Monday, October 10, 2016

Angry Old Men: A Brief History of Demagogues

Photo by Flickr user Gage Skidmore

While the second presidential debate of 2016 raged on Sunday night, the good folks at Merriam-Webster were busy keeping track of the most searched terms on their website from viewers. For a brief spell, two of those words were "demagogic" and "demagogue," suggesting people didn't really understand it when Hillary Clinton was going on about the "demagogic rhetoric" that's been at the heart of this horrific election. (Other most searched words included "bigly" and "lepo." As in "a lepo," as in Gary Johnson isn't alone in his ignorance over the crisis in Syria.) Her opponent Donald Trump, of course, is a textbook demagogue, a political leader who (to quote Merriam-Webster) "tries to get support by making false claims and promises and using arguments based on emotion rather than reason." He's far from the first.

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