The other version of populism is built around policies that would support working and low-income families, often coupled with a sharp critique of economic elites—“the 99 percent” versus “the 1 percent.” This was the populism that Bernie Sanders rode during a surprisingly successful challenge to the anointed Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and that mobilized younger voters almost as powerfully as Barack Obama had eight years earlier.

It would be a mistake to treat these two populisms as flip sides of the same coin. The white cultural resentment generated by Trump—particularly because it represents a distinct minority defined by identity rather than ideology—is a profound challenge to the Republican Party and to mainstream conservatism, just as Wallace’s was to the Democratic Party in another era. The policy differences between populist Democrats like Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren and their mainstream counterparts such as Clinton and her running mate Tim Kaine, however, are subtle. Sanders’ proposals, for example, flowed easily enough into the party platform and the vision of its nominee Hillary Clinton. Remaining policy differences between the two camps are relatively minor, such as those between “free college” and “debt-free college,” or between a restoration of the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall banking regulations repealed in 1998 and a proposed new regulatory regime. These are still differences of ideology, but modest ones; and the differences in identity between the Sanders and Clinton camps, other than on matters of age and style, are hard to find. Instead, the left’s version of populism can seem more like a fresh coat of paint, or a sharper argument for otherwise standard liberal policies.

Nonetheless, the distinction between left populism and mainstream progressive politics does diverge in one significant way: Sanders and Warren want to name names. Their narrative, like Trump’s, is one of “heroes and villains”—the villains being not immigrants, but the “millionaire and billionaire class” or big political donors. Warren, for example, has been relentlessly focused on personnel, more insistent on limiting the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street and going after the Obama administration acolytes of former Citigroup chairman and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (whom she blames for the tame treatment of executives during the financial crisis) than on any other particular policy.

In Hillary Clinton’s view of the world, though, there are few villains, and when they are named it is with legalistic care. (Trump himself is a villain, but carefully distinguished from other Republicans, even those who support him.) Politics, in this view, is a matter of problems, to be fixed, often by elites wielding dispassionate expertise.

So one of the central questions of our era has become: Does successful American politics need villains? Since the rise of the Tea Party in 2009, left populists have imagined that the politics of resentment that motivates the right can be coopted or converted to the left, redirected toward corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy. While Trump attacks the “corruption” that leads to, in his view, bad trade deals, an ill-fated embrace of immigration and diversity, and American failure, left populists seem to be betting that an attack on “corruption” that names alternative targets betraying the American ideal—the Citizens United decision, middle-class wage stagnation, or the cost of college—will hook voters in the same way.

But there are major flaws in this thinking. The bonds of right populism are not so easily broken and reformed. The “heroes and villains” of Trump’s narrative (he is the only hero) are not forged by policy positions but by deep ties of cultural identity and affinity. Put more bluntly, white Trump and Tea Party supporters are not interested in a populism that involves an alliance with non-white, younger, culturally diverse voters. Meanwhile, the relentless attack on “corruption” from populists on both sides has led to the strange paradox that voters still view Hillary Clinton, merely a lifelong denizen of the existing political system, as more corrupt than the genuinely venal Trump, a master of tax scams, direct-marketing scams, and charity scams. Politics based on resentment and attacks on “corruption” have merely deepened mistrust of government, which is in itself a barrier to the policies that left populists favor.

Instead, perhaps what American politics really needs is a third kind of populism. Instead of the “them” populism of left and right, we should look to the tradition of “us” populism—one in which citizens work together, from local to national levels of government, to define and solve problems. A politics in which citizens are not just engaged as angry protestors calling on the system to change, but as part of the system itself.

America has had a populism like this before, as described in historian Lawrence Goodwyn’s portraits of the rise of late 19th century agrarian alliances, in Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America, and several other books. Where Hofstadter saw only resentment and status anxiety, Goodwyn saw millions of people who had been quiescent suddenly becoming engaged, participating fully through unions, farmers alliances, and new political movements to redesign the economic structures of a fast-growing country. He celebrated the cross-racial alliances forged in the South and the transformations of political consciousness experienced by individuals participating in this democratic renascence.

