A sad stance to take. Looking at Trump's increased popularity and his success with non-white communities and union members, the transformation of his party into something that is coded as working class... and then branding the majority of voters as "cult members"? Well, that is certainly the kind of MSM take that will continue to push people away from the left. And I'm not a Trump voter either (for the various disqualifying reasons you mention). Do you really feel like you'd be unable to debate populist Batya Ungar-Sargon? Or even Ben Shapiro? I mean, even Trump-loather Sam Harris was able to do that. I know you could too.
Also, sorry, but liberals are just as hard-headed about never admitting their faults. Trotting out the very rare time that Hannah-Jones admitted she is wrong is not a convincing example about how liberals are more open about their mistakes than conservatives. Where are all the apologies for defund the police, for COVID policies, for school closures? Both sides are completely horrible at admitting when they've been wrong. Look at the Democrat nominee herself for fuck's sake.
I get that you are distraught now, but I really expected clearer thinking from you. You lost the vote and so now you're going to take your toys home and never play with those kids again? Come on. I lost too and I'm still not going to dehumanize and generalize about the people who won. These people are my relatives for chrissakes - all working class, and a combination of Filipino, black, white, and Latino. And women, so many women. They are not cult members.
Shapiro showcased his weather vane dishonest in his conversation with Harris. Batya Ungar-Sargon displayed the same in her conversation with Destiny, an exchange I found just as soul-crushing depressing as Destiny did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WJyoOtvOUk
Both Ben and Batya try to pin Clinton and Trump's reactions to losing an election as equivalent. I can certainly debate those people, but we're occupying different slices of reality, and I know they're smart enough to realize it.
I don't deny that liberals are hard-headed about admitting faults or in believing crazy shit! The distinction (very broadly speaking) is in regards to the pervasiveness and indelibility of conspiratorial thinking. Hanania already wrote about this: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/left-wing-ideologies-are-not-conspiracy
I don't believe "working class party" is the proper prism to examine this, those distinctions are meaningless nowadays. And please note that I, unlike plenty of mainstream liberal commentators, have never pinned Trump's appeal on either misogyny or racism. I find that stance to be a cliche and misleading talking point, and I don't share it. My criticism should always be interpreted narrowly and when I don't denigrate cult members without giving an explicit definition of who fits. If someone does not have an article of faith they restructure their world around, then my criticism does not apply to them.
I think Ben and Batya's thoughts and comments are coming from a place of good faith (even when that means that they have reconsidered their past stances on Trump, as with Ben). They are able to express either disagreements with some of Trump's stances (Ben) or a degree of worry that he won't follow through on his commitments (Batya). These are not the traits of cultists.
Re. Destiny: although apparently he is a class-focused progressive like me, I find him to be unbearable to listen to. It's the arrogance (which also makes Shapiro in general unbearable to me as well, except when he debated Sam Harris, where he surprised me). But I will give it a shot - thanks for the link.
I should read that Hanania article. But it has been very hard for me to read anything from him, or to take him at all seriously, after he tweeted that black people require more surveillance from the state. This is either not a serious person, or a racist. Much as I consider Trump's actions with fake electors/Jan. 6 as disqualifying, I consider Hanania's comments about black people to be equally disqualifying. Perhaps this is my error.
I think looking at what makes Republicans the new working class party is the exact prism through which to examine the divide. It is certainly the prism that my working class relatives are looking through! Nor do I think such distinctions are meaningless. The Dems literally appeal to the most to college-educated, non-working class communities - a statistically proven fact. They have become the party of the elites. (The Republicans have likewise become the party of counter-elites like Trump, Musk, Vance - a fact that is continually overlooked by MAGA). The parties have essentially switched bases.
I highly recommend you reading Peter Turchin's End Times for more of an overview on this transformation and how elites control the plutocracy that is the U.S. This election showed the electorate attempting to reject that elite control - whether intentionally or not. Personally, I fear that they are simply replacing one group of elites with another. I guess we'll see if either of our fears are borne out...
I realize I made a mistake of omission and neglected to mention a distinction about roles within cults. There's the true believers, and the enablers (or opportunists). Neither Ben nor Batya are cult members in the sense of being true believers, but they are opportunists who cater (but not exclusively!) to an audience of deluded true believers for clout.
Regarding pundits, the overwhelming distinction I draw nowadays is whether or not they live within reality. Destiny does, so does Hanania, even though they have wildly different opinions on policies and other issues. Bentham's Bulldog wrote about this axis: https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-lives-in-reality-caucus
When I said the working class prism is meaningless, I meant that the old definition of "working class" was already very amorphous to begin with, and plopping it into a new reality doesn't make much sense to me. I can concede it's the best label we currently have, as faulty as it is.
I think you draw the wrong conclusion; the most ardent Trumpists are likely unreachable yes, but there are millions of people on the fringes; people who voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024, people who voted against Kamala only because they're upset about their economic position, people who accept that Biden legitimately won the 2020 election and just think Trump's lies don't matter that much, etc. They're not going to be convinced by a single article, but in general people are quite malleable to "vibes". If someone treats them respectfully, says stuff that seems at least superficially intelligent, seems to align with their other values, etc., this can change their mind.
LOL. I honestly thought your article was referring to the cult of progressives until I got further into it! That’s because the party that just got its ass completely walloped for shoving an unpopular, unimpressive, and unbelievable (in the literal sense of the word) candidate down our throats now refuses to acknowledge the reality that a lot of normal people simply thought Trump and his team would be better for the country than her and hers.
