Hoffer and Politics Today

I'm enjoying reading Hoffer, knowing his own personal story and realizing that this was Dwight Eisenhower's favorite book. This alone adds a touch of irony since the closest thing in today's politics -- or so it seems to me -- to the worrisome "true believer" is the radical right deniers of all that contradicts their dearly-held and unwavering faith: that, e.g., evolution and climate change are fictitious ploys of the left, abortion is murder while the death penalty is justice, healthcare reform is a threat to individual liberty while the Patriot Act is, well, patriotic. There is no doubt in my mind that Hoffer's ideas fit these folks pretty well: they are, at bottom, an unhappy lot--with the present, with themselves and with those who are less in need of the doctrinaire ideology of certainty they subscribe to. While I buy Hoffer's argument that these folks derive some psychic benefits from this mindset despite losing out in real benefits because their politics essentially strengthens the grip of the wealthy on our politics at the expense of most of the non-rich.

That said, I do believe that ours is an age where politics has been largely relegated to the margins and social movements of the left, notwithstanding the paranoid delusions of Beck and Limbaugh, are pretty much moribund, being replaced by a strange kind of estranged disengagement. In class, I likened this to the cumulative effects of all the psychotropic drugs -- xanax, prozaic, ritalin, etc. -- that didn't exist when Hoffer was writing. Sean's point about the effect of technology -- cell phones, email, texting, twitter and the like -- altering or defining down our social capital these days is well taken, and I think that might be part of it. If nothing else, it adds a distraction of gadgetry that makes political pursuits -- and any pursuits that demand concentrated effort -- difficult to sustain at the level that a social movement would require.

The events in Tunisia and Egypt (and perhaps Libya) are timely reminders that power is a relationship between the leaders and the led. And when the latter withdraw their support from the former, even when the Mubaraks and his ilk control the armed services, the fragile nature of the leaders' power is illuminated. So it is here. If we are ruled by an oligarchy of immense wealth, we have to admit that we are, to a degree, complicit in their power inasmuch as those who wield power are empowered by those over whom the power is wielded. The religious right's complicity here is fairly evident given the role of the religious right in the Republican base. But the absence of a real left, a progressive politics with the energy if not the numbers to take on the oligarchy is, in its own way, an element in the story of the unchallenged oligarchy. Tonight I blamed "biochemical desocialization" -- i.e., pharaceutical dependence -- for the pervasive levels of disengagement politically in the US today. You feel powerless and unhappy, tired and irritable? Take a pill -- or self-medicate with illicit drugs or alcohol. We see our lives as atomistically separated from one another, not as connected by economic or social forces, and if we suffer we do so as individuals, as Mr. Muldoon has reminded us from time to time. But we pay politically for these views and these habits. You might say that the result is not what worried Hoffer; instead of mindless social movements submerging the identities of individual members, we have what is basically a "zombie politics" -- pretty much dead from the neck up. As lost individuals we look for the elixir that will dull our pain, thereby perpetuating the political order that imprisons us under the rules that allow those with the gold to make the rules. I may feel otherwise upon finishing Hoffer, but for the time being, I'm inclined to see a deficit in the energy that got translated into social movement politics after WWII.