The Victorian Demagogue: 19th Century Words on a Modern Danger
mimimatthews.com
mimimatthews.com
He may have aroused strong passions but was far from a populist having lost his seat opposing the then popular Crimean War.
Just because a newspaper - presumably a politically opposed newspaper- once called him demagogue doesn't make him so. Especially odd as the article ends by defining demagogues as unable to face their opponents in debate - the very talent that John Bright is historically remembered for.
So, if not in the Proles, where does our hope lie?
Back in 1850s, Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln debated with three hours speeches each. It wouldn't sit well with the attention span of modern audience.
Lincoln had to persuade people that slavery was a bad idea. We have now, largely, climbed that particular hill and are working on the next society-wide injustices.
Also, that three hour debate would be all you got. We have 24 hour rolling news now.
(I have to admit that Trump is contradicting this thesis rather badly)
It's always easy to look back and say "Why did this issue even need an argument?!".
"Marriage is between a man and a woman" was a standard for a very long time. It wasn't arbitrary. It had a really solid and complicated derivation. The Stonewall Riots were 47 years ago, but in the early '90s, even Obama and Ms. Clinton agreed with "man and woman", at least in public.
And there are still people who will hold that this is a "sin" and you can't really tell them otherwise because they use a different moral toolkit than you do.
AGW research dates to roughly 1989 - call that 27 years ago. That's not that long. It's also balanced on a very tricky spot in our economic system. It is inherently political. There's also no clear path to mitigate it beyond granting government(s) a lot of power.
GHG on the other hand is a problem where lots of people's incomes depend on ignoring it.
It's hard to argue that the system isn't rigged when the rules of the system aren't as important as the outcome that relatively powerful decision-makers want to see.
They don't "have to", they want to
I don't follow. Which point?
While true demagogues exist, the application of the label demagogue is largely political. In this case, she is clearly talking about Trump (but cleverly not naming him so has plausible deniability). She is pointing only towards things which draw parallels to Trump to the exclusion of the larger picture, and the implication is that people only support demagogues out of ignorance. But ignorant people don't support demagogues when they feel they are being adequately represented.
It is disenfranchisement that lead to popular support for emotional appealers. And not every person who rides to power on this wave of disenfranchisement is a automatically a demagogue (see current top comment about John Bright). When your options are "vote for the guy who says what feels good and might actually represent me" versus "vote for someone who has shown he won't represent me" (whether that thinking is correct or not), the supposed demagogue is the rational choice.
Education doesn't fix it in any case. There are many candidates who have run on platforms that appeal to educated voters, but have clearly only done so for power, because their actions in office have, at best, been neutral towards their supposed passionate platforms, but have personally enriched themselves. Educated voters still line up behind them.
Pretty much all political discourse has sunk to this level.
We can see this with the "gotcha" videos that are all over social media where you ask voters about the actual issues, completely disassociated from any candidate or rallying cry, and almost all the time you'll end up with more moderate and carefully considered positions.
Education doesn't really have an impact on how susceptible or gullible we are - that's something else that has to be trained and practiced, and the individual has to recognize their susceptibility and be willing to act on it. Education alone does not solve this - consider all the smart persons who believe conspiracy theories - their education in these cases only serves to help them define what they see as logical connections, whereas someone less educated might not be as steadfast because they have less to rely on.
I think James Randi has offered an idea to the effect that "scientists are the easiest to fool because of their education." When someone registers and makes sense in their mind, a mixture of pride and their reasoning process drives them to stick to their guns when they reach a conclusion. Not to pick on anyone in particular, but look at Eric Raymond (ERS) and his blog - certainly a bright guy by many metrics, but believes absolutely crazy things.
Finally as an aside, one additional problem with education is that the instructors can add their own bias; often people understand this politically, so to use that as an example, consider left or right leaning politics entering education. Instructors speak from authority - what happens when political leanings are attached to actual facts? You have students walking away conflating opinion with fact from an authoritative source, sometimes unable to tell the difference. Omission of what is taught and what is not also affects this.
Demagogary is a complex issue and a bit of education isn't a complete solution. The issue is that people, even educated ones, can choose what they want to listen to, and that is truer now more than ever. Though echo chamber is bandied around as a buzzword now, it is really easy to fall in on that with how current trends for online discussion go. The integration of the social media aspect, voting systems, etc make having plain conversations very hard. Even on HN, which I do enjoy very much since the community by and large is willing to keep discussions civil but honest, has topics where any dissenting opinion is simply dimissed, not discussed.
The biggest factor in determining whether someone listens to a demagogue, is how well their message aligns with the listener's self interest. This applies to all levels and kinds of education.