Ridicule especially antagonizes the demagogue. It deflates the pretentious and the powerful. It reduces to human size those puffed up by their self-importance. It exposes them for who they are. It affirms the self-respect and dignity of the oppressed. Demagogues, lacking the capacity for self-transcendence, cannot see the ludicrousness and absurdity of their pretensions. They cannot distinguish between their inner fantasies and reality. They can belittle and ridicule others, as Trump does, with great cruelty, but they see nothing humorous about similar treatment directed at the self-created edifice of their own glory.
"There are people who tell jokes," goes a joke illustrating the morbid humor prevalent among the populace in East Germany during the communist rule. "There are people who collect jokes and tell jokes. And there are people who collect people who tell jokes."
I have covered numerous demagogues as a foreign correspondent, including the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi and the Syrian dictator Hafez Assad of Syria, as well as Erich Honecker of the former East Germany, Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania and Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia. They had different idiosyncrasies and styles. Gadhafi and Ceausescu loved the spectacle and pomp that come with power. Milosevic and Assad spent long periods out of the spotlight. But all had patterns of behavior exhibited by Trump.
Bertolt Brecht's "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui" provides the blueprint for how demagogues work. It is the story of a Chicago mobster cornering the cauliflower market in 1930s Chicago through threats, blackmail and coercion. It is also a thinly disguised allegory for the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The Barker, who opens the play, lays it out in the prologue:
"Ladies and gentlemen, we present today,
The great historical gangster-play!
Learn all bout blackmail and framing! Further:
How to succeed in big business through murder."
Demagogues expend great energy marginalizing, censoring and silencing all critics, something the corporate state has already done to dissidents such as Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader. They use the media, especially the airwaves, as a vast public relations department to amplify their lies and promote their personality cults. They destroy cultural and education institutions, replacing them with rote vocational training, nationalist kitsch and tawdry entertainment. They elevate members of their family, sect, tribe or clan to the inner circles of power. (Trump's tribe, of course, is the billionaire class.) They put generals in key positions. Those in the military appeal to demagogues because they are not trained to think but to be obedient. The military also does not shrink from violence. The demagogue and the inner circle grow fabulously rich by pillaging the state. They live in private inner sanctums of opulence and depravity that resemble Versailles or the Forbidden City. They banish anyone in the court who tells them unpleasant truths. They read into the most benign acts wild conspiracies. They often sexually assault girls and women. Hussein and Gadhafi were notorious rapists. Trump's misogyny is well documented.
Demagogues foolishly see the elaborately staged public events held for them as proof that a populace loves and respects them. And in the final, decrepit stages of their rule they became grotesque parodies of themselves. The sycophants around them, profiting from the orgy of corruption, feed their gargantuan self-delusion. The demagogues, believing they are divinely inspired geniuses and omnipotent, make decisions based on hallucinations. When a demagogue reaches that stage, society can be obliterated.
Demagogues usually seek to immortalize their grandeur in huge building projects that are monuments to their immortality. Saddam Hussein sought to rebuild the ancient city of Babylon. He constructed a replica of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II on the ruins of the original, embossing his name, like Nebuchadnezzar II, on many of the bricks. Gadhafi built the largest irrigation system in existence, calling it "the eighth wonder of the world." Ceausescu, whose birthday was a national holiday, constructed a massive palace, The People's House, at a cost of $1.75 billion in Bucharest. He conscripted as many as 100,000 workers for the project. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, who died from accidents during the construction. The palace, which is the second largest building in the world, after the Pentagon, has 3,500 tons of crystal and 1 million cubic meters of marble. It was two-thirds finished in December 1989 when the regime was overthrown. In a visit to the national museum that winter, I found it filled with idealized portraits and busts of Ceausescu. Rooms were devoted to hagiographic accounts of his mythical life story. Building projects and image creation of this kind make Trump -- who has decorated his residence in Trump Tower as if he were Louis XIV, the Sun King -- salivate.
Demagogues foster the psychosis of permanent war, which often leads to actual war. The psychosis of permanent war becomes a tool to abolish civil liberties and condemn dissent as treason. Huge expenditures go into the military, which demagogues see as an extension of their personal power, while the rest of the country decays. There is nothing a demagogue loves more than a big military parade.
The story of demagogues is as old as civilization. They have risen and fallen like the tides, always leaving in their wake misery, destruction and death. They exploit the frustrations and anger generated by a decayed society. They make fantastic promises they never keep. They demonize the vulnerable as scapegoats. They preach hatred and violence. They demand godlike worship. They consume those they rule.
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