Divided America: Insights from Eric Hoffer
The longshoreman philosopher helps us see the diversity in the MAGA movement.
This is Part 5 of a series.
Eric Hoffer is like the Daniel Boone of American intellectuals. I would say that he is an autodidact, but, if he were still alive, the term would probably make him cringe. Much of what we know about his life before he published The True Believer in 1951 sounds more like folktale than intellectual biography. When he was five, his mother fell down the stairs with him in her arms. She died, and he went blind until his sight returned when he was fifteen. He did not have much formal schooling, but, once his sight returned, he read widely and was particularly impressed with Montaigne’s Essais. In addition to reading, Hoffer lived on skid row, visited his share of brothels, and prospected for gold. He eventually settled down and worked as a longshoreman and wrote ten books in his spare time.
In an interview promoting The Insurrectionist Next Door, her 2023 documentary about participants in the January 6th riot, Alexandra Pelosi recommended that everyone read Hoffer’s The True Believer. She said that Hoffer would explain everything.
In The True Believer, Hoffer wrote that mass movements “all appeal to the same types of mind.” Notice that he says “types.” A mass movement might attract people who have experienced repeated failures, who feel frustrated, and who blame others for their failure. He does not use the word “victim,” but he clearly describes a person who feels victimized. Consistent with research in The Authoritarian Personality (the Berkeley study), published one year earlier, he sees a person who fears change, even though they are dissatisfied with their lives: “The outside world seems to them a precariously balanced mechanism, and so long as it ticks in their favor they are afraid to tinker with it. Thus the resistance to change and the ardent desire for it spring from the same conviction, and the one can be as vehement as the other.”
But a mass movement might also attract misfits, the poor (he discusses five kinds of poverty), the inordinately selfish, minorities, sinners, and even the bored. In The Insurrectionist Next Door, Pelosi interviews a brother and sister who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. They were on a road trip. The sister had never attended a protest event and wanted to check it out. She was basically bored. The brother went along to protect his sister. They both became swept up in the events and ended up in jail.
Hoffer also says that a mass movement can be comprised of many smaller movements. Within the MAGA collective, we find fundamentalist Christians, the Proud Boys, white nationalists, corporate executives, and small-government conservatives. If he were trying to explain the MAGA movement, Hoffer might say there is not a single explanation. No mass movement is monolithic. This is how it gains power, but it is also a weakness. With time, most mass movements fragment because the various groups have trouble compromising and maintaining a collective identity.
Those of us outside of the MAGA movement tend to see it (singular) as a homogenized collection of the same type of mind (also, singular). Hoffer wants us to see the diversity. Seeing a different history for each person who attends a MAGA rally is the first step toward recognizing them as individuals (plural) and diminishing the power of the group.
As in Erik Erikson’s essay on Hitler and the Berkeley study of the authoritarian personality (Part 2 and 3 in this series), Hoffer sees the family of origin as playing an important role. He does not describe that family structure in detail, but he says that true believers have a “hostile attitude toward the family” and “undermine the authority of the parents.” The flawed family “fosters automatically a collective spirit and creates a responsiveness to the appeal of mass movements.” The true believer brings order to a chaotic life as they are absorbed into a group: “A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence.”
This is, as Hoffer sees it, an escape from the “irksome burden” of freedom, which places the blame for an individual’s shortcomings “on the shoulder of the individual.” In a group, the individual can be, as an “ardent young Nazi” said, “free from freedom.” This is what Hoffer wants to understand: the trigger that initiates a mass movement—group identity. If we pair his observations with those in Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, published in 1960, we can begin to explain how a backlash movement like MAGA erupts, seemingly fully formed, seemingly out of the ether.
The eruption comes as individuals “who crave to be rid of an unwanted self” identify with a “holy cause” and are “reborn to a new life in its close-knit collective body.” In other words, the trigger is what happens when a group, like the crowd at a Trump rally, provides what is missing in an individual who feels left behind in the present and fears an even worse fate in the future. The “holy cause,” Hoffer says, is not about creating a better future—that is, progress. It is about “possessing and preserving the present.” If he lived long enough to witness the MAGA movement, I think he would have added “. . . or returning to some vague past when the world felt more predictable.” The group identity doesn’t solve anything—long term.
In Crowds and Power, Canetti writes that, when a crowd is formed, there is a discharge of emotion that erases distinctions, making the individuals feel unified and equal. The identity that emerges in a crowd typically has a feeling of persecution. “One of the most striking traits of the inner life of a crowd,” Canetti writes, “is the feeling of being persecuted, a particularly angry sensitiveness and irritability directed against those it had once and forever nominated as enemies.” Once a crowd is formed, it gains strength. It is difficult to stop the crowd from outside its borders; it is more vulnerable to disruption from within. As Canetti points out, “Everyone belonging to such a crowd carries within him a small traitor who wants to eat, drink, make love and be left alone.”
As with the Berkeley study, Hoffer says that people who are easily drawn to mass movements are not ideological. “In pre-Hitlerian Germany,” he writes, “it was often a tossup whether a restless youth would join the Communists or the Nazis.” Hitler and his movement intentionally included “National” and “Socialist” in the name of their political party (the National Socialists German Workers’ Party) so that they might attract members from both the far right and the far left. In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein calls those who shift from one side of the political spectrum to the other diagonals. Hoffer says that one way to stop a mass movement is to substitute “one movement for another.” The danger is that the new movement may be as dangerous as the old one.
Migration, Hoffer writes, can fill the same need as joining a group because “every mass movement is in a sense a migration –a movement toward a promised land.” As long as America still had a frontier, those who didn’t fit in didn’t need to join a fringe group; they just went West. As I have written in other posts, we as a country are still trying to deal with the loss of the frontier. It is part of the reason that Americans are drawn to a nostalgia for some vague past, an America that had a more open horizon, a land without fences, a time when good cowboys wore white hats.
As I have been repeating throughout this series, the best argument to a Trump supporter is no argument at all—at least, if we are thinking of extended logical arguments. We should focus more on ethos than logos. In other words, we should be the kind of American who represents the America where we want to live. We need to focus on empathy not pity, curiosity not judgment, joy not resentment, and love not anger. There is no guarantee this will work, but at least we will not become what we are blindly fighting.