Listen / Read
I’ve had to listen to this a few times to consider each point on balance. I’m probably a bit biased in favour of Obama (probably quite a bit), and my immediate reaction is to spit feathers at religious folk for choosing this occasion to think critically and get all cynical. I mean, what the fuck, yo? And why would you go banding about words like ‘demagogue’ in reference to America’s first black president?
Vishvapani paired ‘demagogue’ with ‘Democrat’, for the joy of alliterative tinkering. But the two words’ shared etymology just reminded me of what another black leader once said when accused of demagoguery :
“Well, let’s go back to the Greek, and maybe you will learn the first thing you need to know about the word ‘demagogue’. ‘Demagogue’ means, actually, ‘teacher of the people’. And let’s examine some demagogues. The greatest of all Greeks, Socrates, was killed as a ‘demagogue’. Jesus Christ died on the cross because the Pharisees of His day were upholding their law, not the spirit. The modern Pharisees are trying to heap destruction upon Mr. Muhammad, calling him a demagogue, a crackpot, and fanatic. What about Gandhi? The man that Churchill called ‘a naked little fakir’, refusing food in a British jail? But then a quarter of a billion people, a whole subcontinent, rallied behind Gandhi – and they twisted the British lion’s tail! What about Galileo, standing before his inquisitors, saying ‘The earth does move!’ What about Martin Luther, nailing on a door his thesis against the all-powerful Catholic church which called him ‘heretic’? We, the followers of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, are today in the ghettoes as once the sect of Christianity’s followers were like termites in the catacombs and the grottoes – and they were preparing the grave of the mighty Roman Empire!”
Malcolm X, of course. Both words begin with the Greek ‘demos’, meaning people; “-crat” is from ‘kratos’, meaning ‘rule’; and “-gogue” is from ‘agogos’, meaning ‘guide’.
Of course in contemporary use, Malcolm X was referred to as a demagogue in his Nation of Islam days because he was a black separatist whose militantly aggressive language and vilification of white ‘devils’, it was feared, would have black people literally taking arms against their white oppressors.
Today we might refer to the likes of BNP leader Nick Griffin as a demagogue, and I’ve heard Fox News accused of demagoguery before now. A demagogue is one who appeals to popular desires and prejudices as opposed to reason and the use of rational argument. Kind of like Republicans.
So I felt a bit uncomfortable when Vishvapani used that word. Even though he tried to balance his overall assessment of Obama’s speech and language, I don’t feel he succeeded. The only sense in which Barack Obama could conceivably be considered a demagogue is classically so, in the Greco-Roman sense of a leader who espouses the cause of the common people. Today’s common people want to live in a better, fairer, wiser world and Barack Obama has espoused that cause.
Sure, now he’s done that, realism has to set in. I heard echoes of Jimmy Carter in his acceptance speech as he told Americans that times are going to be hard, that they’ll have to take collective responsibility for the work to be done. And Kennedy too: “Ask not what your country can do for you…”
Giving Vishvapani the benefit of my attempt to remain unbiased, he seems to be saying that in all this hullabaloo, this ‘secular’ fervour, we still need to have our wits about us. But Barack Obama’s entire campaign has been underlined by people power, and his election demonstrates that the people have stopped being ‘in thrall’ to the politics of fear which have demagogically dominated much of the last 8 years. In more ways than one Obama’s message is about freedom.
So for fuck’s sake, save the cynicism for someone more deserving of it and give the man a damn chance, motherfuckers.