signer's book continues in the same vein, but focuses on the peril of instances where a single, popular individual comes to power through democratic means and uses that power to subvert democracy.
Demagogue is, at its core, a meditation on an inherent danger: "As democracy expands," Signer writes, "it increases the potential for its own destruction." Framing his argument around the ancient Greek historian Polybius's cycle of regimes - the notion that monarchy will always descend into tyranny, aristocracy will lead to oligarchy, and that pure democracy will decay into "government of violence and the strong hand" - Signer's book revisits a conundrum that has occupied the great political theorists from Plato, who saw his mentor Socrates sentenced to death by the mob, to Hannah Arendt, who watched as her professor and lover Martin Heidegger was seduced by Nazism.
Signer sets out four criteria that define the demagogue: he is a leader who presents himself as a common man, depends on charisma and a deep emotional connection with the people, exploits his own popularity to satisfy his political ambitions and, finally and most crucially, having achieved power, openly challenges or breaks accepted norms and laws in order to implement his goals.
Signer's cast of demagogues ranges from the ancient to the contemporary. It includes the Athenian general Cleon, who used oratory and public appeals to topple the respected but elitist elder statesman Pericles; Hitler, who took advantage of the Weimar Republic's democratic system and widespread popular resentment of the Versailles Treaty to rise to power; and the Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr, who exploited popular outrage at the US occupation, the chaos wrought by the de-Baathification order and Shiites' lust for political power to make himself the leader of a popular insurrection. The world today is full of figures who meet Signer's criteria for demagoguery: Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Russia's Vladimir Putin and Hizbollah's Hassan Nasrallah - who leads an organisation that is arguably stronger and more popular than the Lebanese state - are just a few he cites. And there are other potential demagogues lurking, such as Evo Morales in Bolivia, whose heavy-handed populism is raising eyebrows, and Jacob Zuma, almost certain to become South Africa's next president, who some critics fear will take an imperfect liberal democracy and turn it into yet another corrupt African kleptocracy.
Signer looks to the United States as the model of democratic resiliency - a place that has at times flirted with demagoguery without ever succumbing. Among these moments of near unravelling were the election of the rough frontier general-turned-president, Andrew Jackson - during whose inauguration the "unkempt masses" climbed in and out of White House windows - and the rise of the Louisiana governor and senator, Huey Long, who turned his state into a personal fiefdom and intended to challenge Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency in 1936 but instead fell to an assassin's bullet. George W Bush, whom the anti-war left frequently painted as a power-hungry tyrant trampling the constitution, does not make Signer's list - after all, no matter how hard he tried to distance himself from his blue-blooded roots, he was not a man of the people and never had the oratorical talent or charisma to develop an enthusiastic mass following. Not every populist leader is a demagogue - and not every leader who abridges freedoms and breaks the rules does so in a demagogic manner.
Political scientists specialising in democratic development have been arguing for decades about the necessary conditions for democracy. In the 1960s adherents of "modernisation theory" insisted that economic development was a necessary precondition for democratic government because economic growth begets liberal values; a younger but already influential Huntington focused instead on the necessity of building strong, stable institutions. Recent critics, such as Zakaria and Chua, have warned of the dangers of crash-course democracy, which gives rise to illiberal governments or demagogues who tap into the majority's resentment of market-dominant minority groups - fertile ground for the age-old democratic dilemma Signer so fears.
The leading contemporary scholars of democracy promotion, Thomas Carothers and Larry Diamond, have both recognised that existing democracy-promotion programmes cannot easily change deeper societal problems, such as the values and expectations of citizens. But both Carothers and Diamond reject the notion that a certain set of social norms and values must be in place before democratisation can take root. In a 2007 essay called "The `Sequencing' Fallacy", Carothers attacked modernisation theorists as well as the likes of Chua and Zakaria for insisting that an efficient state is a precondition for democracy. This, he argues, is an excuse for autocracy, based on the false premise that autocrats will usher in the rule of law and other preconditions for democracy.
More recent proponents of modernisation include Michael Mandelbaum, who argued in his 2007 book Democracy's Good Name that - due to free-market reforms - democracy was continuing to flourish abroad despite failed US efforts to promote it. Owning private property, according to Mandelbaum, itself constitutes a form of liberty and participation in a market economy fosters both trust and compromise - prerequisites for a liberal democratic state. Similarly, Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, the authors of Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy, contend that economic development inevitably gives rise to cultural shifts. Whereas their parents were forced to focus on feeding the family, the younger generation in many poor countries is no longer focused on survival. Consequently, they are abandoning traditional and religious value systems, opting instead for a more secular outlook that places a higher premium on individual rights and self-expression.
These individualist values are remarkably similar to what Signer calls a "constitutional conscience", a public attitude towards governance that he sees as the chief safeguard against the rise of demagogues - although he does not argue that markets and economic growth are prerequisites for such an attitude. Channelling de Tocqueville and Arendt, Signer envisions "a living culture of political values among ordinary people" that makes citizens responsible for democracy's success and encourages them to challenge any government abuse of authority. Without these values to nurture a liberal state, democracy is "like a body without a soul," writes Signer.