Our democracy would benefit from an investment in this kind of “us” populism, especially its ideas about refining existing institutions to strengthen citizen voices and public trust, and creating new mechanisms for public engagement and deliberation. This might include steps such as setting up participatory budgeting or seeing labor unions, community organizations, and similar associations as civil society institutions—rather than just economic claimants.

This new populism can’t simply be conjured into existence. It has to rise up from the lived experience of millions of individuals. But we have tools, including new technologies and new techniques of organizing, that can help. There are signs of a more meaningful and participatory democracy emerging in many American cities. Perhaps by the next presidential election, this budding “us” populism can compete with the populism of resentment that dominated in 2016.

The post Do American Politics Need Villains to Be Successful? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Clinton ad imitated an offering from Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential campaign. That year, a Johnson ad featured quotes from three prominent Republican governors—Nelson Rockefeller of New York, William Scranton of Pennsylvania, and George Romney of Michigan—denouncing their party’s nominee, U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. The ad concluded, “Even if you’re a Republican with serious doubts about Barry Goldwater, you’re in good company.”

Much like Trump in 2016, Goldwater ran an outsider’s campaign, far more popular with the party’s grassroots than its establishment. Goldwater’s uncompromising anti-communism and vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act (which he considered an unconstitutional federal intrusion on states’ rights) attracted support from conservative Democrats, especially from the South. But his campaign’s high-profile defenders of segregation, most notably U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, repelled moderate Northern Republicans. So did the candidate’s intemperate statements on the campaign trail, as when Goldwater mused about lobbing nuclear weapons into the “men’s room at the Kremlin.”

President Johnson effectively served as his own chief strategist. During the summer of 1964, he lamented the media’s excessive interest in the backlash—Southern Democrats who were abandoning the party because of its support for civil rights legislation. “They talk about all the South quitting me, and they talk about everybody quitting me,” Johnson complained to one aide in August. But polls indicated that the greater number of partisan defections had come from Republicans, who distanced themselves from Goldwater. It was time, Johnson believed, to focus on “the Republican backlash—all these extreme statements [by Goldwater], and Ku Klux Klan, and all this other stuff.”

Johnson eventually deemed the phenomenon “the frontlash” (a term he thought would appeal to journalists). Upper middle-class independents and moderate Republicans normally didn’t vote Democratic in national elections, but they could be wooed through a relentlessly negative campaign that portrayed Goldwater as a dangerous extremist. Talk “about the danger of a woman having a two-headed baby, and men becoming sterile, and drinking contaminated milk, and these things,” Johnson privately explained, and “they’ll know who they ought to be scared of without our ever saying so.”

This strategy reached its most aggressive point on Sept. 7, 1964. A Johnson commercial featured a little girl, plucking the petals off a daisy, counting one to ten as she did so. Her voice, then image faded, eventually replaced by a bomb countdown and a mushroom cloud. Finally, Johnson’s voice emerged: “These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”

The daisy ad, the most famous attack ad in any presidential campaign, generated furious protests from Republicans, who argued it unfairly demonized their nominee. The commercial, which appeared only once but received massive media attention, helped firm up the connection between Goldwater and nuclear war.

While Johnson’s strategy was tactically brilliant, it came with a drawback: the President struggled to articulate a positive agenda. Instead, he fell back on clichés about patriotism and biblical values, generic themes that would alienate neither the union activists who then formed the Democratic Party’s base nor the traditionally Republican suburbanites, mostly women, who he hoped to attract to his coalition.

Clinton has run her version of a frontlash campaign in 2016. But the problem that Johnson confronted has, if anything, become even more pronounced. Bridging the enormous ideological gap between millennials who backed Clinton’s primary rival, Bernie Sanders, and “never Trump” Republicans would challenge even the most talented politician. As a substitute for Johnson’s paeans to patriotism, Clinton has relied on appeals to identity politics, but, like Johnson in 1964, her approach has primarily been negative, focused on convincing voters that electing her opponent could have catastrophic consequences for the republic.

