If there is any one book I would require be a staple of every college education, whatever the field, it would be Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer. If you haven’t read it, your education is incomplete and you should put reading it at the top of your to-do list; it is, by a bunch, the best study available of mass movements and what animates and sustains them.
We marvel today at the popularity of Donald Trump’s cheap demagoguery, and wonder why a man so conspicuously irreligious holds such appeal for evangelicals especially. We make justified comparisons to 1930s Germany, when Hitler was scapegoating Jews and Thomas Wolfe was one of the first to begin telling their stories.
When the war ended the universal question was, How could a country so advanced in the sciences and arts have created the horror of the death camps? Hoffer went upstream of that question and asked, instead, What is a mass movement?
It was the right question to ask, and the answer explains slime like Trump, too.
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