The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street: mass movements?

Are the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street mass movements? Eric Hoffer, the “longshoreman philosopher” of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, would have judged them so, because of what they are doing for their followers. On Dec.13, 1946, this never-schooled dockworker and former agricultural migrant worker, writing in his notebook, summed up his thinking about mass movements and their “true believers.” Asking himself what a mass movement does for its followers, he answered:“It takes them out of themselves. It gives them a future. It fills their lives with activities. It frees them of responsibility for their own lives; frees them of the killing strain of competition. It frees them of loneliness. It gives them a cause for pride. It fills them with hope. It gives them a sense of righteousness. It gives them courage and banishes fear from their hearts. It gives them a sense of superiority over those not in the movement. It gives them a sense of growth and development, a feeling of success. It gives them the feeling that they are useful, wanted, important. It gives them the illusion of might and fills their souls with grandeur.”I found that previously unpublished list in Hoffer’s archives, during my research for his biography. When Hoffer assessed mass movements, in his classic book, “The True Believer,” published in 1951, the examples before his eyes were Nazism and Communism, but he also wrote that the same principles of mass movements and their fanatical followers could be found in the early history of the Catholic Church, in the Reformation, in the French Revolution, and in certain movements in 19th-century Japan. By the mid-1960s, when Hoffer held a part-time professorship in the political sciences department at Berkeley — despite never having spent a day of his life attending school — he would also see these elements operating in the Free Speech and Anti-Vietnam War movements. Mass movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are important to a Democratic society, Hoffer believed, because a Democratic society must be home to both the majority who are content with the present — the “well-adjusted,” autonomous individuals who in a crisis will always leap to defend their society — and to a leavening of malcontents, incipient true believers whose anger and passion are needed because their movements point up our society’s faults so we can better direct our energies toward fixing the problems identified by the movements. A social conservative and a believer that the individual must make his or her own way, Hoffer would have applauded the Tea Party’s mission to cut down the size of government and the entitlement programs. But as a man who steadily railed against the loss of manufacturing jobs because of what he envisioned that doing to this country’s working class, he would also have appreciated the anti-greed message of Occupy Wall Street. The Tea Party has already evolved to the point of having quite an effect on the political consciousness of the United States. In Hoffer’s terms, Occupy Wall Street is not far behind them in gaining the critical mass necessary to having a similar effect. Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written more than two dozen books and many television documentaries.