Hillary Misreads the Classics

So you don't have to. A number of observers have noted how Hillary appears to have totally misinterpreted 1984, saying how we should have faith in our elite overlords, who clearly have our best interests at heart, while gathering all the money and power to themselves, but Stacy McCain catches her doing it again: Hillary’s Delusional Reading of Classics

Everyone is stunned by the self-deceptions and blame-shifting in Hillary Clinton’s campaign memoir What Happened, and Ace of Spades aggregates several of the most mind-blowing excerpts.

Most notably, as British socialist writer James Heartfield observes, Hillary claims that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is about the importance of trusting “our leaders, the press, experts” — a 180-degree reversal of Orwell’s actual meaning. A free society requires a citizenry distrustful of power, and not predisposed to accept whatever beliefs officially-approved “experts” advocate. Independent minds must be skeptical, for example, of the suggestion that we should reorganize our healthcare system according to what “leaders” and “experts” tell us.

Only her arrogance — imagining herself as the expert leader who deserves our unquestioning trust — could lead Hillary to reverse the lesson of a classic anti-totalitarian novel like Nineteen Eighty-Four.

However, Hillary also misinterprets Eric Hoffer’s 1951 classic The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. This is a book that I have repeatedly recommended as a guide to understanding the kind of people who are attracted to radical ideologies like feminism:

. . . especially Part 2 (“Potential Converts”) and sections IV (“The Role of the Undesirables in Human Affairs”) and VI (“Misfits”). What Hoffer writes about the influence of “the inferior elements in a nation” (p. 24) and the “incurably frustrated” who have “an unfulfilled craving for creative work” (p 47) applies to many of the angry young men and unhappy young women who rush to join the mob of disgruntled “progressives.”

Being familiar with Hoffer’s ideas — The True Believer is sitting on my desk even now — it was mind-boggling to read Hillary’s warped view:

During the campaign, Bill and I both went back and reread The True Believer, Eric Hoffer’s 1951 explanation of the psychology behind fanaticism and mass movements, and I shared it with my senior staff. On the campaign trail, I offered ideas that I believed would address many of the underlying causes of discontent and help make life better for all Americans. But I couldn’t — and wouldn’t — compete to stoke people’s rage and resentment. I think that’s dangerous. It helps leaders who want to take advantage of that rage to hurt people rather than help them. Besides, it’s just not how I’m wired.

Really? A campaign that denounced Republican voters as “deplorables,” led by a candidate who promised among other things to destroy the jobs of coal miners (helping “make life better,” you see), who irresponsibly incited a phony campus “rape culture” hysteria and endorsed the racial violence of “Black Lives Matters,” was not about stoking rage?

The projection is strong in this one. On authoritarianism, Hillary Clinton was the greater threat