9 - Coda
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Summary
I can only wonder what Ortega y Gasset would have thought had he been able to observe the divisive and corrosive nature of contemporary American politics and read my book on crowds. He wrote his book in 1932, but his ideas seem oddly relevant today—in part because he recognized the problems generated by the emergence of the “multitudes” or what Le Bon would call the crowd. It was Trump's behavior—and the behavior of his angry followers who attacked the Capitol that led me to write this book. Bob Woodward and Robert Costa conclude their book, Peril, as follows (2021:418):
Five years ago, on March 31, 2016, when Trump was on the verge of winning the Republican presidential, we worked together for the first time and interviewed Trump as his then unfinished Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. That day we recognized he was an extraordinary political force, in many ways right out of the American playbook. An outsider. Anti-Establishment. A builder. Bombastic. Confident. A fast-talking scrapper. But we also saw darkness. He could be petty. Cruel. Bored by American history and dismissive of governing traditions that had long guided elected leaders. Tantalized by the prospect of power. Eager to use fear to get his way. “Real power is—I don't even want to use the word—rear,” Trump told us. “I bring rage out. I do bring rage out. I always have. I don't know if that's an asset or a liability, but whatever it is, I do.” Could Trump work his will again? Were there any limits to what he has his supporters might do to put him back in power? Peril remains.
That is the situation we face now in America as our democratic institutions are in peril from Trump and the Republican Party, which has become an antidemocratic cult of Trump followers—or is the term “worshipers” more accurate?
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- Crowds in American Culture, Society and PoliticsA Psychosocial Semiotic Analysis, pp. 85 - 86Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2023