"His rhetoric was religious; he dissolved politics in a religious aura ... He promised deliverance and redemption, rebirth and salvation, even as he reviled the nation's enemies as godless and satanic; he did all that in the name of Providence, for he believed that Providence had selected him to deliver the people. In the beginning of his leadership, when he was still seeking to beguile his conservative allies, he appeared at his most devout. [At a mass meeting before his election] he was greeted with an incomparable storm of applause. Then he gave a far-ranging speech which roused all to a momentous pitch. At the end he began to pray, as it were, and concluded with the word 'amen.' Exactly the right mixture for his audience: Brutality, threats, great bragging about power and then again humility before the oft cited 'Almighty.' He declared after his election: 'the Almighty withdrew His blessings from our people' because they had forgotten 'the highest treasures of [the nation's] past, its honor and its freedom.'"
-- I've taken liberties with this quotation from Fritz Stern's Dreams and Delusions (page 145), by deleting the name of the man he was referring to and by including part of the text of a footnote on the same page in order to emphasize the parallels with today's crisis in global leadership. The "leader" referred to was of course Adolf Hitler.
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