Heather,
Your 4 PM (ET) talk today was fascinating. I was taken with your explanation of why it’s incredibly difficult for followers of a deceitful leader to disengage from that person, especially after joining them in marginalizing and being hateful and hurtful to other humans. If followers did break away, they would be wracked with gui…
Your 4 PM (ET) talk today was fascinating. I was taken with your explanation of why it’s incredibly difficult for followers of a deceitful leader to disengage from that person, especially after joining them in marginalizing and being hateful and hurtful to other humans. If followers did break away, they would be wracked with guilt and regret.
I looked up Eric Hoffer, described as an American moral and social philosopher, and found this:
“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents … Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.” ~ Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
“Hoffer states that three personality types typically lead mass movements: “men of words”, “fanatics”, and “practical men of action.” Men of words try to “discredit the prevailing creeds” and create a “hunger for faith” which is then fed by “doctrines and slogans of the new faith.” (p. 140) Slowly followers emerge.
Then fanatics take over. Fanatics don’t find solace in literature, philosophy, or art. Instead, they are characterized by viciousness, the urge to destroy, and the perpetual struggle for power. But after mass movements transform the social order, the insecurity of their followers is not ameliorated. At this point, the “practical men of action” take over and try to lead the new order by further controlling their followers.
In the end mass movements that succeed often bring about a social order worse than the previous one. (This was one of Will Durant’s findings in The Lessons of History.) As Hoffer puts it near the end of his work: “All mass movements … irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred, and intolerance.” (p. 141)”
This connects to your explanation of today. Is this what we’ve been truly witnessing over the last years? Where does this “movement” go from here?
Unlike continental European political systems, the American political system tends to be essentially binary; and with the Trump Republican Party essentially at war with itself, and 'delaminating', the long-term prospects for a mass party led by 'practical men of action' do not look particularly good for the long run. As Eric Hoffer described it, popular discontents were seized upon by 'men of words': writers, artists, about whom Hoffer regarded as dilettantes, cranks, fault-finders, charlatans and worse. At a certain point, the ruling elites are discredited; and as Hoffer tells it, the intellectuals who use their words to discredit those elites are easily pushed aside by those who seized power, typically with the assistance of the Armed Forces and police. That has been the pattern in South America, Central and in Southern and Eastern Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, the former Russian Empire in the seven years following the armistice of World War I, and elsewhere in East Asia and South Asia during those turbulent years.
In America, a different pattern arose, not of someone arising from the lower classes and claiming to be the representative of the dispossessed, such as an Adolf Hitler, a Josef Stalin, a Leon Trotsky, a Benito Mussolini or a Mao Tse-Tung, seizing on revolutionary rhetoric. The American dream was to become rich, and who better to feed the fantasies of those feeling themselves dispossessed, then the promises of someone like Donald Trump, forever pretending to be far richer than he actually was, but exceedingly astute and tapping into the grievances of those Americans who had not prospered in America's burgeoning economy, essentially since the administration of John F. Kennedy, some fifty years earlier. The whys and the wherefores are too lengthy to even summarize; but in a nutshell, in the seventy years following the end of World War II, the class system within America changed dramatically from a wealth- and property-holding class system, where inheritance and generational transfers of wealth became less important than the wealth that was created from information and technology. Under the pressures of the Cold War, scientific and technical information, through its development and exploitation, became an absolute priority, given the fact that both the United States of America and its chief antagonists, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China all had nuclear weapons of sufficient magnitude and deployment capability to hold each other hostage.
The American response to its adversaries' advances in science and technology, specifically in the area of long-range delivery systems for nuclear weaponry, came as a shock, when in 1957, the Soviet Union was able to orbit a Communications Satellite, 'Sputnik I'. The American response was to energize it's system of higher education, on one hand creating crash programs for recruiting, educating, and deploying tens of millions of people now educated in the sciences and mathematics; and paying them well enough so that many of them who had been recruited and educated at public expense, were now able to market their skills and the technologies those skills represented, by going into business for themselves. In the San Francisco Bay area, and in the area of the Route 128 Beltway that defines the towns that surround Boston and Cambridge Massachusetts, these new startup companies became the new pillars on which the economic futures of those cities were to be sustained for decades to come. Not everyone would be up to starting a new technology business, but there were plenty of now-well educated men and women who would find good employment working in those companies.
These are not the people who were attracted to Donald Trump. Instead, Trump supporters tended to be those people who tended to be 'left behind', as economic success invariably went to others who are better educated, more dependable as employees, more interested in improving their skills, networking, and expanding their wealth, based upon the value that they brought to the new companies they were creating. Instead, the 'left behind's' tended to be poor whites who suddenly found themselves 'downwardly mobile', whose lives were plagued with job insecurities, food insecurities, health insecurities, these were the people who were described in such books as JD Vance's 'Hillbilly Elegy' and George Packer's 'the Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America'.
At the same time, international trade, propelled forward by all those wonderful new technologies that nullified time and distance, grew exponentially. The net effect was an enormous outflow of jobs from the United States and overseas to its trading partners around the world, where labor costs were minute fractions of what comparable wages would have to be paid if the jobs were kept in the United States. Concurrently, those jobs that remained were now typically worked by immigrant labor heading north from Latin America, driven north by horrific social and economic conditions in their former homelands.
Donald Trump, the narcissistic con-man and pseudo-magnate, came from a family that made their wealth putting up cheap, substandard apartment housing in New York City's inner suburbs, whose specialty was in milking Federal housing assistance programs. Trump is a showman, and above all, an opportunist, with a predator natural ability to sniff out weaknesses in public assistance programs; and he was willing to do anything that would pass his bottom line, regardless of its illegality or moral depravity.
For Trump, it was all about raking in as much money as he could. The men he recruited to assist him had long use their political connections through graft and grifting to steal as much as they could while they were holding office. But the American political system made corruption on the grand scale that Donald Trump was used to exploiting difficult to accomplish. Trump's control over these men was more the way of threatening to cut them off from whatever perquisites they had managed to garner for themselves; and so in fear of him were they, that the aqueous to anything he demanded. These men were essentially petty thieves whose sole access to wealth where the government jobs they held or their legislative salaries, or acting as hatchet men for their political donors. Most of what they did was to tear down the institutional restraints on their ability to steal money from the government. These men are not revolutionaries in any sense.
At the same time, Trump's supporters are unlike the supporters of Juan Peron in Argentina in the decade following World War II. Peron's government drew its support from the so-called 'shirtless ones', and urban, working-class proletariat that was sustained and supported by handouts from Peron's government. America's 'left behinds' are principally America's rural poor, those who have not benefited from our postwar boom in technology and trade. Trump gives them nothing in any material sense; but he does entertain them at his massive rallies. In other words, Trump's sole ability was to give voice to his supportive base, while doing nothing to alleviate their misery. His behavior during the coronavirus crisis is entirely emblematic of his essential lack of interest or caring for anyone but himself.
Consequently, the model created by Eric Hoffer in his examination of mass political movements in Germany and especially in the Soviet Union does not hold. If Donald Trump ever got to be a strong man, it might look like that regime of Francisco Franco, in Spain, or Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, in Portugal; but given Trump's obvious incompetencies, it is unlikely he would have survived for long. Trump thrives only in those situations where his opponents play by the rules, and he does not.
