How the Words of Demagogues Seize Power

Philippe-Joseph Salazar, Contre la Rhetorique. Comment les mots des demagogues prennent Le pouvoir [Against rhetoric. How the Words of Demagogues Seize Power] (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 2024).

1. In the Aftermath of an Election

Several people have asked me in recent days, “As a philosopher, how do you explain Donald Trump’s electoral victory in the US presidential election on November 5, 2024?” I had just read Philippe-Joseph Salazar’s book, Contre la rhétorique. Comment les mots des démagogues prennent le pouvoir [Against Rhetoric], and I had prepared a review. As philosophical eternity meets political actuality from time to time, it seemed to me that I could contribute to the philosophical understanding of the present time, if I hurried to finish and publish an extended review of this book, which is presented here.

Caveat 1. Against Rhetoric is certainly a reflection on political language in the present time, but there is, as far as I know, no mention of Trump, or his rivals. This book cannot therefore relate to the election that has just taken place, except insofar as this election is a phenomenon of political language, necessarily situated in the field of which Salazar theorizes.

Caveat 2. “Demagogues,” for Salazar, are those who practice a certain abuse of language, which is the rhetoric he writes against. For Salazar, the word “demagogue” therefore means a precise concept, formed in contact with a large mass of carefully analyzed facts. In the mainstream media, the word “demagogue” obviously does not have such a rigorous meaning. That Trump is a “demagogue,” in the sense that the mainstream media give to the word, is self-evident. But it is just as obvious that these media are among the places where rhetoric, in the Salazarian sense of the word, is practiced to the full, consisting of rigorous demagogy, whose favorite instruments are, precisely, “words,” armed with magical power. That is why the most effective demagogue is not necessarily the one you think, if you think at all. Basically, everything depends on the meaning of the word “demagogue;” let us say the content of the concept, so to speak or, in the absence of a concept, of the verbal and mental mush that takes its place.

2. Introduction

This is a little more, or a little less, than a book review —it is a dialogue with a good book. What is a good book? Paul Valéry said—and I agree: “A good book is one that makes me have ideas.” In what follows, then, the reader may find it difficult to distinguish Salazar’s ideas from those that his book made me have, or brought back to my mind for further consideration. But I have done my best to avoid confusion.

The best praise you can give a book is to say that you found it interesting enough not to put it aside, then to have been hooked by it enough to read it to the end, finally to have found it nourishing enough to have felt compelled to reinvent and assimilate it. If the assimilation is very thorough, it is hard, in the end, to draw the line between him and me. Confusion here is more like communion.

In the analysis of very subtle thought, I do not exclude the possibility of having produced misunderstandings; but if this is the case, and I find illumination in them, I thank the author for having allowed me to commit them, certain that in addition to forgiving them, he will be kind enough to explain them to me.

This book on political rhetoric seems to me practical, for the use of citizens and decision-makers, or at least those who wish to have the means of not letting themselves be dominated by postmodern sophists and demagogues. That I why I liked it right away.

It is an astonishing book, in many ways, written by a Frenchman who, although educated in France in the Sorbonian and Normalien seraglio, chose to make his career in South Africa, where he has become a figurehead. And yet, despite his globetrotting life and highly developed international culture, he remains extremely attentive and sensitive to what is going on in his homeland, which is very immediate in his book—more so, certainly, than the US and its political divisions. But perhaps this exile is not so surprising. This book, like the others I have read, notably Hyperpolitique. Une passion française belongs to the forma mentis generally attributed to Anglo-Saxons. He (Salazar) always starts from singular facts (in this case, “words,” their uses and powers), and works his way back to their reasons, and has no taste for systematization or explanation by first principles. Which always causes a certain frustration for my almost genetic Cartesianism.

Against Rhetoric is also a book of astonishing style, deliberately non-academic, not for lack of erudition or rigorous thought, but because this consummate rhetorician, who knows the rules of ars bene dicendi inside out, has chosen to adopt a provocative style, almost oral, very lively, colloquial at times, combining inner discourse uttered to the outside world as it emerges, chaotically rigorous, with constant rejoinders to interlocutors who are none other than Leviathan and his henchmen, bombarded with rage and pulverized without mercy. Salazar is to thinking what Céline is to the novel.

