The personality cult surrounding the demagogue
From Ian Kershaw’s The Hitler Myth:
Even after the triumph of the 1930 election, many intelligent and informed observers of the German political scene felt that the Nazi party was bound sooner or later to collapse and break up into its component parts. Its social base was diffuse – that of an out and out protest party; it had no clear political programme to offer, only a contradictory amalgam of social revolutionary rhetoric and reactionary impulses; and not least it was heavily dependent on the personality cult surrounding the demagogue Hitler – seen as the mouthpiece of petty-bourgeois resentments, but ultimately a dilettante who, despite temporary success in the conditions of severe economic and political crisis, was bound in the end to succumb to the real power bastions and traditional ruling elites. [p 29]
Does that sound familiar? It sounded chillingly familiar to me when I read it this morning.
More familiarity:
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1248550265163432/?type=3&theater
Hitler was ‘bound in the end to succumb to the real power bastions and traditional ruling elites’.
The mistake of the ‘intelligent and informed observers’ was to ignore the possibility that Hitler would co opt the German plutocracy and industrialists who ultimately prospered because of the expenditure policies of the Nazi regime, until WW2. Hitler was someone that they could do business with. The assumption that Hitler, Mussolini or numerous Latin American dictators were hostile to the ruling elites in their respective countries is a naive projection of middle class values.