The Trump Cult?

Is the movement that elected Donald Trump President of the United States a cult?

Big Lies that turn perceptual frames or paradigms on their heads” and pull “false lesser-associated non-‘facts’ . . . in train behind the flipped central premise . . . is the very economical technique used by cults both religious and political.”

.. Boot accurately observed that:

Trump’s most ardent supporters are . . . remolding their own views to keep pace with their leader. . . . This shows the extent to which Trump’s rise was not based on any particular positions or views. It was and remains a cult of personality. Trump’s followers worship him—and he worships himself, too. They are bound by a conviction, rooted in basically nothing but quasi-religious faith, that he is a singularly tough and savvy dealmaker who will protect American interests in a way that no previous president has done.

.. the idea of a cult of personality, if not the actual phrase, applies to a great many pre-modern political leaders as well, perhaps most of them. The key point of Weber’s distinction was to indicate that in more institutionalized modern political settings some combination of law, custom, and more or less egalitarian norms tends to diminish or at least limit the personalization of political orders.

When cults of personality happen anyway in post-patrimonial political cultures it indicates some invasion of culturally sacred space by what is supposed to be cordoned off from it in a secular age.

Why does this happen? Lilla and others have suggested that political cults tend to fill religious vacuums; that is, they tend to arise when people lose faith in the efficacy of the religious status quo to manage their problems. In other words, in times of confusion and fear, people will vouchsafe unto symbols of the nation, the state, the race, the leader, and so on what they used to reserve for God and related religious symbols.

.. the burgeoning of political religion usually indicates an urge to regress from a contemporary mean—to go back to a purer, simpler, nobler, or somehow better life. In the 20^th century the urge to regression invariably involved a demeaning of modernity, which first established the secular divide. Both fascist and communist varieties of political religion sought to: efface individual agency and smother it in the superior collective, hence the disdain for the cacophonous messiness of democracy

.. two phrases from Virgil: Novus Ordo Seclorum and Annuit Coeptis. For the Founders to have called the United States a “new order of the ages” and to have claimed that “He has approved our undertakings” calls to mind the language of Roman (Republic-era) prophecy and suggests that, like the coming of Christ, the birth of the United States will in due course redeem mankind. The God referred to is only tacitly and hence vaguely the God of the Bible, but He is certainly the God of America.

.. First, there is sharp differentiation between the in-group of believers or adepts and outsiders, who are demonized as enemies. So loyalty is a first-order virtue, and ritualized loyalty oaths often exist in one form or another.

Second, there is a charismatic leader.

.. Second, there is a strong repugnance for theologies or ideologies that are different, and a special absolute rejection of theologies or ideologies that are close but not identical. Deviations from the belief system are rarely accepted as genuine or honest doubt, but are treated either as heresy or alien-group infiltration.

Third, the belief system is utopian.

Fourth, in-group members aver that the group’s beliefs are obvious or natural, and that anyone who rejects them is “blind” or somehow diseased. Conspiracy theories that tend to unify all opposition to the group are common.

Fifth, members proselytize upon opportunity.

Sixth, members believe that any means is justified by the end—including deception, outright lying, theft, physical intimidation, and often violence.

And seventh, in-group members believe in the inevitable triumph of the belief system; they are incurable optimists.

.. but Trump is in most respects several country miles to the left of Tea Party orthodoxy (and of today’s so-called Freedom Caucus).

.. Karl Kraus summed up the process best: “The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he is.” I do not think Trump is manipulating a movement; he is as encyclopedically ignorant as he seems.

.. most self-avowed Christian religious fervor one sees today in the United States, especially of the Protestant sort, is not born of traditional, innocent faith. Much of what professed fervor there is, it seems to me, reflects a deep desire for community and identity in an alienating hyper-commercial culture that is best at manufacturing material fetishism and emotional insecurity. A good deal of it, in reaction, is intellectualized (neo-fundamentalist) religion that often seems to lack the power of the real thing in a pinch.⁴ And that small but influential shard of it known as the evangelical movement is itself already highly politicized, so can be seen as an element breaking down the divide of secular arrangements moving from the religious side toward the political. This seems the most persuasive way to explain evangelical support for Trump—as a form of political transactualism—a man who in no way resembles the model of a pious Christian.

.. I don’t know, and at this early point no one can know, not least because this President is neither a predictable nor stable character.

.. We do not know how this President will react to political crises born of seemingly baked-in scandals

.. But whatever happens, we would be well advised to watch not just the man but also the movement. To the extent it is more cult-like than its recent predecessors, the “excitement” may be just ahead of us as the movement circles the wagons.