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Eric Hoffer Was Wrong About Mass Movements
Back in The True Believer Eric Hoffer first described the arc of mass movements:
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
But he returned again and again to the topic. Here he is in “The Negro Revolution” published in The New York Times Magazine In November 1964 and reprinted in The Temper of Our Time.
Up to now America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.
But then in “The Madhouse of Change” published in Playboy magazine in December 1968 and republished in First Things, Last Things, he says, in respect of America’s blacks:
Can mass movements do ought for the Negro? The answer is no. America is hard on mass movements. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a corporation or a racket. The Black Muslim movement is on the way to becoming a holding company of stores, farms and banks, while the civil-rights movement is largely an instrument in the hands of the Negro middle class to force its way into the privileged enclaves of American life. Used thus, the Negro revolution is not a movement but a racket.
All this is great stuff. But I think that Eric Hoffer is missing the point. And that is why I wrote in the aftermath of my AT piece on the SPLC affair a challenge teoo his maxim.. I wrote:
Every political racket disguises itself for a season as a great cause fighting for justice.
I bet that if Eric Hoffer were alive today he would chuckle at that. And if I got to speak to his ghost I would say to him: “boy, oh boy, did you nail it on mass movements!”
Oh, I don’t doubt that every leader and follower in every political movement that was ever more than the gleam in the eye of an intellectual utterly believed in their sacred quest that would save the world.
But you and I have good reason not to buy into the ravings of lunatics, particularly in the light of the numerous social-science experiments conducted in the 19th and 20th centuries to determine how politics really worked in practice.
I’d say the evidence is pretty overwhelming. Whatever the revolutionaries thought they were doing, the regime they implemented universally rewarded the leaders and supporters with loot plundered from everyone from manual workers to billionaires. In other words, the regime was indistinguishable from a criminal gang. And what do criminal gangs do? They operate rackets.
Let us ask a question:
What is the difference between a criminal racket and a political racket?
The political racket gets to use the army and/or police as enforcers.
Or maybe not quite. I asked Grok: “what is a criminal racket.” The reply:
A criminal racket is a systematic, ongoing illegal scheme designed to generate profit through fraud, extortion, coercion, or other unlawful means.
So let’s ask the question again:
What is the difference between a criminal racket and a political racket?
The political racket is enforced by the power of law.
Although, as we have recently learned, our beloved ruling class often does not even bother to operate its rackets in accordance with the law, but never gets prosecuted by the criminal justice system when it violates the law.
Just to be fair, I decided to ask Grok “what is a political racket?” Grok replied with an extremely sophisticated analysis ending thus:
In short, calling something a political racket accuses it of functioning like organized crime: not random corruption, but a structured, profitable enterprise that exploits its position of power.
Ain’t that the truth.
| Mon, 27 Apr 2026 23:18:31 GMT |
The SPLC Called Ayaan Hirsi Ali an Extremist
It was Ayaan Hirsi Ali reviewing how SPLC went after her that clued me in. She writes:
I was placed on an SPLC blacklist in October 2016. The document was called “A Journalist’s Manual: Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.”
See, if conservative media or conservative foundations called a lefty an extremist the whole world would erupt in outrage. But if SPLC or NAACP or The New York Times calls you a hard-right extremist you better make sure your mortgage is all paid off. That’s because the lefty educated class is the ruling class and hard-right armed insurrectionists are not. And the Bar Association in California can disbar a conservative lawyer like John Eastman six ways from Sunday.
Let me be clear, lefties. When you accuse Trump and Co. of being authoritarians, you are really telling us that when youse guys are in power you act like authoritarians. It takes one to know one.
How many steps is it from representative government under the rule of law to authoritarianism and from there to totalitarianism?
I say that with our lefty friends we are always toying with authoritarianism. That’s what yelling “Extremists!” is all about. And when lefties get the bit between their teeth, because despite the predictions of all the exerts the economy goes South — well we know all about that: Reigns of Terror, Great Purges, and Proletarian Cultural Revolutions.
With our lefty friends we are only one step away from flat out censorship and another step from the camps.
But whatabout the extreme right, and fascism and Literally Hitler?
Dear lefties: the “tell” is that nobody has time for Hitler: not on the right. If there were genuine stormtrooper groups on the right, we racist-sexist-homophobes would call them out and shame them. But then there is AntiFa, that never quite seems to get utterly deplored by the mainstream media and the Democratic Party. Any questions, lefties?
And it’s not that our lefty friends are any worse than your average KKKer. Or any better, for that matter. It’s just that politics leads directly to ramping up the secret police (in the US it’s called the Intelligence Community) and censoring speech and debanking and calling a mostly peaceful protest an armed insurrection and putting people in jail for having the wrong opinion and trying to get the other party’s candidate for president kicked off the ballot.
Because politics is the fight against the enemy. And we far-right armed insurrectionists don’t believe politics ever solves much of anything.
Except calling Ayaan Hirsi Ali an “extremist.”
| Sat, 25 Apr 2026 02:32:19 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Class Analysis: A hundred years ago the rich were thin and the poor were fat; today the rich are thin and the poor are fat. A hundred years ago the rich were idle and the poor worked; today the rich work and the poor are idle.
Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. — Eisenhower
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: A Critique of Critical Theory
