312 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographypeak of his powers at its worst moment of vulnerability in a generation. With malice aforethought,
he has sought out their sore point. This reversal has provoked a national mood of existential crisis.
In Europe, economic downturns do not inspire this kind of soul-searching, for richer are poorer,
remain what they always have been. But Americans are what they make of themselves, and the slim
makings of 2008 shake their sense of identity. Americans have no institutionalized culture to fall
back on. Their national religion has consisted of waves of enthusiasm - “Great Awakenings” –
every second generation or so, followed by an interim of apathy. In times of stress they have a
baleful susceptibility to hucksters and conmen. Be afraid - be very afraid. America is at a low point
in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself.’ (Spengler, Asia Times, Feb. 26, 2008)
THE DYNAMICS OF THE MASS MEETING
It was above all on the night that Obama won the Iowa caucus that the world began to see the
fully developed technique of Obama’s mass meetings, with hysterical crowds and teleprompter
delivery. All the well-worn clichés warning that those who fail to understand history are condemned
to repeat it now became operative, with a vengeance. American politics was rushing backward in
time to postwar Italy and depression-era Germany: the hour of the demagogue and mob orator was
at hand. Fascism had already been tried once, and it had failed. Now, American society had been
schooled in top-down totalitarianism for eight years by the Bush-Cheney-neocon regime, which had
brought military defeat and world economic depression. Now the ruling elite was reversing its field,
and trying a bottom-up approach to the demolition of real representative democracy. American were
however ignorant of the main internal features of fascist movements of the recent past. Would they
fall victim so easily to postmodern fascism? The founder of National Socialism had famously
argued that the masses were always and everywhere characterized by irrationalism: ‘“The people
(das Volk) are in their overwhelming majority so womanly in their views and attitudes that their
thought and action are much less determined by sober reflection than by emotional feelings.” The
goal of mass meetings of the Obama type is to attack the faculties of reason and free will in the
audience. As Georg Lukacs commented, National Socialism “wants manipulation instead of
convincing arguments, wants to create by any means necessary a sultry atmosphere of blind belief
and hysterical gullibility on the part of despairing people. Here again the struggle of existentialist
philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) against reason — quite apart from how much existentialism Hitler
may have known — forms the basis in terms of world outlook for a pure technique of demagogy.
Hitler’s ‘originality’ consists in the fact that he was the first to apply American advertising methods
in German politics and propaganda. His goal was to dumb down and swindle the masses. In his
principal work he confesses that his goal is demagogy and the breaking of the free will and
cognitive faculty of people. The only question that Hitler ever thoroughly and conscientiously
studied is by what tricks this goal can be reached. Here he discusses all possible external details of
manipulation and the manipulability of the masses.” (Lukacs, Zerstörung der Vernunft, 630-631)
Hitler was very explicit about the goals of his mass meeting: they were cynically planned as a
systematic assault on human reason and human freedom: “In all these cases we are seeking to erode
the freedom of the human will. And that is true especially of meetings where there are men whose
wills are opposed to the speaker and who must be brought around to a new way of thinking. In the
morning and during the day it seems that the power of the human will rebels with its strongest
energy against any attempt to impose upon it the will or opinion of another. On the other hand, in
the evening it easily succumbs to the domination of a stronger will. Because really in such
assemblies there is a contest between two opposite forces. The superior oratorical art of a man who
has the compelling character of an apostle will succeed better in bringing around to a new way of