Or angry and frightened villagers storming Dracula’s castle with torches, crosses and holly stakes.
These are more than just crowds. They are mobs. There are fewer old west lynchings now, and vampires are confined to movies, so if you’re looking for a good old fashioned mob frenzy today, you have to go to a Trump rally.
There you will be able to cheer loudly with all the others around you at a fairgrounds in Robstown, Texas, when your hero suggests that journalists withholding the names of leakers should be sent to jail where they will be other prisoner’s brides; raped, in case that wasn’t clear.
Why do they cheer? Well, it’s simple really: they’re a mob whipped up by a master manipulator. Like Hitler. Like Mussolini.
I don’t like Trump, but he’s just one man. Without his rabid crowds, he would be no more a threat to us than the odd eccentric on a soapbox in a public park telling everyone that the world is coming to an end.
Why do we listen to Trump when we don’t listen to the nuts on soapboxes?
That’s the million dollar question.
Social scientists and politicians theorize that he is speaking to the grievances of his followers, making them feel included and hopeful when they have fallen on tough times, or at least giving them someone to look down on and hate.
In other words, he is inciting them to hatred, often to violence.
He’s not going to help them. Those of us not in his thrall know that. He’s just using them for his own pleasure and aggrandizement. And they love him for it, for giving them purpose—hatred.
What is there to do about it? Many of us have thought his crowds would wake up and see what a fraud he is, what a false prophet. So far, they have not.
They are the problem—their weakness and susceptibility to being misled and abused—but getting rid of him is the only practical way we can deal with them. Without him, his mobs will still be discouraged and angry, even hateful, but there will be no one to gather them together in the torchlight and direct them to storm the castle (or the Capitol).
The unfortunate truth is that we are a danger to ourselves. For reasons I’m not sure we fully understand, there is a little bit of the mob in all of us. Lying dormant, waiting for the stimulus that awakens some atavistic urge that no doubt helped us survive in grittier times but which now stands in the way of the cooperation we are going to need from now on to thrive on our increasingly hot and dry planet.
