Eric Hoffer’s ‘The True Believer’ In The Time Of Trump.
In the era of Trump, voices of rationalism that call us out of the whirlwind for a moment are an increasingly necessary treatment, an oxygen mask that allows us to restore brain function so as to work out where we are headed and what can be done about it. This is true even when the person speaking to us from almost seventy years ago. I have in mind here a short book by a longshoreman writing in the off moments not loading freight: Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer.
Hoffer’s central thesis is that mass movements offer to people who believe themselves to have spoiled lives an opportunity to set aside the self and become a part of a collective action that provides a purpose and substitute identity. The True Believer is one among a handful of books that once read seem always and forever obvious, as if there was never a time before the reading.
This is especially the case now after witnessing a mass movement sweep a failed businessman and reality TV star into the White House. Hoffer’s description in the sixteenth chapter of the kind of person who steps in to take advantage of the discontents in a society is one that sounds tailored for Trump:
When the old order begins to fall apart, many of the vociferous men of words, who prayed so long for the day, are in a funk. . . . Not so the fanatic. Chaos is his element. When the old order begins to crack, he wades in with all his might and recklessness to blow the whole hated present to high heaven. . . . He alone knows the innermost craving of the masses in action: the craving for communion, for the mustering of the host, for the dissolution of cursed individuality in the majesty and grandeur of a mighty whole.
Here are listed the trumped up response to fear of immigrants, hopelessness over the loss of the kinds of jobs that Hoffer worked, and frustration over Obamacare’s imperfections. Even “Make America Great Again” comes straight out of the bolt of cloth of mass movements, since according to Hoffer, the movement must throw away the present for the promise of a future that will restore the ideal past.
In the fourth chapter, Hoffer uses a word to name the group of “failures, misfits, outcasts, criminals, and all those who have lost their footing, or never had one”: undesirables. He might as well have called them deplorables. Having no footing is exactly the experience of the middle class. Hoffer says that one group particularly susceptible to mass movements are the ones who have memories of success that has been lost. People who have always been poor do not see anything unusual in poverty, but, as with the French Revolution, when the poor are given a taste of rising standards of living, they realize what is possible, while seeing it denied to them.
And then there is the Reagan Revolution. It has been an article of faith in the Republican Party, going back to arguments by William F. Buckley, Jr. and others in the fifties onward, that tax cuts are a virtuous act. Unenlightened self-interest would make this a predictable position to advocate for by the rich, but cuts as a policy choice are increasingly accepted by ordinary Americans who are unlikely ever to benefit directly from reductions in the marginal tax rate. Social mobility, while possible, remains improbable, especially moving from the lowest fifth of the income distribution to the highest. The chances of doing that are less than ten percent. And the probability of moving to the top from the working class has been declining over time.
It is necessary to understand that in Hoffer’s view, for a mass movement, the future is a restoration, not a horizon. The leaders reject the notion of a paradise to come, since that would suggest agency on the part of the people — something we build together through our own skills and drive — and the followers need the myth that they have been pulled away from the golden past that they deserve to return to.
And this is one of the ways in which Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan is antithetical to the American spirit. We are a nation that depends on a frontier. As Frederick Jackson Turner showed in his essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” for the first hundred years of our existence as an independent country, we had a literal frontier, a physical line beyond which we could cross to challenge ourselves, to exploit opportunities, and to escape the people we did not want to live near.
We added new frontier territory by acquiring Alaska and Hawai’i, and more importantly, we opened up to the world in the twentieth century. Our growth as a global power was the result. We also have taken our first steps into what Gene Roddenberry called the final frontier, along with great strides in the sciences generally.
In regard to the exploration of space, Hoffer’s analysis goes a good way toward explaining our faltering pace. Sending human beings to Mars is hard to imagine for people who believe that they have been cheated out of their former greatness. While we may debate the merits of going to or inhabiting some place out there, the benefits of science extend far beyond any specific goal, but we have to keep the faith in our ability to improve our situation to be willing to explore new ideas.
As Hoffer shows, mass movements, especially when they achieve power, have an interest in containing knowledge, not in making it available to all. In chapter fifteen, he writes, regarding the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages:
But in the tenth century all learned men were priests, whereas in the fifteenth century, as the result of the introduction of printing and paper, learning had ceased to be a monopoly of the church. It was the nonclerical humanists who formed the vanguard of the Reformation.