Against Rhetoric is a book of conviction and combat for justice, freedom and the dignity of the people, the popolo magre, exploited and debased, “exterminated,” by a perverse plutocracy, and dominated by the perversion of language. “We are reduced to the zero degree of speech. How does this alienation work… The audience does not think the words they speak” (p. 17).

“They should be saying, ‘We are being exterminated,’ but they have been robbed of the words to say this” (p. 176). Salazar clarifies and corrects the Marxist concept of dominant ideology by showing (we will come back to this) that ideological domination can paradoxically be reinforced by replacing the ideology itself, which remains conceptual and human, with a system of words functioning as clichés, signals and stimuli, motor or inhibitory; in other words, with an animalistic human language, enabling the stripping away of thought, the imposed formatting of a priori, simplistic and artificial representation, and reflexive conditioning.

The politico-linguistic analysis can be extended to the international order. “To denature a people’s language is to ruin the logical structure of its thought, it is to alienate that people” (p. 92). It is around this idea that a great moment of French-style anti-Americanism is organized. But Salazar’s emotional relationship with the Anglo-Saxon world is extremely ambivalent.

Salazar’s book is proof that a science book can also be a passionate and exciting read, and that the supposed axiological neutrality of knowledge can function as an ideological mask for sordid interests. Rhetoric (the good kind) thus becomes a necessary auxiliary of philosophy and science, against pseudo-science and the most hypocritical ideology. Plato, in his Phaedrus, and Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, would agree on this point.

The title, Contre la rhétorique (Against Rhetoric) is highly paradoxical, since the author is a mind nourished by classical culture, and so passionate about Aristotle’s Rhetoric (although he says little about it), that one would rather expect to find Pour la rhétorique (For Rhetoric). Does he not speak (p. 10) of “the rhetoric I wish for?” He also declares bluntly (p. 16): “A commonplace is good: it is a sharing of words, a familiar ground, a starting point. I like common places.” That says it all.

The subtitle, Comment les mots des démagogues prennent le pouvoir (How the words of demagogues seize power), clarifies the title, which could be: Pour la rhétorique à laquelle vont mes vœux et contre la rhétorique des démagogues (In defence of the rhetoric I wish for and against the rhetoric of demagogues). This is a work of political rhetoric. The pars destruens is much more important than the pars construens. Unless we are to believe that, as in Plato’s dialogues, the positive teaching remains hidden, as on the reverse side of the sophist’s pulverization.

The originality of Salazar’s book lies not in the traditional but never useless denunciation of cynical sophistry and manipulative demagoguery. It is not in the ridicule of mediocre manuals of managerial rhetoric and the false prestige of pseudo-models (see the section in which he berates the late Steve Jobs, “tête à claques,” a moron, pp. 31-32). Salazar offers a remarkable update of a classic philosophical-political debate, in which all the essentials would seem to have been said, for and against rhetoric, good or bad, but in which everything needs to be renewed, in view of political changes (Part 3), reinforced by technical progress, and cultural evolution (Part 4).

3. Rhetoric and Political Change

Salazar speaks many times of patricians and plebeians (notably in Ch.7). I like to think that his analysis of the present time is inspired by Montesquieu’s analysis of the Roman Republic (Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline). This provides an opportunity to situate Against Rhetoric in the Grand Jeu of international politics.

In the West, dominated by the Anglo-Saxons and their norms, the polity is theoretically democratic, but it has gradually become practically oligarchic. The patricians, aristocratic and republican oligarchs, fear both the democratic plebians (ironically, and by an interesting twist of history, the Republican party, once the most patrician, has, in America, under Trump, become that of the plebeians, or at least for whom the plebeians vote), and the return of monarchy in all its forms (dynastic, tyrannical, strongman, personal power, etc.). Salazar is an outspoken advocate of political realism: “The force of law is simply the result of forces of influence between interest groups that are always in the minority” (p. 117). Rhetoric is necessarily part of a political framework. In the postmodern West, as with the ancient Romans, the primary function of democratic forms is to prevent monarchy; by extolling “freedom” and “rights” against despotism, the people are made to distrust authority, and any possible alliance between the people and their ruler is discredited; it then remains for the patricians, who have become the rulers, to make democracy as indirect as possible and to ensure sufficient control over these representatives, so that they actually represent the interests of the oligarchy; popular belief in democracy then facilitates the people’s obedience to the decisions of the oligarchy, since these decisions are supposed to be their own. The people are paid with words. These words nonetheless provide them with moral satisfaction.

