Tag Archives: cult

The Emerging Battles

Important notice: Due to the cold, the rally today has been moved to Broadway United Methodist Church, 609 E 29th St, Indianapolis. Indoors.

Today, to our great national shame, America will inaugurate our first felon President.

The fact that he’s a felon isn’t even the worst part of this disaster. Trump lacks a single redeeming characteristic–he’s ignorant, intellectually stunted, deeply disturbed and descending visibly into senility. That a (bare) majority of voters chose to place this specimen in the Oval Office may be the all-time saddest commentary on America’s current descent into White Christian Nationalism.

So what can we expect from the collection of grifters, racists and sycophants who will fill the upcoming administration?

I know my posts lately are rarely optimistic, but I think there may be cause–not for optimism, exactly, but reasons to moderate our pessimism. Because MAGA is more likely than not to eat its own. It isn’t just the nutcases in the House of Representatives, who will make it difficult for the GOP’s very thin majority (a majority that owes its status to gerrymandering, not voter sentiment) to pass anything. It’s the fault-lines between Trump’s White Nationalist MAGA base and the uber-wealthy grifters who see him as a tool to evade pesky regulations and fair taxes.

That fight has already started. As Jonathan Last reported in the Daily Beast, Steve Bannon has unleashed on Elon Musk:

“I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day,” Bannon told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera this week. “He will not have a blue pass to the White House, he will not have full access to the White House, he will be like any other person.”

“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” Bannon added.

Bannon focused on the recent fight over H-1B visas, and an immigration system he claimed is “gamed by the tech overlords.”  He claimed that 76 percent of engineers working in Silicon Valley are non-Americans.

Bannon went on to accuse Musk of being self-serving, insisting that his “sole objective is to become a trillionaire.”

“He will do anything to make sure that any one of his companies is protected or has a better deal or he makes more money. His aggregation of wealth, and then—through wealth—power: that’s what he’s focused on,” Bannon said.
Bannon went on to describe Musk’s preferred objective as “techno-feudalism.”

Bannon is not the only MAGA person issuing broadsides against the tech bros:

This isn’t a one-off. Bannon has hated Musk for a long time. And the fight between OG MAGA and Elon MAGA started with Laura Loomer, who launched her own jihad against Musk over the holidays. You can listen to Loomer here but if you don’t want to click, after calling Musk a “welfare queen,” she went on to indict the entire MAGA oligarch class:

“If you have a bunch of tech bros with billions of dollars and direct unfettered access to the vice president and the president of the United States, and then they are also very cordial with our adversaries as in China and Iran—we see that Elon Musk is having these meetings off the books with Iranian officials, with Chinese officials—what does that mean for us?”

If the split among Trumpers was limited to the anger over H-1B visas, that would be one thing, but it isn’t. It’s relatively easy for a party to seem united when it’s in opposition, but once in power, conflicting interests collide and political realities exert pressure, and Trump supporters have distinctly conflicting interests.

Here’s my almost-rosy analysis.

Today’s Republican Party is a White Nationalist cult. What keeps them (barely) cohesive is the cult leader. Donald Trump is the Jim Jones of today’s GOP. Unlike most cult leaders, who rule with iron hands, his obvious disinterest in actual governing means he is less able to exert dominance over factions quarrelling over policy.

The greater danger to Republican power is that Trump is old, unhealthy and in obvious mental and physical decline. His belligerence has masked the extent of that decline, but it is statistically unlikely that he will live to “serve” a full four-year term–and when he’s gone (either drooling in a senility too obvious for even MAGA to ignore, or dead), the MAGA cult will implode.

If JD Vance becomes President, sharp knives will come out; even most Republicans detest him. More to the point, Trump is already demonstrating that he’s unable to exercise total control, and there is no new Jim Jones in the wings.

Until then, sane Americans need to do whatever we can to obstruct and delay MAGA’s efforts to undermine ethics, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

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Will Endorsements Matter?

In traditional election cycles, endorsements–generally issued by newspapers–rarely moved votes. The endorsements this year are very different, but whether they will change any votes is unclear. Trump’s MAGA base is firmly insulated from reality–they seem to occupy a different country, where up is down and wet is dry. It isn’t just accusations about immigrants eating dogs and cats–they believe Trump’s claims that crime is up and the economy is tanking, despite the fact that data shows crime plummeting and the American economy flourishing. They might just as well be on another planet.

Because Trump voters occupy an alternate reality, the avalanche of endorsements of Harris/Walz probably won’t pry MAGA votes away. But we can hope that the unprecedented nature of those endorsements will generate registrations and turnout by rational folks who might not otherwise go to the polls. (That certainly is the hoped-for result of celebrity endorsements from super-stars like Taylor Swift.)

