That Other Big Book on Irrational Politics

It is easy to assume that people who disagree with us politically are crazy, especially when their beliefs seem irrational.  With the rise of the Tea Party, birtherism, pizza-gate, MAGA Republicanism, and the spouting of blatant absurdities by candidate and (later) President Donald Trump, it was not surprising that Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics enjoyed a revival amongst progressives.  Twenty-first-century right-wing delusions of a “deep state” or a stolen election bear a family resemblance to 1950s right-wing phobias about an “immense” Communist conspiracy or the fluoridation of public water supplies.  Conspiracy theories have proven to be a powerful method for explaining why political, social, and economic realities do not conform to one’s liking.  Hofstadter noted that conspiracy-driven manias have accompanied periods of national trauma since the 1790s (and not all have been conservative), but the focus of his argument was the “pseudo-conservative” paranoia of the mid-twentieth century.[1]   It is that same reactionary paranoia, reassembled to fit post-Cold War conditions, that haunts us today.  When there is widespread discontent in the land, dark forces are blamed, and simplistic solutions are sought.

Paranoid Style was published in 1965, a year after Barry Goldwater’s landslide election defeat at the hands of Lyndon Johnson.  Hofstadter accused Goldwater of living off the “emotional animus” of the extreme right, so his repudiation by voters seemed to vindicate the moderate mainstream political culture of the postwar era.  George McGovern, candidate of the radical, utopian, moralistic left, sustained an almost identical rejection by voters in 1972 (losing to Nixon); apparently confirming from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum that extremism in American politics does not pay.  Of course, we now know that it does.  And the mission before us is to understand why.  Hofstadter’s analysis was based on group psychology.  That is, Americans who share some collective outlook or sense of identity will periodically react against perceived threats to their status, political clout, settled world view, or material well-being.  Paranoid Style presented a theory of how entire groups of people can act irrationally in unison.  They rally to express a shared sense of anger and resentment, to identify common villains, malignant forces, and unfair institutions, to propose (often unrealistic or contradictory) actions, and to wallow in panaceas.  Hofstadter’s work is open to criticism, yet after fifty years it still packs a punch.

Another book on fanatical mass movements that made a huge impression on postwar political culture in the United States is less revisited today.  That book is The True Believer by Eric Hoffer.[2]  First published in 1951, it sold briskly enough to delay the issuance of a paperback edition for fifteen years; by 1967 it had sold half-a-million copies.  True Believer was wildly praised by almost every publication that reviewed books, and Hoffer became a national celebrity.  Granted, the public’s fascination with Hoffer did not stem exclusively from the guts of his book; part of his appeal came from the uniqueness of his background.  Unlike Hofstadter (who was a Columbia University professor) Hoffer worked as a longshoreman on the docks of San Francisco.  Although later research would cast doubt on his whereabouts prior to 1934, Hoffer claimed to have been born in the Bronx, to have gone blind as a child—and so received no schooling whatsoever—and, after recovering his eyesight, moved to Los Angeles where he lived on skid row and supported himself doing odd jobs; later he spent years as a migrant farm worker.  During all this time, which included a stint prospecting for gold, Hoffer educated himself by checking books out of public libraries.  This was an impressive personal story that does not hold up to close scrutiny, but it made Hoffer famous as the common man of uncommon erudition and insight.[3]

True Believer was a perfect book for its time.  It appeared just after the defeat of European fascism, Japanese militaristic nationalism, Mao’s Communist victory in China, the outbreak of the Korean War, and at the height of McCarthyism.  So there was an eager audience for an explanation of why and how extremist creeds turned into dangerous political movements.  Hoffer’s argument was no less dependent on psychological interpretation than Hofstadter’s was.  But while Hofstadter focused on group psychology, Hoffer built his case around alienated individuals.  For Hoffer, the substance of any cause is far less important than the movement’s ability to invest its individual members with a sense of worth and a feeling of belonging.

Hoffer’s true believer is a weak and pliable loner who willingly becomes dependent on a mass movement for his (all Hoffer’s pronouns are masculine) purpose in life.  The mass movement will do his thinking for him, and paradoxically this sets him free; it frees him from the labor of thought, and the pain of making decisions.  Men who are unemployed, or who have recently been discharged from the military (where they became accustomed to following orders), or who have always been misfits, or who have failed at intellectual or artistic pursuits, are prime recruits for mass movements.  True believers feel personally shunned, rejected, marginalized, misunderstood, or discarded.  Hoffer’s political or religious fanatics are psychologically troubled or socially inadequate in ways that Hofstadter’s movement fanatics are not.  Indeed, Hofstadter explicitly stated that he was describing “more or less normal people” who succumb to an irrational, paranoid style of politics.  But Hoffer’s mass movement recruits are spiritually dispossessed; they are failures, drifters, empty vessels.  Perhaps this was part of the appeal of True Believer.  It must have been easy for initial readers to feel superior to the “slime of frustrated souls” who were painted broad brush by Hoffer.  Postwar American readers no doubt felt more positively connected to society than did the human detritus described in the book; hence they could be confident that they were beyond (or above) the reach of simple-minded fanaticism.  Psychologically healthy, socially well-adjusted people were not dangerous, because they did not need great causes in order to make their lives complete.

