Demagoguery and Democracy Quotes

“We need to enter the conversation willing to be wrong, willing to admit the limits of our own knowledge, willing to reconsider our evidence, sources, and premises. That is self-skepticism.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy

“Democracy is about disagreement, uncertainty, complexity, and making mistakes. It's about having to listen to arguments you think are obviously completely wrong; it's about being angry with other people, and their being angry with you. It's about it all taking much longer to get something passed that you think reasonable, and about taking a long time resisting some policy you think is dipshit. Democracy is about having to listen, and compromise, and it's about being wrong (and admitting it). It's about guessing - because the world is complicated - the best course of action, and trying to look at things from various perspectives, and letting people with those various perspectives participate in the conversation.

Democracy is hard; demagoguery is easy.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy

“We are all wrong at some times and to some degree. A person who claims never to have been wrong is simply a person with a very convenient memory.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy

“Demagoguery is about identity. It says that complicated policy issues can be reduced to a binary of us (good) versus them (bad). It says that good people recognize there is a bad situation, and bad people don’t; therefore, to determine what policy agenda is the best, it says we should think entirely in terms of who is like us and who isn’t.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy

“We should make sure we are reading multiple points of view, especially some with which we disagree vehemently. We should try to listen to the views we find abhorrent and try to be able to summarize them in ways that are accurate. We don't do these things in order to find common ground, or discover that they aren't so bad, but because it's important to understand why people find demagoguery attractive. And if you do choose to argue with them, you'll be able to show that you know what they believe - you won't be relying on a garbled secondhand version of it.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy

“We now know that slavery was indefensible, that segregation was bad, that we should not have allowed eugenicists to forcibly sterilize sixty thousand people for being 'defective,' that Japanese internment was a ghastly breach of everything that America is supposed to be, that lynching 'uppity' non-whites is unquestionably evil, that sending Jews who had managed to escape Hitler's genocide back to Germany was an appallingly unethical thing to do. All of those things happened because people were persuaded by demagoguery; but, had they seen it as demagoguery, they wouldn't have been persuaded. So, demagoguery works when (and because) we don't recognize it as such.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy

“The underlying problem is that we aren't arguing policies; we're arguing about identities, and therefore compromise is never considered a principled realization that they might have some legitimate concerns. It is, at best, a Machiavellian strategy forced on us by the bad group.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy

“The underlying narrative is that our political culture has been damaged because a demagogue has arisen and is leading people astray. If we accept this narrative (one that doesn't actually hold up to scrutiny), then we try to solve the problem of demagoguery in ways that worsen it: We call for purifying our public sphere of THEIR demagogues, often in very demagogic ways. That narrative misleads us because it reverses cause and effect. We don't have demagoguery in our culture because a demagogue has come to power; when demagoguery becomes the normal way of participating in public discourse, then it's just a question of time until a demagogue arises.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy

“Demagoguery is powerfully reduced when it stops getting people elected, and that usually happens because of in-group policing. Similarly, when it isn't profitable for a media outlet to engage in demagoguery, it won't, and that happens when its target market declines to put up with it. Individual demagogues are best stopped by in-group condemnation, and particular strains of demagoguery are generally ended by public shaming.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy

“We can choose to try to persuade people who are repeating demagogic talking points while choosing not to get into arguments with them.

Demagoguery about 'them' is undone by empathy. Generalizations about 'them' are complicated, and sometimes shattered, by experiences with individual members of 'them,' or even humanizing stories. Tell those stories, mention those friends, talk about those experiences, and just refuse to argue. Invite your interlocutor to meet 'them,' point out the individuals who don't fit the stereotype, and, if you are a member of their out-group, then resist your interlocutor's desire to treat you as an exception. Many of the people who explain how they came to reject demagoguery about some out-group say they were changed when they got to know (and love) people in that group, or when they discovered that people whom they had long loved were members of the out-group. Just bear witness to the glory of diversity and pluralism.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy

“One of the paradoxes about demagoguery is that it is simultaneously shameless and obsessed with honor. Shaming them about being internally inconsistent, incapable of reasonable defenses, citing sources that actually contradict what they say - that puts front and center the cognitive dissonance between their shamelessness and their obsession with honor.

None of these strategies work with people who are deep into conspiracy theories, nor with bots, nor with people paid to argue, but, at least in a public forum, pointing out what is happening can get some other people to walk away from demagoguery. Notice that I'm not saying you will thereby persuade them they are wrong. After all, they might not be. You might be wrong. You might both be wrong. You might both be somewhat right. You're trying to persuade them to engage in deliberation, and that means you have to be willing to engage in it, too.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy

“Good disagreements are the bedrock of communities. Good disagreements happen when people with different kinds of expertise and points of view talk and listen to one another, and when we try, honestly and pragmatically, to determine the best course of action for our whole community. Our differences make our decisions stronger. Democracy presumes that we can behave as one community, caring together for our common life, and disagreeing productively and honestly with one another. Demagoguery rejects rejects that pragmatic acceptance and even valuing of disagreement in favor of a world of certainty, purity, and silencing of dissent.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy

“Demagoguery is comfortable because it says that the world is very simple, and made up of good people (us) and bad people (them).4 The truth is obvious to good people like us, and you don’t need to listen to anyone who disagrees. In fact, we are in a bad situation because we have listened to them too much in the past, been too kind to them, and too compassionate. Demagoguery says we don’t have to debate policies, since what we should do is empower good people (or a good person) to do what every good person recognizes to be the obviously right course of action; we need to stop thinking and debating and just act.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy

“Structurally, democracies succeed when there is a strong middle class, the police and the military are separate and under civilian control, due process is perceived as a 'fairness' test that applies across groups, government has to respect some kind of 'private' space into which it will not intrude UNLESS the public good is at stake, and people get mad if political figures - whether their own chosen representatives or THOSE people's representatives - appear to be untruthful or unfair. If people decide to see things as a zero-sum game - the more THEY succeed, the more WE lose, and we should rage about any call made against US, and cheer any call made against THEM - then democracy loses.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy

“Partisans will try to appeal to the notion that political arguments are really about which group is better in order to dismiss criticism of their group. We might think that we can refute criticism by pointing out that 'the other party does the same thing too.' But whether the other party does it too is relevant only if we're arguing about which party is better, not which policies are better.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy

“Demagoguery is about identity. It says that complicated policy issues can be reduced to a binary of us (good) versus them (bad). It says that good people recognize there is a bad situation, and bad people don't; therefore, to determine what policy agenda is the best, it says we should think entirely in terms of who is like us and who isn't. In American politics, it becomes Republican versus Democrat or 'conservative' versus 'liberal.' That polarized and factionalized way of approaching public discourse virtually guarantees demagogues, on all sorts of issues, and in all sorts of directions. Demagoguery is a serious problem, as it undermines the ability of a community to come to reasonable policy decisions and tends to promote or justify violence, but it's rarely the consequence of an individual who magically transports a culture into a different world. Demagoguery isn't about what politicians do; it's about how we, as citizens, argue, reason, and vote. Therefore, reducing how much our culture relies on demagoguery is our problem, and up to us to solve.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy

“The other argument [about the Iraq War] was about argument itself. It characterized any argument about policy (whether, in fact, Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction and whether regime change could be effected through an invasion) as unnecessary, dithering, disloyal, and possibly even deliberately evil, since the correct course of action was so obvious. Major media outlets demonized dissent. In a democracy.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy

“Arguments for slavery weren't pragmatic or ethical discussions about the realities of slavery; they were assertions about abstract identities (The Slave, The Slave Owner, The Abolitionist) and performances of loyalty to the South. They were demagoguery.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy