"I'm for the poor man — all poor men, black and white, they all gotta have a chance. They gotta have a home, a job, and a decent education for their children. 'Every man a king' — that's my slogan."
"Oh, hell, say that I'm sui generis and let it go at that." — when asked to describe his own politics
"Why weep or slumber America?
Land of brave and true
With castles, and clothing, and food for all
All belongs to you
Every man a king! Every man a king!
For you can be a millionaire
But there's something belonging to others
There's enough for all people to share
When it's sunny June and December too
Or in the wintertime or spring
There'll be peace without end!
Every neighbor a friend
With every man a king!"
Huey Long (1893-1935), the famous governor of Louisiana and senator, is filed under "demagogue," and the endless argument over his ideology — fascist or populist, Hitler or Robin Hood, left or right — has never been settled because the debaters are hunting for a consistent ideological principle at the center of him. But he was a magnetic, voracious character whose sole tenet of belief was his own growth and expansion. Long was an SEE, the kind who rules over the social sphere by the sheer magnetic personality he possesses and by the force of his will.
Long acquired his political skills during his sales job ("travelling salesman" is quite a Gamma extravert profession, in general, and Long was certainly no LIE), spent four years on the roads of Louisiana selling his personality door to door. His talent, according to all the biographers, lied in making the common man feel significant; Long would tour the isolated parishes of Louisiana, places where no politician ever cared to visit, and address people face-to-face, making them feel that they personally know him. You can almost think of him as a predecessor of modern influencers who strive to create a parasocial connection with their watchers. It was not the broadcasting of the emotional ideological EIE-type rhetoric; this was the Fi-creative "just for you" magnetism that made every single follower feel unique. His song quoted above, the words for which he wrote himself, is also telling. It's more natural for an EIE politician to promise the masses a beautiful fiery struggle against an ideological enemy, while an SEE demagogue promises material wealth and prosperity, which he also values (SEE is number one to appreciate the life of a wealthy spendthrift, with SEI, a type far rarer seen among prominent politicians, taking second place).
His political machine ran on the SEE's characteristic currency: loyalty and favor. Long's empire was a vast network of personal patronage — jobs handed out and yanked back, contracts and exemptions and appointments distributed to bind men to him by interest and gratitude. And that’s the most plausible interpretations of him even at his most autocratic. In stripping local government of power and taking direct control over all the appointments within the police, fire departments, and schools in the state, he was not trying to organize for the sake of organization – he wanted to nourish his network by making every post in Louisiana an expression of personal loyalty to him. Even his showman cocky, playful, insolent smirk, seen on many of his photos, is characteristic of SEE (and is rarer seen on blunter SLE's and more dramatic EIE's). It's the look of someone who finds his own dominance fun, who is charming and roguish and a little bit of a scoundrel about it, and who is letting you in on the joke.
"I used to try to get things done by saying 'please,'" he said. "Now I dynamite 'em out of my path." That is Se at full power — the territorial seizure of everything within reach. After surviving impeachment, he did not reconcile: he went after every man who had crossed him with personal vengeance, firing their relatives, ruining the towns that opposed him. But his vengeance was personal. He did not punish men for violating a doctrine, but for crossing him. The will-to-power was the expansion and defense of the self and its dominion, and that personal, relational, territorial quality is what marks it as the ethical-sensing extravert rather than the structural-logical one. His proud self-description as "sui generis" also reveals his "questimic" desire for personal uniqueness.
Long's whole genius for spectacle was the projection of an irrepressible, vivid self that people could not look away from. He would do actual progressive policies — tax the rich, build the charity hospitals, hand out the free textbooks, and he would also rig the elections and run the militia as his private police, not because any program demanded both, but because all of it flowed from one source of himself. His biographer Sarah Churchwell notes: "Long was a racketeer, but his "Share Our Wealth" program did improve local conditions, building roads and bridges, investing in hospitals and schools, and abolishing the poll tax. His economic populism was also not predicated on furthering racial, ethnic, or religious divisions; he subordinated his white supremacism to his redistributionist political message." He promised to make every man a king. What he built was a kingdom with exactly one king in it, and when one of the personal enemies he had made finally shot him down in his own gleaming capitol, the atmosphere of intimate, personal violence finally closed around the man who had been its source.
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