Demagoguery as Pathology: Interpreting European Politics Today

Abstract

The End of Europe by James Kirchick and The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray evince many of the very same political and discursive pathologies which they successfully diagnose in European politics. Both authors have discovered that Europe’s current situation is as much a result of irresponsible public policies and mismanaged crises as of a decay in European political thinking, a decay manifested in Europe’s ever-more simplistic, anti-deliberative—in a word, demagogic—public discourse. And yet, Europeans of today find themselves in a social, political, and economic crisis in part because they lack the discursive means to recognize and deliberate on the very crisis they are in. The result is a damaging political state of affairs which makes escape from itself nearly impossible—a political pathology. Kirchick and Murray do a fine job of capturing the true character of this discourse in their books, yet they do so by unwittingly reproducing it themselves, thereby revealing the difficulties inherent in reforming a political culture from within.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Paul Seaton for his help and patience during the publication process, and Jeffrey Tulis, from whom we have learned the significance of political rhetoric.

Notes

1 Jan Werner-Muller, What is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); William A. Galston, Anti-Pluralism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018).

2 E.g., Grinne de Burca, “The Drafting of a Constitution for the European Union: Europe’s Madisonian Moment or a Moment of Madness?” Washington and Lee Law Review 61, 2 (2004): 555–583; J. H. H. Weiler, The Constitution of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

3 When Democracy Trumps Populism: European and Latin American Lessons for the United States, edited by Kurt Weyland and Raúl L. Madrid (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019). See also Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018).

4 James Kirchick, The End of Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017); Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

5 Kirchick, The End, 170. Similarly, in describing Muslim communities in France, “the subtleties of a very serious problem—the presence within European societies of an increasingly alienated and ghettoized Muslim underclass—were lost amid the sensationalist and inaccurate commentaries by the guests of an American cable news network and the self-righteous retorts by various French public figures,” ibid., 144.

6 Murray, Strange Death, 27. See also 28–29.

7 For a fuller discussion of discursive and political pathologies, see Charles U. Zug, “The Rhetorical Presidency Made Flesh: A Political Science Classic in the Age of Donald Trump,” Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 30, 3–4 (2018): 347–368; Charles U. Zug, “Can Political Science Become Diagnostic? Restoring a Forgotten Method,” Perspectives on Political Science 48, 1 (2019): 56–63.

8 Kirchick, The End, 1.

9 Kirchick does hold out the possibility of healthy national pride and regrets that nationalism has become a sore point for many Europeans: “While they should always be vigilant toward ethnic chauvinism and xenophobia, Europeans should also create a space for healthy nationalism—patriotism—that refuses to let the crimes of their past be used as a sort of moral bargaining chip over its future,” ibid., 130. Overall, however, the thrust of Kirchick’s book is against resurgent ethno-nationalism.

10 Ibid., e.g., 6.

11 Ibid., 2.

12 Ibid., 90–91, my emphasis.

13 Ibid., 11–39.

14 Ibid., 40–70.

15 Ibid., 58.

16 Ibid., 71–81.

17 Ibid., 82–91.

18 Ibid., 168–170. Kirchick states that “a more compelling Euroskeptic argument is that Britain’s EU membership has allowed for untrammeled immigration onto an already overcrowded island” and that “[a] British government could have decided a long time ago to reduce [the country’s] immigration numbers,” ibid., 168–169.

19 Ibid., 154–163.

20 Ibid., 161.

21 E.g., Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, The Movie (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1987); Jeffrey K. Tulis, “The Demon at the Center,” University of Chicago Law Review 55, 2 (Spring 1988): 548–554.

22 E.g., Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, American Conspiracy Theories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

23 Such an account might well be modeled after Rogers M. Smith’s pathbreaking work in Civic Ideals (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997).

24 For the best discussion of this approach to political argumentation, see Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), chapter 2.

25 For a superb summary of this dimension of the Federalist argument, see Herbert J. Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981) 38–47.

26 Pascal Bruckner, La Tyrannie de la pénitence (Paris: Grasset, 2006).

27 Murray, The Strange Death of Europe, 172.

28 Chantal Delsol, Le souci contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).

29 Murray, Strange Death, 221–222.

30 Ibid., 213–215.

31 Ibid., 23–27.

32 Ibid., 7–8.

33 Consider the German doctrine of Lebensraum, or “living space,” which was appropriated by the Bismarckian and Nazi empires. Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

34 Ibid., 33, 35.

35 Ibid., 35, my emphasis.

36 Ibid., 33, my emphasis.

37 Ibid., 30.

38 E.g., Smith, Civic Ideals.

39 It is perhaps worth drawing a distinction here between the individual-rights oriented classical liberal framework I sketch here and more contemporary forms of liberalism, or progressivism, which are based on identity politics. See, e.g., Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal (New York: Harper Collins, 2017).

40 Ibid., 48, my emphasis.

41 Ibid., 57, my emphasis.

42 Ibid., 53.

43 Ibid.

44 The survey can be accessed at: https://www.icmunlimited.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Mulims-full-suite-data-plus-topline.pdf.

45 Ibid., 157–177.

46 Ibid., 174.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid., 175.

49 Ibid.

50 Douglas Murray, “Norway Syndrome: A New Condition for Western Victims of Rape,” The Spectator, April 8, 2016: https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/04/norway-syndrome-a-new-condition-for-western-victims-of-rape/.

51 “Once a week for 3 months, they meet for televised group therapy together with celebrity psychologist Peder Kjøs in a studio. They also keep a video blog in which they document their emotional ups and downs.” Adriana Margareta Dancus, “The Virality of Norwegian Guilt. How a Story of Male Rape from Norway Made International Headlines,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 10, 2 (2018): 75.

52 Ibid., 74–82.

53 Ibid., 78.