Hoffer is not MAGA avant la lettre, so to speak, but reading him did throw light for me on MAGA as a movement, uniting a mass of people in a common cause. According to Hoffer, mass movements appeal to those he calls “the frustrated,” people who feel “disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things.” The leader of such a movement “cannot conjure [it] out of the void.” Instead, there first has to be “an intense dissatisfaction with things as they are.” The leader then articulates and justifies “the resentment dammed up in the souls of the frustrated” and stages “the world of make-believe” in which the world is made anew and the frustrated find satisfaction. Hoffer also notes “the enormous joy [the frustrated] derive” from decrying “the present and all its works.” They “derive as much satisfaction—if not more—from the means a mass movement uses as from the ends it advocates.” MAGA’s deep satisfaction at “owning the libs” springs to mind. So, too, does its aesthetics of transgression—its glory in ill-concealed dog-whistles and contempt for manners and norms.

Despite the high-flown language, Hoffer’s intellectual ambition was to write a sober, tell-it-like-it-is account of the nature of mass movements.
Consider further Hoffer’s thoughts on the archetypal leader of a mass movement. “The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass-movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world. Charlatanism is to some extent indispensable”—confidently pretending to knowledge while paradoxically estimating it as worthless. And then there is this:

The main requirements [for the leader] seem to be: audacity and a joy in defiance; an iron will; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; faith in his destiny and luck; a capacity for passionate hatred; a cunning estimate of human nature; a delight in symbols (spectacles and ceremonials [and baseball hats?]); unbounded brazenness which finds expression in a disregard of consistency and fairness; a recognition that the innermost craving of a following is for communion and that there can never be too much of it; [and] a capacity for winning and holding the utmost loyalty of a group of able lieutenants.

I’m not sure that President Trump has “an iron will,” and many of his “lieutenants,” loyal though they certainly are, proved to be laughably inept when he sought to overthrow the 2020 presidential election. For its part, his new administration has already put on a few clown shows. (For example: freezing nearly all federal grants and loans, and then quickly rescinding that order when its implications became apparent.) But Trump goes some ways toward meeting most of the other requirements.

God bless the internet: there’s a free pdf available online.

The thing about playing for a professional soccer team located north of the Arctic Circle is that you have no choice but to accept a few cold truths.

For much of the year, it’s going to be frigid. It’s going to be windy. And it’s going to be dark.

That’s all part of the deal when you sign for Bodo/Glimt, the unlikely upstart that has won four of the past five Norwegian championships. The club is based in the small town of Bodo, on the skinny northern stretch of the country, 67 degrees above the equator and a 10-hour drive from any sizable city. For the past few months, it has sat in near permanent darkness.

Bodo/Glimt is so far north that even other Norwegians think it’s a little too remote. But to the club’s players, simply existing there is the ultimate home advantage.

“I see it in the eyes of opponents when they come to Bodo,” central defender Jostein Gundersen says. “To be honest, we also think it’s really cold—it’s not like we don’t feel it. But we know it’s much worse for them. So we hope for it to be a little bit cold, and windy, and dark and snowy.”