On Election Day 1964, Johnson carried 44 states and won 61 percent of the popular vote. The next day, however, the President worried that his enemies would present the outcome as the voters having voted against Goldwater without embracing the specifics of his program. Journalists, he lamented, would ignore the “love and affection” voters had shown him. Instead, they would present him as “the lesser of two evils. Corn pone. Southern.”

Even a Johnson victory lacking a meaningful ideological mandate yielded significant congressional gains for his party. In the 1964 House contests, Democrats picked up 37 seats, giving them a more than 2-to-1 advantage for the 1965-1966 session. And despite holding 26 of the 35 Senate seats up for election, Democrats gained two additional Senate seats in 1964. But the surge was temporary; Democrats suffered major losses in the 1966 midterm elections. And the party’s popular vote came in almost 20 points below Johnson’s 1964 level in 1968, when Richard Nixon’s victory returned Republicans to the White House.

Although Clinton has never enjoyed a polling lead comparable to LBJ’s in 1964, the lessons of the past would suggest that her updated frontlash strategy should produce a victory this November. But it seems unlikely a Democratic Congress will accompany any victory. For the party to secure even a one-seat majority in the House, Democratic incumbents would have to go undefeated and Democratic challengers would need to win 27 of the 29 seats the non-partisan Cook Political Report currently lists as either toss-ups or leaning toward Republicans. The party’s Senate chances initially looked more promising, but in recent weeks, declining fortunes in Ohio and Florida mean that the Democrats might need to win on unfavorable terrain in either Missouri or North Carolina to retake the Senate.

In our vastly more polarized era, it might well be that only a positive message from the top of the ticket—such as that offered by Ronald Reagan for Republicans in 1980 or Barack Obama for Democrats in 2008—will meaningfully affect down-ballot races. But at the presidential level, Johnson’s frontlash model has been revived more than 50 years later, with the Democrats once again facing a Republican whose political and personal positions render him particularly vulnerable to the tactic.

The post Hillary Clinton’s Negative Ad Campaign Style Is Vintage appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s a shame, because the Obama-era efforts hold important lessons about what’s possible in addressing inequality and how we must do better in the future.

As Obama entered office, public consciousness of inequality of income and wealth was on the rise and the Great Recession brought disastrous economic consequences for tens of millions of Americans. In the past 40 years, inequality of income rose faster in the U.S. than in any other nation and the inequality of wealth exceeded that found in any other advanced economy.

Obama tackled the problem of inequality from the beginning. The first bill he signed as president was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act—an equal pay legislation. Ledbetter had worked for Goodyear for 20 years before learning she was paid less than men for the same job. The law removed the requirement that a petition regarding discriminatory pay be filed within 180 days of the discrimination; it also made any discriminatory paycheck actionable.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the administration’s 2009 stimulus bill, has not received enough credit for assisting poor families and for preventing more people from falling into poverty. The act added $20 billion for food stamps and food banks, support for poor neighborhoods, an increase in unemployment insurance, and $3.5 billion for job training. With an unprecedented 45 million Americans in poverty today, one enduring criticism is that Obama should have focused on a second stimulus rather than his health care bill.

Yet the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act also helped reduce inequality to a degree. The law’s redistributive features are not generally recognized by the public, but they help explain the unrelenting opposition from its reactionary opponents. Obamacare contains higher Medicare payroll taxes on individuals with incomes above $200,000 and families with incomes above $250,000 and it levies fees on the healthcare industry (which has gained millions of new customers from the ACA) and on drug and medical device manufacturers.