Perhaps Hoffer was not so prescient here, since the most people have access to the most information now in human history. Or rather, there is a more subtle truth in what he said. A volume of texts by itself does nothing, and if readers lack the capacity to sort facts from false claims and lack the skills of logic to draw valid conclusions, access is reminiscent of the raw recruit with a book of matches in a dark room.
The cliché in response is to criticize reality television — as I pointed out, Trump is one of its stars — and celebrity culture. Here again, things are more complex. The numbers of American Idol votes did exceed votes for president in 2012, but that was a result of changes in the voting methods and the fact that voting early and often was allowed. And as a writer, I am pleased to see that scripted programming is coming back, while reality TV has been declining in viewership. But in a mass movement, the fantasy of a noble past — the reign of Saturn, the Golden Age — and the image of wish fulfillment on television look a lot alike.
As an aside, I do have to note that Donald Trump as president reminds me of another bit of perception in literature — Zaphod Beeblebrox from Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Beeblebrox, the president of the galaxy, was put into office as a distraction from the real power behind the curtain, to mix literary references. Given Trump’s cabinet picks, it is hard not to conclude that to the powers in today’s political climate, “draining the swamp” may be an accurate description of the policy goal, but we must wait until said swamp has been transformed into fossil fuels. In any case, Trump’s Twitter account provides abundant material to fill the pages of the papers and the hours of cable television news, leaving me to wonder what else might be going on. The fantasy keeps people from digging with too much enthusiasm.
One necessary belief to set mass movements in motion, as mentioned before, is the failure of the present and the lack of agency on the part of any individual person to do anything about it. To accomplish that, a sure path is destroying education. Republicans have been denigrating educators for decades, calling us lazy, overpaid elitists who are more concerned with pushing a liberal agenda than with teaching critical thinking — by which they mean doubts about evolution or climate science. I have noted a decline in the preparation of students taking my composition and literature classes in the years since 1998, and while it is good to be suspicious of anecdotes, the effect of constant testing that refuses to allow any sense of context with regard to the struggles of the schools and the students is more than just my personal observation. And it is hard not to believe in claims that there has been a Republican plan to destroy public education after reviewing the evidence. Lest I seem too biased, let me state here that I have no respect for the feckless Democrats who have allowed this to pass without comment — or even helping it along, in the case of Ted Kennedy and No Child Left Educated.
The flaws in our educational system are troubling in a time when news sources are increasingly evaluated on the basis of ideology, rather than the facts. This is especially the case for people on the right wing. Almost half of respondents to a Pew survey who identified themselves as consistently conservative and a third of those who labeled themselves as mostly conservative named Fox News as their primary and often only source of news. Ideological sources of news is nothing new. It is in fact the norm in the United Kingdom, though perhaps it is more honest there, since time is not wasted on claiming to be “fair and balanced.” But if the poll conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2011 is correct — the poll that found that viewers of Fox News Sunday morning shows are less informed about world events than people who do not watch the news at all — we are in trouble.
Hoffer anticipates all of this in the thirteenth chapter of The True Believer. As he puts it, “All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world.” Kellyanne Conway could have quoted Hoffer here, though instead she described the strategy as “alternative facts.” And while there have been doubts expressed by the comedian Samantha Bee and others about Trump’s skill at reading, Hoffer presents another explanation in the same chapter: “There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer.” Whether by artifice or inability, Trump’s adoption of popular ignorance appeals to his mass movement, confirming and justifying the suspicions about the elites — while concealing all the work that he is doing for the same.
The True Believer also shows that mass movements are a cyclical phenomenon, rising in times of frustrated discontent to sweep away the present order, only to become the new order that will itself fail to satisfy the masses. In Hoffer’s view, all such movements are essentially identical, differing only in their uniforms and in minor details of ritual. The emptiness of mass movements, exposed once they have taken power, is akin to the emperor in the Hans Christian Andersen tale who is convinced that he has been given a marvelous suit of new clothes, while in fact being sent out to march naked before the people. But a movement such as the ones Hoffer analyzes must be all show. To provide actual progress would be once again to give the people a sense of agency and to ameliorate their frustrations, thereby sapping the drive of the movement.
