We welcome your reviews of books that • were published within the past three years • do not advocate for a political party or politician • do address issues supported by the League, and • intrigued you enough that you want to share them. Please submit your review at any time to Margan and Thad Zajdowicz (Margan.Zajdowicz [at] gmail.com).
The Demagogue’s Playbook
The Battle for American Democracy from the Founders to Trump
By Eric A. Posner
History will teach us … that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants. —Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 1
Eric Posner, professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School, has written an engaging book on demagogues. Posner is a conservative whose support for the Iraq War and the Bush administration position’s on “enhanced interrogation techniques” was troubling to many, including to the author of this review. During the Trump administration, Posner grew uncomfortable with a presidency that seemed to hit new lows on a daily basis. This book is the result of his discomfort.
Posner uses the broad canvas of American political history to paint his picture of demagogues and populism in seven tightly scripted chapters. Fear of demagogues was fundamental to the work that led to the Constitution. Posner opens with the profound dread that Madison, Hamilton, and others felt for the potential rise of a demagogue. An instructive table in Chapter 1 contrasts demagogues with statesmen; I defy you to peruse it without thinking about the last four years. Posner posits that the Founders’ classical educations as well as their experiences as colonial British citizens pushed them to design a government midway between a democracy and an aristocracy. Opposing aristocracy out of hand, the Founders worked to create a Constitution that asked the people to delegate political power to “an elite class of gentlemen”; of course, we know whom they had in mind.
Backlash inevitably led to the rise of Andrew Jackson. I agree with Posner that Jackson was a demagogue. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in 1835 in Democracy in America, “He tramples on his personal enemies, whenever they cross his path, with a facility without example.” A white Christian nationalist, Jackson’s policies regarding banking and patronage set the nation behind fifty years in its development. Populism changed and expanded in the years after the Civil War, setting the stage, in the context of the Gilded Age, for what Posner calls the triumph of elite technocracy or the Progressive Age from 1901 to 1945. While demagoguery was contained in the sense of no president bearing that label, it was an age of turbulence with lesser demagogues such as Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin.
World War II prompted another backlash to progressive technocracy. Posner explores the stains of Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace and the rise of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. He marks Nixon’s administration as the downturn for trust in government, preparing fertile ground for demagoguery. And then Donald Trump, the second presidential demagogue, emerges. At this point the reader should refer to the table comparing demagogues to statesmen. Posner expands on Trump’s election and failed presidency at length. At book’s end, he reminds us that we elected Donald Trump in 2016. As I write this, the denouement—the second impeachment trial of a demagogue—is livestreaming on my television screen. If we have learned nothing else, it should be to actively oppose demagogues. We failed in 2016. We did better in 2020. The threat of demagogues, as the Founders knew, is ever present.
—Thad Zajdowicz, Co-editor, Book Corner