This liberal regime is neither stable nor peaceful. Indeed, if an elite wants to take more than its fair share without formally establishing a dictatorship, or arousing internal opposition, it must take what it needs elsewhere, outside, using plunder or other means. A liberal oligarchic regime is thus of necessity perpetually in a war of conquest and imperialism. But war and empire, which save the Republic (= oligarchy), also endanger it. The way to make the threatened oligarchy last is a certain rhetoric. Salazar is fighting against this rhetoric. He fights it by knowing it, by dismantling its mechanisms.

Salazar, without inflicting a historical summary on us, even if it is a brilliant overview, also meditates on the history of rhetoric, starting from the oblivion of true rhetoric, an oblivion that allows bad rhetoric to dominate, by reducing the faculty of critical analysis of discourse. As we know, rhetoric was born in the democratic city-states of Greece, as the art of persuasion. When the Macedonian empire subjugated the free cities of Hellas, did political rhetoric lose its raison d’être? In any case, it tended to be reduced to the art of pleasing the listener or reader through the quality of its style. However, it retained its dialectical and humanist dimensions, as well as its raison d’être, to create persuasion, in judicial eloquence, or in speeches of pomp and ceremony, or, later, in the eloquence of the pulpit. In post-Renaissance education, taken over by the Jesuits, rhetoric was the ideal means of introducing humanism and practicing what we now call interdisciplinarity. In any case, whatever the political regime, it is very rare for a common decision to be taken by a single omnipotent and omniscient brain, and without deliberation. The deliberative genre is the mainstay of all rhetoric, which can be defined as the art of intervening in deliberation with words, with relevance and effectiveness, to lead to the right decision. Rhetoric was eliminated from school curricula in France in 1890, along with drama, under the influence of scientistic pedantry, dried-up neo-Kantian rationalism, and the bureaucratic, paper-based tyranny of the written word, its formalism and its procedures (which are truly what make fools of any nations, as Otto von Bismarck observed in his Memoirs). We forget that the written word refers to the spoken word, to real, living interlocutors, to their human relationship, in which the voice, whether raised against a backdrop of philia or conflict, has all its specifically human dimension of signifying what is true and just. Inflation in the teaching of philosophy and science filled the void thus created. It is not certain that technical progress, with the renaissance of the audiovisual medium, represents a veritable revenge of the oral on the tyranny of the written word.

At the same time, as democracy in the West has been gradually reduced to a legal fiction (it is up to history to show whether such a process can be reversed), the functions and forms of political language have been greatly weakened. The oligarchy needs the appearance of democracy to endure, just as the emperor Augustus did when monarchy was restored. But under these conditions, there is only room for “debates that lead nowhere… except wag the dog” (p. 28) And language has to be structured in such a way that there is both debate and no debate.

With the absolute freedom of global capital circulation, political debate is emptied of meaning, since the capital/labor balance of power has been completely broken in favor of capital. Thus, the proliferation of “dialogue,” and of “listening” with “openness,” covers a practice of ritual manipulation—communicating, pedagogizing, threatening, dialoguing—whose manifest inadequacy and intolerable arrogance give rise to popular revolts. As a result, “riot police are an element of speech efficiency” (p. 26). There is no longer a “real public, but (a) greenhouse audience” (p.31). “The aim is not to persuade, but to put on a show of speech shared by a group” (p. 33), and not to change the world, but to provide relief by producing a temporary effect of psychic well-being.

