In Defense of Demagogues

by Murray Rothbard

[Posted April 26, 2002]

This short manuscript is dated 1954. It has never before been published.

For many years now, demagogues have been in great disfavor. They are not
sober, they are not respectable, they are not "gentlemen." And yet there
is a great and growing need for their services. What, exactly, have been
the charges leveled against the demagogues? They are roughly three in
number.

In the first place, they are disruptive forces in the body politic. They
stir things up. Second, they supposedly fail to play the game in
appealing to the base emotions, rather than to cool reason. From this
stems the third charge: that they appeal to the unwashed masses with
emotional, extreme, and, therefore, unsound views. Add to this the vice
of ungentlemanly enthusiasm, and we have about catalogued the sins of
the species demagogue.

The charge of emotionalism is surely an irrelevant one. The problem of
an ideology is not whether it is put forth in an emotional,a
matter-of-fact, or a dull manner. The question is whether or not the
ideology is correct. Almost always, the demagogue is a man who finds
that his ideas are held by only a small minority of people, a minority
that is apt to be particularly small among the sober and respectable.
Convinced of the truth and the importance of his ideas, he sees that the
heavy weight of public opinion, and particularly of the respectable
molders of this opinion, is either hostile or indifferent to this truth.
Is it any wonder that such a situation will make a man emotional?

All demagogues are ideological nonconformists and therefore are bound to
be emotional about the general and respectable rejection of what they
consider to be vital truth. But not all ideological nonconformists
become demagogues. The difference is that the demagogue possesses that
quality of mass attraction that permits him to use emotion to stir up
the masses. In going to the masses, he is going over the heads of the
respectable intellectuals who ordinarily guide mass opinion. It is this
electric, short-cut appeal direct to the masses that gives the demagogue
his vital significance and that makes him such a menace to the dominant
orthodoxy.

The demagogue is frequently accused by his enemies of being an insincere
opportunist, a man who cynically uses certain ideas and emotions in
order to gain popularity and power. It is almost impossible, however, to
judge a person's motives, particularly in political life, unless one is
a close friend. We have seen that the sincere demagogue is very likely
to be emotional himself, while stirring others to emotion. Finally, if a
man is really an opportunist, the easiest way to acclaim and power is to
play ball with the ruling orthodoxy, and not the opposite. The way of
the demagogue is the riskiest and has the least chance of success.

It is the fashionable belief that an idea is wrong in proportion to its
"extremism" and right in proportion as it is a chaotic muddle of
contradictory doctrines. To the professional middle-of-the-roader, a
species that is always found in abundance, the demagogue invariably
comes as a nasty shock. For it is one of the most admirable qualities of
the demagogue that he forces men to think, some for the first time in
their lives. Out of the muddle of current ideas, both fashionable and
unfashionable, he extracts some and pushes them to their logical
conclusions, i.e. "to extremes." He thereby forces people either to
reject their loosely held views as unsound, or to find them sound and to
pursue them to their logical consequences. Far from being an irrational
force, then, the silliest of demagogues is a great servant of Reason,
even when he is mostly in the wrong.

A typical example is the inflationist demagogue: the "monetary crank."
The vast majority of respectable economists have always scoffed at the
crank without realizing that they are not really able to answer his
arguments. For what the crank has done is to take the inflationism that
lies at the core of fashionable economics and push it to its logical
conclusion. He asks; "If it is good to have an inflation of money of 10
percent per year, why isn't at still better to double the money supply
every year?" Only a few economists have realized that in order to answer
the crank reasonably instead of by ridicule, it is necessary to purge
fashionable economics of its inflationist foundations.

Demagogues probably first fell into disrepute in the 19th century, when
most of them were socialists. But their conservative opposition, as is
typical of conservatives in every age, never came to grips with the
logic of the demagogues=92 position. Instead, they contented themselves
with attacking the emotionalism and extremism of the upstarts. Their
logic unassailed, the socialist demagogues triumphed, as argument always
will conquer pure prejudice in the long run. For it seemed as if the
socialists had reason on their side.

Now socialism is the fashionable and respectable ideology. The old
passionate arguments of the soap box have become the tired cliches of
the cocktail party and the classroom. Any demagogy, any disruption of
the apple cart, would almost certainly come from the individualist
opposition. Furthermore, the State is now in command, and whenever this
conditions prevails, the State is anxious to prevent disruption and
ideological turmoil. In their wake, demagogues would bring "disunity,"
and people might be stirred to think for themselves instead of falling
into a universal goose-step behind their anointed leaders. Furthermore,
individualist demagogues would be more dangerous than ever, because they
could now be equipped with rational arguments to refute the socialist
cliches. The respectable statist Left, then, fears and hates the
demagogue, and more than ever before, he is the object of attack.

It is true that, in the long run, we will never be free until the
intellectuals--the natural molders of public opinions--have been
converted to the side of freedom. In the short run, however, the only
route to liberty is by an appeal to the masses over the heads of the
State and its intellectual bodyguard. And this appeal can be made most
effectively by the demagogue--the rough, unpolished man of the people,
who can present the truth in simple, effective, yes emotional, language.
The intellectuals see this clearly, and this is why they constantly
attack every indication of libertarian demagoguery as part of a "rising
tide of anti-intellectualism." Of course, it is not
anti-intellectualism; it is the saving of mankind from those
intellectuals who have betrayed the intellect itself.

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Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was professor of economics at the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas. This manuscript is among his archives
held at the Mises Institute.