This is a mass movement that has no place to go because it's leader, Donald Trump, lives only in the moment and has no ability to use the governmental powers he holds in any purposeful way.
^^^"This is a mass movement that has no place to go because it's leader, Donald Trump, lives only in the moment and has no ability to use the governmental powers he holds in any purposeful way."^^^
With all due respect:
Donald Trump was the catalyst that brought this mass movement out of the closet but he was not the engineer of the movement. There is someone out there waiting in the wings to pick up the torch as Trump fades away. There are people currently in and out of government channels, as well as recently elected ultra right wing adherents, who are willing to agitate to an extreme level. There are people who ignite passion and have a broad base of followers; Limbaugh, Hannity, Carlson, Ingraham, Jones to name a few. These people are not going to simply shut up and go away, (except for Limbaugh, when he draws his last fetid breath). The ultra right wing organizations are not going to close shop just because Trump is no longer president.
The other fallacy is to simply focus on the left behind. Sure, they are the ones who are visible and flock to his rallies and chant ugly slogans, they are, in essence, the grunts and the stooges, making all the noise. But behind those folks are the moneyed, the people who have been listening to, writing and promoting incendiary rhetoric and donating to campaigns and organizations for decades. The Mercers, the Adelsons, the Kochs, the wealthy white Republicans living in gated communities across the country have poured billions of dollars into politics and political organizations over the last seven decades.
And then there are the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo, the so called militias, the neo Nazi groups, the ultra evangelical "ministers" shrieking and screaming hate. These people are not going to sit down and shut up.
Donald Trump is too intellectually disorganized and narcissistic to be the real driver behind the movement. These traits made him unsuitable for the role of president. The money behind the madness knew this and counted on the fact that, if nothing else, Trump would be successful in generating chaos and passion.
This mass movement doesn't really need Trump anymore but as long as he's in the public eye he will remain the fire-starter in chief. That's all his masters need from him. Nothing more.
I agree with your post, as well as some points of Mr. Siler's above. I think to imagine that all these people who have rallied around Trump et al. are somehow going to magically melt away is dangerously naive. As Daria said, I think it is safe to say that Trump was the catalyst that made people with some of these abhorrent ideas come out of the woodwork. They've always been there lurking under the surface waiting for a moment to appear. They have also kind of egged each other on. Are they ALL unified? I don't think so. They most likely have their individual rallying points. Yes, I think once Dear Leader departs from the scene and loses his bully pulpit of the office, there may be a certain ebbing of enthusiasm for him, but I don't think at all he'll necessarily "go gently into that good night". I would refer folks back to HCR's interview a few days ago by Bill Moyer as a pretty good summing up of where at least the Republican party may go and what I may become. I think, too, that comparisons of populism/fascism of Europe in the past 100 years or so with contemporary events in the US are apt in some ways--mainly as regards the manipulation of people...that is eternal and never changes--but things have changed quite a bit because of, quite simply, technology. That has changed the playing field somewhat, and that to me is what is worrying. Because of adding the phenomenon of effects of technology on our societies, we are in uncharted waters. We've not been here before under these circumstances and figuring in that consideration--technology--means we don't necessarily have the benefit of history to teach us anything. Humanity might not change with regard to our all too human natures, but the environment now HAS changed and IS changing, so that may change some things in ways that we can't imagine. Consider how much our society in this country has changed from when the Founders put this Noble Experiment called the "USA" together at the end of the 18th century. The would freak out to see us now. Just a rambling stream of thoughts...(NOT proofed, so I apologise for any errors!)
Mr. sellers, I refer you to my response to the message posted by Ms. Wilber. Technological change, and the impersonal anomie of communicating solely through the medium of social media has a human cost; and one of the dangers we have not been prepared to face is how malleable this new medium is for propagating false narratives and disinformation.
Exactly. That is the point I was striving to make. I think things have changed even from Hoffer's time and those rapidly changing advances in technology change the playing field in ways that even he could not have imagined. Human beings don't change, though. As I said, it can become difficult to rely on history as a teacher when the technological advances keep changing the environment. We're kind of in some unfamiliar territory here, IMO. I also think the American system of government does make some of what happened in Europen history not as possible. Still, imagine what, say, Hitler and the Third Reich would have done with the technology we have now. Scary.
With all due respect, Eric Hoffer deserves to be judged on the entirety of his thinking as expressed in his writings. Recall that Hoffer is best known for his first book, written in spare moments between assignments as a longshoreman in San Francisco from 1943 until his book was published in 1950. Even then, as I have alluded to above, Hoffer continued to write, often in diary form, between assignments, or after work in his rented room. Nonetheless, he was an acute and original thinker, forceful in his expository writing, displaying none of the qualifiers and ambiguities that so often burden (and deaden) academic writing. That said, there are current writers whose style and forcefulness echo that of Eric Hoffer. One such writer who has drawn a great deal of favorable attention is Timothy Snyder who is the Levin Professor of History at Yale University whose recent book (2017) "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Tim Duggan books [Penguin Random House LLC]. Like Eric Hoffer, Professor Snyder conveys his thoughts through attention-capturing titles and easily absorbed and remembered aphoristic summaries, each of which is followed by a short, pithy analysis that expands upon the point he has just made. I personally favor aphorisms wherever possible, as they target the imagination. Well done, they convey their point with hammer blows. Eric Hoffer and Timothy Snyder share common bandwidth. Reading both multiplies their impact. And remember, in a world addicted to dancing video images and babbled slogans, the printed word is still the first line of defense against the Authoritarian's strategy of capturing the emotions before the thinking mind has had a chance to respond.
Finally, think stochastically, meaning, train yourselves to think probabilistically, based upon the probabilities that whatever you are hearing from others might be neither true nor false, depending upon their context. Ask better questions, like 'what's missing from this picture'; identify cognitive biases; and question assumptions. We are in the toughest battle of our intellectual lives, and we need to be fully prepared.
I agree totally with your analysis. He has been manipulated from the start - the useful idiot. There are many facets of this "movement," all serving their purpose, and I fear we'll be seeing more in the future.
Daria Wilber: I'm not disagreeing with you that Donald Trump came to personify the bitterness and alienation that his supporters feel with the parts of the American population who continue to do better, in the sense that they are socially, economically, and politically more likely to prosper. Your comments and others, have prompted me to revisit my assembled collection of Eric Hoffer's published works, 11 titles of which occupy a prominent place on my library bookshelves.
As to your first point, the right wing agitators are paid spokespersons, regardless of their popular following. New contracts can be canceled, their broadcast slots, and their employment relationships can be terminated at any time. There is no constitutional right to flood the airwaves with hate propaganda, regardless of how much money their sponsors have. First Amendment rights to free speech do not include the right to amplify their message. We used to have an 'equal time rule'; and that was enforced. There is nothing preventing us from doing that again, and to apply that role to social media as well. We just need the political will to do so.
I think people will agree that First Amendment jurisprudence might require some updating, especially insofar as the way in which disinformation and outright fabrication of false narratives crowd out public discourse and rational argument. Understandably, there are purists out there, whom I vehemently disagree with me on that; but the counter-argument is that human minds need space to think. This finding has been affirmed by researchers in brain science studying cognitive dissonance. Slowing things down makes for better decision-making, the same way in which judicial and legislative decision-making is intended to slow down the tempo of decision-making in order to ensure that better decisions are made.