Obama’s critics, and the president himself, have said he hasn’t done enough to tell the story of this battle against inequality. But it’s not for lack of trying. In December 2011, Obama confronted the unfairness of our economic system in a speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, where ex-President Theodore Roosevelt in 1910 made his historic “New Nationalism” speech calling for a “Square Deal” for the American people. The next month, Obama’s State of the Union focused on restoring America’s promise of opportunity. Always cautious during his first term, Obama waited until after his re-election to talk directly about “income inequality.” Instead, he emphasized fairness and everyone “playing by the same rules.” At the time, billionaire Warren Buffett pointedly disclosed that he was taxed at a lower rate than his secretary (who Obama invited to sit with the First Lady Michelle Obama in the House gallery for the State of the Union), and Obama called attention to the unfairness of hedge fund earnings being taxed at 15 percent; anyone earning over $1 million, he said, should pay an effective tax rate of at least 30 percent. The Republican-controlled House predictably ignored his suggestion.

In his campaign for re-election, Obama hammered away at the same themes, while successfully painting his opponent Mitt Romney as an out-of-touch rich guy, with help from Romney’s own mistakes. Once re-elected, in his 2013 State of the Union, Obama spoke directly about income inequality, calling it “the defining challenge of our time.” He promised then, and at other times throughout the year, to devote the rest of his presidency to attacking inequality. The Congress he addressed had reached a milestone: more than half its members were millionaires and the body’s total worth was approaching $5 billion.

Obama’s second term is often portrayed as an exercise in futility: the president proposes and the Republican Congress opposes. But that’s not the whole story. In 2013, the president’s give-and-take with Republicans on budget priorities succeeded in increasing tax rates on the highest earners.

This happened in two ways: Money in tax shelters got treated like other income and limits were imposed on the deductions high earners can claim. While the “Bush tax cuts” were extended for most Americans, the cuts for those making over $500,000 expired. The so-called 1 percent are now taxed at pre-Ronald Reagan levels. Although most capital gains are still taxed at only 15 percent, more affluent taxpayers in the 39.6 percent income-tax bracket now face a 20 percent rate on their capital gains. The result—the 400 highest earners among American taxpayers are now paying an effective tax rate of 22.9 percent, up from 16.7 percent in 2012, but still down from 26.4 percent in the late 1990s.

Obama has also made effective use of his office and executive powers to address inequality. Unable to persuade Republicans in Congress to raise the federal minimum wage, (stuck at $7.25 an hour, and worth far less in real terms than the minimum wage in 1968), Obama has used the “bully pulpit” to advocate higher wages and encouraged a growing movement among states and cities to raise their minimums on their own.

In 2014, the president issued an executive order raising the minimum for workers hired by federal contractors to $10.10 an hour. The president also required federal contractors to report wage data to the Labor Department, to prevent abuses and serve as fuel for future action.

In early 2015 Obama again resorted to an executive order to give federal workers up to six weeks of paid maternity leave, and asked Congress to extend this to private workers. The president also advocated a Healthy Families Act giving workers in the private sector up to seven days paid sick leave; some 44 million, or 40 percent of the workforce, do not have paid sick leave. Just four states and the District of Columbia, along with 18 cities, have passed laws requiring employers—usually with 15 or more employees—to give such paid leave.

Obama’s Labor Department also issued guidelines to help states establish savings plans for private-sector employees whose employers don’t offer them. And Obama has sought to reverse regulations that burden unions. While organized labor was disappointed that the president and Senate Democrats failed to enact legislation making it easier to unionize workplaces, Obama delivered a huge gain for low-wage service workers in his appointments to the National Labor Relations Board.

In August 2015, the board delivered a series of decisions by a 3-2 partisan vote making it easier for unions to represent workers in fast food restaurants and retail giants like Wal-Mart. And this May, the Department of Labor announced sweeping new overtime rules that could affect as many as 12.5 million workers. The regulatory action will make it almost impossible for employers, even smaller firms, to avoid paying overtime to workers who put in more than an eight-hour workday.

