Demagoguery

Why America Must Not Reelect this Demagogue: That’s What Trump is, and it Matters

by Eli Merritt

Trump is a demagogue –– and therefore a poison to democracy. Joe Biden is not. Voters must understand that clearly. The health, and possibly survival, of our democracy depends upon it.

Why Americans Fall for Grifters: A Warning From a 1957 Film

by Jake Tapper

Journalist Jake Tapper reflects on the prescience of the 1957 Elia Kazan/Budd Schulberg film "A Face in the Crowd", which anticipated the power of inflammatory appeals in the mass media. 

The Guardians: Does "The Resistance" Actually Want More Democracy, or Less?

by Samuel Moyn

Samuel Moyn warns that a leading Never Trump legal scholar is less concerned with how Trump might harm minorities than with how Trump might harm the image of rule by elites. 

Trump Keeps Taking Pages From Joe McCarthy’s Playbook

by Larry Tye

Anyone hoping the recency of Trump's conversion to Republicanism and conservatism might allow him to govern productively with Democrats should heed the example of Joseph McCarthy, who similary rebranded himself a conservative. Neither moderated because their political survival depended on extremism.