What has set this year’s endorsements apart isn’t just the unprecedented number of them, but the political identities and bona fides of the endorsers. (Example: Evangelicals for Harris–really!) Recently, four hundred economists endorsed Harris, warning that the election “is a choice between inequity, economic injustice, and uncertainty with Donald Trump or prosperity, opportunity, and stability with Kamala Harris, a choice between the past and the future.” The other day, seven hundred national security figures announced their endorsement of the Democratic ticket. They were later joined by General Stanley McChrystal.

The sheer number of Republican endorsers–not just the “Never Trumpers”– is staggering.

It isn’t simply high visibility people like Liz and Dick Cheney. Every day we encounter headlines like “State Republican party chairs endorse Kamala Harris for president.” In addition to the Republicans who spoke at the Democratic convention, a group of more than 200 who worked for former Presidents George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Sen. Mitt Romney and the late Sen. John McCain signed onto a letter supporting the Democratic nominee.

A recently launched “Republicans for Harris” is steadily growing.

Perhaps the most striking of all was a New York Times recent compilation of opinions of Donald J. Trump from “those who know him best”–members of Trump’s own administration, and “friends” who’ve known him for many years. As the introduction to those quotations put it,

Dozens of people who know him well, including the 91 listed here, have raised alarms about his character and fitness for office — his family and friends, world leaders and business associates, his fellow conservatives and his political appointees — even though they had nothing to gain from doing so. Some have even spoken out at the expense of their own careers or political interests.

The New York Times editorial board has made its case that Mr. Trump is unfit to lead. But the strongest case against him may come from his own people. For those Americans who are still tempted to return him to the presidency or to not vote in November, it is worth considering the assessment of Mr. Trump by those who have seen him up close.

Those opinions followed, and they are scathing. I encourage you to click through and read them.

The sheer number of economic, military and governmental experts–both Republicans and Democrats–who are warning against another Trump administration ought to be dispositive, but it clearly isn’t making inroads into MAGA fidelity, and I think there are two main reasons.

The first–and most frequently noted–is the similarity of MAGA Republicanism to a cult. In large part, MAGA folks have drunk the Kool-Aid. For whatever reason, some people are susceptible to the Jim Jones and Donald Trumps of the world, and fact-based arguments are irrelevant to them. Their devotion to the cult leader fills some sort of psychic need that the rest of us don’t share and can’t understand.

The second reason is less well understood, but I think it’s important.

Much has been made of the growing division between educated and uneducated voters. Education is absolutely not the same thing as intelligence, but folks who never learned how government works, or what the Constitution requires, are much more likely to believe, for example, that the government can simply round up and deport millions of immigrants (not to mention failing to understand the effect that would have on America’s economy if it were possible). They believe Trump when he says other countries will pay for his proposed tariffs–despite the fact that anyone who took Econ 101 knows tariffs are a tax on Americans. Etc.

The first group will simply ignore facts. The second rejects expertise as offensive elitism.

The reality-based community needs to turn out in force.

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Loyalty Signaling

I’ve posted before about “virtue signaling”-a way of publicly expressing a moral viewpoint with the intent of communicating one’s connection to people of similar, virtuous sentiments. (When I first purchased a Prius, a colleague asked if the purchase was prompted by a desire to “signal” my concerns for the environment to those who would be sympathetic. I guiltily wondered if he was on to something..)

However, I had never heard of “loyalty signaling” until I read a recent column by Paul Krugman.Krugman was  referencing scholarship on the development of cults, and he was particularly impressed by a paper by a New Zealand-based researcher, Xavier Márquez.

“The Mechanisms of Cult Production” compares the behavior of political elites across a wide range of dictatorial regimes, from Caligula’s Rome to the Kim family’s North Korea, and finds striking similarities. Despite vast differences in culture and material circumstances, elites in all such regimes engage in pretty much the same behavior, especially what the paper dubs “loyalty signaling” and “flattery inflation.”

Krugman defines signaling as a concept originally drawn from economics; it describes costly, often pointless behaviors engaged in by people trying  to demonstrate that they have attributes that others value.

In the context of dictatorial regimes, signaling typically involves making absurd claims on behalf of the Leader and his agenda, often including “nauseating displays of loyalty.” If the claims are obvious nonsense and destructive in their effects, if making those claims humiliates the person who makes them, these are features, not bugs. I mean, how does the Leader know if you’re truly loyal unless you’re willing to demonstrate your loyalty by inflicting harm both on others and on your own reputation?

