Long may we laugh at our absurd demagogues

In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke warned that ‘pure democracy’ was as dangerous as absolute monarchy. ‘Of this I am certain, that in a democracy the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority whenever strong divisions prevail,’ he wrote. He compared demagogues to ‘court favourites’ — gifted at exploiting the -insecurities of the powerful, whether the people or the monarch.

For Burke, the risk of democracies being captured by demagogues then degenerating into tyrannies was a good argument against universal suffrage. The multitude would always be susceptible to being swayed by feeling rather than reason; they could no more be trusted with absolute power than a king or a queen. The answer, he believed, was a mixture of democracy and aristocracy, the one acting as a counterweight to the other.

It’s a curiosity of Burke’s essay that in the 226 years since it was published, his pessimism has proved well-founded about almost every country that has embraced universal suffrage except Britain. Looking at Europe and its neighbours, it’s tempting to conclude that this problem afflicts only immature democracies. I’m thinking of Russia and Turkey, but it’s also a problem in Poland, Hungary and Romania and may yet prove the undoing of France’s fifth republic. Indeed, I suspect the reason arch-federalists like Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk aren’t that keen on democracy is because it paved the way to dictatorship in Italy, Spain and Germany. You could argue that the EU was established to ‘save’ the Continent from the excesses of mob rule, with unelected commissioners and senior officials standing in for Burke’s hereditary elite.

But Donald Trump’s success suggests that even mature democracies are vulnerable to demagoguery. He is the latest in a long line of populist firebrands stretching back to ‘Pitchfork’ Ben Tillman, the senator who led a paramilitary group and boasted of killing African-Americans during the 1876 election.