In the oligarchic West, the elites are no less enslaved than the people. This is where Salazar’s analysis penetrates deeply. There is something structuralist about it. If, in the USA for example, there were only good, dominated people and bad dominators, all it would take is a revolution, or winning an election, or even the French-style chopping off of a few heads, to put the bad guys out of business. But alas, that is not the case. “A control… is exercised over our elites” (p. 37). For “our elites live as if wiretapped” (p. 35). Behind the facade of democracy, “the elites are afraid to say anything.” It is not just a fear of occult power, it is a fear of stepping outside the reductive framework that language has become. Ideology, in the Marxist sense, is here primarily formal, an a priori form, pure and reductive: for this is what language has become, a structure that annuls speech, prohibits all discourse, disarticulates thought. It is unlikely that US Democrats are the only ones to mentally inhabit this structure, even if they seem to be the ones who frolic in it with glee.

When individual freedom is the only passion, money becomes the only power. Everything becomes a commodity. This is true, but philosophically, commodification could be likened to objectification—the reduction of everything to the status of “object,” i.e., the amorphous slave of the will to power. That said, it is worth noting that this “objectivization” is, in practice, commodification; and that it is indeed complete commodification that enables the total domination of the powerful. In the beginning, commodification is wholly materialist, but in the end, since ideas are only words and words are only commodities, words are as real as things, and things as evasive as words, so that the real ceases to exist, matter begins to float in the unreal, leaving only language as a means of producing power, submission and money, and, in rhetorical phantasmagoria, the real itself.

Words themselves are transformed into commodities. Words are “objects,” in the sense of entities dominated by the will to power/individual arbitrary freedom, like all things and like all people, who are nothing but things. If we “objectify” everything, we are purely in a mastered space, and robbed of control over time, so that there is no longer any historical logic, because we have reached the end of History, where at last everything is a commodity. And all discourse is nothing but stereotyped, unchallenged blather. When the plebeians are first of all consumers, they voluntarily become subhuman, and the patricians, superhuman. The will to power triumphs, freedom is no more than its reverse side, and what remains of democracy is no more than the reverse side of a soft, mercantile totalitarianism. Do we believe that an election is enough to change this?

In Chapter 4, Salazar outlines what might be called a non-materialist, non-Hegelian political Marxism. Is speech a commodity? Yes, in the “capitalist” logic, where everything is a commodity, where everything is a means of production. Words are means of production—the production of power or submission. But Salazar remains, in his own way, a democrat. “I observe,” he writes, ”a Plague ravaging democracy.” (p. 15): the interplay of power and language.

Salazar loves the freedom of soul and life, not the hum of “democratic” rhetoric. Jean Guitton told Paul VI that democracy was “the most powerful machine to have men obey” (Jean Guitton, Mon testament philosophique, Acte 1). Salazar allows us to add that postmodern democracy is the most powerful machine for manufacturing a prodigious voluntary servitude of men who want to be subhuman to superhumans, and that the teeth of this machine are “words,” which have become creative absolutes with no referent. If the youth of a nation could be educated to speak their minds and mean what they say, that would be the end of this “democracy,” which can be defined as power over the people and against the people by the people. It would be as free as it could be. Salazar is a revolutionary. An isolated revolutionary. In fact, most of those who profess to be “agents of change” are nothing more than submissive demagogues.

Advances in technology and the digital age are increasing universal commodification (p. 175). Social networks, which purport to be a counterweight to the oligarchic monopoly of information in a democracy, are often just another version of this arbitrary language, which ensures that democracy is reduced to the routine performance of magical rites. “When we speak publicly in bits and bites, we think in bits and bites” (p. 92): The social network, the buzz, and the four-word or ten-second thought that hits home. According to Salazar, these networks of verbal commodities produce emotional pleasure, in a world where power is stable precisely because this denaturation of language renders criticism powerless and serious debate irrelevant. According to Salazar, this commodification is therefore the very form of domination of the people, “downgraded by cultural genocide, but bourgeois by digital habit.”

There is a class struggle; but thanks to a certain gentrification, it is cushioned and spread from “doing” to “saying” (Ch.10, pp. 97 ff.). Above all, thanks to a chattering existence in a linguistic, semi-delusional and almost magical unreality, this struggle is exhausted in the irrational and capricious. This does not mean that it has ceased. Physical violence has been replaced by cunning and the power of words. In other words, as long as plebeians share with patricians a belief in the magical power of words, not only do they uncritically support their praxis, but through all their words, they adhere to an absolutely arbitrary principle of freedom which is (1) the cause of their oppression and exploitation, in the liberal universe, and (2) the justification, in their own eyes, of this oppression, of their powerlessness to criticize it seriously, and therefore the source of their voluntary servitude, as much as of their restive and grumbling powerlessness. In Chapter 17 (pp. 161 ff.), Salazar comments on Pasolini by asking “who benefits from words?” He believes that exploitation endures as cultural genocide, under gentrification (working and middle class embourgeoisement) and through gentrification (which is complete objectification and commodification, hence submission).

