All demagoguery all the time: Fox News and American politics' epidemic of craziness

Joseph Heath
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"Straight-up propaganda": Fox News, charlatans, conspiracy theorists and the religious fanatics endangering democracy

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Excerpted from "Enlightenment 2.0: Restoring Sanity to Our Politics, Our Economy and Our Lives"
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An epidemic of craziness seems to have swept over the American political landscape. This is of course a problem not just for Americans, but for people all around the world. It remains the case that most people think of the United States as the world's leading democracy. Although they may not choose to imitate many of the specific features of American democratic institutions, the prestige of democracy around the world is very much tied up with the performance of the American system. When this political system proves demonstrably  incapable of keeping charlatans, conspiracy theorists, and religious fanatics out of political power, this is a huge blow to the prestige of democratic systems as a whole.
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To see the problem that this creates, consider the situation in China, where plenty of people have very reasonable concerns about the possible consequences of democratization and whether it would be, on the whole, good for their country. Defenders of the existing system, such as Zhang Weiwei, put the argument in exactly these terms: "Despite its well-known strengths, liberal democracy as an institution has been seriously eroded by such persistent problems as demagoguery, short-termism, simple-minded populism, the excessive influence of money and the role played by special interests . . . the Chinese system of meritocracy makes it inconceivable that anyone as incompetent as America's George W. Bush or Japan's Yoshihiko Noda could ever get to the top." The more degraded and corrupt American democracy becomes, the more difficult it becomes to argue for democracy-even if many of the conditions in the United States are a consequence of unusual features of that particular political system, which need not be imitated elsewhere.
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Contemporary apostles of democracy often like to wax rhapsodic about the origins of Western civilization in Athens during the classical period. They point to democracy as one of the preconditions for the great flowering of science, art, philosophy, and mathematics that occurred during that period. They often forget to mention that the great philosophers of ancient Athens-Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle-were quite hostile to democracy. Their central objection to popular rule was that they regarded it as unstable. The figure that they feared most was that of the demagogue, the unscrupulous individual who could gain power by appealing to the emotions and prejudices of the people. For Plato in particular, it was this vulnerability to demagoguery that was the fatal flaw in democratic political systems.
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