Garry Wills had him nailed a long time ago.
Jesus, are we stupid or what?
“He was all energy and conviction, never letting up, though
I was soon worn down by the emotional attrition. Every time I tried to ease my
way out the door, he loomed up with new giant claims or some belligerent
challenge—was I calling him a liar? Like all spellbinders, he was clearly
convincing himself at least part of the time, trying to believe, with an actor’s
wish to measure up to the part. Or, alternately, he would taunt me with
undisguised lies that he made me respond—and had me hooked again. The weird
fascination of Hitler became comprehensible at last. Much as I tried to stay
clinical and observant, he involved me, made me angry, or sympathetic, or
frightened; ashamed for him, or ashamed of myself for letting his emotional
bullying work. He was the voice of all that Sixties mystique of “the
confrontation”—the belief that sheer conflict will somehow purify, as when
people in encounter groups screamed, criticized, fatigued each other down to
the ultimate capitulation—and called their stripped down exhaustion “reality.”
The street theatre of shouts and trashing, tear gas and taunting the pigs, was
a way of moving these “encounters” out onto the public stage. My Demagogue had
brought the process full circle around, taking the inflated political rhetoric
back into the ego’s echo chamber. The Sixties experience—“mind-blowing,”
consciousness-altering—was always some kind of trip.”
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