The Classical Demagogue

A dēmagōgos (demagogue) was, for the ancient Greeks, an agos (leader) of the dēmos (the common people; the many), while a dēmēgoros was one who speaks before the public assembly (agoreuō). In classical democratic practice, these terms were not pejorative or condemnatory; they only assumed this aspect when classical political thought, especially that of Plato, and subsequently of Aristotle and Plutarch, defined a demagogue as someone who, driven by self-advantage and wealth, seeks political power by flattering the people and pandering to them.Footnote ⁹ In doing so, these philosophers were attempting to understand and address a new democratic phenomenon that had already been noted by poets and historians: the rise of exceptional individuals such as Cleon, the wealthy Athenian who became general after Pericles's death and who was notorious for using inflammatory speeches and buffoonery to encourage the greed and audacity of the Athenians in the Peloponnesian wars.Footnote ¹⁰ Cleon, according to Thucydides, convinced the Athenians to put to death the men of Mytilene (a city on the island of Lesbos that had revolted from Athens), a decision they repudiated the next day.Footnote ¹¹

Classical political thought saw the demagogue as someone from the demos, or the many poor, though he could also be an oligarch who “played the demagogue” or appealed to the people to gain advantage in oligarchic rivalry.Footnote ¹² The demagogue was therefore distinguished from the politikos, or statesman, who possessed political virtue and knowledge and who pursued the common good or advantage through public policy defended by persuasive speech or rhetoric that moderated rather than excited the envy, fear and hopes of the many.Footnote ¹³ The demagogue was also distinguished, at least initially, from the tyrannos, or tyrant, who sought to rule for their own advantage by overturning democracy, though to the extent that some demagogues encouraged the decrees of the people to override the laws, they secretly aspired to be tyrants.Footnote ¹⁴ Thus the classical political understanding of the demagogue, by focusing on the leadership of the people and emphasizing the rhetoric or public speaking that has such a pre-eminent role in democracies, attempted to reveal the crucial link between the demagogue and democracy, the regime founded on the rule by the many. It is instructive to examine this classical understanding of regime because it is in the larger context of regimes and the dynamic struggles between their different principles that the demagogue makes an appearance; it also helps us to see how this approach differs so profoundly from that of the modern state, which was one of the major innovations liberalism initiated to restrain the demagogue.

Classical political thought understood the demagogue in the context of the politeia, or regime—the authoritative arrangement of offices that not only accounted for the organization or structure of institutions but also, more fundamentally, revealed the aspirations or goals of each political community. In classical thought, each regime aimed not only at the necessary aspects of all political organizations, including material prosperity and security, but was also animated at its core by a higher conception of the good. Regimes were therefore much more than contractual arrangements between citizens but indeed defined, and therefore were evaluated by, their views of the noble or complete life. These notions of the noble or good life included a life of virtue, honour, wealth or freedom, so that regimes were defined as aristocratic, timocratic, oligarchic or democratic.Footnote ¹⁵ The character of the regime was evident, above all, in the nature of those who held highest office, as well as in the practices and institutions they defended. But it was usually in cases of regime change or revolution, when a regime shifted from one conception of the noble life to another, that its nature was most visible. These changes took place because there was a tendency for all regimes to insist on and promote their core principle and therefore exclude or disenfranchise other ideals, leading to instability and—potentially—stasis, or revolution.

Although there was a diverse range of regimes, classical thought saw the predominant struggle in all politeiai as one between the rich few and the many poor, so that most regimes were animated and defined by the constant struggle between democrats and oligarchs.Footnote ¹⁶ This conception of regimes accounted for the practical political solutions offered by classical thinkers on how to moderate and stabilize regimes, especially by countering the impulse of all regimes to become more extreme by asserting their principles to the exclusion of others. The classical proposals therefore included instituting the rule of law and the mixed regime that would combine oligarchic and democratic offices to accommodate the concerns of each and thereby make room for those in the middle, who would moderate the struggle between the rich and the poor. These solutions were also intended to provide room in ruling offices for those who sought not just the partial good but the good of the city as a whole. The distinction between just regimes, which aimed at the common good, and corrupt regimes, which pursued the interest of a part, was intended to educate all in the idea of a good that transcended any specific interests one may have in the polis.Footnote ¹⁷

