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...the Mississippi, seated in an impressive series of gardens and carefully groomed shrubbery. I had never heard of the building before moving to Baton Rouge, and shortly after my arrival in July of 2002, I walked across the street to experience the much talked about monument for myself. When I saw it, I was overcome with the kind of adolescent bemusement immortalized in the Washington Monument scene from the 1996 theatrical hit, Beavis and Butthead Do America (Figure 1). [1] Aside from providing Louisianans an endless reference for jokes about the state's colorful political history, something deathly serious remains after the laughter abates. [2] A clue to the gravity of this unusual (or, rather, all too common) monument is that it is "commented" upon by another: in front of the capitol and erected upon the grave of a popular former governor and US state senator, a statue of Huey Pierce Long beholds the New State Capitol in awe (Figure 2), its right hand thrown back in both bravado and astonishment (Figure 3), its left resting atop a scale model of the building (Figure 4). As the following excerpt from a field guide to the state capitol demonstrates, Long is inextricably wedded to the building, sometimes referred to as "Huey's monument" or "achievement":
Huey P. Long, one of the most dynamic personalities ever to flash across the American political scene, dominated Louisiana politics for seven years, serving as [the] Governor from 1928 to 1932 and as a U.S. Senator from 1932 until he was shot to death in 1935. Ironically, he was mortally wounded in a still-unexplained melee inside the capitol, the magnificent structure he conceived, rallied public support for, and pushed to completion in only two years. Even today, more than four decades after his untimely death, his presence still looms large over the entire edifice. (Jolly and Calhoun 2)
[FIGURES 1-4 OMITTED]
The rhetorical figure of Huey haunts the capitol and discourse about it, which is literally guaranteed by the proximity of his interred corpse. The dialogue between these two monuments is about gifts and gifting and consequently engages the rhetoric of responsibility: the statue of Huey is admiring the New State Capitol but also stands in awe of the building that the historical Long helped to erect; his phallus towers over him, symbolically oblivious to Long's likeness, as if to remind the petrified subject of his duty to "the people." In this sense, these monuments illustrate the way in which human symbolicity is more in control of us than we are of it: from a distance, the large statue of Long is dwarfed by the memorial to his political prowess (Figure 1). After the laughter passes, standing at the site of these monuments one can succumb to an uncanny feeling, a ghostly sensation and intellectual uncertainty about whether the monuments jubilantly celebrate or mournfully regret the death of this important historical figure (of course, it is both). The feeling is uncanny not only because reactions to the historical Long are ambivalent but also because the massive size of these monuments asks the spectator to reckon with his or her own sense of autonomy and significance, to measure up to the power of the symbolic at the same time one measures up to the legacy of a powerful dead man (see Freud, Uncanny 120-153; Royle 1-38). Prima facie, words fail to describe this feeling.
Such ambivalence about the figure of Long is homologous to the way scholars have approached and reacted to the elusive rhetorical mode he exemplifies: demagogic rhetoric. Patricia Roberts-Miller has recently argued that although an increased interest in demagoguery has arisen among political theorists, "demagoguery has more or less disappeared from [rhetorical] journals and books" because we simply cannot agree about how to define it (460). [3] As Roberts-Miller frames it, the problem is overcoming disagreement about what makes a demagogue a demagogue with a better or more robust definition. I would add that the dissatisfaction with our previous understanding of the demagogue concerns our failure to attend more studiously to the particularities of the emotional appeal, which many suggest is the most distinctive feature of demagogic discourse. [4] In this essay, then, I draw upon Lacanian psychoanalysis to advance a more nuanced understanding of demagoguery and, even more specifically, the emotional appeal that centers it.
Using Long as an example, I begin first by suggesting that a psychoanalytic understanding of "desire" helps us to explain better the feeling of being moved by a charismatic speaker (even from beyond the grave!). I then argue that demagogic rhetoric is goaded by the desire-driven, psychical structures of neurosis, namely, obsession and hysteria. In distinction from the hysteric, who constantly identifies him- or herself with the object of another's desire, the demagogue is an obsessional neurotic, righteously complete, frequently obscuring or erasing audiences as mere objects at the exact moment of professing his or her love for them. Ironically, I argue that the obsessional rhetor appeals to audiences precisely because of his or her apparent completeness and lack of need for listeners--because he hystericizes audiences by claiming to bring order to chaos, thereby representing strength, resolve, and absolute autonomy. Understanding the psychical structures of obsession and hysteria as dialectical modes of charismatic encounter, I argue, explains the psychodynamics of the demagogue as a unique economy or arrangement of desire that places much more emphasis on the feelings inspired by ethos and pathos, and largely at the expense of logos and reasoned argument.
