Moby Quotes

When leaders use words to bludgeon and not to persuade, when opinion supersedes fact and people stop listening to one another, we have, the perfect conditions for the true demagogue. [Donald] Trump is running hard for that role.

Donald Trump is an unstable charlatan who is appealing to the worst instincts in people, and I believe ultimately the American people are going to reject that.

I believe democracy can survive. But it's certainly true that the euphoria of the 1990s - an era when democracy was spreading and more and more people found it attractive - has ended. Trump is not a cause but rather a symptom of this change.

It sure is a rising tide, and we have a particularly nasty exemplar of it in the U.S., in Donald Trump.

I think my main concern is because I worry about demagoguery. It's real. You see the people standing up there and applauding.

Trump brings rhetoric and reality together in a cartoon caricature of a Republican politician that anyone can understand. That gives him a vital role in history. He is the perfect exorcist to drive a stake through the heart of the modern Republican Party.

In place of presidential addresses, stump speeches, or town halls, we have Trump's demagogic mass rallies. In place of the usual jousting between the administration and the press, we have a president who fantasizes on Twitter about physically assaulting CNN.

The Republicans love alpha-males, and they're sick of the corruption, too. Not that Trump will do anything about it. But at least he's not bought. And he throws in just the right amount of racism to appeal to the Republican base.

The lack of societal and institutional safeguards provides fertile ground for populist movements fueled by fear.

The two candidates have very different visions of America. Donald Trump's is very dark: Things are not going well. There are dark days ahead unless you make a change, and he's the one to fix it.

Populism, literally, means speaking for 'the people.' In practice it means demagoguery.

It’s very simple: If you try to win elections by talking to the elites of this country, you’re going to get your ass kicked — there are not enough Beyonces, Oprahs or Hollywood elites to elect anyone. Trump is not the disease. He is the symptom. The disease is political, cultural, and economic elites who keep telling the public what they should think, feel and believe.

The world is changing and people don't like change.

The conservatives nearly always tolerate the demagogue while he is destroying liberals.

(Howard) Dean is a raving nut bag...a raving, sinister, demagogic nutbag...I and a few other people saw that he should be destroyed.

What happened in the US is a regression to the domination side of the social scale. Trump claimed that he, as a "strongman," would solve all our problems, and was elected by fanning fear, hate, scapegoating, the debasement of women.

Trump provides a more direct and arrogant persona that produces the ugliness of a society ruled entirely by finance capital and savage market values, one that prides itself on the denigration of others as well as of justice, passion, and equality.

You had a socialist get 47 percent of the votes in the Democratic primary: Bernie Sanders. You have an outright white nationalist populist [Donald Trump] who is now in the White House with an authoritarian strongman who has no regard for facts, no regard for tradition, and no regard for the Constitution. That is what you get when you import third world conditions. You get third world politics, and that's where we are now.

I think a lot of the people that stand by Donald Trump are deplorable. And the things that they say are deplorable.

Donald Trump is appealing to the basest, the most selfish and the most literally un-American of instincts.

Donald Trump is an especially depressing phenomena because he is so debased and debasing and millions and millions of people want him to be president. We're seeing how at least whole swathes of white America are becoming your worst nightmare of eternal Zombie High School. Something like a perfect mix of Groundhog Day and The Moronic Inferno. How can it be that a guy who looks like a bloated cadaver pulled from the Gowanus canal, with some rouge on his cheeks and a sticky Something About Mary wig, is actually applauded by his followers for making fun of how other people look?

You might have some people that disagree with populism and anti-globalism and so forth, but Donald Trump has no desire to undermine America.

The usual pattern of demagogues is to promise the moon, fail to deliver, and then blame vulnerable others for those failures.

The people excited by ambitious demagogues, sooner or later return into the hands of the Aristocracy.

Populism is everywhere. We have religious populism in the Muslim-majority countries as much as we have populism in the United States of America.