In classical thought, the demagogue, as noted above, is someone who is a leader or defender of the demos, or the people. The democratic principle, based on the equality of all citizens, meant a much broader franchise and therefore a regime that was more stable than an oligarchy, which in asserting its principle of merit measured by wealth, inevitably limited the range and scope of citizenship and concentrated authoritative offices in the hands of a few families. Yet, like all regimes, democracy tended to assert its foundational principle of equality in ever increasing and comprehensive ways. The expansion of equality, to the extent that it broadens access to authoritative offices, would seemingly support a regime's stability and therefore not be a weakness. But in seeing all inequality, including differences based on wealth, virtue and talent as fundamentally unjust, democratic regimes revealed a powerful egalitarian impulse vulnerable to exploitation by demagogues.Footnote ¹⁸ The envy and resentment born of this democratic sense of unjust inequality and the fear that democracy was ever subject to oligarchic subversion were passions exploited by the demagogue—apparently to defend the regime but, in fact, for personal advantage and aggrandizement. The demagogue would use the lifeblood of all democracies—public speaking and persuasive speech or rhetoric—to show how he was the great defender of the people and democracy against those who threatened the regime by moving it toward oligarchic principles or, worse, by treacherously depriving the people of their freedom by supporting foreign powers. In attacking the rich and well born, the demagogue exploited democratic envy and resentment of any inequality to promise redistribution of wealth, becoming the hero and leader of the people—a champion of the downtrodden who now had someone to defend and benefit them. The people were willing to give as much authority as possible to the demagogue to allow the prosecution of a cause in the name of the people, but in doing so, they did not realize that they were undermining the regime itself. The ambitious and articulate demagogue was therefore able to alter the democratic regime not by force but by personal accumulation of authoritative offices, resulting in due course in the overthrow of the regime and the institution of the rule by one for the demagogue's own benefit, also known as tyranny.Footnote ¹⁹

The classical attempt to counter this weakness of democracy took a number of forms, such as the polity (or mixed regime) and the rule of law, in addition to those noted above. More specifically, classical political philosophers sought to educate the talented few who had political ambitions to pursue the public good rather than tyranny. The education of the statesman and potential philosopher was therefore the major theme for classical political thought.Footnote ²⁰ A second theme was the education of the democratic public, so that people would be able to distinguish between statesman and the demagogue. The introduction of this distinction, the extensive writings on sophistry, and the analysis of the new art of rhetoric that sought to show the techniques of persuasion founded on ethos, logos and pathos were all instituted precisely for the purpose of teaching the public how to recognize demagogues and thereby undermine the beguiling force of their powerful rhetoric.Footnote ²¹ Classical political thought therefore sought to ameliorate rather than extirpate the weaknesses of democracy through moderation of regimes and democratic education in rhetoric and justice.

Modernity and the Problem of the Demagogue

Is the populist a demagogue “by another name”? It would seem that the demagogue has now been replaced in contemporary political studies by the populist.Footnote ²² But in what way is the populist different from the demagogue? Does the populist address a fundamentally different phenomenon? In the discussion that follows, I will argue that modernity, in its liberal aspect, sought to solve conclusively the problem of the demagogue by replacing the classical regime with the modern neutral state. But this attempt proved to be a mixed success, giving rise to the new demagogue, or populist. As I will show, the demagogue is in important respects similar to the populist, but there are also important differences between the two. The populist is more constrained than the classical demagogue, especially by modern liberal innovations such as constitutionalism and the larger state. But the populist is also now better armed, with new conceptions of the “people” and new rhetorical means in the form of propaganda. To see this second aspect more clearly, we need to note the two broad distinctions in modern thought that are consequential for populism—its liberal trajectory, and those aspects that were opposed to it. As we will see, the liberal aspect of modernity sought to do away altogether with the problem of the demagogue by denying any distinction between statesman and demagogue and then by caging both within legal and institutional structures that would curb and exploit individual ambitions for the common advantage. Those aspects of modernity that challenged liberalism, as we note in the next section, retained important features of liberal thought but, in contesting liberalism, in effect rearmed the demagogue as the modern populist with the new language and weapons of modernity.