And once this kind of signaling becomes the norm, those trying to prove their loyalty have to go to ever greater extremes to differentiate themselves from the pack. Hence “flattery inflation”: The Leader isn’t just brave and wise, he’s a perfect physical specimen, a brilliant health expert, a Nobel-level economic analyst, and more. The fact that he’s obviously none of these things only enhances the effectiveness of the flattery as a demonstration of loyalty.

Does all of this sound familiar? Of course it does, at least to anyone who has been tracking Fox News or the utterances of political figures like Lindsey Graham or Kevin McCarthy.

Krugman repeats his often-communicated belief that the G.O.P. is no longer a normal political party. (As he says, it sure doesn’t look anything like the party of Dwight Eisenhower). But as he and a number of other observers have pointed out, it does bear a distinct and growing resemblance to the ruling parties of autocratic regimes.

In the U.S., of course, the Trump Party doesn’t (yet) exercise complete control– so Republican politicians suspected of insufficient loyalty to Donald Trump aren’t sent to the gulag. “At most, they stand to lose intraparty offices and, possibly, future primaries.” Yet–as Krugman says, these threats are seemingly sufficient to turn them into modern-day versions of Caligula’s courtiers.

Unfortunately, all this loyalty signaling is putting the whole nation at risk. In fact, it will almost surely kill large numbers of Americans in the next few months….

Republican politicians and Republican-oriented influencers have driven much of the opposition to Covid-19 vaccines, in some cases engaging in what amounts to outright sabotage. And there is a stunning negative correlation between Trump’s share of a county’s vote in 2020 and its current vaccination rate.

Krugman says that hostility to vaccines has become a form of loyalty signaling–which, if accurate, answers a question about vaccine refusal that has confounded most sane Americans. As he says, the G.O.P. has become something having no precedent in American history (although there have been many precedents abroad.)

Republicans have created for themselves a political realm in which costly demonstrations of loyalty transcend considerations of good policy or even basic logic. And all of us may pay the price.

When cult members “drink the Kool Aid,” they typically only kill themselves. Unfortunately, the cult that has replaced the once-Grand-Old-Party threatens to kill us all.

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Answering Norris

A few days ago, Norris Lineweaver left a question prompted by my partisan history.

Once upon a time, you were an active Republican. What were the pillars of Republican ideas then versus now? What pillars of Democrat thinking (at large) attracted you to make a change? What major shifts took place in the Republican Party that define them today?

Fair question, and Norris isn’t the only one who has asked it. Every so often, a student would come across my book What’s a Nice Republican Girl Like Me Doing at the ACLU? and confront me with a version of “You were a Republican?” It’s difficult to convey to younger people, especially, the immense difference between today’s GOP and the party to which I once belonged.

Here’s a clue: In 1980, I ran for Congress. I was pro-choice and pro-gay-rights (although LGBTQ issues weren’t the subject of much discussion back then, a story in NUVO made my position clear). I WON a Republican primary. Convincingly. That just wouldn’t happen today.

It’s difficult to overstate the extent to which the Republican Party has become radicalized. 

I became politically active in 1960. A Facebook meme that looked at the Republican Party platform from 1956 was found “mostly true” by Politifact.  That platform endorsed: Providing federal assistance to low-income communities; Protecting Social Security; Providing asylum for refugees; Extending the minimum wage; Improving the unemployment benefit system to cover more people; Strengthening labor laws so workers can more easily join a union; and Assuring equal pay for equal work regardless of sex.

Today’s Republican Party rejects all those positions–although it still gives lip-service to protecting Social Security. There’s a reason so many of us “old” Republicans insist we didn’t leave the GOP–the GOP left us.

As Republicans began their transformation into culture warriors, those of us who considered ourselves “traditional” Republicans differentiated ourselves by protesting that we were “social liberals and fiscal conservatives.” For most of us, being fiscally conservative meant being prudent–neither profligate spenders nor pious “conservatives” for whom fiscal conservatism was code for cutting social programs and enacting tax breaks for the rich. 

As the GOP continued its war on reality and sanity–not to mention Black and Brown people–I was one of many who concluded the disease was terminal, and I left.

As Tom Nichols recently wrote in The Atlantic,  today’s Republicans find themselves in their own version of end-stage Bolshevism– members of a party “exhausted by its failures, cynical about its own ideology, authoritarian by reflex, controlled as a personality cult by a failing old man, and looking for new adventures to rejuvenate its fortunes.”

The Republican Party has, for years, ignored the ideas and principles it once espoused, to the point where the 2020 GOP convention simply dispensed with the fiction of a platform and instead declared the party to be whatever Comrade—excuse me, President—Donald Trump said it was….

