It's the brotherhood of identity not logic that constitutes and motivates the True Believer audience...

Hoffer:  ...it is not logic that persuades and recruits but rather it is the promise of brotherhood (identity and safety) that does.  It's the brotherhood of identity, not logic, that constitutes the True Believer audience.  For them, it is the simplicity of anti-thesis and a firm rhetorical identity (ethos) that attracts and motivates their political rhetoric and actions.  That is why common sense and logic and TRUTH (logos) aren't persuasive to Trump's followers:  it was never what attracted them in the first place.



Donald Trump Race Shocker: Polls Prove His Success Really Is Based on Racists | Alternet:

"While these results aren’t surprising, there’s a couple of important lessons to be drawn from them. One, traditional coalition-building is collapsing in the Republican Party, which has become victim of its own propaganda machine. Two, this should (but won’t) put to bed any lingering hope that Trump is somehow going to say something too racist and lose his base of support. 

To start with the second one, because it is the sexier issue: For months now, there’s been a sense in the pundit class that Trump is going to cross a line one day, saying something that will wake his supporters up to the fact that he’s not ready to win a general election, causing them to give up their love affair with the Orange One and move, however reluctantly, to a Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush. This assumption underestimates how enraged these voters are. These are people that often feel that they are losing their identity. This group is animated by the idea that white Christian conservatives are the dominant class by rights, and that any attempt to share power is capitulation. The Bushes and Rubios of the world are seen as squishes, people who think “conservatism” can somehow be separated from this white Christian identity. 

As the poll shows, xenophobia is broadly popular in Republican circles, but clearly, it’s a priority issue for Trump supporters. People who are in such a panic state, believing their very identity is under threat by growing racial and ethnic diversity, aren’t going to be interested in people who they see as accepting change as inevitable (even if they promise to slow it down). They want to hear that it can be stopped, even reversed. And Trump is making that promise. 

This entire situation is also a nice reminder that the politics of coalition-building, as frustrating and contentious as they can be at times, have benefits over the multi-decade conservative effort to use propaganda to create a singular, lockstep coalition. Democrats work by bringing people with different issues together, settling differences through compromise and often tedious amounts of discussion. For decades now, the right has gone a different route: Using talk radio, conservative publications and Fox News to create a singular conservative identity and persuading people in the coalition to adjust themselves to it. 

There’s been a lot of political benefits to this, of course. For instance, it might seem like the churchy anti-abortion community would balk at slashing the social safety net on the grounds that it encourages abortion. But that doesn’t happen. Anti-choicers are conservatives first, and conservatives want to cut welfare and that’s that. To budge on this issue is to court accusations of liberalism, which cannot be countenanced."

'via Blog this'