Cult of personality? You betcha.
by digby
I’ve been calling the Trump phenomenon a cult of personality for a while now. This is because I have observed that it doesn’t matter what he says or does, his followers will continue to support him and they are demanding that everyone else do so as well. The cult is infecting the political leadership as well.
Here’s how Wikipedia defines it:
A cult of personality arises when a regime uses mass media, propaganda, or other methods such as Government-organized demonstrations to create an idealized, heroic, and at times worshipful image of a leader, often through unquestioning flattery and praise. A cult of personality is similar to divinization, except that it is established by mass media and propaganda usually by the state, especially in totalitarian (or sometimes authoritarian) states. The term was developed by Nikita Khrushchev’s initially secret speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences given on the final day of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, February 25, 1956, which criticized the lionization of Josef Stalin (and by implication his Communist contemporaries – Kim Il-Sung and Mao Zedong), and its contrariness to the originators of Marxist doctrine.
We have two mass medias in this country. One is the mainstream media, the other is the right wing media which tens of millions watch and read. They are the cult and they are powerful.
Here’s something from Greg Sargent this past week on the subject:
The Glorious Republican Civil War of 2017 isn’t really a battle over policy or ideology. It isn’t even quite the clash of grand agendas we constantly read about — the supposed showdown between populist economic nationalism on one side, and limited government conservatism, free trade and internationalism on the other.
Instead, the GOP civil war is really a battle over whether Republican lawmakers should — or should not — genuflect before President Trump. The battle is over whether they should — or should not — applaud his racism, his authoritarianism and his obvious pleasure in dispensing abuse and sowing racial division. It’s also over whether Republicans should submit to Trump’s ongoing insistence that his lack of major accomplishments is fully the fault of Republicans who failed his greatness.
The Post reports that allies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have hit on a new strategy for countering Stephen K. Bannon’s insurgency. Bannon’s challengers are running on the idea that they constitute the true bearers of the Trumpist banner against a GOP establishment that has allegedly betrayed Trumpism. The strategy is to walk a careful line, avoiding attacking Trump while linking Bannon’s version of Trumpism “to white nationalism to discredit him and the candidates he will support.”
The notion that the GOP civil war is really about whether to genuflect to Trump’s racism and authoritarianism helps resolve some glaring disconnects in our politics that make little sense under any other interpretation.
For instance: The GOP civil war does not align with any major policy dispute now underway among Republicans. The New York Times reports that Republicans see the general goal of cutting taxes (with the largest benefits going to the rich) as tonic to unite the party. The real disagreements on taxes revolve around whether the plan will end state and local deductions (which is opposed by Republicans whose constituents would lose out) and whether the plan should balloon the deficit.
In other words, there is no serious disagreement between the Bannon wing and the GOP establishment on the goal of cutting taxes to the great benefit of the wealthy, while skyrocketing the deficit. Meanwhile, on Obamacare, the main disagreement arose when a few moderates couldn’t stomach its enormously regressive rollback of health-care coverage. There are no Bannon/populist objections to the GOP establishment position on taxes or health care, even though there should be ones in line with Trump’s campaign vows to soak the rich and protect the safety net for aging working-class and rural white voters.
My frame also helps explain how Trump and his allies can continually cast GOP leaders as betrayers of Trump, even though they all agree on the same big-ticket goals on health care and taxes. GOP leaders react to Trump’s worst abuses by condemning them where they have to, and playing them down where possible, while always retreating to the idea that Republicans will all get along on tax reform. When Trump allies blast the GOP establishment as sellouts, they are saying two things — that GOP leaders are both insufficiently enthusiastic about his ongoing employment of white identity politics and that they are failing his agenda in some sense that never has to be defined. Their loyalty is suspect on both fronts.
Bannon understands the power of this narrative, and he’s exploiting it for his own murky purposes. He is building a movement around the idea that Trump is both winning everywhere and being failed everywhere. Bannon tells Trump voters that Trump is winning when he is pilloried by elites (including Republicans) for failing to denounce the Charlottesville white supremacists. Bannon tells Trump voters that black football players should be kneeling in thanks to Trump, because Trump is winning for America in spite of having “no help.” This Bannon play goes way back. As Joshua Green’s biography reports, as soon as Trump secured the nomination, Bannon immediately exaggerated the threat that the GOP establishment would steal the nomination, to rally “Pepe” (Trump nation) to “stomp their a–.”
The GOP civil war is really over how Republicans should react to Trump’s bigotry and authoritarianism, and about how they should react when Trump demands that they admit that they are the losers when things go wrong. This is why Sens. Jeff Flake and Bob Corker focused their criticism on those particular excesses; why other Republicans were reluctant to endorse that criticism; and why Trump easily brushed them off by ridiculing them as losers. This is not to say there are no meaningful policy divisions — if Trump pulls out of NAFTA, there will be a real schism — but rather that they pale in importance to these larger story lines. Trump put it well in this tweet:
Jeff Flake, with an 18% approval rating in Arizona, said “a lot of my colleagues have spoken out.” Really, they just gave me a standing O!
We don’t know if that actually happened, or if it did, why Republicans applauded Trump. But what Trump means by this is that Republicans have no choice but to applaud him even though he damn well will keep doing all the things that Flake and Corker protested, and even though they also find those things distasteful or horrifying. And as it happens, Trump is right.
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