The Cult of Drama

Rare photo of the comments section at We Hunted The Mammoth

David Futrelle is a drama-blogging demogogue.

But that’s redundant. All demagogues are dramatic. It is a requirement of the genre. The Cult of the Demagogue needs a steady diet of drama to sustain a crisis mentality. The villains must be a constant threat, or the flock will lose a sense of urgency and disappear for meaner pastures. The Cult of the Demagogue is simultaneously a Cult of Drama, because it is a cult, and there has never been a cult that did not thrive on drama.

The Drama

U.S. radio pioneer Father Charles Coughlin ranks as one of the great demagogues of the 20th Century because he understood drama and executed a brilliant dramatic strategy. Coughlin exploited the intimacy of radio, a new technology, to create a bond with his listeners as he told them how much they had to fear from the hidden forces at work in their world. He and his audience were in a Great Drama together, and of course they believed that they were the only ones who could see the Real Truth about the Communists and the Jews who were hellbent on ripping apart the fabric of American society.

Are you impressed by the volume of comments that David Futrelle gets at We Hunted The Mammoth? Here’s the New York Times on Coughlin’s audience-engagement score: “By the early 1930’s his fans were sending him 10,000 letters a day.” The easy-to-understand “us versus them” scheme in Coughlin’s radio broadcasts forged a deep personal connection in his Cult of the Demagogue. Audiences often respond with gratitude and even love when they are guided through the confusion of reality to the clarity of drama. Welcome to the drama, welcome to the cult.

Like Bill O’Reilly and David Futrelle today, Coughlin was a media demagogue as opposed to a political demagogue. (Coughlin tried expanding his influence by starting a political party but failed.) Because they seek directly to abuse the enormous power of the government, political demagogues such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy get most of the attention from those who study demagoguery; demagogues with subpoenas just seem more dangerous than demagogues with microphones, and in some ways they obviously are.

But Father Coughlin was enormously influential, to the point that President Franklin Roosevelt was preoccupied with “taming” him. Coughlin framed the social and political agenda for his audience of millions. In his folksy style, the kindly but passionate radio man told the story of the Good People, who were under attack by the Cult of Evil represented by the Communists and the Jews. His show was a radio drama, with you as the protagonist. Father Coughlin would make you angry, he would make you scared, and he would always make sure you understood that while the villains were fundamentally evil, in fairness, they were also bananas.

If Charles Coughlin had had a blog, it probably would have looked something like this:

Ugh, communists are the WORST, amirite?

The Hero

The aggressive anti-social behavior that cults demonstrate toward those around them is in the category known as hero behavior. Only a hero can push the boundaries of social convention and ethics to complete the critical mission for the benefit of the rest of us. We don’t give that privilege to just anyone. Only heroes get to break the rules.

The demagogue needs to break the rules. That’s why the demagogue needs to see himself as a hero. Only a hero could get away with such otherwise socially unacceptable acts as misleading, lying and demonizing. The behavior determines the role.

The demagogue is always a hero. But what is a hero? You might think that a hero is someone who fights and wins. You would be wrong. While many heroes fight and some heroes win, it is not necessary for a hero to fight or win. It is only necessary for a hero to suffer.

Jesus did not fight or win. He only suffered. That is all it took for Jesus to become one of the greatest Heroes of all time, and sell more books than God.

Suffering is the main function of the hero, and suffering is at the root of all Drama, including the drama at the blogs of drama-blogging demagogues.

Suffering in the Cult of the Demagogue

The hero must suffer. That’s what sells the tickets.

Some heroes advertise their suffering, just to make sure you know. Hamlet doesn’t shut up about his suffering from Act One to whenever it is that he finally dies. Joan of Arc was known to have said a thing or two about her inner pain. And don’t get me started on Job.

Does David Futrelle advertise his suffering? You bet he does. He generously opens up about his suffering when he writes his most important posts — the ones where he asks his readership for money:

When I started this blog I had no idea that it would turn into a community, but now that it has it’s the community here that keeps me going, even when I get utterly sick of the awful, awful people I write about regularly. I appreciate you all — you of the Man Boobz community, that is, not the awful misogynists — more than you realize.

David Futrelle suffers by spending most of his day reading the output of “awful, awful people.” He suffers so much that he gets “utterly sick” and has to lean on his community “more than you realize.” But he must make this sacrifice, so that he can bring the stories of awfulness to his audience, which then also suffers terribly as it experiences these “awful, awful people.” Everybody in the Cult of the Demagogue is suffering as they share the stories of scandal and villainy with each other. The experience is so wrenching that you almost wonder why they compulsively do it, day after day.

This is how she reacted to the latest story on Mammoth. She can’t wait to read the next one…

They don’t enjoy it. No. It almost destroys them. But they do it for you. Team Mammoth must do the work of filling those file cabinets and letting everyone know what the files say about the character of the targeted group. They must.

I mean, just imagine what would happen if Team Mammoth didn’t do this emotionally strenuous but very important work. Just imagine.

Actually, that’s not a question that comes up very often in the Cult of the Demagogue. What would happen if the Cult of the Demagogue didn’t endure the suffering and do the very important work of ruminating on and publicizing the essential badness of the “awful, awful people”?

The answer is that we might have a reasonable conversation.

Just look at what the MRAs are up to now — and you want to talk about issues?