To understand why liberal modernity needed to confront and solve the problem of the demagogue, it is necessary to start with the seemingly new challenge that revealed religion presented to the classical solution to the problem of the demagogue. The relationship between classical thought and the Abrahamic religions—especially the way that Judaism, Christianity and Islam appropriated aspects of classical thought and the extent to which modern theology owes its origins to such philosophy—is a deep and complex question.Footnote ²³ What is clear, however, is that the distinction between sacred and secular, and the intrusion of theological concepts and divine mandate into political debates, posed a profound new challenge to political authority. Demagogues could now use the language of theology, including the concepts of sin, divine punishment and redemption, as well as the new rhetorical forms, such as prophecy, sermons and edicts, to question and even override the authority of secular rulers. This new manifestation of the “false prophet” therefore questioned the truth and relevance of the classical insights into politics altogether.Footnote ²⁴ Consequently we find in early modernity not only a direct attempt to confront and limit the role of piety in politics but also a wholesale repudiation of major aspects of classical thought due to its perceived complicity in the new pious politics. We can see this clearly in Machiavelli's The Prince, where he announces that he will “depart from the order of others,” going to the “effectual truth” rather than “imagined republics and principalities,” to advise princes “to learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity.”Footnote ²⁵ The new approach was founded on a realism that eschewed revelation in the name of reason. As a result, modern thinkers radically questioned the classical concept of the regime and the ambition to moderate the excesses of political instability through mixed regimes and education in virtue. Their clear-eyed assessment of the limits of virtue and justice in politics allowed them to attack classical hopefulness, even utopianism.

Yet this repudiation permitted modern thinkers to entertain much greater hopes for the efficacy of their political insights and proposed institutional solutions. An instructive example is Thomas Hobbes, who is so consequential for our discussion because of his influential ideas of power, the social contract and the modern state.Footnote ²⁶ Hobbes regards the glory-seekers and the ambitious, those who desire office or precedence, as one of the major causes of political instability and war (Lev. VI, 123; Lev. XIII, 185). “Popularity of potent Subject (unlesse the Common-wealth has a very good caution of his fidelity,) is a dangerous Disease,” according to Hobbes, “because the people (which should receive their motion from the Authority of the Sovereign,) by the flattery, and by the reputation of an ambitious man, are drawn from obedience to the Lawes, to follow a man, of whose virtues, and designes they have no knowledge” (Lev. IXXX, 374). Such individuals become especially dangerous, according to Hobbes, when they claim divine authority and exploit religious fears to achieve their ambitions.Footnote ²⁷ The solution Hobbes proposes is radical; indeed, he claims that he is the first political scientist who has solved the problem of politics and secured the basis for “peace everlasting,” provided his ideas are implemented.Footnote ²⁸ He sought to do so by repudiating classical political thought and its new theological admixture, scholasticism. Hobbes argues that the absence of a summum bonum, or an ultimate good, combined with the human desire to seek power to satisfy indeterminate future desires, results in competition and contention, and ultimately a state of war. The solution to this perennial and foundational problem of conflict is a legal contract where all agree on what is summum malum, namely fear of violent death, bringing into existence a new entity, the “state,” as an artificial god to enforce the original contract of peace. Hobbes's new politics, founded on the desirability of peace rather than the contradictory and irreconcilable claims over what is a good life, was intended to disable the demagogue and potential tyrant. In doing so, however, he denies any difference between statesman and demagogue because his concept of power assumes all seek power and therefore cannot be criticized for doing so—“Desires, and other Passions of man,” according to Hobbes, “are in themselves no sin” (Lev. XIII, 187). Moreover, Hobbes's new conception of the state disengages the demagogue from its original link with democracy because the state is now conceived as a neutral executive architecture designed to secure the agreed-upon goals of security and prosperity by ousting the destabilizing and deadly debates over justice of regimes. From now on, only the state is legitimate and incidentally, because it is founded on the rights of nature of each individual, only the state as contract (and not patria as “land”) is legitimate, denying the demagogue the ability to use patriotism or the welfare and prosperity of the people as the basis for rhetorical claims. Finally, all who challenge the state, especially those who use revealed religion, are defined by Hobbes as proud or vainglorious, a form of madness.Footnote ²⁹ Consequently, the artificial god of the Leviathan state does away with the proud and ambitious—those who would exploit the people's fear of divine punishment to satisfy their personal desire for power—by instituting a machinery of state that is enforced by the actions of the contracting parties who, in pursing their private lives, also reinforce and protect the workings of the state. We therefore find at the origins of the modern state a radically new basis for political stability that has, as an important part of its strategy, a concerted attack on the demagogue. This approach was subsequently taken up and refined by other liberal thinkers, who introduced new features, including representative democracy, separation of powers and federalism, to limit and fragment power and thereby direct the ambitions of the demagogue into more salutary channels.Footnote ³⁰ The liberal trajectory of modernity can therefore be seen as a direct assault on the demagogue—not on the classical basis of an education that distinguishes between statesman and demagogue and instructs in the art of rhetoric, or moderates the struggle between the few and the many by means of the polity, but on the basis of a new institutional solution that channels individual ambition for the common advantage. The intention, it would seem, is to exploit the energy and ambition of the demagogues and, in doing so, conclusively remedy the danger they posed.Footnote ³¹