You may be familiar with one of Eric Hoffer's later works, "The Ordeal Of Change", first published in 1963, and republished in 2006. Hoffer drew a straight line between a society undergoing drastic change and the cognitive dissonance that encumber members of that society that are and able to cope with either the pace at which changes occur, and the unanticipated outcomes that frequently emerge as a consequence of complex interactions within and between social systems, institutions, and their overall environments.
In that spirit, Hoffer wrote:
"The simple fact that we can never be fit and ready for that which is wholly new has some peculiar results. It means that a population undergoing drastic changes a population of misfits, and misfits live and breed in an atmosphere of passion. There is a close connection between lack of confidence and the passionate state of mind and, as we shall see passionate intensity may serve as a substitute for confidence the connection can be observed in all walks of life."
Eric Hoffer had a lot more to say about the subject of change and its effect on human society, and much of what he wrote addresses our situation now.
Evolution occurred over a span of a billion years, with punctuated changes occurring episodically, followed by further eons of stasis. All the while, living creatures were learning to adapt to their new environments, and with varying degrees of success. Adaptation itself can be the product of either random mutations that enable entities or species to better survive in their environment, or it can be a latent skill that can readily be put to use to make that that species' odds of survival better than they were without the change in behavior.
Over the past several decades an entirely new branch of science has emerged, now called Complexity Science, for want of anything better. There are mathematical models for how change occurs; but even their creators would readily admit that these are works in progress. You might even call it the 'science of extreme conditions and their entirely unpredictable consequences'. You might recall that some twenty years ago, a former stock trader turned academic coined the phrase 'black swan events' to describe the collapse of financial markets impacted by high volatility, market interconnectedness, and unrestrained risk-taking. The man's name is Naseem Nicholas Taleb who has made quite a name for himself in the popular literature of thinking about, and acting upon, what might be occurring when complex systems interact with one another.
I think what we're seeing now is a consequence of a large fraction of society that is unable to comprehend what is happened to them, viz. exposure to the coronavirus, coupled with a governmental response from the Trump administration that proved to be an utter failure of imagination. It's no wonder that more people haven't gone crazy with fear and disbelief that this could be happening to them. We've been pushing the envelope for years, and our safety net has shrunk to the size of a postage stamp. Much of this could have been avoided had proper precautions been taken; but as I mentioned above, people are disinclined to believe and rely upon information that they have not encountered before, and it is especially hard that the one person charged with the constitutional duty of anticipating this calamity of sickness and death that we are experiencing was AWOL from his job.
I would agree with you that Donald Trump is too cognitively disorganised
to lead a response to his followers' deep-seated alienation from American political and social life; I see him more as a parabolic lens through which they and their suffering come into focus, but not in any good way. For that matter, no American president since Lyndon Baines Johnson to see these people at the gut level; but even then, Johnson allowed himself to be rattled by holdover advisors from the Kennedy administration and Republican triumphalists into getting involved in Vietnam. I think Joe Biden has the chops to pull things together, if he can convince Republicans that their survival depends upon his success.
Art, I don't deny that you bring up very good points. I agree with you on many of them. (I will admit, I have not read all 11 books written by Eric Hoffer, so you have me there.) But, Hoffer's ideas about how rapid change impacts people as individuals and collectively are as important today as they were when written.
One of the points we may view differently is based on your comment:
" the right wing agitators are paid spokespersons, regardless of their popular following. New contracts can be canceled, their broadcast slots, and their employment relationships can be terminated at any time."
They may be paid spokespersons with contracts but they will likely find new homes in the right wing media outlets that have sprung up in the last few years. Each of these new outlets is ready and willing to push the envelope closer and closer to the edge. The folks who are stirred up now are willing to follow any one of the agitators to the ends of the earth. Right wing talking heads are no different from the on air/on-line evangelicals who have taken over large swaths of American Christianity, fleecing them in the process. The prosperity gospel, give, give, give and, if you believe and are "righteous", you will be rewarded. Their faith leaders tell them that. Their political leaders tell them the same thing. And yet, nothing gets better, so they need to give more, believe harder, scream louder, be more righteous. All the while their leaders are ignoring the fact that people are suffering while happily bleeding them dry. Even as the faithful watch loved ones die, or as they themselves lay dying, they will cling to the lies.
All leaders tend to be charismatic and very, very persuasive. Those on the right use anxiety, fear, loss, and bigotry to incite more of the same. Those in the center and left use compassion, equality, the greater good and the fear that those things will be pushed aside (as the have been in the last years). A good many people are angry and defiant (70m plus); some of the talking heads have been screaming at them for decades, (Limbaugh in particular). Over the decades the rhetoric about how the Democrats are trying to "screw you" has become increasingly rabid and loud. The right has also been clever and intertwined the assualt on faith and Jesus into their "righteous cause". Regardless of reality, those who have bought into the right's propaganda are not going to let go easily because doing so contradicts everything they believe in. (And I absolutely agree that there is no First Amendment Right to spew violent garbage and that updating is in order.)
Many analysts and the leadership of both parties have gotten a lot wrong. They rely on projections and data while ignoring human emotions, how quickly they can be manipulated and changed and the sheer number of people who can be mustered at the drop of a hat. The state of Georgia is a prime example; one day Republicans voted for Trump and the Republican ticket within a few days Republican voters refuse to vote for the Republican contenders in a senate runoff because a Democratic candidate won the presidency in a " fraudulent election ". They believe the nonsense of the vote being stolen through a worldwide effort of nefarious deep state operatives and nothing will change their minds about that. Right now, they are like a ball of mercury, ever shifting and easily fragmented but willing to coalesce in an instant if they hear a message that resonates.
Technology has made communication and the transfer of information lightening fast. We are ignoring the speed at which people are now shifting from one platform to another. Why? Because it is evolving so rapidly and because most people, including lawmakers, didn't take the hideous aspects and impacts of social media seriosly until just recently. All it took was Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., to clamp down on the spread of false information by the right and the President to elevate Parler (and others) from a relatively little used platform to a popular platform. The shift from conventional social media to alternatives was instantaneous. People are absolutely free to express any sentiment, including violence, without fear of the administrators throttling them. There have never been so many outlier channels on which people can express their views and there will be more.
And then there is the other side, people who are sick and tired of being screamed at and lied to by the leadership. Joe Biden was successful in his run for the presidency, not just because of his experience and merit, but because his demeanor was/is calm and civil and focused on the needs of the people. We can only hope that he will be able to provide leadership that promotes unity and healing on all fronts.
I agree with you. I never thought that Donald Trump was the one in charge. He was requited by the oligarchy because he had the personality to attract all the disenfranchised, angry people woh could do the work of the cult. I really loved Eric Hoffer's book. I learned a lot about how these cults of personality come about.
Thank you for taking the time to write your views. Really enjoyed your writing here about this time period. Hope you’re right in your conclusion about Trump’s mass movement. While I agree with many of your assessments, Trump has blown through so many norms and been so destructive and criminally negligent as POTUS, the task of rebuilding a well-oiled government structure and public faith in that structure will take a very long time. And how does truth re-establish itself as the foundation of public discourse? ❤️🤍💙
I wish we would all stop calling it violating norms and start calling it what it is, breaking the law. I completely agree about the need to re-establish truth. Reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, updated for the internet age, would be a start.
