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4.6 • 8.7K Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2015

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Diagnosing a demagogue; breaking down a media feeding frenzy in San Bernardino; and the life and death of New York Times reporter and AIDS victim Jeffrey Schmalz.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Bob Garfield.
0:08.2	And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Seems that we have to figure out how to grapple with a demagogue.
0:14.1	Don't take my word for it. Search demagogue on Google News, and you get this.
0:19.2	And then you have demagogues like Trump coming along.
0:21.8	He says, I know what the cozy of problems is.
0:23.4	Where Trump is demagoguing and getting up and saying Obama is going to take your guns.
0:27.1	Donald Trump, a demagogue with a soft spot for a dictator.
0:31.2	But Michael Signer, author of the book Demagogue, the fight to save democracy from its
0:35.9	worst enemies, says a true demagogue must meet
0:39.0	19th century writer James Fenimore Cooper's four criteria.
0:43.6	One, they must pose as a mirror for the masses.
0:47.4	Two, they must trigger great waves of emotion.
0:51.0	Three, they must use that emotion for political gain, and four, they must seek to
0:57.6	break the established rules for governance. Cooper was by no means the earliest to fear demagogues,
1:04.5	that where he dates back to the ancient Greeks. Signer says it was also very much on the minds
1:10.2	of the founding fathers.
1:12.0	There are several institutions that we have that are meant to protect us from the danger of demagogues.
1:17.8	One of them is the U.S. Senate.
1:19.4	It was meant to be kind of a house for statesmen who would see it as their mission in American public life
1:25.4	to lead us kind of away from temptation and toward
1:29.4	higher accomplishments.
1:32.2	Mm-hmm.
	...

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