MAGA’s Mass Appeal
“A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics, and consolidated by men of action.” Thus spake Eric Hoffer, a twentieth-century American philosopher of German origin who famously supported himself for many years as a longshoreman on the San Francisco waterfront. Hoffer’s first and best-known book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, from which the quotation comes, was published in 1951 to both acclaim and censure. No less a luminary than the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. praised The True Believer as a “brilliant and original inquiry.” But Orville Prescott, the New York Times’s daily book critic, was less impressed, remarking that “Mr. Hoffer flings dogmatic judgments in all directions.”
The return of President Trump has given rise to a number of articles seeking to identify the “men of words” who pioneered the MAGA movement or at least might enable us to understand it. The New York Times introduced its readers to the once-fringe monarchist(!) blogger Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug), and in one of his columns, David French explored the relevance of the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt. Reading French’s column, I recalled that my cousin Ed Martin, who is President Trump’s interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, had once told me he’d cut his teeth on a certain intellectual who was a must-read for our political moment. I texted him to remind me of the name, and, taking a brief break from making outrageous headlines, Ed texted back: Eric Hoffer. So I got myself a used, two-dollar copy of The True Believer.
Hoffer is an enigmatic figure. It’s not clear whether he was born in 1898 or 1902, and the oldest official record of him is a Social Security application from 1937. He more or less burst onto the scene with The True Believer, and no one who knew him from his youth ever came forward after he became a public figure.
The book isn’t a work of dazzling erudition—Hoffer’s reading is mostly restricted to texts from the preceding seventy-five years, with a fondness for writers like the French “Orientalist” Ernest Renan—but it does show both literary and intellectual ambition. The reader can almost feel Hoffer straining to deliver one bon mot after another. As Orville Prescott tartly commented, he “tosses off maxims and aphorisms with the aplomb of La Rochefoucauld himself.” Here’s a sampling: “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.” “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” And my favorite: “The face of the mass is as ‘the face of the deep’ out of which, like God on the day of creation, [the leader] will bring forth a new world.”
Despite the high-flown language, Hoffer’s intellectual ambition was to write a sober, tell-it-like-it-is account of the nature of mass movements. His concern in The True Believer, like Machiavelli’s in The Prince, is the effective truth, how things really work as opposed to how we’d like to imagine they do, and to that end he doesn’t hesitate to draw insights even from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. At the same time, Hoffer insists that his book “is not a textbook. It is a book of thoughts,” more “in the nature of suggestions” than assertions. But perhaps inevitably given Hoffer’s epigrammatic style, it is full of assertions—what Prescott called “dogmatic judgments.”
Hoffer is not MAGA avant la lettre, so to speak, but reading him did throw light for me on MAGA as a movement, uniting a mass of people in a common cause. According to Hoffer, mass movements appeal to those he calls “the frustrated,” people who feel “disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things.” The leader of such a movement “cannot conjure [it] out of the void.” Instead, there first has to be “an intense dissatisfaction with things as they are.” The leader then articulates and justifies “the resentment dammed up in the souls of the frustrated” and stages “the world of make-believe” in which the world is made anew and the frustrated find satisfaction. Hoffer also notes “the enormous joy [the frustrated] derive” from decrying “the present and all its works.” They “derive as much satisfaction—if not more—from the means a mass movement uses as from the ends it advocates.” MAGA’s deep satisfaction at “owning the libs” springs to mind. So, too, does its aesthetics of transgression—its glory in ill-concealed dog-whistles and contempt for manners and norms.
Consider further Hoffer’s thoughts on the archetypal leader of a mass movement. “The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass-movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world. Charlatanism is to some extent indispensable”—confidently pretending to knowledge while paradoxically estimating it as worthless. And then there is this:
The main requirements [for the leader] seem to be: audacity and a joy in defiance; an iron will; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; faith in his destiny and luck; a capacity for passionate hatred; a cunning estimate of human nature; a delight in symbols (spectacles and ceremonials [and baseball hats?]); unbounded brazenness which finds expression in a disregard of consistency and fairness; a recognition that the innermost craving of a following is for communion and that there can never be too much of it; [and] a capacity for winning and holding the utmost loyalty of a group of able lieutenants.
I’m not sure that President Trump has “an iron will,” and many of his “lieutenants,” loyal though they certainly are, proved to be laughably inept when he sought to overthrow the 2020 presidential election. For its part, his new administration has already put on a few clown shows. (For example: freezing nearly all federal grants and loans, and then quickly rescinding that order when its implications became apparent.) But Trump goes some ways toward meeting most of the other requirements.
Hoffer offers no prescriptions for resisting or countering a mass movement. Instead, he depicts the “spokesmen of democracy” as basically powerless “when the times become unhinged” and when the unglamorous work of legislation is displaced by what Walter Benjamin called the “aestheticization of politics.” (Benjamin wasn’t one of Hoffer’s interlocutors, but see Alexander Stern’s recent essay in these pages about the subordination of politics to culture.) From Hoffer’s point of view, the problem is that “[t]he spokesmen of democracy offer no holy cause to cling to and no corporate whole to lose oneself in.” Inasmuch as “[t]he liberal sees the present as the legitimate offspring of the past and as constantly growing and developing toward an improved future,” she—say, Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton—has no words that can speak to the frustrated who loathe the present and would sooner choose “the chaos of the creation of a new world.” The “enthusiasm of resentment” will not, in other words, be tempered by reinvigorated industrial policy.
Against that background, what opponents of MAGA can hope for over the next two years, before the midterm elections, appears quite thin. We can hope that people not infected by MAGA’s enthusiasm of resentment will stand firm. We can hope that the courts will grind MAGA down. And we can hope it will collapse under the weight of its own incompetence. But a renewed “material politics”—a better building back better—may not be enough to beat MAGA back. If Hoffer is at least half right, what will likely be needed to sweep it away is a mass movement of a different kind that will mobilize the frustrated in a different direction. What shape might it take? Who would its leaders be? Will it come at all?
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