For the laws broken djt needs to go to jail. Or at least spend a lot of money trying to stay out of jail. However what djt has done is stretch the heck out of what we would call norms.
Although I would enjoy seeing T**** and his cabal spend some time behind bars, so few wealthy white people ever end up in prison that I'm not holding my breath on that one. And even if they did do time, it would likely be in a very comfortable country club style prison for white (collar) criminals. I'd like to see them all be deported to Russia. Let's trade them for Snowden.
Precisely. How many bankers, lenders, finance guys went to prison after the 2008 mess? Precisely zero if I recall. How many regular people got utterly screwed?
Kathy, I totally agree. My question is 'how to do that'? If we can't bring truth and proof back into public discourse, and legally prosecute those from top to bottom for going beyond free speech into kidnapping, threatening lives, etc. we are doomed to watch our country go down in flames.
I think we must start by holding the Trump administration to account. There must be consequences, not for revenge, but to prevent the next one. Sometimes I wonder, if Nixon had been prosecuted, would this have happened? We pride ourselves on the fact that no one is above the law in America. But that isn’t really true, unless we hold those who abuse their power to account.
I suddenly realized, through reading your admirable summary of radicalization of movements - that the vast swath of it’s voters you write about are simply .... Republicans.
Life Iong conservatives were NOT going to vote for Biden. Never. This is an aging electorate that bought into Reagan, forty years ago. Many Dem Reaganites. So, they buy the swag, attend rallies and believe in their leader. The proud boys are a tiny, tiny set of players, in costumes with guns and Doc Martens, perhaps. Ans they love to scream
I see many trump signs, in a vey predictable setting. This crowd predictably lives in mobile homes or trailers, often in very poor condition. With various items in the yard., which you’d never expect (but always do). We look at each, and simply brings as we drive by. But, they are our rural neighbors and have been, all our lives
Hey, I live in a trailer! My trailer park is on the edge of the capitol city of my state and I have been pleasantly surprised this year by the number of rural residents who have placed Black Lives Matter signs in their yards. True, a fair number of T****/Pants signs were around here, too, but an equal number of Biden/Harris signs sprouted after they were nominated. Most of the T**** signs are down, but people are leaving their Biden signs up.
By the number of people driving very high-priced new gas-guzzlers in the recent T**** parades through our downtown, and the fact that the majority of T**** signs around here have been on large estates with multiple fancy vehicles, I think we are seeing different demographics among "the believers".
I'm with you Lanita - I lived in a trailer for several years - I guess technically my double wide is one but as far as I'm concerned its perfect! I never lived in a trailer park, although there are some very nice ones.
Frederick, you have to realize that many trailer residents are people who may not be able to afford to buy or rent a house. This covers an awful lot of people, many on the lower end of the 99%. Not ALL of them believe in the deity of trumpism.
There is a different demographic in trailer parks, than rural America where trailers are older and often in need of serious repair. Some host the misplaced refrigerator and range (in the yard), simply because it is expensive and difficult to haul the item to the transfer station. I have spent years in Northern Calif, since 1996 (near Santa Rosa), and the most affordable living option is in “Over 55" communities, and this is a very common housing arrangement.
Plenty of Trump supporters did not place signs and flags in their well-manicured front yards, and do not live in mobile homes or trailers. They don't go to rallies. They live comfortable lives and want to continue to protect their own assets. The crowd that angles to get in front of the cameras are fine for drawing eyeballs to the Trump train, but there are lots and lots and lots of silent passengers who voted for this Administration.
"President as arsonist.."..bingo...when Comey was fired as FBI director, my Dad who was a staunch republican turned to me and said "I fear for the republic..." Over the past months I have come to understand his fear...I hope they shut off tRumps twitter feed...my bigger concern is how to reverse thevradicalization that is going on in the block that voted for tRump...if he goes to jail I will be very happy but fear it will make a martyr of him. The whole "fraudulent election" call has become a belief system born of tRumps own narcissism. I fear for the republic now too...
Yes! That line about. POTUS as “arsonist of radicalization” is such a great description, and the story about someone being run off the road reminds me of the pizzagate tragedy. What will it take to get people out of the right-wing “alternative facts” bubble they’re living in?
When the Fairness Doctrine is reinstated and they are no longer fed 3 meals a day of "lying, mendacity, untruthfulness, fibbing, fabrication, invention, perjury, perfidy, perfidiousness, lack of veracity, telling stories, misrepresentation, prevarication, equivocation. deceit, deception, deceitfulness, pretence, artifice, falseness, two-facedness, double-dealing, double-crossing, dissimulation" (many thanks to Lexico).
As long as purveyors of right wing crap continue (they know what they’re saying is manufactured or misleading) and make money and gain fame, we’ll be dealing with the fallout.
Not all are competent though, nor do they clearly see what they are in effect doing. We got the first 2 categories but they never had the third, "Action Man" in their midst. Even then while they were mixing up the "Words and Fanatics" stages they never got their collective act together and so there was neither full transformation nor transition. We can be thankful!
One big question is whether there will arise a competent less psychologically flawed “Trump” to seize control of the movement that coalesced around him.
The GOP has certainly demonstrated they have no qualms about using all that hate and aggrieved rage as a device to win elections. However uneasy it may make some of them, I’m sure most see it as just an extension of the culture war they used so effectively.
And as we’re seeing now they don’t have a problem with damaging the country or democracy as long as they are able to carry out their real purpose — tax breaks for rich people.
True, but don't forget that Democrats failed to take aggressive action to stop those situations, even during times when Democrats held both the House and the Senate. Thus the assertion, which is at least partly true, that both parties have been culpable. Pending further detailed study, I assume those complaints against Democrats are well-founded.
They have many in the party but, like Gingrich when he was Speaker of the House, they are not terribly attractive people and don't have the (rancid) smell of faux success from being a media personality. Gingrich couldn't make a group of rabid supporters coalesce around him but you can bet some neofascist will work on that.
Heather does a video talk on Tuesdays at 4 pm and Thursdays at 1 pm, on Facebook Live. You can watch the video later on Facebook, or after a few weeks it will be on her YouTube.
Ralph, did you find it? I watched live for the first time yesterday, then I watched it later with my husband. Previously I watched several of her talks some days after they were recorded. If you search on her full name in Facebook, then click on Videos, you should see her Dec 15 talk listed. She has a Youtube channel with many older recordings too. I haven't yet figured it all out, but every one has been really helpful and good. Best wishes.
Kari, Thank you for sharing the link on Eric Hoffer! I planned to follow up on that! I agree it was a great talk. I shared it in one of my likeminded Facebook groups.
Heather,
Your 4 PM (ET) talk today was fascinating. I was taken with your explanation of why it’s incredibly difficult for followers of a deceitful leader to disengage from that person, especially after joining them in marginalizing and being hateful and hurtful to other humans. If followers did break away, they would be wracked with guilt and regret.
I looked up Eric Hoffer, described as an American moral and social philosopher, and found this:
https://reasonandmeaning.com/2017/09/04/summary-of-eric-hoffers-the-true-believer/
“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents … Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.” ~ Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
“Hoffer states that three personality types typically lead mass movements: “men of words”, “fanatics”, and “practical men of action.” Men of words try to “discredit the prevailing creeds” and create a “hunger for faith” which is then fed by “doctrines and slogans of the new faith.” (p. 140) Slowly followers emerge.
