Volunteers unfurl a giant banner printed with the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution during a demonstration against the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling at the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall Oct. 20, 2010, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Getty Images)
We often hear that the reason for adopting the Constitution was to limit the powers of the national government. As a matter of historical accuracy, this is wrong.
We already had a national government of severely limited powers under the Articles of Confederation, and by all accounts at the time those limitations prevented the government from carrying out its necessary functions.
The actual purpose of the proposed Constitution was in fact to increase the powers of the national government, with the important caveat that there had to be a way of preventing that government from abusing those increased powers.
In a republican form of government, founded on the consent of the governed, the most dangerous impetus to an abuse of those increased powers, according to the Founders, is demagoguery. The word has the same root as does “democracy”: demos, the people.
Dictionary.com tells us that the etymology of the word itself is Greek, going back to the idea of a demagogue as “a leader championing the cause of the common people in ancient times.”
However, Merriam-Webster tells us that the primary definition of a demagogue is “a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power.” More interestingly, a contemporary definition of “demagogue” as a noun is “a person, especially an orator or political leader, who gains power and popularity by arousing the emotions, passions, and prejudices of the people,” and as a verb means “to treat or manipulate (a political issue) in the manner of a demagogue; obscure or distort with emotionalism, prejudice, etc.”
(Anything about this sound familiar?)
The key words here are “popular prejudices and false claims,” “emotions,” “passions,” “manipulate,” “obscure,” and “distort,” understood in contrast to an appeal to reason or intellect.
James Madison famously wrote about this in Federalist 63 to justify a Senate:
As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.
So too, in Federalist 71 Alexander Hamilton justified the proposed term of office for the president by reference to the dangers of demagoguery:
The republican principle . . . does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests. It is a just observation, that the people commonly intend the PUBLIC GOOD. This often applies to their very errors. But their good sense would despise the adulator, who should pretend that they always reason right about the means of promoting it. They know from experience, that they sometimes err; and the wonder is, that they so seldom err as they do; beset as they continually are by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate; by the artifices of men, who possess their confidence more than they deserve it, and of those who seek to possess, rather than to deserve it.
Such language from both Madison and Hamilton — “the artful misrepresentations of interested men,” men “who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests,” “the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate,” “the wiles of parasites and sycophants”— evinces their concern about the demagoguery that sparks faction.
Our problem nowadays is that we are assaulted by demagoguery in political speeches and especially in negative campaign ads (perhaps themselves a reason why television mute buttons were invented). Cable television, talk radio, and social media send this through the roof.
Negative ads rarely attempt to appeal to your conscious, rational thinking-process. Rather, they try to stimulate your anger and fears. That is, they attempt to create and elicit an emotional rather than intellectual response.
Where positive ads tend to be in bright colors with clear video, perhaps with uplifting music and a friendly sounding voice-over, negative ads tend to be in grainy black and white, often with uncomfortable colors like bright reds and yellows to alarm you.
Negative ads work on creating fear and suspicion. The narrator’s voice tends to be a sneering or alarming tone, often something of the sort we hear in a preview for a horror film. The ads often use words like “radical” and “extreme” to characterize their target. And no one can possibly read the alleged sources for their alarming claims that listed in very small print at the bottom of the television frame.
Of course, political competition is not a tea party; it’s heated and often rough. I understand that.
But doesn’t true leadership aspire to appeal to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”?
So, negative campaign ads on television, radio, and the internet will do more to manipulate you than to inform you. They’re playing with your worries and fears.
As in economics so in politics, caveat emptor: let the buyer beware.
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