Yes- there are plenty of cultish Trumpists, as we’ve all known for years. But that’s not who won the election for Trump. It was the un-brainwashed, the once Never-Trumpers, and the homeless politicos who determined this year’s outcome. Perhaps that’s not your point, in which case what is your point?
While some on the left now appear open to waking up and considering new approaches to avoid getting slaughtered again, it seems the majority are still rooted in their own cult, blaming everyone and everything else but themselves. Was it that the Dems pushed for terrible ideas like wokeness and open borders for 3.5 years, ignored economic realities, attempted to cover up Biden’s decline, and not run an open primary that caused them to lose? No, of course not. It’s racism, misogyny, and stupid people who believe their own eyes and/or behave like cult members who are at fault. Again. The normies who went for Trump this year probably voted for Biden and/or Obama previously, and if they’re anything like me, wish the Dems didn’t suck so bad at politics and running the country right now so they didn’t have to make that choice.
Not that it matters, but I’m a lifelong liberal (in the actual / classical sense) and while I personally didn’t vote for Trump, it would have been easier for me to do so than to vote for Harris. I say this despite seeing the same things you do re: Trump, and I don’t think my view of reality is too skewed. I know there are many like me out there, and I’m certainly not in a cult. How come everyone continues to ignore and slander this sliver of the country that actually IS open to debating and changing beliefs as new information and ideas emerge?
I agree with a lot of what you say. When I tar anyone with a brush like "cult member", I do so carefully by transparently outlining the specific criteria I'm using. Everyone always has an incentive to herald their pet issue as the one explanation to rule them all in a post-election analysis. I think many explanations are deluded (I can't stop rolling my eyes at the racism and misogyny lines) and for me I just focused on what I found most depressing, which is the increasingly undeniable cohort that is indeed detached from reality and unwilling to ever abandon their articles of faith.
So you’re saying the Dems did NOT push for “woke” ideas or a seemingly open border? Perhaps you can lend me some grace and restate what I was witnessing with my own eyes…maybe you’d like to propose different terms to describe mandating DEI policies, building CRT-type ideas in school curricula, reversing previous immigration measures (eg remain in Mexico), adopting catch and release policies, etc, etc, etc and then Kamala pretending for 4 months that she was no longer in favor of any of that? Please. If anyone’s had their head in the sand and ignoring reality it’s you.
The moment you say "Dems pushed for terrible ideas like wokeness and open borders for 3.5 years" nothing else about your critique matters, because you've shown you're not living in reality.
"The normies…went for Trump"
This is a common argument from people who can't defend Trump's fascist leanings, his criminality, his bizarre lies used to stoke racial hatred and division. It's a form of the ad populum: hey if all these "normies" like him, he must be OK.
He's not OK. He is very literally the worst president our country has ever had, and the last time the "normies" put him in charge he destroyed millions of jobs, killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, and was twice impeached.
Why the "normies" made this disastrous mistake is exactly the question the essay explores.
We don't do it for the fringe, but for the middle that isn't as involved with politics as some are and are interested in hearing and learning from competing ideas. Reason can't win over obsession, but rational, sound arguments can win open minds. It may not be enough to make it worth your while, but don't think it's pointless.
I think part of the mistake is tying up too much of this in the person of the candidate themselves.
The reality is that 30%-40% of voters are NEVER going to vote for a Republican, and approximately the same percentage will NEVER vote for a Democrat. (In the worst trouncing in recent history, Mondale still got 40.6% of the vote).
I think there is a genuine cult of personality around Trump, in a way that Harris and Biden don’t have (but maybe Bill Clinton and definitely Obama did). But for a very large contingent of voters who are basically Republican or at least lean that way given current policy vibes, certainly more than enough to swing the election, the choice is not between Harris and Trump. It’s between “holding my nose and voting Trump” and “loudly proclaiming Trump is great to make the cognitive dissonance go away, because I was never voting Democrat”. I think you should probably consider what’s going on in THAT person’s head before you write it all off as a cult.
As for whether you should keep writing, I would say it’s a mistake to write because you think you are actually influencing elections. Write if you enjoy it, or it gives you purpose, and if you have something unique to say or an unusual perspective to share (I think you usually do!).
Maybe I should have been extra crystal clear that I don't believe every Trump voter is in a cult. That would be a ridiculous thing for me to claim, making an assertion about 74 million or whatever individuals without knowing anything else about them.
I’m disappointed if that’s all you took from my post.
However, since you opened the door… look I don’t expect you to do paragraphs of throat clearing about “not all Trump voters” before making a good point, which you’ll note that I agreed with, that there is a genuine cult of personality around Trump.
But you said only “This post is about Trump and his supporters” with zero additional qualifiers, said that this includes “millions of Americans”, etc. I don’t think I’m being hypersensitive to get the impression you were casting a very wide net with the “cult” label. My apologies if I misread that.
And I maintain the point I made: I think there are a lot of *non culty* voters that went with Trump for other reasons, but would still defend some of the more indefensible Trump stuff if challenged on it because cognitive dissonance sucks and most people get defensive when you attack their “side”. Not every “side” is a cult, and I think these cognitive dissonance avoiders are worth thinking about and engaging in a way that the genuine culters are not.
