Why do we use 'cult' to describe normal illiberal politics?
Hillary Clinton said during a recent presentation that Donald Trump’s followers won’t abandon him no matter how many criminal indictments are brought against him. The former Democratic presidential candidate added, “that it’s more of a cult than a political party at this point and they’re going to stick with their leader.”
With that, “cult” became the appellation of the week in the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, because anything Clinton says about Trump and his followers is a cut so deep that it demands a week’s worth of outrage.
Complicating matters was Sarah Palin. In response to Clinton, Alaska’s former governor said, “The definition of a cult is a group of people who are excessively supporting one another and a cause, all about conformity and compliance, and intolerance of anyone who doesn’t agree with what their mission is.”
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She went on to say that she was describing “the left,” a remark that itself generated its own thread of debate. But many on “the left” took her definition of “cult” as an inadvertent admission. They said Palin, because she understands the company she keeps, was dodging the truth with a bit of whataboutism.
I don’t know why we have to use words like “cult” or “cult-like” to describe normal illiberal behavior. Why must we reach for something extraordinary to understand something rather ordinary, which is the tendency in rightwing politics to sort the world between us and them – between friend and enemy?
I don’t know why Hillary Clinton, of all people, would think it’s accurate and truthful to describe the Republicans as “more of a cult than a political party.” She has been “the enemy” for so long that she’s less a person than a fetish – a representation of a representation. No one in America knows better than she does that what’s happening is a consequence of routine authoritarianism.
My fear is that she used “cult,” because she still can’t quite bring herself to accept a reality in which the Republicans are reverting to their natural, primordial state. My fear is that even Hillary Clinton, who knows better, still can’t accept that the Republicans are amassing toward a restoration of their true selves, toward becoming a party akin to the Chinese Communist Party.
Chinese “President” Xi Jinping is the leader of the CCP. He is, officially speaking, infallible. Obedience to the party line is enforceable by death. Dissent from the party line is continually crushed. There is, generally, “intolerance of anyone who doesn’t agree with what their mission is.”
Xi is, in many ways, like Trump. But are we going to assign “cult leader” to him? Are we going to assign “cult follower” to hundreds of millions of supporters?
Let’s instead recognize routine authoritarianism for what it is.
And what it is not.
Cults are many things, many of them terrible, but they are not what Donald Trump’s campaign has become – a vengeance movement. He has centered the indictments, according to the Post, and is now “determinedly delegitimizing the legal system, as he has … with public health measures, the intelligence community, elections and other people or agencies he views as opposing him.”
Cults do not center revenge, because they are by their nature utopian. In essence, they seek transformational change that’s personal. Their followers are idealists, true believers, and anarchists in the purest sense of the term. That’s why, in the words of sociologist and cult expert Janja Lalich, cults demand such “a high level of personal commitment from its members in words and deeds.”
Trump is many things, most of them terrible, and many of them indeed similar to what a true cult leader would exhibit, but he is not asking his loyal followers for “a high level of personal commitment,” because there’s nothing about his vengeance movement that “includes a call for a personal transformation.” A cult, however bad it may be, offers a vision of utopia. Trump calls only for defeating the enemy, for victory in war and for rejoicing in the spoils of war.
Clinton said the Republicans, under Trump, have become “more of a cult than a political party at this point and they’re going to stick with their leader.” But she could more accurately have said the same thing about George W. Bush.
A charismatic leader in his own right, the former president was, and was surrounded by, true believers with “a high level of personal commitment” to transforming the world according to a cult-like vision of democratic utopia. It was a Middle East crusade prosecuted in the name of their god, America.
They killed thousands of Americans. They killed millions of Iraqis and Afghans. They destroyed a civilization to wrest a romance out of the ashes. They maimed our reputation abroad. And they set in motion the restoration of their political party toward something akin to their ideological enemies in China.
Only, instead of being voted out, as Donald Trump was, George W. Bush was voted back in. And he was given a second term, in 2004, by more than his own people. No one called him a cult leader, though. They called him the president.
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Pedro Pascal walks the picket line at the SAG-AFTRA strike on Sept. 26, 2023 ,at Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank, Calif. (Photo by Hollywood To You/Star Max/GC Images)