Challenges to Liberal Modernity

The liberal movement in modernity confronted a number of profound challenges, from traditional or conservative sources, as well as from those who endorsed its modern premises but sought to repair or correct its deficiencies.Footnote ³² How these different approaches conceptualized and sought to ameliorate the challenge of the demagogue is an important question that has yet to receive the attention it warrants. In this context, we will focus on the historical turn in modernity initiated by Hegel and on the subsequent movements both on the “Left” and the “Right,” because these redefined the nature of political debates and, in so doing, provided new opportunities to the modern demagogues or populists. Both the Left and the Right continued to accept the liberal premises: for example, the modern concept of the “individual” and progress. But, in important respects, they liberated the demagogue and provided a new rhetorical armoury.

Perhaps the major difference between the Left and Right was the different role of individual leadership within their philosophical architecture. Hegel's “Spirit,” as transformed by Marx into dialectical materialism, accorded primacy to transcendent causes, so that the role of any one individual (and therefore of the populist) became questionable: for example, consider Hegel's claim that if not Napoleon had not existed, someone else would have taken his place, as well as the problem of the individual in Marxism, evident in the concept of the “vanguard of the revolution.”Footnote ³³ On the Right, we find a greater scope for individual agency albeit in a supra-political aspect, with an emphasis on the creative individual who, in gathering in himself the forces of fate and history, can stand above morality to redefine the “tablet of values” as Nietzsche puts it.Footnote ³⁴

In addition to this difference, there was the importance to be attributed to ideas. The need to theorize the character of dialectical materialism, and especially to account for class consciousness, resulted in the introduction of “ideology” and false consciousness into the political lexicon, justifying the populist on the Left who could now exploit the new language of modern science to pursue his personal cause in the name of a larger historical mission. Marx's “class struggle” and the need for the working class to overthrow the bourgeoisie provided scientific proof of the arguments previously exploited by demagogues against the rich. On the Right—by drawing on Rousseau's defence of the fundamental equality and natural goodness of man and his celebration of the infallible “General Will,” on Herder's emphasis on language for defining a people, and on Hegel's insights into recognition of the “Other,” as well as on the newly emergent concept of the “nation” and therefore nationalism—a new conception of the “people,” one derived from categories based on language, soil, race and blood, came to redefine the older political understanding of demos. The people were no longer “the many”; they were now a new entity with a noble mythical and metaphysical genealogy that justified grand ambitions—and sacrifices. This new rhetorical trope had the added advantage of being true by simple assertion, without the burdensome duties of persuasion imposed on demagogues by the old language of judgment, justice and common good. History and class were scientifically true, just as das Volk and Heimat were self-evident and incontrovertible to all who belonged. Finally, for both the Left and the Right, the modern state with its size, territorial sovereignty and technological achievements permitted a new and powerful tool for the populist. Though the size of the modern state seemed to be a fatal limitation on demagogic speech, technological advances made possible a new intimacy with the people, while the concentrated resources of the state made possible propaganda, the new powerful weapon in the arsenal of the populist.Footnote ³⁵

Populist as New Demagogue

We are now in a position to see if our examination of the populist and the demagogue has brought us any closer to answering our initial question of who is the modern populist. As we have noted, the demagogue, in classical thought, is a leader of the common people, or the many—someone who exploited factional differences between the few and the many, and especially between the rich and poor, by using speech that fed rather than moderated public fear, envy and indignation, all for personal advantage and, in the extreme case, to overthrow democracy for personal rule. This classical approach to understanding the demagogue is especially illuminating because it reveals the distinctive moral, political and rhetorical aspects that, combined, yield a comprehensive account that allows us to distinguish the statesman from the demagogue. Accordingly, in the discussion below, we take up each of these aspects of the classical understanding to see what is distinctly modern about the populist. What our discussion will reveal, in each instance, is that the theoretical concerns and presuppositions of modernity, both in its liberal and counter-liberal aspects, as noted above, refract and inflect the terms of the debates and, in doing so, occlude the character of the modern populist.