Meanwhile, even as the more progressive wing within Obama’s party would have liked to see more energetic action taken against Wall Street, there is evidence that the complicated financial reform known as the Dodd-Frank is having some effect in reining in the financial sector. Bank earnings are down, and the biggest banks are lending more while preserving healthier balance sheets under tighter regulation.

All told, the administration’s higher income tax rates on the affluent, subsidies for health insurance, expanded tax breaks for poor families with children, and other measures, amount to an impressive government counterattack on advancing inequality. Nevertheless, the administration faces two problems in selling its narrative: the fact that public opinion is a lagging indicator to economic reality (things can turn better before the benefits are widely appreciated), and the more daunting reality that there are limits to what government can do in the face of structural forces (such as technological change) creating deeper income and wealth inequality in our society.

As Obama prepares to leave office, Americans are only now beginning to consider his overall legacy, and may soon come to appreciate his efforts to combat economic inequality and restore a sense of fairness and opportunity to American life. Whether his successor will try to build on Obama’s effort, or be able to do so, remains to be seen.

The post Obama’s Unsung Legacy in the War on Income Inequality appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There is a clear pattern, a back and forth, that my co-authors and I identified in researching for our book, The Party Decides. While rule changes may give the upper hand to voters for a few presidential cycles, elites will always try to find ways to stage this voting process in their favor.

At this summer’s conventions, both parties are reconsidering the rules of the presidential selection process, after Donald Trump’s divisive triumph on the Republican side and Bernie Sanders’ strong Democratic challenge raised questions about the fairness of procedures. But no matter what reforms to the selection process that parties may pursue, the back-and-forth struggle between elites and the voters will likely continue.

Today, the nominating process is itself the product of reforms that didn’t alter this dynamic. Presidential elections now consist of both primaries—where residents simply cast their ballots in the area designated to them based off their address—and caucuses—where voters gather openly to decide which candidate to support.

This mix of primaries and caucuses is relatively new to American politics.

In the early decades of the Republic, members of Congress got together to decide presidential nominations. The rest of the nation was totally frozen out of the process. In the early 19th century, reforms designed to make the process more representative led to national party conventions. These gatherings enabled leaders from across the country to take part in the momentous decision of nominating a potential president. The convention system lasted for more than a century until there was a reform movement put in place to increase participation even further.

The modern presidential nominating process wasn’t born until 1968. The Democratic Party—like the rest of the country—was deeply and sharply divided over the war in Vietnam, when party leaders meeting at the convention in Chicago decided to select the sitting vice president, Hubert Humphrey, to take on Richard Nixon in November. There was rioting in the streets and shouting in the convention hall. The problem was not just that Humphrey was intimately associated with the Johnson administration’s hawkish military policies in Southeast Asia. What drew the ire of many was that Humphrey had failed to compete in any of the primaries and caucuses that nominating season. He was plucked from the wings and foisted upon the party in a very undemocratic fashion.

In 1968, this type of political movement could occur because primaries and caucuses were not binding. In the aftermath of that bitter convention, Democrats created the McGovern-Fraser Commission to democratize the nominating process. They decided that, starting in 1972, candidates who won the most votes in each contest would receive the most delegates from that state, conferring significantly more importance on the primaries and caucuses. Additionally, the candidate who amassed a majority of delegates—2,383 for Democrats and 1,237 for Republicans—would automatically become the party’s nominee. While McGovern-Fraser was a Democratic Party committee, Republicans followed suit and the two parties had in place extremely similar procedures by 1976.

The goal was to wrest the power to nominate away from the party bosses and give it to the people—and that is exactly what the McGovern-Fraser reforms succeeded in doing. Candidates for president were now essentially required to submit themselves to the voters in order to be crowned their party’s nominee. Democratic Party elites, seeing things slipping away, in 1982 convened the Hunt Commission to reform the process yet again. This time they sought to regain some of their influence by mandating that 20 percent of the delegates would not be bound by voter preferences and therefore would be able to choose whomever they wanted to support come convention time. These superdelegates only exist on one side of the party divide however, as the Republicans did not choose to emulate the Democrats this time.

