Size Matters

 Trump continued to express his idiosyncratic obsession with crowd sizes today. After disputing for days whether the number of attendees at Harris's political rallies was really as large as she claimed, he has now upped the ante. After the media shared videos of the large groups at Harris events, Trump baselessly asserted that the Harris campaign must have doctored this photographic evidence with AI—in order to make the crowds look bigger than they were. 

This has been a long-standing obsession on Trump's part. As longtime observers of his political career will recall, it was a dispute over crowd sizes that led to the coining of the phrase "alternative facts," which has played such a large role in defining the post-truth era of American politics that Trump created. And it was in part his fondness for crowd events that fueled Trump's paranoid opposition to COVID-era restrictions on mass gatherings. 

To understand why this issue matters so much to Trump, it is necessary to read Elias Canetti's classic study, Crowds and Power. It is the book that defines the crowd as the essential unit of raw power. In modern politics, the crowd stands in for the metaphorical army. It is the "pile" of soldiers, in Canetti's term. Hopefully, in a democracy, the clash of the armies unfolds nonviolently—at the ballot box. But the symbolism of the crowd is nonetheless clear. 

Thus, Trump, as a classic demagogue, has always measured his power by the size of the crowd he can command.

And his followers have in turn treated his crowd events as defining, quasi-mystical events, which knit them together through an almost transcendent experience of group consciousness. If Durkheim's definition of religion is true—i.e., that it is the feeling of solidarity that comes through a sudden awareness of one's part in a larger social collectivity—then Trumpism is certainly a religion; and the Trump rally is its central rite. It is the eucharist of the Trump cult.

Canetti, like other theorists of crowd psychology before him—from Le Bon on down—was aware that the crowd could be a dangerous thing. It could turn into a hunting pack as often as it could its nonviolent alternative (the "increase-pack," as Canetti calls it). The crowd was often an indicator for the demagogue's latent power to inflict violence. And of course, on January 6, it was actually used for that purpose. The metaphorical "army" became an actual horde. 

And so, as "religious" as Trump's rallies may seem, we should always heed another lesson of religion when confronted with them. The Bible says: "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil." Power and the force of latent or implied violence may often be found in crowds, after all—but truth and righteousness seldom. As Yeats argued, in his poem "The Leaders of the Crowd"—this is a thing the demagogues will never learn to appreciate.