To what extent does the moral dimension of the classical understanding of the demagogue capture an important aspect of the populist? In classical thought, the major difference between the statesman and the demagogue is that the demagogue seeks rule for self-aggrandizement. The modern view of the populist, as our discussion above indicates, shows a variety of divergent positions on this formulation due to tensions within modernity regarding the nature of leadership and the character of politics more generally. The first is the claim that this conception of demagogue is unhelpful or meaningless because individuals and their psychology are not consequential in politics due to the predominance of larger historical movements (whether spiritual or material), unconscious forces or the primacy of behaviours over intentions. The second is to concede an important role to leadership but to deny any difference between statesman and populist on the basis that all leaders are power-seeking individuals. This approach has been justified on the basis of a scientific or positivistic impulse in modern social sciences that seek to observe effects rather than make moral or evaluative judgments.Footnote ³⁶ Confronted with this dilemma, the third position has been to accept a moral distinction between statesman and populist but to find this distinction not in a leader's character or ambition but in their rhetoric. This approach reduces populism to a question of rhetorical technique and nothing more. As a result, leaders who use certain forms of expression are called populist and others are not.Footnote ³⁷ The final approach is to see the populist as a unique leader, a special figure ordained by spirit, or fate, to promise a new beginning. This view sees the populist as a “charismatic” or creative individual who transforms and reconstitutes politics in radically new ways. Such an approach clearly makes the populist an exceptional and morally ambiguous phenomenon rather than an ordinary and recognizable aspect of democratic politics. In doing so, however, it excludes a range of leaders who are clearly not exceptional in this sense yet nevertheless could be understood as populists.Footnote ³⁸

These contending modern presuppositions, individually and combined, have in effect complicated and obscured the question of who is a populist and therefore, in important respects, can be seen as the theoretical provenance of the seeming elusiveness of the populist in the contemporary scholarship. In other words, the divergence and diversity in the scholarship, I suggest, has its source not in the nature of the populist itself but in modernity and its ambition to solve the problem of the demagogue. More significantly, to the extent that these approaches all neglect or deny the important moral dimension of the populist, they necessarily preclude the relevance of the classical understanding of the demagogue and consequently emphasize other aspects, such as rhetoric, culture or ideology, to understand the nature of the populist. Yet when we put to one side these theoretical presuppositions, what emerges is the similarity of the populist and the demagogue, in terms of their moral disposition, character and ambition, and therefore the relevance of the classical conception of the demagogue for our contemporary understanding of the populist. To be sure, the evaluation of the motives of leaders and therefore our ability to distinguish between the statesman, demagogue and the tyrant has, in practice, always been fraught with difficulty, not least because our judgment can be clouded by the unavoidably partisan nature of political struggles. This problem is exacerbated in the case of the populist by the power and prevalence of modern concepts and formulations, making it hard to distinguish the populist who exploits them, especially those who do so by devising bespoke ideologies (“Peronism”), from millenarian leaders who genuinely see themselves as servants of history or the embodiment of the “Will of the People.” One way to address this problem, I suggest, is by recovering the classical concept of magnanimity that distinguished between noble ambition and mere self-advancement.Footnote ³⁹

The second important aspect of the classical understanding of the demagogue concerned the political context, specifically the struggle between the few and many and therefore the importance of democracy as a regime for understanding the demagogue. As our discussion has revealed, both the demagogue and populist are essentially linked to democracy. Yet the classical regime is significantly different from the modern state, above all in the fact that modern democracies are liberal—founded and defined by constitutionalism, separation of power, an independent judiciary and concepts of rights (whether natural or human). This means the populist confronts more extensive and formidable hurdles and obstacles in the state than the demagogue did in the classical regime.Footnote ⁴⁰ The demagogue, as leader of the many, was seen as an essentially democratic phenomenon. Insofar as demagogues posed a challenge to good public policy and the stability of the regime, they were also seen as the perennial weakness of the otherwise stable democratic regime that needed to be moderated or ameliorated. The populist, located in the modern ordering of the state, presents a different character. Because of the asserted neutrality of the modern state regarding regime type, the populist is no longer understood as the inevitable problem of democracy. Attempts to view the populist as a larger political problem not directly linked to democracy have in general proven to be unhelpful because they have made the populist “disappear.” One such approach, as we have seen, has been to view the populist as a sociological or cultural phenomenon. Another has resulted in a shift in focus from the “populist” (the person) to a concept wholly unknown in classical political thought—“populism”—to understand the phenomenon of the populist. The continuing debates regarding the efficacy of these sociological and “ideological” approaches confirm the relevance and salience of democracy for understanding the populist.Footnote ⁴¹ Yet the modern political context of the state has made a significant difference for the populist, as opposed to the classical demagogue. The modern liberal-democratic state's attempt to address the problem of the demagogue institutionally has resulted in a series of formidable obstacles to the ambition of the populist.Footnote ⁴² Modern states, to the extent that they are founded on constitutions, tend to be representative democracies that limit executive power, through term limits, or by dividing and defraying power, or even through federalism. Combined with limitations on executives imposed by bills of rights, democratic and procedural difficulties of amending constitutions and the oversight exercised by a legally protected judiciary with powers of judicial review, we can see that the populist now confronts complex and interrelated institutional obstacles that were previously unknown to the demagogue. In this sense the populist is in a much weaker position than the demagogue.Footnote ⁴³

