Fuel for the Fires that can Burn America

No account of American politics is complete, or even credible, without including the myth of White supremacy and the cultural and structural changes that diminish personal status.

Eric Hoffer was a longshoreman and self-educated philosopher.   In 1951 he published a book, The True Believer, that helped many understand the rise of both Communism and Fascism.  It inspired research and formed the basis of some of the most successful explanations of political behavior in the 20th century.  

Today I read a news column citing current academic analysis of the Trump phenomena. Without referring to Hoffer, it repeated some of his ideas, now clothed in new jargon.

I taught these ideas in my classes and would do so today.  In fact, in the 1960s, my primary mentor in graduate school, Walter Dean Burnham, was already applying these ideas and envisioning a movement similar to the Trump wing of the present Republican Party. 

Here is how I see these ideas today. Please excuse the length of my summary.  It actually requires a longer explanation than is possible in this format. 

I accept two basic assumptions.  First, we Americans value high status and believe that there are no insurmountable barriers to its attainment. Thus, people’s self-worth depends in part on how the see themselves in relationship to others.  As long as a man, or woman takes pride in their place (role or status) in society, they can hold their head up high.  Such a sense of worthiness that may derive from occupation, religion, living an approved life style, or race and nationality. 

Weaken or destroy these basic pillars of identity and people are adrift.  Life loses meaning and purpose. 

The second assumption is that as their status diminishes they are vulnerable to whatever group or charismatic leader can replace their lose of personal worth with the worth of being a member of a strong and valued group.

It can be: racial identity, nationalism, political movements, religion or other similar identities.  In all cases it is a powerful movement that views itself as destined to triumph, a true belief that offers hope and purpose.

I remember a fellow student, when I was studying at the University of East Africa in 1961, tell me about the change in his father, a poor farmer in Tanzania, when recruiters for TANU, the revolutionary nationalist party came to his village.  An old, tired man became young again.  His life was renewed.   He was reborn. 

There can be many times and ways in which large numbers of men and women lose status. In Europe, during the rise of the industrial revolution, tens of thousands of old craft jobs were lost, livelihoods that had provided generations of craftsmen a respected role in their communities.  Historians refer to them as the old middle class.  They were the mainstays of urban society.  They produced the basic products of market sale, shoes, gloves, cloth and jewelry. 

Large scale manufacturing in factories had replaced much of their work.  Within a single generation they had lost their livelihoods and, importantly, their identity as valuable members of society. They subsequently became the backbone of the Fascist movement.

Today a veritable tsunami of factors are eroding the traditional sense of personal worth for many Americans.  Robotics, world trade patterns, and new technologies are transforming the American workplace, displacing many and contributing to a sense that one’s abilities and skills do not, or soon will not count. 

Further, for generations many white men anchored their personal worth in their “superiority” to Blacks, despite their own low status jobs.  For much of the 20th century racial attitudes helped white men accept poor working conditions and wages.  White jobs.  Black jobs.  I can remember growing up in a Chicago suburb where sales personnel in the three top Department Stores were all White.  In Woolworths and other lessor stores, and for cleaning after hours, the “help” was Black.

This has been especially true of that part of American society and history who have lived on the margins of society.

As historian Nancy Isenberg (White Trash) relates in her outstanding discussion of the persistence of class inequality in American, “the wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement. They were alternately known as “waste people,” “offals,” “rubbish,” “lazy lubbers,” and “crackers.” By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters” and “sandhillers,” known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds.”  (from the review in Goodreads)

Today, I believe they comprise a significant part of the Trump phenomena and feed off of assaults on their sense of worth, as, in addition to the failing value of their “whiteness,” their religious beliefs are laughed at by an increasingly secular America. 

Much of this is in Eric Hoffer’s slim volume. You could call it “old stuff.”  Today, whether as a partial or a sufficient explanation for the cult like fervor, and unshakable beliefs, of the “Trump Nation,” it is back, and no longer as an explanation for European politics.

Good.  It helps us understand why our cultural fuel, waiting in a dry season, has been ready for the right flame.