Here was both the practical allure and the central flaw of the book.  True Believer has been recognized as a potent representative of “consensus school” thought, primarily because it condemned equally the radicalism of both the Left and Right.  It also turned a jaundiced eye toward religious fanaticism at a time when secularization and ecumenicism seemed to align with reason and moderation (Hoffer was an atheist who criticized fanatical atheists).  But the book’s dramatic attack on fanatics and radicals blinded readers to Hoffer’s implicit dismissal of belief itself.  True Believer and Hoffer’s other writings betray a prejudice against strongly held political beliefs in general: even beliefs that are short of radicalism and devoid of fanaticism, and even when their advocates do not fit Hoffer’s profile of alienation or personal frustration.  Hoffer opposed FDR’s New Deal reforms, and the Vatican II reforms of the Catholic Church, and he despised the “rights movements” of the 1960s.  Despite the many liberal intellectuals who had praised True Believer (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., for instance) Hoffer was suspicious of progressive reform.  He seems to have adhered to a mix of traditionalist and libertarian conservatism that expected people to accept society as they found it and focus on living their own lives without trying to change the system.  Maybe this was another reason for True Believer’s popularity during the Eisenhower era, when Americans in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II decided that they had had enough involvement with great causes, and that they would henceforth cultivate their new suburban gardens.

Nevertheless, Hoffer’s True Believer still retains much that is intriguing and even relevant today.  It is a short book (about 150 pages) that is divided into 18 chapters and 125 subsections; the style is aphoristic, allowing readers to appreciate many of Hoffers pungent observations without having to accept his larger arguments.  Of special importance in today’s environment is Hoffer’s wariness—bordering on hostility—toward intellectuals, the “men of words” who supply the ideas that fanatical “men of action” and their fanatical followers build into mass movements.  Curiously, True Believer’s final chapter on “good,” “bad,” and “useful” movements, counters or complicates much of what is said elsewhere in the book, as if Hoffer was anticipating criticism (he doesn’t use it, but the old excuse that exaggeration and simplification are often necessary for making one’s point would have worked).  In the final analysis, True Believer contains brilliant insights that are uncommonly well stated.  Yet its gut-level message seems to be that too much passion devoted to any cause is a sign of personal sickness.  But shouldn’t the decisive factor—in 1951 or 2023—be the value of the cause?  Is the dedicated crusader for civil rights just as “fanatical” (in the pejorative sense of the term) as the rabid defender of segregation and white supremacy?  Isn’t one more rational than the other?  Moreover, if a powerful commitment to reform signals one’s psychological infirmity, does political apathy confirm one’s mental health?

I’d like to close with a personal observation, knowing full well that most readers of this blog are considerably younger than me, and probably are not aware of Hoffer’s impact or his book’s stature.  I was not around when True Believer debuted in 1951, but the book and its author were still current enough to be mentioned in my high school and college classes (1968-1976).  The book’s reputation was large enough that I bought a copy on my own initiative (nothing to do with school) in 1973, and several of my friends had either read it or were at least familiar enough with it to occasionally speak about it.  (I still have that paperback copy, which I purchased used for 25¢.)  Hoffer was often referenced by journalists and by talking heads on television.  Interviews with Hoffer ran on public television and CBS; I recall watching a later PBS documentary on him toward the end of his life (he died in 1983).[4]  Granted, much of the media’s admiration for Hoffer was based naively on his alleged working-class wisdom.  I wonder if True Believer would have been as highly celebrated if Hoffer had been a typical academic at Berkeley rather than an atypical longshoreman from across San Francisco Bay.  (For what it’s worth: I had never heard of Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style until I entered graduate school in the 1990s.)

I would be very interested in hearing from others regarding their familiarity (or not) with True Believer.

[1] Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1965; New York: Vintage, 2008).  The four essays of Part 1: “Studies in the American Right” combine to make Hofstadter’s case; but see also essay #7 on the Free Silver movement of the 1890s.

[2] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951; New York: Perennial Library, 1966).  Additional editions attest to the book’s success: Mentor (1958), New American Library (1960), Time, Inc. (1963), Time-Life (1980), Harper Perennial (1989, 2002), Perennial Classic (2010), HarperCollins (2019).

[3] Tom Bethell, Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher (Stanford, Calf.: Hoover Institution Press, 2012); chapter 5 for True Believer sales and reception; passim for additional information on Hoffer.  Bethell suggests that Hoffer was probably born in Germany and came to the United States illegally via Mexico in the 1930s; Hoffer’s false claim of birth in the Bronx shielded him from deportation during the depression.

[4] Most likely, the documentary I watched was a 90-minute PBS program produced by WPBT Miami, broadcast in January 1978.