I have read that in Japan there are common expressions for the blissful state of being in large crowds. Americans claim that they dislike crowds despite the evidence of massive throngs at music festivals, sporting events, and megachurches. The Southern Baptist church, Prestonwood Baptist, claims enthusiastic crowds exceeding 15,000 believers (and donors) every week.
The Church of Trump has them beat. Twenty to thirty thousand screaming followers can often attend. President Obama drew larger crowds but I doubt his supporters turned over their lives to these events. Some Trump-crazed supporters would attend dozens of such events, traveling hundreds of miles to worship at these church-like raves.
The journalist Carl Hoffman traveled the Trump rally circuit to interview and even befriend some the rally pilgrims. He reports on his crazy journey in Liar’s Circus, subtitled A Strange and Terrifying Journey into the Upside-Down World of Trump’s MAGA Rallies (HarperCollins, 2020). Hoffman says little about what nonsense Trump had to say at the rallies (God-knows we’ve had enough of that) but rather he writes about the crowd and its true-believer people.
The rally fans were fanatics, they were worshipers at the altar of crazy. Hoffman does indeed remark on the quasi-religious nature of the MAGA rallies. He witnessed rituals, songs, chants, prayers, emotional outbursts, testimony, and wild sermons worthy of a Mississippi tent revival. Hoffman references the American Great Awakening and he refers to how the rallies, like the 19th century protestant resurgence, swept across the country like a virus. At the Trump rallies there were prayers and demons who were mostly the wicked liberals who had an “agenda” to destroy the right wing manifest destiny to a Whites-only greatness.
As Hoffman waited with the faithful in long overnight vigils to enter the hall, he befriended several who followed the circus circuit to dozens of rallies. They had trailers and tents and did cookouts like massive tailgate parties. They came, mostly by car again and again, from distant states but they didn’t come for politics. They came for the event, for the tent revival, for the crowd. Sociologists have studied and written about the strange, enormous power of the crowd over the emotions of the individual. Elias Canetti, in his Nobel Prize winning book, Crowds and Power, explained how tyrants use the power of crowds to gain power over the individual. The crowd takes on a kind of spooky animation wanting growth and sustaining itself with increasing power over thought and emotion. Individuals in crowds surrender their personal power to the autocrat. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about how singing and motion in a celebratory crowd can de-individualize the participant and cede power and adulation to the leader.
Hoffman “realized Trump was a preacher and this was a fundamentalist revival.” Trump preached against a loss of our souls to the Satanic Democrats, or immigrants, or the media. The Trump church endures and the congregations want more and more. Personally, I am praying to hear less and less.
Two Strikes 