In the United States, our most successful demagogues have often become so by making skillful use of whatever the newest media was at the time. Charles Coughlin, the Catholic priest who railed against Jews and capitalism in the nineteen-thirties, did most of his railing via the radios that the American masses had just recently acquired. In the early fifties, Joseph McCarthy took advantage of television’s advent to attract gavel-to-gavel attention for his congressional hearings. Donald Trump is a celebrity demagogue, and, for the moment, anyway, the leading Republican Presidential candidate, because of reality television and Twitter.
Here in America, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, sexism is very much on the wane, but misogyny is not. Sexism—the conviction that women don’t deserve equal pay, political rights, or access to education—can be combatted by argument, by anti-discrimination laws, and by giving women the opportunity to prove their ability. Misogyny is not amenable to such advances; they can in some circumstances exacerbate it, though they may drive it underground.
Ross Perot, the last shoot-from-the-hip, vote-for-me-I’m-a businessman, Republican-ish candidate we saw on the Presidential debate stage, was not given to insulting women. So on one level, Trump’s preening misogyny and gross-out insinuations are something new—a weird product of his own personality and the id-indulging media through which he generally communicates. In their exchange at last week’s debate, Kelly reminded him, “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals,’ ” and then asked if that called to mind “the temperament of a man we should elect as President.” It was a legitimate question, but Trump offered no real answer, let alone regret; the problem, he said, was “political correctness.” None of the other nine candidates onstage countered this interpretation.
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