Almost every day, one of the current candidates says something so incredibly stupid, cruel, prejudiced, sexist….. add almost any negative description you can think of. And I still don’t understand how or why anyone would believe or follow any one of them.
Of course Trump is the most obvious pied piper among the Republican candidates, but with the seemingly universal hatred of Ted Cruz, his supporters are a mystery to me, too. Eight years ago I would never imagine saying that in comparison George W. Bush looks good to me. Worse yet, I hate that the Republican choices are forcing me to even think it. And worst of all, it scares me that there is any chance at all that one of those two men might win the election.
This morning I was searching for a quote from Eric Hoffer on a different subject (which I haven’t found, yet.) However, I found the perfect quote to explain the followers of these Republican candidates:
“There is apparently some connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and a proneness to credulity. The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They ask to be deceived. What Stresemann said of the Germans is true of the frustrated in general: ‘They pray not only for their daily bread, but also for their daily illusion.’ The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.” ~Eric Hoffer