In “The Vulgar Manliness of Donald Trump,” Harvard Professor of Government Harvey Mansfield depicts the President as a demagogue -- precisely the sort of crass figure whose rise to power the Founders wished to forestall. The theoretical underpinning of the article, the concept of “manliness” itself, receives its full expostulation in Professor Mansfield’s book, Manliness (Yale University Press, 2006). We are unable to go into that rich and learned work here. Suffice it to quote from the book’s preface, “Manliness seeks and welcomes drama and prefers times of war, conflict, and risk.” But it is “about fifty-fifty good and bad.” The good manliness, that of the first responders on 9/11 (and, we might add, of the Seals who killed Osama bin Laden), is necessary to resist the wicked manliness of the 9/11 attackers and their ilk.
According to Professor Mansfield, Trump’s is a vulgar manliness, and therefore to be disdained. Vulgarity was understood in ancient political philosophy as the characteristic of the common people. Classical authors, and others through the centuries, viewed democracy as problematic and likely to collapse into tyranny, because the people, in Mansfield’s reprise, were “hasty, angry, impulsive, brash, and punitive.” We need only think of the Roman mob in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The people inevitably will choose a man with those same qualities, one as vulgar as they are, but with the ambition, guile, and rhetorical talent to raise them against “men of quality, nobles, aristocrats, or gentlemen.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/10/on_the_vulgar_manliness_of_donald_trump.html