I agreed with almost everything you said about political tribal affiliations! I agree there's a non-culty knee-jerk reflexiveness going on for sure. I only responded with the part I wanted to add something about, it doesn't mean that I disregarded everything else you wrote.
Re-reading my post I see how I gave off the impression that I was casting too wide a net. I didn't consider how the dots would be connected between "Trump and his supporters” and “millions of Americans”.
The only thing that could possibly serve to break the fever dream of Trump's promises of a new golden age is to allow him to do what he will and see the results.
Unfortunately, the Democrats simply are not offering anything exciting these days. I think the moment that broke Kamala was when she said she "wouldn't change anything" from the Biden admin when asked on the view.
People are increasingly desperate for change because they think "how can it possibly get worse than this?" The answer is obviously, it can and will get worse with shitty leadership. But how can you prove that to people without showing them first hand.
So human brains don't work good, is the TL:DR. However, there are important differences between psychosis, conspirisist ideation, and tribalism. I get that to some extent this is a light riff on various kinds of crazy, but the differences, I think, are important.
I deal with people suffering from psychosis in my professional life too and they exhibit mental processes which are very dreamlike -- paranoia, ideas of reference, disorganized thinking.
Conspiracists are characterized by an overwhelmingly powerful form of confirmation bias. They can convince themselves of anything and confuse convincing themselves with making a rational argument.
What constitutes a cult or cultlike behavior is more disputed, but IMHO, their defining characteristic is that they claim to be the EXCLUSIVE source of epistemic truth. Not merely the most important, the alpha and omega.
A Marine, for example, may undergo brutal training, be expected to provide unquestioning obedience, and be asked to value the organization above the self. But the Marines are not concerned with denying their members relationships with families, or their religious practices, or their larger identification as Americans. So while the Marines are a "high-demand organization" they are not a cult.
Cults are totalitarian belief systems. They invariably end up at odds with science, general education, families and the state because those are all rival sources of epistemic truth.
Trump's followers are a heady mixture of all three pathologies. And beyond that core there is a vast penumbra of causal supporters who like the mood, the vibe of Trumpism, and ignore the concrete stuff. Sometimes I think the deepest problem is how few people can think abstractly to any significant extent.
It's all a mess and a muddle. On one matter I can set the record straight, however: Kool-Aid is the victim of misinformation and never deserved to get dragged into these matters. There was no Kool-Aid at Jonestown; they drank Flavor-Aid.
Also cult-like, and to me what seems the most problematic - the more insane and unhinged it becomes, the more they HAVE to keep going with it, because the alternative is unbearable. The alternative is for them to admit they've been duped.
It's why Trump has makes everyone turn to shit. As soon as you buy in just a little bit, the gravitational pull forces you closer, because to achieve exit velocity, you have to acknowledge that you fell for some bullshit. How FEW former MAGA people do you see or hear from?
"As soon as you buy in just a little bit, the gravitational pull forces you closer, because to achieve exit velocity, you have to acknowledge that you fell for some bullshit."
There are reams of scholarship yet to be written about what we have gained in the way of new evidence of how demagoguery works. I say that in all seriousness.
The dynamic you allude to is one aspect. Then another related aspect is how the demagogue makes personal loyalty to him the supreme virtue, and one of the effects this has on people seeking power is that they compete to humiliate themselves currying favor. This process of competing for power then becomes fuel for the cognitive dissonance that must be overcome to break with the Leader.
There's a fair number of MAGA people that pantomime an exit, but it seems more of a weather vane effect. Glenn Beck famously went on an apology tour in 2016, then took it all back. https://archive.ph/vQKtV
In fairness, the weather vane effect works the other way too. Cohen tried to rebrand himself as part of the Resistance, Joe Walsh had a similar trajectory, and Anthony Scaramucci spent 10 days as Trump's spokesman and turned it into a lucrative podcast career. Scaramucci strikes me as earnest actually, but it's good to keep in mind the financial incentives at play.
I think you fall prey to a bit of the same effect WRT to the Puerto Rico comment. The guy was obviously trying to denigrate Puerto Rico for their relative poverty and the related sanitation and waste disposal issues that they've been experiencing for many years. Here for example is an article from 2022: https://www.ecorichenv.com/article/puerto-rico-landfill-problems. You need only Google it to see that this has been a widely-discussed issue for many years.
It's not clear to me what exactly the "mental gymnastics" are supposed to be by those Trump supporters in the video. Of course it'd be a reasonable criticism to point out that denigrating an entire
island like this is rude, or to suggest that the choice to focus on Puerto Rico rather than somewhere else may have been motivated by some underlying racism, but the Trump supporters in the video who are saying it was about the landfill situation are straightforwardly correct.
The label of "TDS" is of course frequently used to deflect away from legitimate criticisms of Trump, but it does exist, and IMO David Pakman has clearly exhibited it in that video by labeling Trump's rally a "Nazi rally" and pretending that Trump supporters are delusional for acknowledge basic material facts like Puerto Rico's garbage problem. Based on David's language in that video, it seems likely that he's not even *aware* there's been a longstanding waste disposal issue.
I don't think it's obvious that the comedian was trying to denigrate PR for anything in particular. My view is that he took a pretty standard joke but butchered the set up. There's a very cliched joke that uses a reference to floating garbage patches to describe the UK.