To what extent does rhetoric, the third aspect of the classical definition of the demagogue, reveal important insights into the question of who is a populist and, more specifically, what is modern about the populist? Our discussion suggests that in focusing on rhetoric or persuasive speech, we discern a significant difference between the populist and the demagogue. The demagogue's power lay in the ability to appeal to, and therefore exploit, the passions of the people, making the people angry or indignant by showing the injustice of the rich and fanning their envy and greed by promising to distribute the ill-gotten wealth of the rich to the poor. They were also made fearful by showing how their freedom was being threatened or subverted by domestic or foreign oligarchic conspiracies. Importantly, though the demagogue in the small community of the polis was restrained by rules, laws and conventions, the great bulwark against him was the perception of his legitimacy. The demagogue had to pretend to be a statesman, concerned with the common good and with the interests of the polis at heart. He was therefore burdened with the fear of being called a demagogue by other leaders who could appeal to a public educated to discern the art of rhetoric and how it revealed the difference between the statesman and the demagogue. The populist, too, I would argue, appeals to the passions of the people and in general wants to avoid the charge of being a populist. But in two respects the populist is better armed than the demagogue. The first is that Hobbes's assumption that we are all power seekers, comparable to Hume's “just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave” [italics in original] sustains the contemporary anti-politics and anti-politician sentiment that is unable to distinguish between statesman and populist.Footnote ⁴⁴ Where the demagogue was proud to claim to be a political leader, the populist exploits the charge that “all politicians are the same” with the simple expedient of claiming they are not. To be politically inexperienced, with no real record of public service, is for the populist a badge of honour rather than the indictment of lack of ability and experience that it had been in the past. The populist can therefore now defend his or her legitimacy by the simple expedient of claiming to have never served in office or been a leader, as opposed to the demagogue who had to show good leadership.Footnote ⁴⁵ The second concerns the more expansive range of concepts and formulations available to populists to achieve their goal of persuading the people and thereby secure their private advantage or—depending on their own self-awareness—fulfil their chosen role in a grander political drama. This advantage is due to the more extensive lexicon and concepts at the disposal of the populist due to the nature of modern politics. While the demagogue deployed the language of the rich or poor, citizenship and justice, the modern populist's vocabulary is now unmoored from the political. It is instead abstract, religious, scientific and metaphysical.Footnote ⁴⁶ Instead of rich and poor, it now consists of defending the one “class” against the predations of others.Footnote ⁴⁷ The “many” is now seen as the virtuous “People,” defined by nation, ethnos, faith or history.Footnote ⁴⁸ The wealthy few are now cunning “elites” with their hidden yet vast conspiracies. This new lexicon and repertoire expands the glossary of indignation or resentment (even if not speaking of justice, as such, because it remains fundamentally political), allowing the populist to make claims and assertions in shorthand, within scientific, religious or ideological frameworks that define terms and debates. This new language of populism can in addition draw on the seemingly limitless power of the state and the technological advances it promotes and wields. The obstacle to speaking to everyone due to the size and scope of the modern state can therefore be overcome by the populist through radio, television and modern social media that promise faux familiarity and intimacy. Combined with modern refinements in marketing and advertising, the populist can now make use of costly, yet comprehensive, ubiquitous, and repetitive propaganda that declares or asserts simple words or phrases instead of persuading the public with complex and nuanced arguments. These advantages therefore make the populist a more formidable and dangerous challenge to democracy than the classical demagogue.