Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery, and the Troublesome Case of Eugene Debs

Deep on Chicago's South Side, down around 117th Street if memory serves me, there is an old-fashioned supper club, Sneaky Pete's Hideaway, a steak and chop joint where the neon is vintage; the atmosphere is loud and smoky; the martinis are large and icy-cold, made with Gilbey's or Beefeater, not Bombay Sapphire, and never in trendy flavors; the waitresses have little white aprons; every table is served a large tray of crudités, though no one at Sneaky Pete's would dignify a relish tray with such a term; and a diner's only real decision is what cut of meat and how it is to be cooked (Vegetarian? "Hey, Mike, we gotta guy in da dining room says he's a vegetarian!")—the macaroni salad and other sides are served to everyone, "family style."

Professor Patricia Roberts-Miller's proposal for a renaissance of demagoguery studies—the subject itself, the use of Erich Fromm, the prominence of Joe McCarthy and Joseph Stalin—put me in mind of Sneaky Pete's. Although it is Professor Roberts-Miller's goal to bring the study of demagoguery into the twenty-first century, her review of literature on the subject is like a little step back in time, and her survey of the recent (not more than 20 years old) literature outlines an absence, a lacuna. The trail left by her subject was hot and fresh in the fifties and sixties, but grew faint in the seventies, and is today nearly cold.

I am pleased to have my work on the prophetic tradition and radicalism included in Professor Roberts-Miller's survey of "recent" rhetorical work with implications for a renewed study of demagoguery. It's a conversation in which I wished to be included, but it was a tributary I could not, when writing The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America, follow lest I be deflected from my investigation of the prophetic voice. I take my inclusion in Professor Roberts-Miller's review of literature as an invitation to join the conversation now in a very direct way.

Professor Roberts-Miller expresses her desire to rescue "demagoguery" from its status as a mere epithet and to provide it with analytical power, but her own empirical definition of "demagogue"—a list that includes Adolf Hitler, Huey Long, Father Coughlin, Joe McCarthy—militates against her broad purpose. Professor Roberts-Miller has stacked the deck; she has begun her inquiry into the nature of demagoguery by assuming, at the outset, that she knows a demagogue when she sees one and that the traditional roster of demagogic figures is largely correct. Rather than let "demagogue" rest as a succinct ad hominem attack to be hurled at those with whom we disagree, Professor Roberts-Miller lines up some of the most reviled political figures of the twentieth century and sinks the term under the weight of their collective maleficence.

When I wrote The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America, I placed the question of ethos at the very center of the book. The question of prophecy, like the question of demagoguery, is fundamentally a question of ethos. The case study in The Prophetic Tradition that explicitly announces ethos as its subject is that of Eugene Debs, but the chapter with which the Debs chapter is paired—as the narrative, having moved inward to the ethos of prophecy, begins to move outward following the trajectory of prophecy's disintegration—is the chapter treating one of Roberts-Miller's exemplary demagogues, Joseph McCarthy, and herein lies a cautionary tale for Professor Roberts-Miller's easy equation of demagoguery with historically unsavory characters from the political right.

Joe McCarthy represents the culmination of popular reaction, in the 1950s, against many tendencies that Eugene Debs helped to introduce into American politics. Debs and many of his colleagues were victims of the first great Red Scare, and McCarthy helped to fan the flames of the second one. There can be little doubt that, had the two men lived at the same time, they would have been implacable enemies...