Here's an example of it being a common enough joke that it can be referenced with the expectation that someone browsing r/memes will be familiar:
The problem is that the comedian didn't really set up this bait-and-switch at all. Ideally he should have described the "garbage island" more before revealing he meant PR. Of course the Trump supporters in the video are tying themselves into knots. They're being pressed to describe the reasoning behind a badly delivered joke. There's not really a sensible answer besides "that's a dumb question".
I don't think that Isaac King is brainwashed or in a cult. He just made the mistake of engaging in a binary debate rather than questioning the terrain that the debate is grounded on. If you accept the premise that a joke needs to be debated, it'd be reasonable to point to whether there's a lot of trash on the island. The only answer (imo) is just dismissing the joke as having a botched setup. PR wasn't really called a floating island of garbage. A comedian botched a cliched joke.
Yep, because clearly this insult comic not only has a firm understanding of the civil engineering infrastructure in Puerto Rico, he realistic expects his audience of MAGAheads are closely tracking those issues as well.
There is no 'joke' if it's about a landfill. Obviously. I don't care about the offensive joke, but trying to argue in a straightforward way that it was simply a reference to landfill/trash problem is obviously intellectually dishonest.
Kinda proving the thesis here. The joke doesn't work unless it's denigrating PR. I never said jokes aren't usually tethered to some truth, but the joke is OBVIOUSLY that PR is a dump.
The degree to which it's pathetic that people would act like that 'basis' for the joke is about landfills, specifically, as opposed to the joke being about PR being a fucking dump. Saying it's about a waste disposal issue is fucking dumb.
I'll put this way: acting the joke is more about PR's waste disposal problem more than it is about PR being a dump is definitely more good faith than the comic would even expect. I actually think he'd laugh if someone framed it that way. Unless he's intellectually dishonest.
I think I'm arriving at the same point you are, for the same reason: there just seems to be no point in keeping my nervous system on standby for the latest outrage. I also believe there will be a fair amount of schadenfreude after Jan 20th, 2025, when people come to the realization that their vote was miscast and they are worse off than before. Of course, maybe that will never happen, because there will always be a way to blame liberals for anything that happens (even though all 3 branches of government are dominated by the same party)...
"throw your mind back to the Heaven’s Gate group1, where in 1997 all 39 active members were found dead in a large California mansion, dead from voluntarily ingesting phenobarbital"
Untrue. Heaven's Gate left behind an "away team" that remains on Earth to run their PR and online presence. You can e-mail them to this day: https://thenextweb.com/news/the-gate-is-closed
As pointed out previously, educated and formerly sober minded liberals bought and continue to buy wholeheartedly into their own wackadoodle conspiracy theory.
No, not a Trump voter. Not in 2016, not in 2020, not in 2024.
Anyway, yes, there is no reasoning with cognitive dissonance.
Musa al-Gharbi wrote a great post on this topic, "There's No Reason to Be Smug About the Partisan 'Diploma Divide'". The most relevant paragraph is here:
> Yet the cognitive and behavioral science literature suggests that those who are highly educated, intelligent or rhetorically-skilled tend to be significantly less likely than most to revise their beliefs or adjust their positions when confronted with evidence or arguments that contradict their priors. This is because, in virtue of knowing more about the world, or being better at arguing, they are better equipped to punch holes in data or arguments that contradict their priors, or to otherwise make excuses for “sticking to their guns” regardless. And so, they do. (https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/smugness-partisan-diploma-divide)
That article is full of links to the research he's drawing on and I hope to read more of them eventually. Until then, standard caveats apply: there are many degree of freedom involved, some are probably unreplicated experiments, and it's wise to be generally suspicious of social science. But Musa is unusually thoughtful, and has earned my partial & temporary deference.
For most of recorded history moral philosophers have been very down on smugness, so no argument there.
Educated, intelligent people rationalize their views more effectively, although whether they do so more readily would be, I think, a difficult thing to prove.
But the deeper problem is how we maintain a liberal democracy and technological civilization when a critical mass of swing voters do not engage with ideas in any significant way. People who get their political news from cable news shows went for Trump 54-46. People who get their political news from newspapers went for Harris 7030(!)
People who read/watched "a great deal" of political news went for Harris, 53-46. But people who reported consuming NONE AT ALL went for Trump by a crushing 51-32.
Trump's voters are ignorant, which is a problem for democracy, because how do you recalibrate your message or change your policy proposals to appeal to people COMPLETELY TUNING OUT politics and voting on vibes.
A sad stance to take. Looking at Trump's increased popularity and his success with non-white communities and union members, the transformation of his party into something that is coded as working class... and then branding the majority of voters as "cult members"? Well, that is certainly the kind of MSM take that will continue to push people away from the left. And I'm not a Trump voter either (for the various disqualifying reasons you mention). Do you really feel like you'd be unable to debate populist Batya Ungar-Sargon? Or even Ben Shapiro? I mean, even Trump-loather Sam Harris was able to do that. I know you could too.
Also, sorry, but liberals are just as hard-headed about never admitting their faults. Trotting out the very rare time that Hannah-Jones admitted she is wrong is not a convincing example about how liberals are more open about their mistakes than conservatives. Where are all the apologies for defund the police, for COVID policies, for school closures? Both sides are completely horrible at admitting when they've been wrong. Look at the Democrat nominee herself for fuck's sake.
I get that you are distraught now, but I really expected clearer thinking from you. You lost the vote and so now you're going to take your toys home and never play with those kids again? Come on. I lost too and I'm still not going to dehumanize and generalize about the people who won. These people are my relatives for chrissakes - all working class, and a combination of Filipino, black, white, and Latino. And women, so many women. They are not cult members.