An illustration of this has been the Republican promise to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, voted on repeatedly when they had no chance of their votes being anything but theater and picked up on the campaign trail by Trump. As Hoffer might say, a healthcare system that remains complicated and expensive, while giving enough people a taste of the benefits of coverage, and yet preserving uncertainty about how things will work out is exactly the kind of thing a mass movement needs. Taking care away from millions could lead to a counter movement, as recent town hall meetings have shown, and the blessings of a system like Canada’s would reduce the frustrations that many Americans feel about a system that dangles the blessings of riches before them, but forever keeps them just out of reach.
Regarding the potential of a mass movement in the United States, I have been told for years that an authoritarian at the head of a populist uprising could never distort the government into a tyranny. The Trump administration is a test of this and of Hoffer’s doubts about whether such events are possible in a free society. He put it this way:
One cannot maintain with certitude that it would be impossible for a Hitler or a Stalin to rise in a country with an established tradition of freedom. What can be asserted with some plausibility is that in a traditionally free country a Hitler or a Stalin might not find it too difficult to gain power but extremely hard to maintain himself indefinitely. Any marked improvement in economic conditions would almost certainly activate the tradition of freedom which is a tradition of revolt. In Russia. . . the individual who pitted himself against Stalin had nothing to identify himself with, and his capacity to resist coercion was nil. But in a traditionally free country the individual who pits himself against coercion does not feel an isolated human atom but one of a mighty race — his rebellious ancestors.
How the current Congressional investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia will play out remains to be seen, and while Devin Nunes, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has given the administration a moment of relief, the warp and weft of scandals could become a net to bring down the president.
The decline of the middle class as the few gain more and more of the nation’s wealth endangers the tradition of freedom that Hoffer regarded as necessary for fighting an autocrat. But we are allowed some measure of hope in The True Believer for a rational response to mass movements. Hoffer cites Scandinavian countries as examples of small societies figuring out how to work together toward a common purpose “without recourse to either religiofication or militarization,” as he puts it in the eighteenth chapter. And this seems to be born out in an article for Time by Zamira Rahim, titled, “Norway Is Happiest Country in the World. What’s the Secret?” on the United Nations’s World Happiness Report. According to Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, one of the report’s associate editors, “The Scandinavian countries are very big on social support. The top countries, you can see, have societies which are not at each others throats. But also they have high GDP per capita.”
There is a domestic example of this to be found in the resistance against the present administration. It comes as no surprise to me that Bernie Sanders is leading the way, going out to the country to speak directly to voters — specifically to voters who supported Trump in 2016. And there is talk about Sanders being the left’s version of Ronald Reagan, a communicator who reaches the ordinary people. As Noah Millman, writing for The Week, observes, Jimmy Carter set the stage for Reagan by running as an outsider, while then failing to deliver to the masses. It is Millman’s hopeful suggestion that Trump may be on a similar path and that Sanders or someone preparing to take up his cause could win in 2020.
Carrying the message to Trump voters goes back to the need for the kind of mass movements that Hoffer criticizes to separate members from the facts. What Sanders has demonstrated is that presenting the case for progressive ideas works, even with an audience that saw Donald Trump as the answer only a few months before.
Hoffer names Lincoln and Gandhi as examples of leaders who “not only try to curb the evil inherent in a mass movement but are willing to put an end to the movement when its objective is more or less realized.” I understand his suspicion of large groups of people acting out of their frustrations. To err is human, but to create a colossal mess requires slogans and uniforms and bands. But I also have to recall that Franklin Roosevelt’s reforms likely saved America from the mass movements that swept Europe, steering us between communism and fascism and preserving democracy as a result. The key element of such movements — the frustrations of their adherents who believe that their lives have been spoiled and are in need of a fantastical restoration — is broken when we restore genuine agency to people.
The establishments of neither party, Republicans or Democrats, are willing to lead the way out of mass movements into individual and social fulfillment, and so it is up to each one of us to act. As I said at the start, The True Believer is the kind of inspiration to set readers into personal motion toward a better answer.
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