- Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson review – how to feel OK when you have a brain that is trying to destroy you, by Kathryn Hughes, September 16, 2015.
2. Up to this point, he was more of a garden-variety blowhard.
In the 17th century, poet John Milton called it a “goblin word” — a sobriquet so low that it was reserved for only the most insidious of rabble-rousers — yet in the last few months, any number of observers, from GOP presidential also-ran Rick Perry to former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, from the Economist to, most recently, the New York Times, have crossed a rhetorical line in our politics by calling Donald Trump out as a “demagogue.”
Until recently, I’ve resisted it. As the author of “Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies,” I have been asked countless times in recent years whether Trump is a demagogue, and have always responded — indeed, thought — that he was not. Clearly, though, with his escalating effrontery toward the American creed, he is now.
This is not a matter of mere semantics. In the same way that precision should be used when issuing a terror alert, the term demagogue, properly applied, should be a tocsin of democracy — deployed judiciously and ringing loudly to foretell a singular menace to our republic.
The word dates back to ancient Athens, where the original term in Greek literally meant leader (agogos) of the people (demos). In 1838, American author James Fenimore Cooper observed that true demagogues met four criteria: they posture as men of the common people; they trigger waves of powerful emotion; they manipulate this emotion for political benefit; and they threaten or break established principles of governance.
【Garden variety?】相关文章:
最新
2020-09-15
2020-08-28
2020-08-21
2020-08-19
2020-08-14
2020-08-12