Donald Trump's speech day in two phrases.

“Lock her up”

“Locker-room talk”

Donald Trump and "The English Constitution" in Debate No. 3

Here is the British political theorist Walter Bagehot writing in his The English Constitution (1867), the same year as the Second Reform Bill which expanded the franchise to a portion of urban male working classes in England and Wales for the first time, doubling the vote from one million to two million, still quite shy of ‘one man, one vote.’  Bagehot’s latent fear is that the Vox populi will descend into a form of Vox diaboli, and here he echoes John Stuart Mill’s and Alexis de Tocqueville’s concern with “tyranny of the majority.”  But what is notable in Bagehot (quoted below) is the emphasis on the “responsibility” of leading statesmen to give “the manly utterance of clear conclusions … in a felicitous way”[1] and not to raise questions which are “antagonistic to the whole interest of the state.”  Donald Trump’s unprecedented claim that the American elections are “rigged” – and his refusal to deny this in American debate No. 3 - bringing into question the 240-year-old America tradition of peaceful transition of governments should he lose – is his clearest abdication of responsibility yet and more characteristic of demagoguery than anything else.

… our statesmen have the greatest opportunities they have had for many years, and likewise the greatest duty.  They have to guide the new voters in the exercise of their franchise; to guide them quietly, and without saying what they are doing, but still to guide them.  The leading statesmen in a free country have great momentary power.  They settle the conversation of mankind.   It is they who, by a great speech or two, determine what shall be said and what shall be written for long after.  They, in conjunction with their counsellors, settle the programme of their party – the ‘platform’, as the Americans call it, on which they and those associated with them are to take their stand for the political campaign.  It is by that programme, by a comparison of the programmes of different statesmen, that the world forms its judgement.  The common ordinary mind is quite unfit to fix for itself what political question it shall attend to; it is as much as it can do to judge  decently of the questions which drift down to it, and are brought before it; it almost never settles its topics; it can only decide on the issues of those topics.  And in settling what these questions shall be, statesmen have now a great responsibility. If they raise questions which will excite the lower orders of mankind; if they raise questions on which these orders are likely to be wrong; if they raise questions on which the interest of those orders is not identical with, or antagonistic to, the whole interest of the state, they will have done the greatest harm they can do.[2]

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[1] Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (New York: Doubleday/Dolphin, nd), p. 20.

[2] Ibid., p. 18.

Trump's Temperament

... neither … moderated by reason nor fixed by faith.[1]

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[1] Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ed. and Abridged Hans-Friedrich Mueller (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), p. 414, (Chapter XXI).  Here Gibbon is speaking of Emperor Constantine’s son Constantius.

Gibbon on American Debate No. 2 and Trump's Transgressions

Every popular government has experienced the effects of rude or artificial eloquence.  The coldest nature is animated, the firmest reason is moved, by the rapid communication of the prevailing impulse, and each hearer is affected by his own passions and by those of the surrounding multitude.  The ruin of civil liberty had silenced the demagogues of Athens and the tribunes of Rome; the custom of preaching, which seems to constitute a considerable part of Christian devotion, had not been introduced into the temples of antiquity; and the ears of monarchs were never invaded by the harsh sound of popular eloquence till the pulpits of the empire were filled with sacred orators, who possessed some advantages unknown to their profane predecessors.[1]

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[1]Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ed. and Abridged Hans-Friedrich Mueller (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), p. 398, (Chapter XX).  In this Chapter on the Conversion of Constantine, Gibbon writes: “According to the strictness of ecclesiastical language, the first of the Christian emperors was unworthy of the name till the moment of his death.”  (p. 376)