I think there are three factors we need to consider.
First is the importance of social norms. This has been emphasised in a recent work by Vicente Valentim, The Normalisation of the Radical Right. He argues that in last decade or so, it is not so much an increase in a preference for radical right views but rather a breakdown of norms that kept these views subdued. As he says, “Humans are social beings, and their behaviour does not happen in isolation.”
The second factor is a specific context which can give rise to feelings of resentment and activate dormant or latent sentiments. The third factor is the skill of the demagogue in channelling the disaffection and anger of a certain group of people towards an outlet. The skilled demagogue can give the sense of generalised resentment a narrative, a shape.
As should be clear from the above, the demagogue does not act in a vacuum. The objectives, the motives, the ideas of the demagogue need to be set against the external conditions and circumstances that may encourage or neutralise those aims.
If this is all a bit abstract, then let’s look at a concrete example through the work of Ian Kershaw, the author of the magisterial two part biography of Hitler.
In the first part, Hubris, Kershaw emphasises the importance of context:
“The First World War made Hitler possible. Without the experience of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the upheaval of revolution the failed artist and social drop-out would not have discovered what to do with his life by entering politics and finding his métier as a propagandist and beerhall demagogue. And without the trauma of war, defeat and revolution, without the political radicalization of German society that this trauma brought about, the demagogue would have been without an audience for his raucous, hate-filled message. The legacy of the lost war provided the conditions in which the paths of Hitler and the German people began to cross. Without the war, a Hitler on the Chancellor’s seat that had been occupied by Bismarck would have been unthinkable.”
In the second part, Nemesis, Kershaw points to Hitler’s ability to channel grievances towards a particular direction:
“His success as a demagogue lay in his ability to say what the disaffected masses wanted to hear, to speak their language – to capture and exploit a psychology of despair and invest it with new hope for a phoenix-like resurgence of the nation. He was able as no one else to give voice to popular hatreds, resentments, hopes, and expectations. He spoke more stridently, more vehemently, more expressively and appealingly than any of those with a similar ideological message. He was the mouthpiece of the nationalist masses at a decisive time of all-embracing national crisis.”
We see in the above the three factors coming together. Social norms had broken down in the midst of War; German society had been radicalised by the experience of war; Hitler’s ‘talent’ was to be able to channel the sense of anger and bitterness, to give it a shape, a story, to find scapegoats and to offer the promise of rebirth.
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c guy avoiding charges is SA pretending to be atheist?
