Today we have yet another GREAT piece by Rick Perlstein about our weird political culture. He takes a look at America’s current obsession with “cult-culture” as a way people are trying to explain our politics to themselves. Boy, do I relate to that. I’ve been reading books and studies and psychology papers as well as watching the movies and series Perlstein outlines in his piece. (He notes a few that I haven’t seen which I excitedly made note of for weekend binging.) I have been obsessed with this subject for the past few years for obvious reasons.
Here’s an excerpt but do read the whole thing if you’re as concerned about this phenomenon as I am:
THE ASSOCIATION OF TODAY’S REPUBLICAN PARTY and its luminous god-king Donald J. Trump with cults began almost as soon as his first presidential campaign did. But what would a docuseries about MAGA-as-cult—the one Netflix, Hulu, Max, or CNN would never produce, because that would make them unduly “partisan”—look like?
It could start with the truism that cult formation, as my binge-watch last week makes clear, works best among a population already primed for it: prosperity gospel evangelicals, psychedelic searchers, woo enthusiasts.
Or the modern Republican Party, since its capture by the conservative movement.
Amanda Montell, author of the bestseller Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, has a fun podcast called Sounds like a Cult, each weekly episode devoted to a phenomenon along a spectrum from obviously sickeningly and terrifying (the sex-slaver Keith Raniere; two documentary series about him, Max’s The Vow and Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult on Starz, both from 2020) to, well … really? (Though the episode on pickleball is surprisingly convincing.)
The episode on conservative youth activism is somewhere in between. It’s centered on an interview with an apostate, journalist Tiffany Nguyen, who got me thinking about one of those things us adolescents learned in our cult awareness trainings in the 1980s: Be wary of innocent-seeming, attractive-sounding inducements. Like a free vegetarian meal, which was how the Hare Krishnas got you, or a psychological reading, in the case of Scientology. Or a free journalism training summer camp. That is how aspiring scribes like Nguyen got hooked.
The name of the sponsor, the “Leadership Institute,” sounded no alarm bells; they’re usually bland. They advertised their value neutrally as well, noting their alumni who’d gone on to big print gigs (Malcolm Gladwell!) or the network news. The inducements into a world of us-vs.-them thinking come slowly, embedded in useful tips like what a lede is and how to do an interview. Dropping claims that only the right values free speech, and the left subverts it, might serve as a red flag, if you’re sophisticated—which is why, like so many cultish formations, the right prefers to scoop them up when they’re too young to know better.
In another cultish hallmark, novitiates move up a ladder of engagement, each new step a marker of trust that allows them to glimpse the entirety of the project. For Nguyen, that meant being placed with a mentor—who happened to be a white nationalist. Then, by the time they’re placed with a conservative organization, they’ll have accepted certain principles on faith: that they’re not merely reporting on the world but fighting evil, so the ends justify the means. They’ll be armed with an arsenal of what the pioneering scholar of coercive thought Robert Jay Lifton calls “thought-terminating clichés”—like, when in doubt, to ask a Democratic official what they think the definition of “woman” is.
Perlstein shows that the cultishness existed long before Donald Trump came along, which is super important. As with everything else in his life, he exploited something that was built by others, he didn'[t create it himself. It finally found its full potential when he showed up.
THE QUALITATIVE SHIFT THAT SIGNIFIES the post–Tea Party Republican Party as having finally passed into the realm of what I call fascism was the arrival of that missing piece, a leader taken as worthy of being worshipped, as if a prophet or saint or even God in the flesh. His “followers” experience him as a charismatic presence with mystical powers far beyond those of a normal being. Not merely someone who administers a government; someone who smites demons instead, cheating death through the grace of the Almighty.
The very stable genius said this just yesterday:
As Perlstein points out, these cult leaders always take their followers’ money, isolate them from their families, and their sexual exploitation and violence is always ignored or forgiven by the faithful flock. Sound familiar? It sure does to me.
Is this too much, roping together January 6th and the mass suicide at Jonestown? Well, one of the attractive things about Amanda Montell’s book and podcast is that she understands the word “cult” as a heuristic, that cultishness is a continuum, and always context-dependent. In the case of MAGA, Tina Nguyen and Montell point to its “very specific plan to effectuate a vision that makes no sense to outsiders.” Cults have a built-in sunk cost dynamic: They depend upon ingraining people so deep within them that they feel like nothing without the cult.
This is what I worry about. If Trump finally shuffles off to Mar-a-lago, what happens to the cult? Does it continue under other leaders? Sometimes they do.
Just read the whole thing. It’s important to know what we’re really dealing with here. It’s not politics, at least as we have understood them in the past. It’s got all the hallmarks of one of the all-American cults but it’s fascist at its core. And as Perlstein notes, all of that has been inexplicably normalized and those of us who are watching this with increasing horror are left sounding like the crazy people for pointing out.