Then fanatics take over. Fanatics don’t find solace in literature, philosophy, or art. Instead, they are characterized by viciousness, the urge to destroy, and the perpetual struggle for power. But after mass movements transform the social order, the insecurity of their followers is not ameliorated. At this point, the “practical men of action” take over and try to lead the new order by further controlling their followers.
In the end mass movements that succeed often bring about a social order worse than the previous one. (This was one of Will Durant’s findings in The Lessons of History.) As Hoffer puts it near the end of his work: “All mass movements … irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred, and intolerance.” (p. 141)”
This connects to your explanation of today. Is this what we’ve been truly witnessing over the last years? Where does this “movement” go from here?
Unlike continental European political systems, the American political system tends to be essentially binary; and with the Trump Republican Party essentially at war with itself, and 'delaminating', the long-term prospects for a mass party led by 'practical men of action' do not look particularly good for the long run. As Eric Hoffer described it, popular discontents were seized upon by 'men of words': writers, artists, about whom Hoffer regarded as dilettantes, cranks, fault-finders, charlatans and worse. At a certain point, the ruling elites are discredited; and as Hoffer tells it, the intellectuals who use their words to discredit those elites are easily pushed aside by those who seized power, typically with the assistance of the Armed Forces and police. That has been the pattern in South America, Central and in Southern and Eastern Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, the former Russian Empire in the seven years following the armistice of World War I, and elsewhere in East Asia and South Asia during those turbulent years.
In America, a different pattern arose, not of someone arising from the lower classes and claiming to be the representative of the dispossessed, such as an Adolf Hitler, a Josef Stalin, a Leon Trotsky, a Benito Mussolini or a Mao Tse-Tung, seizing on revolutionary rhetoric. The American dream was to become rich, and who better to feed the fantasies of those feeling themselves dispossessed, then the promises of someone like Donald Trump, forever pretending to be far richer than he actually was, but exceedingly astute and tapping into the grievances of those Americans who had not prospered in America's burgeoning economy, essentially since the administration of John F. Kennedy, some fifty years earlier. The whys and the wherefores are too lengthy to even summarize; but in a nutshell, in the seventy years following the end of World War II, the class system within America changed dramatically from a wealth- and property-holding class system, where inheritance and generational transfers of wealth became less important than the wealth that was created from information and technology. Under the pressures of the Cold War, scientific and technical information, through its development and exploitation, became an absolute priority, given the fact that both the United States of America and its chief antagonists, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China all had nuclear weapons of sufficient magnitude and deployment capability to hold each other hostage.
The American response to its adversaries' advances in science and technology, specifically in the area of long-range delivery systems for nuclear weaponry, came as a shock, when in 1957, the Soviet Union was able to orbit a Communications Satellite, 'Sputnik I'. The American response was to energize it's system of higher education, on one hand creating crash programs for recruiting, educating, and deploying tens of millions of people now educated in the sciences and mathematics; and paying them well enough so that many of them who had been recruited and educated at public expense, were now able to market their skills and the technologies those skills represented, by going into business for themselves. In the San Francisco Bay area, and in the area of the Route 128 Beltway that defines the towns that surround Boston and Cambridge Massachusetts, these new startup companies became the new pillars on which the economic futures of those cities were to be sustained for decades to come. Not everyone would be up to starting a new technology business, but there were plenty of now-well educated men and women who would find good employment working in those companies.
These are not the people who were attracted to Donald Trump. Instead, Trump supporters tended to be those people who tended to be 'left behind', as economic success invariably went to others who are better educated, more dependable as employees, more interested in improving their skills, networking, and expanding their wealth, based upon the value that they brought to the new companies they were creating. Instead, the 'left behind's' tended to be poor whites who suddenly found themselves 'downwardly mobile', whose lives were plagued with job insecurities, food insecurities, health insecurities, these were the people who were described in such books as JD Vance's 'Hillbilly Elegy' and George Packer's 'the Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America'.
At the same time, international trade, propelled forward by all those wonderful new technologies that nullified time and distance, grew exponentially. The net effect was an enormous outflow of jobs from the United States and overseas to its trading partners around the world, where labor costs were minute fractions of what comparable wages would have to be paid if the jobs were kept in the United States. Concurrently, those jobs that remained were now typically worked by immigrant labor heading north from Latin America, driven north by horrific social and economic conditions in their former homelands.
Donald Trump, the narcissistic con-man and pseudo-magnate, came from a family that made their wealth putting up cheap, substandard apartment housing in New York City's inner suburbs, whose specialty was in milking Federal housing assistance programs. Trump is a showman, and above all, an opportunist, with a predator natural ability to sniff out weaknesses in public assistance programs; and he was willing to do anything that would pass his bottom line, regardless of its illegality or moral depravity.
For Trump, it was all about raking in as much money as he could. The men he recruited to assist him had long use their political connections through graft and grifting to steal as much as they could while they were holding office. But the American political system made corruption on the grand scale that Donald Trump was used to exploiting difficult to accomplish. Trump's control over these men was more the way of threatening to cut them off from whatever perquisites they had managed to garner for themselves; and so in fear of him were they, that the aqueous to anything he demanded. These men were essentially petty thieves whose sole access to wealth where the government jobs they held or their legislative salaries, or acting as hatchet men for their political donors. Most of what they did was to tear down the institutional restraints on their ability to steal money from the government. These men are not revolutionaries in any sense.
At the same time, Trump's supporters are unlike the supporters of Juan Peron in Argentina in the decade following World War II. Peron's government drew its support from the so-called 'shirtless ones', and urban, working-class proletariat that was sustained and supported by handouts from Peron's government. America's 'left behinds' are principally America's rural poor, those who have not benefited from our postwar boom in technology and trade. Trump gives them nothing in any material sense; but he does entertain them at his massive rallies. In other words, Trump's sole ability was to give voice to his supportive base, while doing nothing to alleviate their misery. His behavior during the coronavirus crisis is entirely emblematic of his essential lack of interest or caring for anyone but himself.
Consequently, the model created by Eric Hoffer in his examination of mass political movements in Germany and especially in the Soviet Union does not hold. If Donald Trump ever got to be a strong man, it might look like that regime of Francisco Franco, in Spain, or Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, in Portugal; but given Trump's obvious incompetencies, it is unlikely he would have survived for long. Trump thrives only in those situations where his opponents play by the rules, and he does not.
This is a mass movement that has no place to go because it's leader, Donald Trump, lives only in the moment and has no ability to use the governmental powers he holds in any purposeful way.
^^^"This is a mass movement that has no place to go because it's leader, Donald Trump, lives only in the moment and has no ability to use the governmental powers he holds in any purposeful way."^^^
With all due respect:
Donald Trump was the catalyst that brought this mass movement out of the closet but he was not the engineer of the movement. There is someone out there waiting in the wings to pick up the torch as Trump fades away. There are people currently in and out of government channels, as well as recently elected ultra right wing adherents, who are willing to agitate to an extreme level. There are people who ignite passion and have a broad base of followers; Limbaugh, Hannity, Carlson, Ingraham, Jones to name a few. These people are not going to simply shut up and go away, (except for Limbaugh, when he draws his last fetid breath). The ultra right wing organizations are not going to close shop just because Trump is no longer president.
