Love him or hate him, there’s no more prototypical American demagogue than Huey Long. Even if you disagreed with his arguments or his methods, there’s no question that Huey Long had a profound influence on Franklin Rooselvelt and the overall political culture of the 1930’s. Perhaps that is why John Judis is suggesting that we need a new Huey Long to push Obama beyond where he wants to go. But I have a different view.
There’s a bumper sticker from the Bush era that says ‘If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.’ There are plenty of fact-based reasons to be outraged and to demand significant change in how Washington (including the Democrats and including Obama) operates. But there is no good reason to go beyond that and call for open demagoguery. When Congress lines up the CEO’s of all our major financial organizations in a hearing room, it’s tempting to just scream at them (and many Democrats do exactly that) but whipping up public outrage for its own sake or for your own personal engrandizement is not the answer to our problems. There is a sense in which the clarion call ‘they’re ripping you off’ is always true, and yet there has to be a positive side to that argument.
As for populism, there is already something afoot in this country with protesters littering the front-yards of bankers with cast-off couches and bedside furniture (to represent the foreclosure crisis) and politicians like Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) encouraging her constituents to squat in their homes rather than heed the banks’ notices to vacate. Economic hardship leads to populism in an organic way, without much need for actual leadership. The leadership will emerge automatically. But the quality of that leadership matters. Demagogues, by definition, are not honest leaders. They do not operate in good faith. They exploit people’s suffering just as surely as the Wall Street tycoons that brought us this crisis. And they make lazy, and easy, arguments that rouse the passions but don’t solve the problems.
If there is value in the demagogue, it is in scaring the bejeesus out of the comfortable and leading them to make concessions they would not otherwise make. But calling for mobs to influence policy is problematic, at best. In some sense, those mobs will emerge on their own if economic times get bad enough and people don’t believe the government is acting in good faith to address their hardships. But it would be better if those mobs were well-led by smart, thoughtful, and fair leaders. We have seen many times, in world history, how critical good leadership can be and how disastrous it is to have leaders that advocate the wrong tactics and strategies.