Dostoevsky on MAGA

Re-reading Dostoevsky’s novel 1872 novel Demons at the moment, this brought to mind the Make America Great Again movement, where the socially awkward but deeply sincere character Shatov who has renounced revolutionary, leftist ideology, talks of the attitude of this milieu towards its own nation and people. In an earlier chapter he retorts to the self-indulgent but relatively benign liberal figure Stepan Verkhovensky:

“These men of yours never loved the people, never suffered for them or sacrificed anything for them, no matter what they themselves imagined for their own good pleasure !”  he growled gloomily, looking down and turning impatiently on his chair. “One cannot love what one does no know, and they understood nothing about the Russian people! Not only have you overlooked the people - you have treated them with loathsome contempt.”

The bit though about the attitude to nation and its successes or failures belo:

“They’re paper people; it all comes from lackeyishness of thinking. And there’s hatred there too,” he said after a moment’s silence. “They’d be the first to be terribly unhappy if Russia somehow suddenly got reconstructed, even if it was in their own way, and somehow became boundlessly rich and happy. They’d have no one to hate then, no one to spit on, nothing to jeer at! All that’s there is an endless animal hatred of Russia that has eaten into their organism . . . And there are no tears invisible to the world under the visible laughter.”