We might add that, in the past, gentrification in the West took place mainly through work. Since industry has been relocated to other countries, embourgeoisement has largely resulted in direct benefits to individuals, which are indirectly taken back from them by being collectively marked down as debts. This is how, with the complicity of its elites and for their exclusive benefit, a country is transformed into a cash cow and its working classes into debt slaves. This would not happen if popular leaders could speak their minds and did not share the language of freedom gone irrational.

Chapter 11 (pp. 103 ff.) therefore deals with “rebellion through words.” All rebellion is doomed to recuperation, if the plebeians do not rediscover language, “the right speech” (Ch.2, pp. 23 ff.). A true revolution will therefore be cultural or it will not be; and the cultural revolution will be a recovery of the rightness of language, against (bad) rhetoric. Otherwise, “all the language of rebellion is controlled upstream by those who govern” (p. 104).

Salazar’s originality also lies in his understanding that, while there is class struggle and oppression of some, it is nonetheless everyone who is alienated: “Plebeians, patricians, all demagogues.” In other words, all mental slaves to “rhetoric.” The dominant ones, driven by the instinct of the will to power, set up a language of death, a structure of domination, which, once set up, functions autonomously, like a machine to smash anything that might remain human. Yet, patricians are also slaves to it, except that they are slaves to the will to power that possesses them and which they enjoy to the point of wishing death onto the plebeians who, by the same token, are slaves to that very will which possesses them and which they endure to the point of not wanting to live differently.

“He who holds the highs holds the lows,” as the military say. The highs, here, in a still civilized culture, could be concepts, principles—but there are no more concepts and principles, just the will to power, issuing fictions that are supposed to be the only reality, and words are the vessels of these fictions: “Reality is replaced by a word” (p. 46). Words, stimuli without syntax, signals without etymology, clichés without referent (“there is nothing outside the text,” Derrida, Of Grammatology)—incorporate the structure of absolute cultural domination, which enables this political domination, which in the postmodern age is antiphrastically called ’democracy,” since the word means, as already mentioned, power over the people, against the people, but by the people. But it is a domination that is more than political—it is theocratic: since the elite individuals are creators, they are not the rulers, nor even the pontiffs; they are the gods. And since the gods are supermen, normal humans can only be subhuman.

Salazar’s distaste for systematics, and for philosophical, scholastic vocabulary, perhaps prevents him from driving the point home even more decisively. Such a system where reality no longer exists, and neither does objectivity, is in absolute subjective idealism, especially in its linguistic version. The dominant class say it, and it is done. That is where the perverse rhetoric lies: in the imposition of the belief that the speaker, through his language, constitutes the object, or even creates it. Belief, in this case, is “a strong, unshakeable opinion.” In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell has the abominable O’Brien say: “I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party” (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 193). In short, the Kantian transcendental self, first exploded into individual subjectivities, ends up being identified here (according to a Jacobin Rousseauist logic, applied to the spiritual) with the collective personality of the “Party,” i.e., the pseudoprogressive Western elite united for “Freedom,” i.e., for its absolute power and supreme authority.

Theoretically, everyone could create their own world in their own words, living in the bubble of their own solipsistic delusion; but in practice only Supermen have the power, and therefore the right, to do so. They can (they believe) create their world with their words, and the others are obliged to use these words, which force them to live in the elite’s delirium, a world in which they are culturally exterminated. “They try by all means,” says Salazar, “not to give us, the plebeians, access to the words to say it differently.” Thus, “we suffer the empire of words” (p. 47). “A commodity language… enslaves plebeians to the stereotyped language of the patricians and to the strange belief in the miraculous power of noise” (p. 49).