The other fallacy is to simply focus on the left behind. Sure, they are the ones who are visible and flock to his rallies and chant ugly slogans, they are, in essence, the grunts and the stooges, making all the noise. But behind those folks are the moneyed, the people who have been listening to, writing and promoting incendiary rhetoric and donating to campaigns and organizations for decades. The Mercers, the Adelsons, the Kochs, the wealthy white Republicans living in gated communities across the country have poured billions of dollars into politics and political organizations over the last seven decades.
And then there are the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo, the so called militias, the neo Nazi groups, the ultra evangelical "ministers" shrieking and screaming hate. These people are not going to sit down and shut up.
Donald Trump is too intellectually disorganized and narcissistic to be the real driver behind the movement. These traits made him unsuitable for the role of president. The money behind the madness knew this and counted on the fact that, if nothing else, Trump would be successful in generating chaos and passion.
This mass movement doesn't really need Trump anymore but as long as he's in the public eye he will remain the fire-starter in chief. That's all his masters need from him. Nothing more.
Fire Starter in Chief. That is a fabulous title for djt.
How about Dumpster Fire?
I agree with your post, as well as some points of Mr. Siler's above. I think to imagine that all these people who have rallied around Trump et al. are somehow going to magically melt away is dangerously naive. As Daria said, I think it is safe to say that Trump was the catalyst that made people with some of these abhorrent ideas come out of the woodwork. They've always been there lurking under the surface waiting for a moment to appear. They have also kind of egged each other on. Are they ALL unified? I don't think so. They most likely have their individual rallying points. Yes, I think once Dear Leader departs from the scene and loses his bully pulpit of the office, there may be a certain ebbing of enthusiasm for him, but I don't think at all he'll necessarily "go gently into that good night". I would refer folks back to HCR's interview a few days ago by Bill Moyer as a pretty good summing up of where at least the Republican party may go and what I may become. I think, too, that comparisons of populism/fascism of Europe in the past 100 years or so with contemporary events in the US are apt in some ways--mainly as regards the manipulation of people...that is eternal and never changes--but things have changed quite a bit because of, quite simply, technology. That has changed the playing field somewhat, and that to me is what is worrying. Because of adding the phenomenon of effects of technology on our societies, we are in uncharted waters. We've not been here before under these circumstances and figuring in that consideration--technology--means we don't necessarily have the benefit of history to teach us anything. Humanity might not change with regard to our all too human natures, but the environment now HAS changed and IS changing, so that may change some things in ways that we can't imagine. Consider how much our society in this country has changed from when the Founders put this Noble Experiment called the "USA" together at the end of the 18th century. The would freak out to see us now. Just a rambling stream of thoughts...(NOT proofed, so I apologise for any errors!)
'...for what IT may become..." No way I'm a Republican!
Mr. sellers, I refer you to my response to the message posted by Ms. Wilber. Technological change, and the impersonal anomie of communicating solely through the medium of social media has a human cost; and one of the dangers we have not been prepared to face is how malleable this new medium is for propagating false narratives and disinformation.
Exactly. That is the point I was striving to make. I think things have changed even from Hoffer's time and those rapidly changing advances in technology change the playing field in ways that even he could not have imagined. Human beings don't change, though. As I said, it can become difficult to rely on history as a teacher when the technological advances keep changing the environment. We're kind of in some unfamiliar territory here, IMO. I also think the American system of government does make some of what happened in Europen history not as possible. Still, imagine what, say, Hitler and the Third Reich would have done with the technology we have now. Scary.
With all due respect, Eric Hoffer deserves to be judged on the entirety of his thinking as expressed in his writings. Recall that Hoffer is best known for his first book, written in spare moments between assignments as a longshoreman in San Francisco from 1943 until his book was published in 1950. Even then, as I have alluded to above, Hoffer continued to write, often in diary form, between assignments, or after work in his rented room. Nonetheless, he was an acute and original thinker, forceful in his expository writing, displaying none of the qualifiers and ambiguities that so often burden (and deaden) academic writing. That said, there are current writers whose style and forcefulness echo that of Eric Hoffer. One such writer who has drawn a great deal of favorable attention is Timothy Snyder who is the Levin Professor of History at Yale University whose recent book (2017) "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Tim Duggan books [Penguin Random House LLC]. Like Eric Hoffer, Professor Snyder conveys his thoughts through attention-capturing titles and easily absorbed and remembered aphoristic summaries, each of which is followed by a short, pithy analysis that expands upon the point he has just made. I personally favor aphorisms wherever possible, as they target the imagination. Well done, they convey their point with hammer blows. Eric Hoffer and Timothy Snyder share common bandwidth. Reading both multiplies their impact. And remember, in a world addicted to dancing video images and babbled slogans, the printed word is still the first line of defense against the Authoritarian's strategy of capturing the emotions before the thinking mind has had a chance to respond.
Finally, think stochastically, meaning, train yourselves to think probabilistically, based upon the probabilities that whatever you are hearing from others might be neither true nor false, depending upon their context. Ask better questions, like 'what's missing from this picture'; identify cognitive biases; and question assumptions. We are in the toughest battle of our intellectual lives, and we need to be fully prepared.
Whoa!
I agree totally with your analysis. He has been manipulated from the start - the useful idiot. There are many facets of this "movement," all serving their purpose, and I fear we'll be seeing more in the future.
But, now we know.
Daria Wilber: I'm not disagreeing with you that Donald Trump came to personify the bitterness and alienation that his supporters feel with the parts of the American population who continue to do better, in the sense that they are socially, economically, and politically more likely to prosper. Your comments and others, have prompted me to revisit my assembled collection of Eric Hoffer's published works, 11 titles of which occupy a prominent place on my library bookshelves.
As to your first point, the right wing agitators are paid spokespersons, regardless of their popular following. New contracts can be canceled, their broadcast slots, and their employment relationships can be terminated at any time. There is no constitutional right to flood the airwaves with hate propaganda, regardless of how much money their sponsors have. First Amendment rights to free speech do not include the right to amplify their message. We used to have an 'equal time rule'; and that was enforced. There is nothing preventing us from doing that again, and to apply that role to social media as well. We just need the political will to do so.
I think people will agree that First Amendment jurisprudence might require some updating, especially insofar as the way in which disinformation and outright fabrication of false narratives crowd out public discourse and rational argument. Understandably, there are purists out there, whom I vehemently disagree with me on that; but the counter-argument is that human minds need space to think. This finding has been affirmed by researchers in brain science studying cognitive dissonance. Slowing things down makes for better decision-making, the same way in which judicial and legislative decision-making is intended to slow down the tempo of decision-making in order to ensure that better decisions are made.
You may be familiar with one of Eric Hoffer's later works, "The Ordeal Of Change", first published in 1963, and republished in 2006. Hoffer drew a straight line between a society undergoing drastic change and the cognitive dissonance that encumber members of that society that are and able to cope with either the pace at which changes occur, and the unanticipated outcomes that frequently emerge as a consequence of complex interactions within and between social systems, institutions, and their overall environments.
In that spirit, Hoffer wrote:
"The simple fact that we can never be fit and ready for that which is wholly new has some peculiar results. It means that a population undergoing drastic changes a population of misfits, and misfits live and breed in an atmosphere of passion. There is a close connection between lack of confidence and the passionate state of mind and, as we shall see passionate intensity may serve as a substitute for confidence the connection can be observed in all walks of life."
