From John’s “abusive rhetoric” … take a look at the emphasized sentence. From this one sentence alone, one can see the author lives in la-la land. It’s BS.
Characteristics of Demagoguery
By Trish Roberts-Miller
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Demagoguery is a discourse that promises stability, certainty, and escape from the responsibilities of rhetoric through framing public policy in terms of the degree to which and means by which (not whether) the outgroup should be punished for the current problems of the ingroup. Public debate largely concerns three stases: group identity (who is in the ingroup, what signifies outgroup membership, and how loyal rhetors are to the ingroup); need (usually framed in terms of how evil the outgroup is); what level of punishment to enact against the outgroup (restriction of rights to extermination).
Demagoguery is always polarizing, and always relies on binaries. It is not distinguished by emotionalism or populism, not only because lots of very good and helpful methods of deliberation are emotional and populist, but because it is often not emotional at all, and quite often elite discourse. Demagoguery can look “rational” in that it can provide a lot of data, numbers, assertions, and even analyses (as in Grant’s Passing of the Great Race, or Laughlin’s report for the 1924 Immigration Act).
It has certain characteristics:
Binary paired terms. A concept described by Chaim Perelman, paired terms are sets of binaries that are assumed to describe a logical relationship. So, for instance, a common set of paired terms in demagoguery is:
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Thus, one either punishes or rewards others. To punish others is strong and manly; to reward them is weak and girly.
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