Degrading the people into an object is the deepest demagogy.

Evidence

Those men in effect were not capable of leading the people, were not capable of arousing their enthusiasm and their passion, if one is to take demagogy in its original meaning. Did they at least attain the end which they set themselves? They said that they were aiming at the creation of a modern State in Italy, and they in fact produced a bastard. They aimed at stimulating the formation of an extensive and energetic ruling class, and they did not succeed; at integrating the people into the framework of the new State, and they did not succeed. The paltry political life from 1870 to 1900, the fundamental and endemic rebelliousness of the Italian popular classes, the narrow and stunted existence of a sceptical and cowardly ruling stratum, these are all the consequences of that failure. … In reality, furthermore, the rightists of the Risorgimento were great demagogues. They made the people-nation into an instrument, into an object, they degraded it. And therein lies the greatest and most contemptible demagogy, precisely in the sense which the term has assumed on the lips of the right-wing parties when they polemicise against those of the left—although it has always been the right-wing parties who have shown the worst demagogy, and who have often (like Napoleon III in France) appealed to the dregs of society. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 503

Categorization

• DEFINE: Recovers demagogy’s original meaning (arousing popular enthusiasm) and contrasts it with the right-wing sense where treating the people as an object is itself the worst demagogy.
• XREF: Feeds the toolkit concept of how ruling classes relate to the people-nation — instrumentalization rather than integration — useful for later readings on how elites fashion ‘the masses’ as objects.