{"id":2796,"date":"2015-12-08T12:05:36","date_gmt":"2015-12-08T17:05:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=2796"},"modified":"2015-12-08T12:05:36","modified_gmt":"2015-12-08T17:05:36","slug":"the-true-believer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=2796","title":{"rendered":"The True Believer"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/i>. 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> was one of the first to begin telling their stories.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

It was the right question to ask, and the answer explains slime like Trump, too.<\/p>\n

Available from Abe Books<\/a> | Barnes & Noble<\/a>\"icon\" | Powell’s Books<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2796"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2796"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2798,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2796\/revisions\/2798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}