This post was really beneath you, Yassine.
I appreciate the pushback.
Shapiro showcased his weather vane dishonest in his conversation with Harris. Batya Ungar-Sargon displayed the same in her conversation with Destiny, an exchange I found just as soul-crushing depressing as Destiny did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WJyoOtvOUk
Both Ben and Batya try to pin Clinton and Trump's reactions to losing an election as equivalent. I can certainly debate those people, but we're occupying different slices of reality, and I know they're smart enough to realize it.
I don't deny that liberals are hard-headed about admitting faults or in believing crazy shit! The distinction (very broadly speaking) is in regards to the pervasiveness and indelibility of conspiratorial thinking. Hanania already wrote about this: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/left-wing-ideologies-are-not-conspiracy
I don't believe "working class party" is the proper prism to examine this, those distinctions are meaningless nowadays. And please note that I, unlike plenty of mainstream liberal commentators, have never pinned Trump's appeal on either misogyny or racism. I find that stance to be a cliche and misleading talking point, and I don't share it. My criticism should always be interpreted narrowly and when I don't denigrate cult members without giving an explicit definition of who fits. If someone does not have an article of faith they restructure their world around, then my criticism does not apply to them.
Thank you for your graceful response.
I think Ben and Batya's thoughts and comments are coming from a place of good faith (even when that means that they have reconsidered their past stances on Trump, as with Ben). They are able to express either disagreements with some of Trump's stances (Ben) or a degree of worry that he won't follow through on his commitments (Batya). These are not the traits of cultists.
Re. Destiny: although apparently he is a class-focused progressive like me, I find him to be unbearable to listen to. It's the arrogance (which also makes Shapiro in general unbearable to me as well, except when he debated Sam Harris, where he surprised me). But I will give it a shot - thanks for the link.
I should read that Hanania article. But it has been very hard for me to read anything from him, or to take him at all seriously, after he tweeted that black people require more surveillance from the state. This is either not a serious person, or a racist. Much as I consider Trump's actions with fake electors/Jan. 6 as disqualifying, I consider Hanania's comments about black people to be equally disqualifying. Perhaps this is my error.
I think looking at what makes Republicans the new working class party is the exact prism through which to examine the divide. It is certainly the prism that my working class relatives are looking through! Nor do I think such distinctions are meaningless. The Dems literally appeal to the most to college-educated, non-working class communities - a statistically proven fact. They have become the party of the elites. (The Republicans have likewise become the party of counter-elites like Trump, Musk, Vance - a fact that is continually overlooked by MAGA). The parties have essentially switched bases.
I highly recommend you reading Peter Turchin's End Times for more of an overview on this transformation and how elites control the plutocracy that is the U.S. This election showed the electorate attempting to reject that elite control - whether intentionally or not. Personally, I fear that they are simply replacing one group of elites with another. I guess we'll see if either of our fears are borne out...
I realize I made a mistake of omission and neglected to mention a distinction about roles within cults. There's the true believers, and the enablers (or opportunists). Neither Ben nor Batya are cult members in the sense of being true believers, but they are opportunists who cater (but not exclusively!) to an audience of deluded true believers for clout.
Regarding pundits, the overwhelming distinction I draw nowadays is whether or not they live within reality. Destiny does, so does Hanania, even though they have wildly different opinions on policies and other issues. Bentham's Bulldog wrote about this axis: https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-lives-in-reality-caucus
When I said the working class prism is meaningless, I meant that the old definition of "working class" was already very amorphous to begin with, and plopping it into a new reality doesn't make much sense to me. I can concede it's the best label we currently have, as faulty as it is.
I think you draw the wrong conclusion; the most ardent Trumpists are likely unreachable yes, but there are millions of people on the fringes; people who voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024, people who voted against Kamala only because they're upset about their economic position, people who accept that Biden legitimately won the 2020 election and just think Trump's lies don't matter that much, etc. They're not going to be convinced by a single article, but in general people are quite malleable to "vibes". If someone treats them respectfully, says stuff that seems at least superficially intelligent, seems to align with their other values, etc., this can change their mind.
This is unquestionably true
It does not provide me much solace
Same
LOL. I honestly thought your article was referring to the cult of progressives until I got further into it! That’s because the party that just got its ass completely walloped for shoving an unpopular, unimpressive, and unbelievable (in the literal sense of the word) candidate down our throats now refuses to acknowledge the reality that a lot of normal people simply thought Trump and his team would be better for the country than her and hers.
Yes- there are plenty of cultish Trumpists, as we’ve all known for years. But that’s not who won the election for Trump. It was the un-brainwashed, the once Never-Trumpers, and the homeless politicos who determined this year’s outcome. Perhaps that’s not your point, in which case what is your point?
While some on the left now appear open to waking up and considering new approaches to avoid getting slaughtered again, it seems the majority are still rooted in their own cult, blaming everyone and everything else but themselves. Was it that the Dems pushed for terrible ideas like wokeness and open borders for 3.5 years, ignored economic realities, attempted to cover up Biden’s decline, and not run an open primary that caused them to lose? No, of course not. It’s racism, misogyny, and stupid people who believe their own eyes and/or behave like cult members who are at fault. Again. The normies who went for Trump this year probably voted for Biden and/or Obama previously, and if they’re anything like me, wish the Dems didn’t suck so bad at politics and running the country right now so they didn’t have to make that choice.