By calling for the careful nurturing of constitutional values, Signer is trying to bridge the divide between development-focused modernisation theorists, idealistic democracy promoters and democratic pessimists. He does not believe the market will create these values on its own, he warns that democracy promotion without a constitutional component will fall flat and, despite his fear of demagogues, believes that democracy - fortified with constitutionalism - can escape Chua and Zakaria's illiberal trap.
Signer's prescriptions include: expanding civic education; providing election training; encouraging free markets; and tailoring constitutional norms to different cultural and religious value systems rather than merely imposing western models. He also calls for an increased civilian role in humanitarian missions and democracy-promotion efforts, which now rely heavily on the military. Although these proposals are broad and abstract, his critique of US policy in Iraq offers a more concrete sense of what genuine constitutionalism would require.
There the US reconstruction effort failed because it sought to impose a constitution on Iraqis rather than encouraging them to develop one of their own. As Diamond, who was sent to supervise democracy-promotion programmes in 2004,...
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Review of Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from its Worst Enemies, February 23, 2009
Demagogue was informative and thought inducing. Mike Signer has an engaging writing style interspersed with personal experiences / insights that makes Demagogue an easy, interesting read. His passion for democracy and the love of his country come through in his writing, but his optimism does not overshadow history. He acknowledges the contradictions of Jefferson owning slaves and the injustices of Andrew Jackson against the Native Americans.
My first impression of the book was "where was this book when I was sleeping through Western Civilization as an undergrad?" Demagogue quickly contextualizes the typical readings of a Western Civilization survey course with 21st century geopolitics, providing an historical context and theoretical framework of why democracy will survive in the U.S. Mike Signer shapes the major thesis of Demagogue through using the major philosophers and the demagogues that shaped their thinking. Starting with the ancient Greeks then moving quickly to the Constitutional framers the book presents the philosophy that provided the bedrock for the Constitution and the progression of democracy; reviewing Plato and Aristotle, Jefferson and the Constitutional framers and deTocquoville, as they relate to demagogues like Huey Long, Hitler and Moqtada al-Sadr. Mike illustrates his theory in a colorful, readable manner. I thoroughly enjoyed the book.
Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Signer's book is just in time!, March 12, 2009
Had I not spoken with Michael Signer at a political event, I would probably never have read Demagogue: The Fight To Save Democracy--and I would have been the poorer for it.
The purpose of his book is to provide a political theory, both empirical (what is) and normative (what can be), to craft a foreign policy that promotes democracy by working with people within their own cultural context--as opposed to installing/imposing "one size fits all" democracy from the outside. And while his argument for such a foreign policy is compelling, his writing is far richer for what it tells us about our own (constitutional) democracy.
Signer uses the four criteria posited by James Fenimore Cooper in 1838 (yes, the Last of the Mohicans guy) to describe the demagogue (used in the most negative way).He included the "political tsunami" (41) Cleon of Athens and from the 20th century foreign favorites such as Hitler and Mussolini and lesser known domestic ones, such as Huey Long, Father Coughlin, George Wallace, among others.
Against this background, Signer introduces "seven great political thinkers who personally grappled with the fight to save democracy" (22)--Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Walt Whitman (yes, the poet as political thinker!) While Plato and Strauss "joined [together] on the wrong side of the democracy divide" (149) basically asserting the common people needed an elite to govern them, the rest of our grapplers "call[ed] for a strengthened political role for ordinary people [we the people!], coupled with a greater civic education and a stronger sense of responsibility and obligation" (23).
Along the way, Signer reminded me that ours is a constitutional democracy based on our collective constitutional conscience (the mores that de Tocqueville described), which values the rule of law and the "spirit that underlies the law" (210). And while we do employ the mechanisms of a structural democracy (elections, political parties, etc.) our constitutional democracy is not to be confused with the mere structural democracies of countries such as Lebanon, Venezuela, Russia, Cuba--and, of course, Iraq.
Singer's prose is engaging and his tone objective and respectful. For example, he gives a cogent and, for me, quite enlightening history of the move from conservatism through neoconservatism to the present day neocon movement. His assessment of the Bush administration's disaster in Iraq was justifiably (IMO) pointed in fact and analysis but civil in tone.
As "we the people" recover from the Bush administration, Demagogue couldn't be more timely. After the eight years of the demagogic forces within his administration, this book is a (clich�d) "must read" for those of us who have wondered why the egregious attacks on our Constitution were allowed by "we the people" to happen. More important, however, is to realize ways that we can renew our collective constitutional conscience so such attacks are never allowed to happen again.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
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Mr. Ziai needs to purchase a dictionary and read it for a couple of weeks, if not months, before he has the gall to critique any book! beggins?, wanderin?, hostory?
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another far left anti-intellectual fallacy
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