Michael Signer

Michael "Mike" Signer is the Mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia and an author, advocate, political theorist, and attorney. He is known for his books Becoming Madison: The Extraordinary Origins of the Least Likely Founding Father and Demagogue: The Extraordinary Origins of the Least Likely Founding Father and as a longstanding Virginia Democratic activist and former candidate for lieutenant governor. He is a lecturer at the University of Virginia.

Authorship

Signer is the author of Becoming Madison: The Extraordinary Origins of the Least Likely Founding Father (PublicAffairs 2015), a book about leadership and statesmanship that is also an intellectual and psychological biography of young James Madison and his rivalry with his nemesis Patrick Henry in the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. The book has received enthusiastic reviews in a number of venues, including the Richmond Times-Dispatch ("This is intellectual history at its finest… “Becoming Madison” is an essential biography of an essential Founder”), The Wall Street Journal (“Sound and revealing”), Library Journal ("an important study of the intellectual and psychological development of a young Madison who believed that leaders should forsake self-interest in promoting the common good"), and The Daily Beast ("A bull's-eye"). He has also discussed the book on MSNBC, and C-SPAN BookTV.

In 2014, Signer was the keynote speaker at the Montpelier Foundation's annual celebration of the birthday of James Madison, where he said, "Returning Madison’s Method to politics could do much to conquer not only many bad ideas, but to help us believe again in leadership itself.... We think of statesmen today as dead and dull, as stony and lifeless as the columns and edifices of our Greco-Roman memorials. Yet what Madison shows is they are flesh and blood fighters. Even if it’s old-fashioned, we need to return to that spirit once again—to honor and celebrate and elevate leaders—statesmen—who fight with their heart and spirit for the common good.":

Signer wrote Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies, a book on democracy, American history, and national security. In Foreign Affairs, Professor John Ikenberry wrote that Demagogue "echoes Tocqueville's contention that liberal mores and traditions within society are the bedrock of democracy." Kirkus Reviews praised the book's "muscular narrative," and Publisher's Weekly wrote that the book "signals the need for a new direction in foreign policy."

Anne-Marie Slaughter, currently the president of the New America Foundation, said, "Michael Signer has written a strikingly original book. Demagogue tells the story of democracy by analyzing its antithesis – the often frighteningly charismatic leader who draws his strength from his purported connection to the demos itself. Amid the myriad studies of democracy and waves of democratization, of rising incomes, civil society, institutions and elections, Signer brings the human element back into the equation. The demagogue, he argues, is an eternal element in democracy's rise and fall, one that we ignore today, from Venezuela to Russia, at our peril."

Author and journalist Peter Beinart said, "Demagogue is a simply extraordinary book. A fascinating work of political theory, an eloquent response to the Bush administration's disastrous efforts at promoting democracy, a roadmap for progressives seeking to chart a new foreign policy direction and an intellectual lifeline for anyone who believes America should be on freedom's side, and knows, in their heart, that there must be a better way."

In connection with the book, he addressed the U.S. Agency for International Development, George Mason University, the BBC's Doha Debates in Qatar, and the World Affairs Council of Richmond. He has been interviewed on NPR, MSNBC, the BBC, C-SPAN's Book TV, and Fox News.

He also has become a leading national voice in the movement to declare Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump a demagogue. In 2011, Signer wrote an article for the New Republic determining that Trump was not a demagogue. In 2015, however, Signer wrote an article for the Washington Post declaring that Trump has become a demagogue, meeting the four-part test Signer presented in his book Demagogue: that the demagogue is a mirror of the masses, triggers waves of great emotion, uses that emotion for political benefit, and threatens or breaks established rules of governance. Signer's declaration was covered by several prominent national media outlets, including interviews with David Greene of NPR's Morning Edition and Brooke Gladstone of WNYC's On the Media.

Signer has published articles, essays, and book reviews in the University of Richmond Law Review, Corporate Counsel, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and the Daily Beast, In 2006, he wrote an influential article on progressive American exceptionalism titled "City on a Hill," in the inaugural issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He teaches nonfiction writing at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C.

Legal experience

Signer is a prominent Virginia attorney. He is the founder and managing principal of Madison Law & Strategy Group, PLLC, where since 2010 he has practiced corporate and regulatory law. His clients have included alternative investors, start-ups, political campaigns, and government contractors. He is co-Chair of the Business Law Section of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Bar Association and a member of the Virginia State Bar's Access to Legal Services Committee. He also chaired the Pro Bono Committee of the Young Lawyers Conference of the Virginia State Bar.

After graduating from the University of Virginia School of Law, Signer joined the Corporate Department of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr. In 2005, Governor Mark Warner of Virginia appointed Signer as one of two counselors in his gubernatorial office in Richmond, where he advised the governor on issues including executive clemency, civil settlements, FOIA requests, and state contracting policies. He was asked to chair a special committee on the repercussions of DNA analysis in criminal files.

After Governor Warner’s term ended, Signer returned to the Public Policy and Strategy and Government Litigation groups at WilmerHale, where he counseled clients on matters including public policy strategy, regulatory approval, and federal investigations.

He is a long-time voting rights attorney. He has helped run many statewide voter protection programs in Virginia, including serving as statewide director for the 2004 program directed by the Democratic National Committee. In 2010, he traveled to Panjshir Province, Afghanistan, as a member of a U.S.AID-sponsored mission to monitor Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections. He also founded and co-chaired the New Electoral Reform Alliance for Virginia, which successfully fought for statutory fixes in Virginia’s General Assembly

Public service

He serves as Chair of the Emergency Food Network, as President of the Fifeville Neighborhood Association, and as a member of the Steering Committee of the West Main Street Redevelopment Project in Charlottesville. He is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Center for National Policy. He is a Principal and former Board member of the Truman National Security Project, and is Chair of the New Dominion Project PAC, a Virginia-based political action committee.

In the 2008 elections, Signer served as chief national security advisor to the John Edwards for President campaign, an experience he wrote about in the Washington Post. He was later senior strategist on the 2008 Congressional campaign of Tom Perriello. Signer served as senior policy advisor at the Center for American Progress and later as an advisor to President-Elect Barack Obama's State Department Transition Team.

In 2009, Signer was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, receiving 21% of the vote.

From 2009 to 2013, Signer served as an appointee by then-Governor Tim Kaine to Virginia's Board of Medicine, which oversees and disciplines Virginia's 50,000 doctors. He was a member of the Finance Committee for Terry McAuliffe for Governor and later served as chair of Governor-elect McAuliffe's Transition Council on Homeland Security. Earlier in his career, he was legislative aide to then-Delegate Creigh Deeds.

Instruction

Signer teaches an advanced undergraduate seminar titled "Leadership, Statesmanship, and Democracy" at the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia and a seminar titled "Race, Policy and the Past" for the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. For several years, he was visiting full professor at Virginia Tech’s Master’s Program in Public and International Affairs Program.

Early life and education

Signer graduated from Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia and magna cum laude from Princeton University. He earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was a Clerk at the Legal Aid Justice Center and Research Assistant to Professors A.E. Dick Howard and Michael Klarman. He was also president of the Law Democrats and co-founder of the UVA Chapter of the American Constitution Society. While at UVA, he also founded the UVA Coalition for Progress on Race in the wake of a racially motivated attack on a fellow student, and went on to co-found the Center for the Study of Race and Law.

Personal

Signer lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with his wife, Emily Blout, and their twin sons.