In various chapters of his book, Salazar examines these words emptied of thought, these miraculous noises (his material is French, but his an analysis can be replicated elsewhere): “identity,” “sequence”… “Proximité.” “Proximité,” a French buzz word, is right on the money. (Ch.13, p. 125 ff.). “Community” would serve the same purpose in America. In a liberal universe that includes a debauchery of bond-destroying individualism, we need to say, “vive la proximité, care for your community” at all times and repeat, American style, “let’s have a conversation, let’s be together.” That pseudo-Kantian imperative is as absurd as it is categorical, but it is made to function as a producer of the good it signifies. “Words” are thus the sacraments of individualistic (polytheistic) religion. We will see how these sacraments slide into the realm of magic. The proliferation of the imperative corresponds to the expansion of the irrational. The magic of the “word” enables us to make the isolated believe they are linked, the lonely believe they are part of a family, the exploited believe they live in solidarity. All you have to do is believe in the magic, and it is done. This is how “the people are paid with words.” For example, the hospital staff were called “heroes” during the pandemic. “Heroes were all” (p. 92 sq.) and all exploited without better wages once the pandemic had gone (p. 94).

“Political imposture breeds hate or contempt” (p. 66). Chapter 7, on the dialectic of hate and contempt, is a remarkable analysis of relationships between patricians and plebeians. Salazar agrees there is a class struggle, save for the fact it is not a fatalism. Is not the real choice, he asks, between class struggle and charity (p. 75)? Salazar dismantles the mechanism of the inversion of passions, as power wears thin: normally, elites despise the people, who hate them; when elite power wavers, it is the people who begin to despise and the elite to hate. The election of Donald Trump in 2024 is an example of this inversion of feelings and intimidation. But nothing substantial can happen, in terms of revolution, as long as language remains destroyed, as long as it has not been rebuilt against (perverse) rhetoric.

4. Rhetoric and Cultural Evolution

At this point we have a clear concept of the forms adopted by the dominant ideology, faithful to its original meaning [The German Ideology], but subjected to Salazar’s own Marxist requalification. Absolute linguistic subjective idealism, which is the proper name for what is presented as ragione debole (Vattimo’s weak thought), in the postmodern age, is both the pinnacle of the narcissistic sublimation of individual freedom, and the means par excellence of the domination exercised by supermen over submen—what we call postmodern liberal democracy. It remains to be seen how this political domination is coupled with theocratic domination.

In Chapter 5, under the witty title “A Tale of Cargo and Bamboo,” Salazar draws a parallel between our societies and the mentalities of a Melanesian cargo cult, which is not necessarily to our advantage. Postmodern rhetoric’s use of language can be traced back to the wild speculations of French Theory, and more deeply to its foundations, the work of Nietzsche. Viewed through an anthropologist’s rather than a philosopher’s lens, this use of language is akin to that of a polytheistic religion and a magical mentality. Postmodernity, with its prodigious anti-objectivity and irrationality, constitutes an extraordinary civilizational regression, a “spectacular return to the primitive” (p. 53). Auguste Comte already said that technical progress, spread among an uneducated people, would revive fetishism. The ordinary post-modern individual lives intoxicated with power, amidst objects they can scarcely comprehend, and under patricians who know how to control everything with words—hence the undeniable return of magic.

Salazar analyzes the Covid crisis in terms of the rebirth of the magical mentality. Beyond all Machiavellian or financial calculations, real or imagined, it is a fact that even scientists were enslaved, playing their part, as in a movie cast, so that “the whole public debate… hinged on magical drifts of language” (p. 55).

In fact, postmodernity, where every individual is a god, is polytheistic; and in polytheism, everything is possible, so no reason survives, and speech becomes magic: “Peoples steeped in technology, in the latest connected objects, have behaved, gorged on magic words, like Stone Age tribes, and their leaders with them” (pp. 56-57).

This is how democratic practices, emptied of meaning, become magical rites: “Democracy has become a cargo cult [of the mysterious modern commodity that fell from the sky or from a ship on the distant shores frequented by the tribe]. Thus, like this amiable Melanesian tribe, awaiting reality, goods materializing, the public indulges in magical, hallucinogenic dances: strikes, marches, banners, watchwords, TV shows. It is lafèt (“fun time” in pidgin). Without any lasting effect, without ever getting to the heart of the problem, that there is nothing to expect from the powerful” (p. 57).

