This is a wonderful discussion that reflects the tensions in our pursuit of democracy today. Rachel has brought up trenchant thoughts on the value of culture and power in democracy, Matt has raised provocative questions about whither demagogues in America today, and Brian asks how we go about building democracy in Afghanistan in light of the perils there today.

All good questions that I urge you to look into and comment about.

But I'd like to concentrate instead here on two posts by readers.

Saladin writes,

Thank you very much for posting this synopsis for us slackers who did not get the reading done. It is very helpful. There is a lot to chew on here.

"is a state of mind, an expectation, a norm in which politics must be conducted in accordance with standing rules or conventions, written or unwritten, that cannot easily be changed; it is a principle whereby all power is limited, and whereby forces of power can act and decide only within strict limits defined by the national constitution."

Forgvive me I am not a trained political scientist, I am curious about how and when those rules should move. Is it only when the motives are pure? How does one know? How does a polity recogonize that some rules are helpful while dismissing those that have outlived their usefulness?

Hannah1980 then writes:

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Interesting stuff, I've jsut finished reading Demagogue by Michael Signer so this post really attracted my attention. Has politics ever not been about being a demagogue? Obviously there are extreme versions but surely the nature to democracy to some degree is about being a demagogue and appealing to the people's desires?

These are tough and important questions. Let's take them in turn.

Demagogues, by nature, violate established rules -- they threaten order. Saladin rightly notes that what "order" and "rules" means is not fixed, not set in stone. This might be frustrating to an analytical philosopher looking for a clean, bright-line definition of what a demagogue is and isn't. But as I point out in the book, we shouldn't spend too much time on this question, because demagogue isn't a binary category. It is instead a sliding scale -- someone can be more or less of a demagogue, just as they can bend OR break the rules.

Demagogues are contextual -- they are products of a given culture and they violate order and test boundaries (and threaten violence) based on a country's own standards. The point is that each country has its own sense of legitimate lawfulness.

But constitutionalism -- the two-pronged sense I argue for in the book, both internal (individuals proudly regarding themselves as people with rights and freedoms and an obligation to participate in public life) and external (keeping leaders who would be authoritarians on a short leash) -- will always hem in those who would test or break established rules -- whatever those rules are.

Now, on Hannah's question, "Has politics ever not been about being a demagogue?" and whether "the nature to democracy to some degree is about being a demagogue and appealing to the people's desires."

It's a fascinating question.

Just as war is an extension of politics by other means, demagoguery is an extension of democracy by other means. As I argue throughout the book, demagogues have haunted democratic politics since its inception -- whenever you introduce political freedom, there is always a perverse paradox -- that the people will hand over their power to a demagogue (in the ancient Greek, the word simply mean "leader of the people" -- but they also triggered the "cycle of regimes," where a democracy becomes a tyranny through the agency of a demagogue).

This means that Hanhah is onto something. There is perhaps a little bit of demagoguery in most democratic politics. To the extent unscrupulous and ambitious political figures get traction and start seeing openings, they will try and push the people to give them more and more power. It's a slippery slope from that to Huey Long to Hugo Chavez to Moqtada al-Sadr or Benito Mussolini.

That's where the people come in. The bulwark (in Matt Dallek's nice phrase) to this slippage is constitutionalism -- when the people, in concert, stop democracy's tendency to disintegrate at the hands of a demagogue. The people rescue democracy from its historical paradox -- just as they are the raw fodder of a demagogue, they can also resolve the demagogue. This, I argue, is one story about America. And it's one we need to keep in mind at this very critical turning point for democracy around the globe.

So a couple of questions... Demagogue is about democracy and constitutionalism -- what do your inquiries and these questions suggest about freedom itself today? Secretary Gates recently said we should no longer aim for a "Valhalla" of democracy in Iraq. If freedom is the bulwark to authoritarianism, have we done enough thinking about what true (constitutional) freedom actually should be? In an age where we see both overt tyranny -- I would count Lukashenko in Belarus and Putin in Russia as examples -- but also more insidious forms of control and oppression through surveillance, intimidation, and simple chaos (as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan) -- what are we aiming for? What's the end state?

I argue in the book that democracy needs to take into account local culture and history to be constitutional, and that, for instance, elements of Sharia law could be considered in cultivating constitutionalism in historically majority Muslim countries. Brian does a good job of flagging the challenges to U.S. policy-making. But in the question of vision: what would this mean in Afghanistan, for instance? What's the end state?

A related but somewhat different question -- and this goes to Hannah1980's point -- where are we in our deeper, more philosophical thinking about freedom? Demagogues are locked in a deadly dance with freedom throughout history. But we break free often enough. Am I justified in my optimism that freedom is on a constantly-improving arc in history? Or is Hannah1980 right (I am paraphrasing her) that democracy is more or less condemned to fusion with the demagogue?