Searching for a good indoor activity when shut-in by sub-zero weather and the pandemic, I decided to reorganize my library. This has taken a lot of time because I pause to remember and reflect on each book.

Fifty-five years ago, I bought a paperback for 60 cents called “The True Believer” by Eric Hoffer. Unlike most academicians, he was a longshoreman in 1951 when the book was published. Although old and yellowed, this often-quoted classic is surprisingly relevant to the 2021 violent and deadly attack on our nation’s Capitol to stop the peaceful transition of power.

Hoffer maintains that all mass movements share certain essential characteristics. Although there are obvious differences between fanatical Christians or Muslims, nationalists, Communists, Nazis or white supremacists, the fanaticism that motivates them is similar. They are characterized by extreme enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred, intolerance, blind faith, and single-hearted allegiance. Their devotion and loyalty are a desperate clinging to something that might give worth and meaning to their lives: a cause, a religion, an ideology.

Hoffer says the same people are susceptible to any mass movement: the poor, the misfits, the ambitious, the bored, the losers and the malcontents who feel unheard and left out. Uniforms, flags, emblems, parades, music, mass rallies, chants, spectacles, and rituals all help separate the individual from self to become part of a group identity, a collective whole. What Hoffer couldn’t foresee is that today paranoid individuals can gather on the internet to embolden one another, spread conspiracies, and and self-radicalize.

All mass movements deprecate the present, for example see the 2017 U.S. presidential inaugural speech on American carnage. They glorify the past, and excite hope for change in the future (Make America Great Again). Emphasis is put on illusions of greatness and arrogance (We’re number one in everything). All claim to have the ultimate and absolute truth (believe only Fox, or Rush, or Info Wars, but do not listen to the lying lame-stream news). Most make use of a big lie and tell it often (I really won. The election was rigged. Germany was stabbed in the back. Power to the proletariat.).

Mass movements unify by finding a common enemy (Jews, immigrants, gays, Muslims, liberals) and a leader whose main requirement is audacity and joy in defiance (an unconventional politician, a disrupter), possession of the one and only truth, (only I can save you), and a cunning estimate of human nature (I love you and know just what you need). They want a leader with unbounded brazenness (120 tweets in a single day, I am the greatest ever, I know more about x than anybody), and a capacity for holding the utmost loyalty of a group (I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support. I can be treasonously derelict in my duties and still not be impeached).

Hoffer helps us put into perspective what we are witnessing during the congressional investigations of the riot and desecration of the Capitol by extremists from all over the country, even our Iowa neighbors. Chances are you know some True Believers that Hoffer describes. The FBI says the worst threat to the U.S. is from right-wing domestic terrorists. They have identified and arrested rioters so far as Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Boogaloo Bois, QAnon, white supremacists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and assorted conspiracy theorists.

The most common theme in these aggrieved and resentful groups is the fear that traditional minorities will soon be in the majority in America. They fear that whites, or Christians, or Republicans, or whatever your team identity, will be treated like — well, like how we have traditionally treated minorities. Hence the cries, “We will not be replaced! Stop the count. Restrict immigration. Suppress voting.”

I am currently reading “Four Hundred Souls” by Kendi and Blain which brought home to me just how fearful white slave-owners were as they became outnumbered by Black slaves. The more fearful they got, the more extreme they got, and then the more they cracked down to maintain their power and privilege. History doesn’t repeat itself but it sure does rhyme.

Butler County Democrats member David Mansheim recently had this column appear in The Courier.