In Chapter 6, entitled “je sais bien, mais quand même,” (“I know, but so what?”) Salazar, developing an idea by psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni, analyzes the irrationality inseparable from postmodern rhetoric: the restructuring of language outside any principle of reference to the real order. Words are magic, and objects are associated with them, to which a magical power is attributed, hence the denial of reality. This denial is structural and principal among the followers of ordinary political discourse in postmodernity. Fetishism (worship of words and symbols), bewilderment and denial when reality resists, confinement in imposture and delirium: “Fetishism offers the first model of a repudiation of reality” (p. 63). There is reality, of course, but even so, it does not exist: “Public speech, in a democracy, is a vast sham played out by fetishists” (p. 64).

Postmodern democracy claims to be liberal and secularist, but in fact functions like a theocracy—like a hyper-dogmatic, hyper-moralistic, excessively intolerant polytheistic theocracy. The “crime of opinion” (pp. 117ff.) has taken on a frightening extension. We should not be surprised. There are eternal and absolute truths. We can call them dogmas and not want them—but the price to pay for rejecting them is exorbitant, for when there is no identified “dogma,” there is no longer any opinion, and therefore no freedom of opinion, because everything becomes dogma, and the “word-oralisms” fix common opinion into firm, obligatory belief. According to Jacobin logic, the freedom of the mind consists in uniting one’s particular thought with the general thought, through a kind of spiritual social contract. And dissenting opinion, which very often may have its share of justice and truth (and which quite often is the most probable, or the most sensible), becomes an abominable heresy against the dogma of polytheistic individualism.

License is given to the fantasy of story-telling, in particular to the caricatured slander of past centuries of non-liberal human history. Everything else than the liberal order is a “black legend” opposed to a childish idealization of the modern/postmodern. This rewriting of history is subordinated (Ch.16, pp. 151ff.) to the “duty of commemorations” (the French even speak of “devoir de mémoire”) In postmodern rhetoric, writes Salazar, we see “the ritual of remembrance transformed into a maneuver and stratagem of ‘memory” (p. 153)… “These duties of remembrance are the pathetic expression of mourning and an inability to rise to a true celebration, that is the understanding and affirmation of a final end, an ultimate goal” (p.158). Cynical exploitation of sentiment by Power: for the superhumans, the aim is to stoke guilt in order to establish their hold over the subhumans who have been taught to speak this “language of the undead” (p. 113).

An interesting application of this theory can be found in Chapter 8, (pp.77ff.) entitled “The Lesson of Al Capone,” or how to “take down a politician.” Answer: by catching him in the act of heresy. But when dogmas are the magic “words,” heresy consists of a wrong word. As if, during an official meeting, we took the liberty of emitting a loud, scandalous linguistic fart. This is the heresy of the “word,” at once lèse-majesté, blasphemy and sacrilege against the “gods” who are supposed to create reality through discourse. Such is “the power of moral watchwords” (p. 79). To mock “words” is to defile the fetish. It is futile to hope to get the laughs. Even in the land of Molière and Voltaire, the punishment is civil death.

The “societal offenses” “all turn against the words that the law imposes” (p. 117). If I were to indulge my un-Salazarian taste for systematization and principles, I would say that the dictatorship of relativism consists in the absolutization and imposition of a language structured by the belief in absolute linguistic subjective idealism, i.e., in the divinity of the Sovereign Individual, the Superhuman.

The truth is, if freedom of thought were taken to its limit, it would be indistinguishable from freedom of delusion and the imprescriptible right to have one’s delusion universally recognized. Well, then! This is exactly what (bad) rhetoric leads to. Salazar shows that rhetoric does not simply consist in the deceptive use of language, in itself right, but in the profound denaturing and distortion of language itself. What Salazar does not say enough about, for my taste, is what this denaturing radically consists in—the loss of the universal, of Form, of Idea. Without a minimum of Plato, the West falls into a mixture of nothingness and barbarism, grotesque delirium and childishness. Not even without a minimum of Plato… But when it comes to language, yes—from Plato.

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