This essay argues that scholars who focus on demagogues rather than demagoguery are mistakenly making charismatic leadership a necessary quality of demagoguery. Instead of focusing on demagogues, we should focus on the conditions that nurture demagoguery. This essay makes the case that charismatic leadership is not necessary for demagoguery but an almost inevitable method of gaining compliance in a culture that promotes outcomes-based ethics.

This paper argues that, for many people and in many circumstances, public deliberation is about group identity rather than argumentation. Research on ingroup and outgroup thinking in social psychology helps to explain why thinking in terms of group identity is so powerful. The power comes from the promise that the world is a stable and easily known place, made up of discrete and transparent groups.