Part I: Desire and the Figure of the Demagogue
Huey P. Long as the Defining Exemplar
Although scholars do not agree on the central characteristics of the demagogue, they do agree on who counts as one. [5] Of the many politicians held out as exemplars of "demagoguery," Long is among the most popular, so much so that his figure is in many ways a measure for the rest. For example, most of the rhetorical scholarship on demagoguery focuses on the skills and timeliness of the rhetor, and in retrospect, the combination of Long's skills and the timeliness of his ascent to power are so kairotic that his career has been likened to "the theme for a motion picture scenario, except for the fact that it happened" (Farley in Bormann 244). [6] Long is simultaneously one of the most hated and beloved political figures in the "New (post-Reconstruction) South." The subject of numerous books, films, and documentaries, Long's notoriety unquestionably stems from his unique style of statecraft and public address (see Boulard; Bormann; Hogan and Williams, "Rusticity"; Jeansonne; Long, Every; Williams, "The Gentleman"; and Williams, Huey). He rose to state and national fame as an eloquent, charming, and sometimes buffoonish outsider wielding a polarizing and populist rhetorical style. For most of his political career, he attacked the unequal distribution of wealth and the lack of educational opportunities for the poor. As governor, his popularity soared as a result of many state-sponsored gifts: he abolished the poll tax; new roads were constructed and paved throughout Louisiana as a result of his policies; children in the public school system that Long championed received free textbooks; he built what was once the premiere land- and sea-grant educational institution of the south, Louisiana State University, and insisted on the unparalleled excellence of its football team, the Tigers; he established free hospitals and attempted to socialize healthcare; and he rallied support for the construction of opulent state buildings that included a brand-new governor's mansion (deliberately modeled after the White House to reflect Long's presidential ambitions) and, of course, the New State Capitol building.
Long's oratorical skills were exceptional. Harold Mixon notes that he was renowned for "his ability to adapt his appeals with equal ease to audiences in Louisiana's Protestant north as well as those of the Catholic south" (Mixon 184). Many scholars have suggested that his deliberately polarizing rhetoric worked by arousing the anger and hopes of the working poor, many of whom lacked the basic everyday conveniences most of us take for granted today, such as running water and electricity. Ernest Bormann notes that although on the national stage Long was initially received as a "clown and a typical southern demagogue," in Louisiana "Long was taken seriously indeed" (Bormann 214). So seriously, in fact, that on a September Sunday in 1935, he was killed, assassinated by the son-in-law of a political rival. The monuments erected to his political career reflect the significance of Long's mystery and memory to Louisianans past and present.
Although Bormann suggests that Long is held up as a "typical southern demagogue," the meanings of this label vary from one scholar to the next. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the ancient meaning of "demagogue" is what most of us today would term a populist. The more contemporary usage, however, is "a political agitator who appeals to the passions and prejudices of the mob in order to obtain power or further his own interests." [7] Bormann's characterization of Long underscores the association of demagoguery with southern populism. Similarly, Roberts-Miller argues that our understanding should not divorce the concept from its populist legacy; she suggests that demagoguery is "polarizing propaganda that motivates members of an ingroup to hate and scapegoat some outgroups" with promises of a coming era of stability and control (462). From a historical vantage, Cal M. Logue and Howard Dorgan have demonstrated that the demagogue is almost always identified as male. Further, Logue and Dorgan suggest that the study of the figure of the demagogue can be reduced to three caricatures: an insincere, immoral opportunist; a charismatic leader who inflames passions for political ends; and a kind of apocalyptic preacher who amplifies a sense of crisis in order to reveal a novel, faith-based solution (3-6). Central to all of these definitions and rhetorical caricatures, however, is the role of emotional appeals--the inspiration of passion, prejudice, polarization, and hate--which are usually described in a pejorative manner. Curiously, love, that which a demagogue inspires among his or her followers, is scarcely mentioned. [8] Nevertheless, no matter how one defines or characterizes the demagogue, we can at least describe the figure as a passionate person who appeals to the emotions of an audience. But how does the demagogue make these appeals, and what is their character? How do these emotional appeals differ from others? To better discern the specificity of demagoguery, I argue that we need a more sophisticated account of the "emotional appeal" that is almost universally identified as the demagogue's primary rhetorical signature.
Demagogic Desire and the Emotional Appeal
With few exceptions, the rhetorical tradition offers little theory that helps us to understand the way in which the emotional appeal works. (9) In general, since the time of Aristotle the study of the emotional appeal tends to fall into either descriptive or instrumentalist accounts. In On Rhetoric, for example, Aristotle discusses the emotional appeal (pathos) in mostly descriptive terms. Emotional appeals have psychological effects on the minds of audiences, insofar as emotions are defined as "mental states," such as "pity, anger, shame," and so on (Lee 67). Although the second book of On Rhetoric devotes large sections to the emotional appeal, the discussion takes on a pragmatic, behaviorist tone (119-215). As Lee explains, from Aristotle's point of view, the rhetorician should "devote particular study to the range of several emotions so that each will be understood psychologically along with the practical measures necessary to evoke it" (71). Such a hydraulic model of the emotional appeal (do this to produce that) would persist until the field of psychology began to emerge in the eighteenth century and work by figures such as George Campbell began to emphasize more strongly the psychological basis of emotions, appetites, and passions.
Arthur Walzer has argued...
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