The enemy

Okay , you have the cause but why do you have it in the first place? i mean all this time you lived without it , why now? why fix the economy now? why fight a war now? how does it make any sense to the population?

why would people rally to your cause after it failed so many times before , yes you can give them hope but what if it keeps failing , you need to justify it , sometimes by truth and sometimes people will lie and use a scapegoat. 

Some people, need their misery to be justified and as ugly as it may sound, scapegoating can work even today. Maybe back in the old times you'd think that what happened with the Jews and the women is basically because of this is how people thought at the time. It's partially true, but if you come and tell the reason of the many failures In a certain thing to a peasant he will probably believe you.
Let me give an example. Lebanon.

Our country is full of horrible corruption yet no leader got decapitated yet. Why? One of the reasons is that all leaders are against corruption and are "fighting against it" all leaders are with freedom and all are with development and progress. So where does corruption comes from? The other religious group of course!

 They are the ones that are making the country worse.
And well why wouldn't people of this party think that? After all its true. But what they perhaps don't see, is that their leaders are also corrupt. They don't need to burn people at the stake to prove that. They just need them to be at least unsure of the truth that their own leaders are corrupt or not so the folk won't take the streets and burn it to the ground.

It can also work in an online community (i want to show you how universal it is), if a drama happened, and it involved 10 people if you throw the accusation on something that is true but not fully it can glue, if you ban someone because they made drama that's not wrong because they actually did it. But you spared 9 others and made them believe that it was all the fault of this one person. And they'll all agree because it's not totally wrong so they can automatically justify it themselves alone and not many people want to feel that they are wrong. Obviously this strategy depends on what happened and how, but with time, with dialog and with the right moves it can be done.

Scape goating is an evil move, but it works, even in our times, in many shapes or forms. Trump did build some of the wall after all.

picture credits : 

https://pixabay.com/photos/goat-animal-livestock-domestic-goat-3613728/