Eric Hoffer had a lot more to say about the subject of change and its effect on human society, and much of what he wrote addresses our situation now.
Evolution occurred over a span of a billion years, with punctuated changes occurring episodically, followed by further eons of stasis. All the while, living creatures were learning to adapt to their new environments, and with varying degrees of success. Adaptation itself can be the product of either random mutations that enable entities or species to better survive in their environment, or it can be a latent skill that can readily be put to use to make that that species' odds of survival better than they were without the change in behavior.
Over the past several decades an entirely new branch of science has emerged, now called Complexity Science, for want of anything better. There are mathematical models for how change occurs; but even their creators would readily admit that these are works in progress. You might even call it the 'science of extreme conditions and their entirely unpredictable consequences'. You might recall that some twenty years ago, a former stock trader turned academic coined the phrase 'black swan events' to describe the collapse of financial markets impacted by high volatility, market interconnectedness, and unrestrained risk-taking. The man's name is Naseem Nicholas Taleb who has made quite a name for himself in the popular literature of thinking about, and acting upon, what might be occurring when complex systems interact with one another.
I think what we're seeing now is a consequence of a large fraction of society that is unable to comprehend what is happened to them, viz. exposure to the coronavirus, coupled with a governmental response from the Trump administration that proved to be an utter failure of imagination. It's no wonder that more people haven't gone crazy with fear and disbelief that this could be happening to them. We've been pushing the envelope for years, and our safety net has shrunk to the size of a postage stamp. Much of this could have been avoided had proper precautions been taken; but as I mentioned above, people are disinclined to believe and rely upon information that they have not encountered before, and it is especially hard that the one person charged with the constitutional duty of anticipating this calamity of sickness and death that we are experiencing was AWOL from his job.
I would agree with you that Donald Trump is too cognitively disorganised
to lead a response to his followers' deep-seated alienation from American political and social life; I see him more as a parabolic lens through which they and their suffering come into focus, but not in any good way. For that matter, no American president since Lyndon Baines Johnson to see these people at the gut level; but even then, Johnson allowed himself to be rattled by holdover advisors from the Kennedy administration and Republican triumphalists into getting involved in Vietnam. I think Joe Biden has the chops to pull things together, if he can convince Republicans that their survival depends upon his success.
Art, I don't deny that you bring up very good points. I agree with you on many of them. (I will admit, I have not read all 11 books written by Eric Hoffer, so you have me there.) But, Hoffer's ideas about how rapid change impacts people as individuals and collectively are as important today as they were when written.
One of the points we may view differently is based on your comment:
" the right wing agitators are paid spokespersons, regardless of their popular following. New contracts can be canceled, their broadcast slots, and their employment relationships can be terminated at any time."
They may be paid spokespersons with contracts but they will likely find new homes in the right wing media outlets that have sprung up in the last few years. Each of these new outlets is ready and willing to push the envelope closer and closer to the edge. The folks who are stirred up now are willing to follow any one of the agitators to the ends of the earth. Right wing talking heads are no different from the on air/on-line evangelicals who have taken over large swaths of American Christianity, fleecing them in the process. The prosperity gospel, give, give, give and, if you believe and are "righteous", you will be rewarded. Their faith leaders tell them that. Their political leaders tell them the same thing. And yet, nothing gets better, so they need to give more, believe harder, scream louder, be more righteous. All the while their leaders are ignoring the fact that people are suffering while happily bleeding them dry. Even as the faithful watch loved ones die, or as they themselves lay dying, they will cling to the lies.
All leaders tend to be charismatic and very, very persuasive. Those on the right use anxiety, fear, loss, and bigotry to incite more of the same. Those in the center and left use compassion, equality, the greater good and the fear that those things will be pushed aside (as the have been in the last years). A good many people are angry and defiant (70m plus); some of the talking heads have been screaming at them for decades, (Limbaugh in particular). Over the decades the rhetoric about how the Democrats are trying to "screw you" has become increasingly rabid and loud. The right has also been clever and intertwined the assualt on faith and Jesus into their "righteous cause". Regardless of reality, those who have bought into the right's propaganda are not going to let go easily because doing so contradicts everything they believe in. (And I absolutely agree that there is no First Amendment Right to spew violent garbage and that updating is in order.)
Many analysts and the leadership of both parties have gotten a lot wrong. They rely on projections and data while ignoring human emotions, how quickly they can be manipulated and changed and the sheer number of people who can be mustered at the drop of a hat. The state of Georgia is a prime example; one day Republicans voted for Trump and the Republican ticket within a few days Republican voters refuse to vote for the Republican contenders in a senate runoff because a Democratic candidate won the presidency in a " fraudulent election ". They believe the nonsense of the vote being stolen through a worldwide effort of nefarious deep state operatives and nothing will change their minds about that. Right now, they are like a ball of mercury, ever shifting and easily fragmented but willing to coalesce in an instant if they hear a message that resonates.
Technology has made communication and the transfer of information lightening fast. We are ignoring the speed at which people are now shifting from one platform to another. Why? Because it is evolving so rapidly and because most people, including lawmakers, didn't take the hideous aspects and impacts of social media seriosly until just recently. All it took was Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., to clamp down on the spread of false information by the right and the President to elevate Parler (and others) from a relatively little used platform to a popular platform. The shift from conventional social media to alternatives was instantaneous. People are absolutely free to express any sentiment, including violence, without fear of the administrators throttling them. There have never been so many outlier channels on which people can express their views and there will be more.
And then there is the other side, people who are sick and tired of being screamed at and lied to by the leadership. Joe Biden was successful in his run for the presidency, not just because of his experience and merit, but because his demeanor was/is calm and civil and focused on the needs of the people. We can only hope that he will be able to provide leadership that promotes unity and healing on all fronts.
I respect your scholarship and opinions.
I agree with you. I never thought that Donald Trump was the one in charge. He was requited by the oligarchy because he had the personality to attract all the disenfranchised, angry people woh could do the work of the cult. I really loved Eric Hoffer's book. I learned a lot about how these cults of personality come about.
This is perfection. I am cutting and pasting this to a friend. Thank you!
Thank you!
Thank you for taking the time to write your views. Really enjoyed your writing here about this time period. Hope you’re right in your conclusion about Trump’s mass movement. While I agree with many of your assessments, Trump has blown through so many norms and been so destructive and criminally negligent as POTUS, the task of rebuilding a well-oiled government structure and public faith in that structure will take a very long time. And how does truth re-establish itself as the foundation of public discourse? ❤️🤍💙
I wish we would all stop calling it violating norms and start calling it what it is, breaking the law. I completely agree about the need to re-establish truth. Reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, updated for the internet age, would be a start.
For the laws broken djt needs to go to jail. Or at least spend a lot of money trying to stay out of jail. However what djt has done is stretch the heck out of what we would call norms.
Although I would enjoy seeing T**** and his cabal spend some time behind bars, so few wealthy white people ever end up in prison that I'm not holding my breath on that one. And even if they did do time, it would likely be in a very comfortable country club style prison for white (collar) criminals. I'd like to see them all be deported to Russia. Let's trade them for Snowden.
Precisely. How many bankers, lenders, finance guys went to prison after the 2008 mess? Precisely zero if I recall. How many regular people got utterly screwed?