One irony of this back and forth is that America’s presidential nominating process is among the most open and democratic in the world. Most other political parties worldwide do not have any sort of primaries, and many that do limit rank-and-file participation in a variety of ways. Also, some parties screen candidates and, without elite support, one cannot even run for the nomination.

But still, the litany of complaints about our system is long: The primary process goes on forever. It is too expensive for non-elite candidates. Iowa and New Hampshire, two relatively unrepresentative states that lead off the proceedings, have disproportionate influence on the final outcome. The votes of many citizens essentially don’t count because in most instances the contest has been wrapped up before their states’ scheduled primaries and caucuses.

Of course, if your preferred candidate is ultimately victorious, the complaints tend to be muted. But supporters of the losing candidates are often quite vocal in their disparagement of the system—and 2016 was no different in this regard.

If you look at the Democratic race, it was clearly a case of the party deciding for Hillary Clinton before the voting began. Clinton quickly locked in virtually all of the elite endorsements, making her the strongest frontrunner the modern system has ever witnessed. Clinton also benefited from the overwhelming support of those infamous superdelegates. And finally, the Democratic National Committee initially scheduled a relatively small number of debates and broadcasted most of them on Saturday nights, minimizing the potential damage to a Clinton campaign that had huge systematic advantages. Despite running under a legal and ethical cloud for most of her campaign, and facing a powerful insurgency led by a surprisingly charismatic challenger, Clinton prevailed in the end and became the first woman ever to be nominated by a major political party for president.

On the Republican side, the lead-up to the primaries and caucuses as well as the ultimate outcome could not have been more different. Party elites clearly would not or could not decide on a preferred candidate during the invisible primary period, splitting their support among several broadly acceptable aspirants including Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich. This opened the door for Donald Trump to capitalize on a populist anger simmering among the Republican primary electorate. Trump won his party’s nomination without any elite support going into the primaries and caucuses and prevailed despite most party elites preferring anybody but him.

One can already see countervailing pressures on the two major parties resulting from the drama of 2016. Sanders supporters are calling to abolish superdelegates and change states’ primary processes to make them more accessible. And Republican leaders will seek to gain a firmer grip on their nominating process to avoid the debacle that has been Donald Trump’s unlikely candidacy. In fact, we saw this play out earlier this week as anti-Trump forces in Cleveland tried to force various procedural roll call votes as a way of, if not stopping Trump, embarrassing him and his supporters.

No matter the reforms, the struggle between elites and voters will go on.

The post Americans Have Been Fed Up With the Presidential Nomination Process for More Than 200 Years appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For all the fear and consternation about the lies, insults, conspiracy theories, and rhetorical excesses of the 2016 presidential election, today’s political troubles have been familiar features of democracy since its invention 2,500 years ago, said a panel of scholars of classics, history, and communications during “How Does Democracy Survive Demagoguery?,” a Zócalo/Getty Villa “Open Art” event.

The wide-ranging conversation at the Getty Villa covered accused demagogues from Pericles to Cicero, Thomas Jefferson to Bernie Sanders. The panelists cautioned that “demagogue” hasn’t always had a negative connotation; in antiquity it often had the ambiguous definition of a politician who speaks for the people.

And at times, panelists suggested that there is at least a bit of demagoguery in any democracy, and in almost any democratic politician.

With perhaps one exception, the only current presidential candidate who wouldn’t be recognized as a demagogue in ancient times might be Hillary Clinton—because as University of Florida classicist Victoria Emma Pagán noted, “There wouldn’t have been a Hillary Clinton in ancient Rome or ancient Greece—women did not participate in the government at all.”

At that, Indiana University historian Eric Robinson quipped: “I’d deny that Hillary Clinton is a demagogue. … To be a demagogue, one of the things you’d have to be is a very, very persuasive public speaker.” And he added, “I wouldn’t accuse Clinton” of being able to fire up a crowd.

