The Demagogue's Playbook
The Battle for American Democracy from the Founders to Trump
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review Editor's Pick
What Happens to Democracy When a Demagogue Comes to Power?
"It is hard to imagine understanding the Trump presidency and its significance without reading this book.”
—Bob Bauer, Former Chief Counsel to President Barack Obama
What—and who—is a demagogue? How did America’s Founders envision the presidency? What should a constitutional democracy look like—and how can it be fixed when it appears to be broken?
Something is definitely wrong with Donald Trump’s presidency, but what exactly? The extraordinary negative reaction to Trump’s election—by conservative intellectuals, liberals, Democrats, and global leaders alike—goes beyond ordinary partisan and policy disagreements. It reflects genuine fear about the vitality of our constitutional system. The Founders, reaching back to classical precedents, feared that their experiment in mass self-government could produce a demagogue: a charismatic ruler who would gain and hold on to power by manipulating the public rather than by advancing the public good.
President Trump, who has played to the mob and attacked institutions from the judiciary to the press, appears to embody these ideas. How can we move past his rhetoric and maintain faith in our great nation?
In The Demagogue’s Playbook, acclaimed legal scholar Eric A. Posner offers a blueprint for how America can prevent the rise of another demagogue and protect the features of a democracy that help it thrive—and restore national greatness, for one and all.
“Cuts through the hyperbole and hysteria that often distorts assessments of our republic, particularly at this time.” —Alan Taylor, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for History
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
University of Chicago Law School professor Posner (coauthor, Radical Markets) identifies precedents for Donald Trump's rise to power in this skillful survey of American political history. Defining a demagogue as "a charismatic leader who would gain and hold on to power by manipulating the public rather than by advancing the public good," Posner explains how the Founding Fathers envisioned and sought to protect the U.S. from such a threat, then labels Andrew Jackson the "First Demagogue" a so-called "man of the people" who exploited the public's fear and distrust of Native Americans and immigrants, and ran a notoriously corrupt administration. Posner also examines populist uprisings, including the 19th-century Grange movement of distressed farmers, and notes that Louisiana's populist governor and senator Huey Long pushed FDR for more radical reforms in the New Deal. Declaring Trump the "Second Demagogue," Posner analyzes the social, economic, and cultural forces behind his election, and calls on voters to remember Trump "not merely as a poor choice for the presidency. as a political monstrosity who should be repudiated by the body politic." Though Posner's prose tends to be more dry and technical than vivid, he delivers a powerful argument for the need to restore constitutional safeguards against demagoguery. Trump naysayers will be enlightened.
