I used to think that Eric Hoffer had the last word on the natural cycle of political mass movements. And I first wrote about it in 2010.
Pat Buchanan hauls out a quote from Eric Hoffer today. “Every great movement begins as a cause, eventually becomes a business, then degenerates into a racket.”
Actually, he's wrong. According to Wikiquote, the real quote is: “Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.”
Okay. The second quote comes from “The Negro Revolution” in The Temper of our Times. But in “The Madhouse of Change” in First Things, Last Things the quote is rendered as
America is hard on mass movements. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a corporation or a racket.
But now, I find that the Hoffer racket argument is just one of many. John Tierney in City Journal has written that all activists are infected with “The March of Dimes Syndrome.” As he writes:
The March helped fund the vaccines that eventually ended the polio epidemics -- but not the organization, which, after polio’s eradication, changed its mission to preventing birth defects.
Actually, per........