Another book in the growing body of literature dedicated to examining demagoguery and how it interacts with, damages, and threatens democracy.

"Demagoguery is the reduction of politics to in-group versus out-group, with the assumption and claim that the in-group is always and forever and in every way better than the out-group."

If that doesn't make you think of contemporary politics, then I think you're just not paying attention. It applies to American, British, and other countries. An interesting and valuable book, one that is sure to make readers think. Hopefully, if it were to find its way into the hands of, for example, Trump and/or Brexit supporters, then maybe it'll help them reexamine what they support/believe. (Unfortunately, I can't see that happening.)

Recommended.

Having battled a few young-Earth creationists in my time online, I can't say there was anything new in this book for me, but I still considered that it was worth the reading. It refreshed my mind, and reminded me of a few things that I might be getting rusty on. The saddest thing about it is that the people who most need to read this are the very ones who are least likely to want to read it, but I hope I'm wrong on that score, because everyone who is registered to vote needs to read this book, especially after the last few elections in the USA, and there is no excuse not to, since it's very concise, very clear, and pulls no punches.

From the blurb, we learn that a demagogue is someone who turns "complicated political situations into polarized identity politics," but as the author points out, it's more complicated and more nuanced than that, and it's all-too-often difficult to spot when the demagogue wool is being pulled over your eyes precisely because we're so used to it. In fact you could make a decent argument that American politics is composed entirely of demagoguery on both sides of the aisle these days. Those who bravely seek to do an end-run around it and stand as independents, are mauled to death by the sound-bites of the two front-runners. The media - which is supposed to be impartial and be wise to these tricks - simply plays along with them.

We can learn from this book what these shameless, grandstanding people say and do to gain and hold power, and what we can do to restore deliberative democracy, because that's the antidote to this poison. The first step is to recognize it, and the next step is to focus on the best way to deal with any given instances of it. This book will help you with both of these issues, because this author knows her stuff and displays it to advantage here. I recommend this book and I sincerely hope more people read it than I fear actually will!

I'm surprised the author didn't use references to creationism or climate change, because demagoguery is rife in the shallow dialog over those contentious issues, too, but if I had a complaint about the book, it's not about the content or the writer's style, but about the presentation, which is in what I call academic minimalism - and it's a style which is wasteful and may even turn-off some readers.

For an ebook, it really doesn't matter that much, but even there, a bulkier book requires more energy to transmit over the internet. From the point of view of a print run, a book like this is far harsher on trees than it ought to be. The pages have wide margins and widely spaced lines. Were the margins smaller and the lines closer, the book could have been probably a third smaller and saved a proportionate number of trees (and perhaps encourage more people to read it since it looks shorter!) I realize my voice is one of a paltry few crying in the wilderness, but at this rate that wilderness ain't gonna be with us much longer and all that will be left is the crying.

Other than that I recommend it unreservedly. Trish Roberts-Miller is a Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas. She has a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley, and teaches in the Liberal Arts department. Though UT is only a few miles from where I live, I don't know this author, but I do know never to get into an argument with her! I wish her all the best with this book.

The Trump presidency would seem to be the ideal time for pondering demagoguery and Patricia Roberts-Miller, as Professor at the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas, appears particularly well placed to shed light on that phenomenon.

Her ‘Demagoguery and Democracy’ is a relatively short book (of just over 130 pages with a fairly large typeface) and the central text would be shorter still if its definitions of various forms of fallacious argument had been relegated to a glossary. It is, nevertheless, a densely argued and thought-provoking book which considers what demagoguery is, how it operates and what can be done to address it.

The style of writing is always engaging although sometimes uneasily sliding from the scholarly (talk of rhetors and arguments ad verecundiam) to the colloquial (“rhetorically pantsed” and “dipshit”).

The arguments are usefully illustrated with examples which are sometimes abstract, sometimes drawn from personal experience and sometimes historical, with the antebellum South, Weimar and Nazi Germany and the internment of those of Japanese ancestry in World War Two comprising the most important points of reference. Although Roberts-Miller acknowledges that demagoguery has its roots in Ancient Greece, for her it became the dominant mode of US public discourse in the days leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

This is somewhat ironic as those who purchase her book might feel that they’ve done so on a false prospectus insofar as she rejects the conventional understanding of the term ‘demagoguery’ (comprising rhetorical appeals to the emotions rather than to the reason of the masses), preferring to define it as a form of identity politics in which the world is seen in binary, polarized terms, so that ‘they’ are automatically assumed to be mendacious whilst ‘we’ believe ourselves to be the embodiment of integrity, authenticity and light. I suspect that this is a view of politics which, even post-Brexit, applies far better to the United States than to the United Kingdom.

Demagoguery, we are further told, “isn’t about what politicians do” but “about how we, as citizens, argue, reason and vote.” This is the most tendentious part of the book for even in the age of social media it is surely the politicians, the spin-doctors and the denizens of mainstream media outlets who frame public discourse, demagogic or otherwise, rather than you and I.

It follows from this that Roberts-Miller’s four strategies “that might help correct our course” are misconceived. We are told, for example, that “We can work to reduce the profitability of demagoguery by consuming less of it ourselves, and shaming media outlets that rely heavily on it”. But by definition those in thrall to what she refers to as the factionalized media’s “informational enclaves” will not be sufficiently self-reflective to take such steps because they won’t even appreciate the existence of the problem in the first place.

It is doubtless true that empathy provides the key to “open the Faraday cage of demagoguery” and highly desirable that people should have open minds and not posit statements that are unfalsifiable but what if some hearts are always hard, if some minds are always closed and some people are simply constitutionally incapable of recognising a valid argument? It is certainly an unhappy paradox that those who would benefit most from reading Roberts-Miller’s book are precisely those people who will never do so.

In short, this is a stimulating read, with Roberts-Miller making a very powerful case that we need to think about how we argue and not just what we argue, as well as clearly identifying what makes particular arguments good or bad. Nevertheless, I can’t help feeling that she’s largely preaching to the converted and doing so on the basis of some rather problematic assumptions.

Thank you very much for this book. Unfortunately, since it is not in kindle format, I am unable to read it.