I hear Rikers is nice this time of year
Kathy, I totally agree. My question is 'how to do that'? If we can't bring truth and proof back into public discourse, and legally prosecute those from top to bottom for going beyond free speech into kidnapping, threatening lives, etc. we are doomed to watch our country go down in flames.
I think we must start by holding the Trump administration to account. There must be consequences, not for revenge, but to prevent the next one. Sometimes I wonder, if Nixon had been prosecuted, would this have happened? We pride ourselves on the fact that no one is above the law in America. But that isn’t really true, unless we hold those who abuse their power to account.
I just saw this and thought of you! Thank YOU for all you're doing to help Georgia. If this link doesn't work, goto Rolling Stone and look up Georgia on my mind. https://www.facebook.com/RollingStone/posts/10157717085005779
Great, thanks!
Love it!
What happens when a Jim Jordan rises to th top of the fetid pile?
Bingo.
Maybe he'll put a damn jacket on
Your description of Trump as a predator is excellent. I think that’s it, in a nutshell.
I suddenly realized, through reading your admirable summary of radicalization of movements - that the vast swath of it’s voters you write about are simply .... Republicans.
Life Iong conservatives were NOT going to vote for Biden. Never. This is an aging electorate that bought into Reagan, forty years ago. Many Dem Reaganites. So, they buy the swag, attend rallies and believe in their leader. The proud boys are a tiny, tiny set of players, in costumes with guns and Doc Martens, perhaps. Ans they love to scream
I see many trump signs, in a vey predictable setting. This crowd predictably lives in mobile homes or trailers, often in very poor condition. With various items in the yard., which you’d never expect (but always do). We look at each, and simply brings as we drive by. But, they are our rural neighbors and have been, all our lives
Hey, I live in a trailer! My trailer park is on the edge of the capitol city of my state and I have been pleasantly surprised this year by the number of rural residents who have placed Black Lives Matter signs in their yards. True, a fair number of T****/Pants signs were around here, too, but an equal number of Biden/Harris signs sprouted after they were nominated. Most of the T**** signs are down, but people are leaving their Biden signs up.
By the number of people driving very high-priced new gas-guzzlers in the recent T**** parades through our downtown, and the fact that the majority of T**** signs around here have been on large estates with multiple fancy vehicles, I think we are seeing different demographics among "the believers".
I'm with you Lanita - I lived in a trailer for several years - I guess technically my double wide is one but as far as I'm concerned its perfect! I never lived in a trailer park, although there are some very nice ones.
Frederick, you have to realize that many trailer residents are people who may not be able to afford to buy or rent a house. This covers an awful lot of people, many on the lower end of the 99%. Not ALL of them believe in the deity of trumpism.
Lanita, your point is very well taken!
There is a different demographic in trailer parks, than rural America where trailers are older and often in need of serious repair. Some host the misplaced refrigerator and range (in the yard), simply because it is expensive and difficult to haul the item to the transfer station. I have spent years in Northern Calif, since 1996 (near Santa Rosa), and the most affordable living option is in “Over 55" communities, and this is a very common housing arrangement.
Lanita, spot on.
*We look at each other as we drive by. and sigh.
Plenty of Trump supporters did not place signs and flags in their well-manicured front yards, and do not live in mobile homes or trailers. They don't go to rallies. They live comfortable lives and want to continue to protect their own assets. The crowd that angles to get in front of the cameras are fine for drawing eyeballs to the Trump train, but there are lots and lots and lots of silent passengers who voted for this Administration.
I agree. Well stated. They’re simply conservatives, and Republicans.
Interesting synopsis.
"President as arsonist.."..bingo...when Comey was fired as FBI director, my Dad who was a staunch republican turned to me and said "I fear for the republic..." Over the past months I have come to understand his fear...I hope they shut off tRumps twitter feed...my bigger concern is how to reverse thevradicalization that is going on in the block that voted for tRump...if he goes to jail I will be very happy but fear it will make a martyr of him. The whole "fraudulent election" call has become a belief system born of tRumps own narcissism. I fear for the republic now too...
Yes! That line about. POTUS as “arsonist of radicalization” is such a great description, and the story about someone being run off the road reminds me of the pizzagate tragedy. What will it take to get people out of the right-wing “alternative facts” bubble they’re living in?
When the Fairness Doctrine is reinstated and they are no longer fed 3 meals a day of "lying, mendacity, untruthfulness, fibbing, fabrication, invention, perjury, perfidy, perfidiousness, lack of veracity, telling stories, misrepresentation, prevarication, equivocation. deceit, deception, deceitfulness, pretence, artifice, falseness, two-facedness, double-dealing, double-crossing, dissimulation" (many thanks to Lexico).
What a brilliant list of synonyms!
Brilliant list, thank you.
As long as purveyors of right wing crap continue (they know what they’re saying is manufactured or misleading) and make money and gain fame, we’ll be dealing with the fallout.
Despite fear of being overly reactionary, let us martyr the bastard.
I think simply shutting off his megaphone might be plenty. He'd die in the vacuum of his stupidity
Not all are competent though, nor do they clearly see what they are in effect doing. We got the first 2 categories but they never had the third, "Action Man" in their midst. Even then while they were mixing up the "Words and Fanatics" stages they never got their collective act together and so there was neither full transformation nor transition. We can be thankful!
One big question is whether there will arise a competent less psychologically flawed “Trump” to seize control of the movement that coalesced around him.
The GOP has certainly demonstrated they have no qualms about using all that hate and aggrieved rage as a device to win elections. However uneasy it may make some of them, I’m sure most see it as just an extension of the culture war they used so effectively.
And as we’re seeing now they don’t have a problem with damaging the country or democracy as long as they are able to carry out their real purpose — tax breaks for rich people.
You know what I find so terribly ironic? It was the Republicans who created the conditions that left Trump’s aggrieved supporters.
True, but don't forget that Democrats failed to take aggressive action to stop those situations, even during times when Democrats held both the House and the Senate. Thus the assertion, which is at least partly true, that both parties have been culpable. Pending further detailed study, I assume those complaints against Democrats are well-founded.
True dat.
And yet still managed to stick the Dems with the blame!
They have many in the party but, like Gingrich when he was Speaker of the House, they are not terribly attractive people and don't have the (rancid) smell of faux success from being a media personality. Gingrich couldn't make a group of rabid supporters coalesce around him but you can bet some neofascist will work on that.
So Very Sad!
I agree with you about Heather's talk today, and thank you for the Hoffer link.
Kari, how can I listen to the 4PM talk by Heather that you mentioned?
Thanks.
Heather does a video talk on Tuesdays at 4 pm and Thursdays at 1 pm, on Facebook Live. You can watch the video later on Facebook, or after a few weeks it will be on her YouTube.
4 and 1 Eastern Time, respectively.
Ralph, did you find it? I watched live for the first time yesterday, then I watched it later with my husband. Previously I watched several of her talks some days after they were recorded. If you search on her full name in Facebook, then click on Videos, you should see her Dec 15 talk listed. She has a Youtube channel with many older recordings too. I haven't yet figured it all out, but every one has been really helpful and good. Best wishes.
Yes, and thanks for your help.
Kari, Thank you for sharing the link on Eric Hoffer! I planned to follow up on that! I agree it was a great talk. I shared it in one of my likeminded Facebook groups.