This is just the way it works when masses of people get desperate. Read any history of any uprising ever and at some point you’ll find people throwing their lives and hopes behind someone who manifestly will betray them.

Throughout history, mobs create the person they want to fulfill their hopes. Then they drape that illusion over whatever real-live wannabe leader is standing there. Later … they pay.

After all, here we have a cultural product whose appeal essentially consists of a broad coalition of the worst people in America: New York Times writers, 15-year-olds who aspire to answer the phone in Chuck Schumer’s office, people who want to get into steampunk but have a copper sensitivity, and “wonks.” Yet because a large fraction of these people are elite taste-makers, Hamilton becomes a topic of disproportionate interest, discussed at unendurable length in The New Yorker and Slate and The New York Times Magazine, yet totally inaccessible to anyone besides the writers and members of their close social networks.

In the report, the TAS described how taxpayers with only minor reporting violations and who owed no delinquent tax were herded into the 2009 OVDP. But once enrolled, the penalties were much heavier than they would have otherwise been subjected to.