Not that it matters, but I’m a lifelong liberal (in the actual / classical sense) and while I personally didn’t vote for Trump, it would have been easier for me to do so than to vote for Harris. I say this despite seeing the same things you do re: Trump, and I don’t think my view of reality is too skewed. I know there are many like me out there, and I’m certainly not in a cult. How come everyone continues to ignore and slander this sliver of the country that actually IS open to debating and changing beliefs as new information and ideas emerge?
I agree with a lot of what you say. When I tar anyone with a brush like "cult member", I do so carefully by transparently outlining the specific criteria I'm using. Everyone always has an incentive to herald their pet issue as the one explanation to rule them all in a post-election analysis. I think many explanations are deluded (I can't stop rolling my eyes at the racism and misogyny lines) and for me I just focused on what I found most depressing, which is the increasingly undeniable cohort that is indeed detached from reality and unwilling to ever abandon their articles of faith.
So you’re saying the Dems did NOT push for “woke” ideas or a seemingly open border? Perhaps you can lend me some grace and restate what I was witnessing with my own eyes…maybe you’d like to propose different terms to describe mandating DEI policies, building CRT-type ideas in school curricula, reversing previous immigration measures (eg remain in Mexico), adopting catch and release policies, etc, etc, etc and then Kamala pretending for 4 months that she was no longer in favor of any of that? Please. If anyone’s had their head in the sand and ignoring reality it’s you.
The moment you say "Dems pushed for terrible ideas like wokeness and open borders for 3.5 years" nothing else about your critique matters, because you've shown you're not living in reality.
"The normies…went for Trump"
This is a common argument from people who can't defend Trump's fascist leanings, his criminality, his bizarre lies used to stoke racial hatred and division. It's a form of the ad populum: hey if all these "normies" like him, he must be OK.
He's not OK. He is very literally the worst president our country has ever had, and the last time the "normies" put him in charge he destroyed millions of jobs, killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, and was twice impeached.
Why the "normies" made this disastrous mistake is exactly the question the essay explores.
I just realized I had read Taibbi's article (https://substack.com/home/post/p-151456685) a little while before yours, so recency bias could have been at play here.
We don't do it for the fringe, but for the middle that isn't as involved with politics as some are and are interested in hearing and learning from competing ideas. Reason can't win over obsession, but rational, sound arguments can win open minds. It may not be enough to make it worth your while, but don't think it's pointless.
I think part of the mistake is tying up too much of this in the person of the candidate themselves.
The reality is that 30%-40% of voters are NEVER going to vote for a Republican, and approximately the same percentage will NEVER vote for a Democrat. (In the worst trouncing in recent history, Mondale still got 40.6% of the vote).
I think there is a genuine cult of personality around Trump, in a way that Harris and Biden don’t have (but maybe Bill Clinton and definitely Obama did). But for a very large contingent of voters who are basically Republican or at least lean that way given current policy vibes, certainly more than enough to swing the election, the choice is not between Harris and Trump. It’s between “holding my nose and voting Trump” and “loudly proclaiming Trump is great to make the cognitive dissonance go away, because I was never voting Democrat”. I think you should probably consider what’s going on in THAT person’s head before you write it all off as a cult.
As for whether you should keep writing, I would say it’s a mistake to write because you think you are actually influencing elections. Write if you enjoy it, or it gives you purpose, and if you have something unique to say or an unusual perspective to share (I think you usually do!).
Maybe I should have been extra crystal clear that I don't believe every Trump voter is in a cult. That would be a ridiculous thing for me to claim, making an assertion about 74 million or whatever individuals without knowing anything else about them.
I’m disappointed if that’s all you took from my post.
However, since you opened the door… look I don’t expect you to do paragraphs of throat clearing about “not all Trump voters” before making a good point, which you’ll note that I agreed with, that there is a genuine cult of personality around Trump.
But you said only “This post is about Trump and his supporters” with zero additional qualifiers, said that this includes “millions of Americans”, etc. I don’t think I’m being hypersensitive to get the impression you were casting a very wide net with the “cult” label. My apologies if I misread that.
And I maintain the point I made: I think there are a lot of *non culty* voters that went with Trump for other reasons, but would still defend some of the more indefensible Trump stuff if challenged on it because cognitive dissonance sucks and most people get defensive when you attack their “side”. Not every “side” is a cult, and I think these cognitive dissonance avoiders are worth thinking about and engaging in a way that the genuine culters are not.
I agreed with almost everything you said about political tribal affiliations! I agree there's a non-culty knee-jerk reflexiveness going on for sure. I only responded with the part I wanted to add something about, it doesn't mean that I disregarded everything else you wrote.
Re-reading my post I see how I gave off the impression that I was casting too wide a net. I didn't consider how the dots would be connected between "Trump and his supporters” and “millions of Americans”.
In that case thank you for the thoughtful response and I’ll say there are clearly at least several people that find your writing very valuable!
The only thing that could possibly serve to break the fever dream of Trump's promises of a new golden age is to allow him to do what he will and see the results.
Unfortunately, the Democrats simply are not offering anything exciting these days. I think the moment that broke Kamala was when she said she "wouldn't change anything" from the Biden admin when asked on the view.