Robinson said that the classic example of a demagogue was the ancient Greek leader Cleon. “He would stomp up and down the stage, pull up his robes, and shout,” said Robinson, who teaches Greek and Roman history. Records of Cleon’s speeches “show him insulting his political opponents, drawing on the anger of the audience, engaging in bluster about the need to project strength at all times. … Some of this may sound a little familiar.”

Texas A&M University communications professor and rhetorician Jennifer Mercieca said, “One thing that’s consistent from ancient Athens through to today, when we think about demagoguery, we’re really thinking about uncontrollable leaders, who don’t follow norms.” She added, “Americans are obsessed with preventing demagoguery.”

Pagán, the University of Florida classicist, asked the audience to consider trust in thinking about demagogues and democracy. It’s an important currency—and demagogues can succeed when they win the audience’s trust. But today, trust is breaking down in the U.S.—not only trust between leaders and the people, but trust between different parts of the population.

Pagán said that other accusations—of conspiracy or corruption—are much more toxic than to claim someone is a demagogue. “The thing about the charge of demagoguery is that it can be countered. If you call somebody a conspirator, it’s harder to retract. … If you say someone is a demagogue—we can have a really good conversation about whether Bernie Sanders is a demagogue. Just calling someone a demagogue is a starting point.”

Donald Trump was frequently mentioned in the conversation, and in audience questions. But Robinson noted that conspiracy theories, which pass for talking points in speeches of the presumptive Republican nominee, were used by ancient Greek politicians as well. And Pagán pointed out that Cicero, the Roman orator and politician, “used insult and invective in ways that we can’t even begin to imagine. … Trump’s insults look like kindergarten stuff” in comparison.

But in ancient Rome, she said, “Every time Cicero talks about fear, he also says … ‘And these are the steps I’m taking to protect you.’” Today’s demagogic politicians don’t appear to be as specific and concrete in explaining what they’re doing or proposing, she suggested.

The panel’s moderator, Los Angeles Times political reporter Seema Mehta, asked the scholars how, in the past, one fought against demagogues. The panel’s answer: it’s never been easy. Pagán noted that you don’t want to engage in discussion with demagogues. Mercieca explained that America’s founding fathers tried to create a weak executive and our system of checks and balances in part to check demagogues. But, she added, the executive branch has grown far more powerful than they intended.

Successful demagogues, the panelists noted, often get their way, though sometimes a clever historian like Thucydides can expose their tricks for the benefit of future generations. And the opponents of one Roman demagogue had success by taking his exaggerated promises and exaggerating them further—“out-demagoguing the demagogue.”

Demagogues can prosper in times of anger. And Mercieca, the Texas A&M communications professor, said that extreme polarization creates “a context within which demagoguery can flourish. When you have people getting very isolated news information from a very specific perspective … you create enemies out of the other.”

Mercieca, who is writing a book about Trump, noted that while his methods seem new, he is using ancient rhetorical techniques, from threats of force, to ad hominem attack to paralipsis. That last refers to the technique of saying, “I’m not saying … but I’m saying”—essentially repeating gossip or rumors but eliding accountability for it. Mercieca, cheekily exemplifying this, began to claim that one of Trump’s ex-wives said he kept Hitler’s speeches by his bed, before catching herself and admitting she couldn’t prove it. “It’s been reported,” she said, Trump-style, to laughter.

Another issue, she added, is that American presidential candidates have come to depend on appeals to fear. “Presidential candidates try to create a crisis for the nation, and insert themselves into that crisis as the hero of that moment,” she said.

In response to an audience question, Robinson suggested that today’s demagogic politicians be countered with the “ancient answer”: debates in which one candidate’s speech is immediately countered on the same stage by another candidate’s speech.

The problem today is that we hear speeches in fragments, and the media responses to speeches are also fragmented. Our televised debates require such short answers that they don’t offer a real opportunity to challenge demagoguery.

“Maybe it’s time to bring back ancient debate,” Robinson said.

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