A Season of Demagogues

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at [email protected]

Demagogues are a staple of history, re-emerging with greater force and virulence during trying times, such as economic crises, as well as in periods of increased violence and mass inward migration.

Political power is an enticement to demagoguery. Adolf Hitler exploited a poisonous cocktail of German pride, humiliation and economic collapse following its defeat in World War I, becoming one of history’s more notorious demagogues. In the U.S., Senator Joseph McCarthy exploited fears of communism to hunt for “the godless commie traitors” in “the land of the free and the home of the brave”.

Commerce is also a lucrative enticement. American talk show huckster Rush Limbaugh and a charade of pundit-profiteers manipulate severe economic dislocation in the world’s leading superpower, manufacturing -- from an alchemy of race-baiting, immigrant-bashing and other exploitable grievances -- troves of gold.

The Bahamas faces a season of demagoguery as we confront a perfect storm of fear and anxiety induced by one of the worst economic crises in most of our lifetimes, and waves of violent crime and illegal migrants, neither of which are likely to crest in the foreseeable future.

Our homegrown demagogues come in a variety of outsized egos and professions, from preachers to politicians to pundits, plying their personal agendas and public ambitions through twisted logic, scapegoating and fear-mongering.

FOR HIRE

Then there are those self-proclaimed and self-absorbed so-called community activists cum mercenaries for hire who promiscuously sell their services to whichever bedfellow desires to purchase their manufactured outrage.

All of the these masters of disguise, with chameleon-like guile, cloak themselves in bogus claims, deep-seated prejudices and self-aggrandizing promise-making, aggressively courting public opinion and power, often in order to suppress private demons, mask deep personal failings, as well as to sublimate thwarted ambitions.

Ironically, the demagogue’s narcissism and belligerence tend to megaphone rather than disguise extraordinary inadequacies. And, one doesn’t have to be a full-time demagogue to practice the dark art of demagoguery. Part-time demagoguery, often by those one may not expect, is also more in vogue in difficult times.

Such demagoguery is plied by some ministers of the religious and political sort, seeking to advance their careers, often through demonizing the more vulnerable. Both full- and part-timers employ crude, but time-tested false reasoning and rhetorical weapons of mass distortion, more of which in next week’s Front Porch.

Sometimes, this virus remains latent like HIV, but once triggered, in the case of demagoguery, often by momentous external crises, it may lead to a full-blown disease with complications for both the carrier and those whom they infect with their deadly appeals to and manipulation of baser instincts and raw emotions.

Some demagogues are like suicide bombers, destroying themselves and others with their lethal payloads and discharges. The part-timers usually prefer to inject their spurious claims into the more vulnerable who often become collateral damage as these part-timers pretend to be more reasonable and responsible.

BLOODLUST

Because the demagogue craves power, he or she will use any and every means necessary to achieve that end. So, spiritual and religious longings, alongside sacred scriptures are made profane, weaponized into inquisitions, jihads and other tools to destroy the infidels, while satisfying the bloodlust of the truest believers.

For other demagogues, patriotism is corrupted into nationalism’s crudest forms, whether chauvinism, xenophobia, or the belief that the rot in my own country comes mostly from the odour of outsiders, rather than from the stench of the fecal matter from within. To wit, demagogues offer such knee-jerk vilification: “If it were not for those Mexicans, Haitians, or (fill in the blank), things would be better.”

But, when external enemies do not suffice, there are always the outsiders within, no matter how long their navel strings have been buried in native soil: the blacks, the Jews, the gays, again, fill in the blank if you have your own favourite outcast.

Still, the ultimate target of many of the current crop of demagogues here at home is none of the above. That honour is reserved for -- cue the insipid theme music of many talk radio shows and the drum roll of the equally insipid bluster, blather and banality found across AM and FM bands -- the greatest object of scorn: politicians.

Ho-hum! Such is the state of our current crop of radio talk show demagogues that this is the best they can come up with. How lazy and unimaginative. A lazy demagogue is like a lazy magician: it’s easy to expose their sleight of hand and shopworn tricks.

With all of their imperfections, the current crop of politicians are considerably more desirable as leaders than the majority of the mindless talk show hosts who have most of the solutions but none of the responsibility for the matters on which they pontificate with great authority and little common sense. Perhaps they were fortunate to have recently, “stayed in a Holiday Inn Express”.

SLACKNESS

Unfortunately, most of the bandwidth of other talk radio hosts, who generally avoid the easy temptation of engaging in demagogic silliness, are often not much better, sometimes ceding the airwaves, high ground, and much of the market to the least common denominators, out of the same slackness of effort and imagination.

In radio, AM stands for amplitude modulation. In the dictionary amplitude refers to breadth, range of intelligence, fullness. In radio, FM stands for frequency modulation. In the dictionary frequency refers to regularity and modulation is defined in terms of temperance and proportion.

Of course, these are not the virtues of the demagogue. But why have so many more capable hosts across many spectra, ideological and otherwise, become allergic to these and other virtues central to their craft and the crafting of a more civilized conversation through the broadcast media?

We know the demagogues on talk radio quite well. The main ones have quickly become clichés, mesmerized by the sound of their own voices. While they are not as influential as they imagine, they do poison the airwaves and the national dialogue with moral and intellectual garbage which they falsely advertise as intelligent and considered commentary.

VACUOUS

The hosts we no longer recognize are those who began with such promise and diligence to their audience, proposing to raise the quality of our national conversations on the issues of the day. But today, we are constantly bombarded with vacuous shouting matches, microwaveable ideas, warmed over clichés and misinformation.

While there is always the entertainment value of talk radio, it should not drown out this broadcast platform’s informational and educational mandates. Talk radio deserves a rethink by those hosts whose programmes have become lazy and hackneyed, not to mention boring and uninspired.

This medium and its potential are too vital to national development to be left to the demagogues. Next week’s Front Porch will explore the grab bag of tricks and logical fallacies the demagogue cum charlatan employs in the hunt for power. It is precisely such false reasoning that more responsible hosts should avoid, unmasking them in those who have corrupted their fraternity’s craft.

While demagogues must be held responsible for their rhetoric and actions, citizens will hold the more serious talk radio hosts as, or more, responsible for elevating a national conversation that is often needlessly bellicose.

While talk radio should allow for vigorous debate, it need not lack civility, and should do no harm. This medium should not be a platform for false claims and often outright lies. While this may be too much to expect from the demagogues of the day -- civility and fact-checking should be the bare minimum that listeners should expect from those hosts who still hold some of the public’s trust.