People are increasingly desperate for change because they think "how can it possibly get worse than this?" The answer is obviously, it can and will get worse with shitty leadership. But how can you prove that to people without showing them first hand.
So human brains don't work good, is the TL:DR. However, there are important differences between psychosis, conspirisist ideation, and tribalism. I get that to some extent this is a light riff on various kinds of crazy, but the differences, I think, are important.
I deal with people suffering from psychosis in my professional life too and they exhibit mental processes which are very dreamlike -- paranoia, ideas of reference, disorganized thinking.
Conspiracists are characterized by an overwhelmingly powerful form of confirmation bias. They can convince themselves of anything and confuse convincing themselves with making a rational argument.
What constitutes a cult or cultlike behavior is more disputed, but IMHO, their defining characteristic is that they claim to be the EXCLUSIVE source of epistemic truth. Not merely the most important, the alpha and omega.
A Marine, for example, may undergo brutal training, be expected to provide unquestioning obedience, and be asked to value the organization above the self. But the Marines are not concerned with denying their members relationships with families, or their religious practices, or their larger identification as Americans. So while the Marines are a "high-demand organization" they are not a cult.
Cults are totalitarian belief systems. They invariably end up at odds with science, general education, families and the state because those are all rival sources of epistemic truth.
Trump's followers are a heady mixture of all three pathologies. And beyond that core there is a vast penumbra of causal supporters who like the mood, the vibe of Trumpism, and ignore the concrete stuff. Sometimes I think the deepest problem is how few people can think abstractly to any significant extent.
It's all a mess and a muddle. On one matter I can set the record straight, however: Kool-Aid is the victim of misinformation and never deserved to get dragged into these matters. There was no Kool-Aid at Jonestown; they drank Flavor-Aid.
A+ comment. You've done a better job of describing many things I was grasping at.
Also cult-like, and to me what seems the most problematic - the more insane and unhinged it becomes, the more they HAVE to keep going with it, because the alternative is unbearable. The alternative is for them to admit they've been duped.
It's why Trump has makes everyone turn to shit. As soon as you buy in just a little bit, the gravitational pull forces you closer, because to achieve exit velocity, you have to acknowledge that you fell for some bullshit. How FEW former MAGA people do you see or hear from?
"As soon as you buy in just a little bit, the gravitational pull forces you closer, because to achieve exit velocity, you have to acknowledge that you fell for some bullshit."
There are reams of scholarship yet to be written about what we have gained in the way of new evidence of how demagoguery works. I say that in all seriousness.
The dynamic you allude to is one aspect. Then another related aspect is how the demagogue makes personal loyalty to him the supreme virtue, and one of the effects this has on people seeking power is that they compete to humiliate themselves currying favor. This process of competing for power then becomes fuel for the cognitive dissonance that must be overcome to break with the Leader.
Dark arts and dark days.
There's a fair number of MAGA people that pantomime an exit, but it seems more of a weather vane effect. Glenn Beck famously went on an apology tour in 2016, then took it all back. https://archive.ph/vQKtV
In fairness, the weather vane effect works the other way too. Cohen tried to rebrand himself as part of the Resistance, Joe Walsh had a similar trajectory, and Anthony Scaramucci spent 10 days as Trump's spokesman and turned it into a lucrative podcast career. Scaramucci strikes me as earnest actually, but it's good to keep in mind the financial incentives at play.
You're my favorite writer on substack, I should probably give you money.
Do/don't https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/dodont-give-me-money
I think you fall prey to a bit of the same effect WRT to the Puerto Rico comment. The guy was obviously trying to denigrate Puerto Rico for their relative poverty and the related sanitation and waste disposal issues that they've been experiencing for many years. Here for example is an article from 2022: https://www.ecorichenv.com/article/puerto-rico-landfill-problems. You need only Google it to see that this has been a widely-discussed issue for many years.
It's not clear to me what exactly the "mental gymnastics" are supposed to be by those Trump supporters in the video. Of course it'd be a reasonable criticism to point out that denigrating an entire
island like this is rude, or to suggest that the choice to focus on Puerto Rico rather than somewhere else may have been motivated by some underlying racism, but the Trump supporters in the video who are saying it was about the landfill situation are straightforwardly correct.
The label of "TDS" is of course frequently used to deflect away from legitimate criticisms of Trump, but it does exist, and IMO David Pakman has clearly exhibited it in that video by labeling Trump's rally a "Nazi rally" and pretending that Trump supporters are delusional for acknowledge basic material facts like Puerto Rico's garbage problem. Based on David's language in that video, it seems likely that he's not even *aware* there's been a longstanding waste disposal issue.
I don't think it's obvious that the comedian was trying to denigrate PR for anything in particular. My view is that he took a pretty standard joke but butchered the set up. There's a very cliched joke that uses a reference to floating garbage patches to describe the UK.
Here's an example of it being a common enough joke that it can be referenced with the expectation that someone browsing r/memes will be familiar:
https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/ob1mr0/largest_island_of_trash_in_the_ocean/
Here's an example of a redditor making the joke straight by saying a song about the Great Pacific Garbage patch is about the UK:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gojira/comments/zl7phy/united_kingdom_reference/
The problem is that the comedian didn't really set up this bait-and-switch at all. Ideally he should have described the "garbage island" more before revealing he meant PR. Of course the Trump supporters in the video are tying themselves into knots. They're being pressed to describe the reasoning behind a badly delivered joke. There's not really a sensible answer besides "that's a dumb question".
