I picked up an abstract, intellectual sense of the phenomenon from literature, film, and documentaries about mass insanity, e.g., anything on Nazi Germany, Salem witchcraft trials, Shirley Jackson's fictional "The Lottery," U.S. racial violence like the KKK, 1960s school integration, various genocides including what happens during the insanity of war, and similar phenomena, including smaller scale group violence.
Like you, I encountered enmity from others for openly protesting Bush's run up to the Iraqi Invasion, at work and at church, where a self-styled leader shot me down with something like, "how dare you question our government?" Some of those enmities were for good; they never lifted (I think they were Republicans).
The eeriest manifestation of this phenomenon that I've witnessed was in the 1980s on the Phil Donahue show just after Reagan's bogus, uncalled-for invasion of Grenada. Donahue was interviewing a small group who had something to do with it (so long ago I forget what) and when he began questioning the legitimacy of the invasion, the entire audience began hissing, and you could see the color drain from his face as he glanced across the audience and backed off the line of questioning. Within a matter of minutes, he had been completely silenced. Whatever the mood was in that TV studio, it even scared me in my living room. The audience was of one mind, and anyone who disagreed would surely be a target.
You mention Jungian archetypes, the zeitgeist, etc. -- I concur, these entities of human consciousness are quite real. Another one that relates closely to all of this is René Girard's theory of mimetic desire, mimetic rivalry, and the scapegoat mechanism. I find Girard a difficult read, but what I've grasped of his work has, over time, resonated as true. I value him so highly that his recent death, at a ripe old age, saddened me because I wish he could have kept going with his amazingly intuitive, but learned and observant, discoveries. He captures a deep, almost instinctual aspect of humanity -- a, imo, aspect that is neither very nice nor very smart -- that explains so much of what looks like little more than group-level dysfunction.
Yes, the Clintons, for all their "smarts" do not rise above any of this shit, or if they do, it's only for the purpose of manipulating it to serve their interests. We so do not need people like that in power.
What's amazing about Bernie is that he doesn't operate on the manipulative level at all -- or if he does, it's extremely limited and benign.
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