>My uncle is a social psychologist. He did research among young skinheads (incidentally in Detroit) and wrote a fascinating book about it: http://www.amazon.com/The-Racist-Mind-Portraits-Neo-Nazis/dp/0140234497. It's years since I read it, but I recall that many of these young men were drawn in for the relationships, not the philosophy.
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>Tamar


That makes sense, but I think that there might be something more afoot here.

I'm decades too late, but with all the crazy rhetoric flying around, I decided that it was time to read what the master demagogue of modern times had to say on the subject and picked up the Kindle version of Mein Kampf.

At $.99, it's overpriced but if you can get past all the poison, (I'd had my fill 3/4 through) there's something to be learned by seeing how a master manipulator of mass thinking approached the subject.

Throughout Mein Kampf Hitler uses a word that the translators of Mein Kampf don't try to put into English:
"weltanschhauung"

Some English dictionaries call it "a comprehensive conception or apprehension of the world especially from a specific standpoint" but that's not an adequate formulation.

I'd like to see some of our German members here take a stab at it. Some German compound words are so packed with meaning that they defy translation to English, but given time, German speakers who also speak English can often get the idea across.

This weltanschhauung - especially if articulated by a figure with apparent authority- can be a magnet for young minds or mature minds whose previous weltanschhauung has failed to produce a satisfying outcome.
There were millions of them in post WWI Germany- there are millions in the Middle East now- and there are millions of them right here in the US today.
This new weltanschhauung - however crazy it might or might not be - might come from a religious group, a military group, or a political figure.

As your uncle said, there's also a large social or group element to it, but there also has to be a unifying idea and a dissatisfaction with the status quo.

That combination explains the renewed appeal of Christian and Jewish fundamentalism, the flight by many modern people to Buddhism and even to some extremist groups like ISIS, the neo-Nazi's, the Klan, the Libertarian militias, etc.

Social, economic and political upheavals, whatever the cause, crumble the existing weltanschhauung and invite someone to formulate a new one.

A major failure of modern liberal thinking is that it has done a good job knocking down old institutions but an awful job replacing them.