There should be an internet law where a comment on a post confirms the thesis of the post.
I don't think that Isaac King is brainwashed or in a cult. He just made the mistake of engaging in a binary debate rather than questioning the terrain that the debate is grounded on. If you accept the premise that a joke needs to be debated, it'd be reasonable to point to whether there's a lot of trash on the island. The only answer (imo) is just dismissing the joke as having a botched setup. PR wasn't really called a floating island of garbage. A comedian botched a cliched joke.
Yeah, I don't think that interview video is a smoking gun for cult-like behavior in Trump supporters.
It's not be the best example at all, and don't care about the example, but I find the over-arching point indisputable.
Yep, because clearly this insult comic not only has a firm understanding of the civil engineering infrastructure in Puerto Rico, he realistic expects his audience of MAGAheads are closely tracking those issues as well.
Sure, Jan.
There is no 'joke' if it's about a landfill. Obviously. I don't care about the offensive joke, but trying to argue in a straightforward way that it was simply a reference to landfill/trash problem is obviously intellectually dishonest.
Jokes are frequently references to real things that exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke
Kinda proving the thesis here. The joke doesn't work unless it's denigrating PR. I never said jokes aren't usually tethered to some truth, but the joke is OBVIOUSLY that PR is a dump.
Not defending Pakman at all, but give me a break.
Thanks for the wiki link, though. Super helpful.
What do we disagree about then?
The degree to which it's pathetic that people would act like that 'basis' for the joke is about landfills, specifically, as opposed to the joke being about PR being a fucking dump. Saying it's about a waste disposal issue is fucking dumb.
I'm confused by what claim you're making here. Is he making fun of them for having bad waste disposal, or not?
I'll put this way: acting the joke is more about PR's waste disposal problem more than it is about PR being a dump is definitely more good faith than the comic would even expect. I actually think he'd laugh if someone framed it that way. Unless he's intellectually dishonest.
"Unless he's intellectually dishonest."
A speaker at a Trump rally, that sacred American institution of rigorous and objective truth-telling?
Surely not.
I think I'm arriving at the same point you are, for the same reason: there just seems to be no point in keeping my nervous system on standby for the latest outrage. I also believe there will be a fair amount of schadenfreude after Jan 20th, 2025, when people come to the realization that their vote was miscast and they are worse off than before. Of course, maybe that will never happen, because there will always be a way to blame liberals for anything that happens (even though all 3 branches of government are dominated by the same party)...
Want to be depressed? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iQ6NTBF8b0
"throw your mind back to the Heaven’s Gate group1, where in 1997 all 39 active members were found dead in a large California mansion, dead from voluntarily ingesting phenobarbital"
Untrue. Heaven's Gate left behind an "away team" that remains on Earth to run their PR and online presence. You can e-mail them to this day: https://thenextweb.com/news/the-gate-is-closed
As pointed out previously, educated and formerly sober minded liberals bought and continue to buy wholeheartedly into their own wackadoodle conspiracy theory.
No, not a Trump voter. Not in 2016, not in 2020, not in 2024.
Anyway, yes, there is no reasoning with cognitive dissonance.
My criticism applies to liberal cult members too; anyone who holds onto an article of faith and restructures their worldview around maintaining it.
Contrary to popular belief, the educated and intelligent are in fact more prone to cognitive dissonance than are the dull and unsophisticated.
This is because the educated are better at symbol manipulation to reach a preordained outcome.
I don't know enough about relative susceptibility but there's definitely a problem there: https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/why-smart-people-hold-stupid-beliefs
Musa al-Gharbi wrote a great post on this topic, "There's No Reason to Be Smug About the Partisan 'Diploma Divide'". The most relevant paragraph is here:
> Yet the cognitive and behavioral science literature suggests that those who are highly educated, intelligent or rhetorically-skilled tend to be significantly less likely than most to revise their beliefs or adjust their positions when confronted with evidence or arguments that contradict their priors. This is because, in virtue of knowing more about the world, or being better at arguing, they are better equipped to punch holes in data or arguments that contradict their priors, or to otherwise make excuses for “sticking to their guns” regardless. And so, they do. (https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/smugness-partisan-diploma-divide)
That article is full of links to the research he's drawing on and I hope to read more of them eventually. Until then, standard caveats apply: there are many degree of freedom involved, some are probably unreplicated experiments, and it's wise to be generally suspicious of social science. But Musa is unusually thoughtful, and has earned my partial & temporary deference.
For most of recorded history moral philosophers have been very down on smugness, so no argument there.
Educated, intelligent people rationalize their views more effectively, although whether they do so more readily would be, I think, a difficult thing to prove.
But the deeper problem is how we maintain a liberal democracy and technological civilization when a critical mass of swing voters do not engage with ideas in any significant way. People who get their political news from cable news shows went for Trump 54-46. People who get their political news from newspapers went for Harris 7030(!)
People who read/watched "a great deal" of political news went for Harris, 53-46. But people who reported consuming NONE AT ALL went for Trump by a crushing 51-32.
Trump's voters are ignorant, which is a problem for democracy, because how do you recalibrate your message or change your policy proposals to appeal to people COMPLETELY TUNING OUT politics and voting on vibes.
Where are my manners? Source: https://www.dataforprogress.org/insights/2024/11/14/what-political-news-engagement-tells-us-about-donald-trumps-victory