Politicians, he claims, are more like pastry chefs than they are like physicians. In the Gorgias, a dialogue written down by Plato around 380 BC, Socrates likens political rhetoric to junk food. In what follows, I’m going to take a look at political rhetoric from the perspectives of two giants of the Western intellectual tradition, Socrates and Sigmund Freud, and then from the perspective of the psychoanalyst-philosopher Roger Money-Kyrle, a thinker who is not as well known, but whose take on propagandistic political speech is stunningly useful. If you can’t understand how someone like Trump can garner so much support, you probably have some misconceptions about how political salesmanship works. But instead of fading away, he’s now more prominent than ever, and is doing better than all of his rivals. After each of his inflammatory statements, they declared that this time Trump has “gone too far” and predicted his downfall. Over the months, mass-media talking heads (and also lots of my philosopher friends) kept repeating that there’s “no chance” of Trump getting the republican nomination, and therefore that there’s “no chance” of his becoming president of the United States. At first, many people thought of Trump as an amusing sideshow. Perhaps the most remarkable (and, for many, alarming) political event in 2015 has been the rise of Donald Trump.
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