A GOP that once prided itself on its intellectual debates is now ruled by the turgid formulations of what the Soviets would have called their “leading cadres,” including ideological watchdogs such as Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin. Like their Soviet predecessors, a host of dull and dogmatic cable outlets, screechy radio talkers, and poorly written magazines crank out the same kind of fill-in-the-blanks screeds full of delusional accusations, replacing “NATO” and “revanchism” with “antifa” and “radicalism.”

Nichols compares today’s GOP to the final “aggressive and paranoid” Soviet-era holdouts in the Kremlin, and notes  that they blame their failures at the ballot box on fraud and sabotage rather than admit their own shortcomings. 

And then, of course, there’s the racism. As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank observed,

Trump’s overt racism turned the GOP into, essentially, a white-nationalist party, in which racial animus is the main motivator of Republican votes. But in an increasingly multicultural America, such people don’t form a majority. The only route to power for a white-nationalist party, then, is to become anti-democratic: to keep non-White people from voting and to discredit elections themselves. In short, democracy is working against Republicans — and so Republicans are working against democracy.

Bottom line: Today’s Republican Party has absolutely nothing in common with the party I joined in 1960, or even the party whose nomination I won in 1980. The Democrats certainly have their problems, but at least most Democrats are sane.

Hope that answers Norris’ question.

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A “Collective Psychotic Episode”

Tuesday’s post, published early by mistake. See you Wednesday morning.

I am (unhappily) persuaded that the thesis of an October 4th article for Salon is correct.

David Mascriotra’s opening line was “There is only one political party in the United States.” He went on to defend that observation

The first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump demonstrated with hideous clarity that the Democratic Party is currently running against not a conservative public policy agenda or a coherent philosophy of governance, but a collective psychotic episode, channeled through an authoritarian demagogue who is equally propelled and crippled by his own neuroses.Gore Vidal, one of America’s best chroniclers of empire, once provided instruction to a British interviewer expressing confusion over the radical hostility Republicans showed toward Barack Obama, and the former president’s inability to react with equal aggression: “Obama believes the Republican Party is a political party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

Mascriotra doesn’t fall into the all-too-frequent mistake of centering his criticism on Trump and his gang that can’t shoot straight. His analysis focuses on the real problem–the fact that the Republican Party has  undergone a radical transformation from a genuine political party into a cult–or, as the quoted paragraph graphically puts it, a “mindset.” And a pretty ugly mindset, at that.

This analysis rejects the (weak) excuse that Republican office-holders don’t stand up to Trump because they are afraid of what the author calls the “bloodlust” of the Trump cult. Although there is undoubtedly some of that, he argues that–at least at the federal level– they share Trump’s hatred of democracy, and he shares statements from several of the “usual subjects”– Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and others–to prove his point.

Republican officeholders and voters “are glad to see him waging war on a system designed to give representation and power to a diverse group of citizens.”

We all know what “diverse group of citizens” means: brown and black people, women, gays, Jews and Muslims. It always comes back to what is increasingly impossible to ignore– the almost total capture of the GOP by white supremacists. To rank and file Republicans, “Making America great again” means recommitting the country to the rule and social dominance of white male Christians. As Mascriotra says, “there is no other reasonable conclusion to draw from the fact that between 80 and 90 percent of Republicans approve of Trump’s performance in office.”

That conclusion –that the GOP is no longer a party, but a white supremacist cult– is also supported by the lack of anything resembling an agenda or a platform.

An American without health insurance, or who pays a high monthly premium for inadequate coverage, can expect nothing from the Republican Party. Working parents who cannot afford child care and have no disposable income after paying each month’s bills can expect nothing from the Republican Party. A young college graduate unable to qualify for a mortgage because he has tens of thousands of dollars in student debt can expect nothing from the Republican Party. Poor children suffering through hunger and struggling to learn basic skills in a dysfunctional school can expect nothing from the Republican Party.

Mascriotra quotes George Will for the proposition that the GOP has abandoned any former connection to a coherent, genuine conservatism. He concludes that Trump’s inability to debate Biden, evidenced by his descent into tantrum and invective, was largely because Republicans no longer have principles or programs to debate or defend.

Through their multi-decade commitment to shrinking government down so small that it can “drown in a bathtub,” to use the words of Grover Norquist, what was once a reasonably coherent pro-business conservative party has arrived at its logical endpoint — a fascist power grab under the guise of an incoherent personality cult.

The late Stanley Crouch warned Republicans of their trouble in the late 1990s, explaining to Charlie Rose that you “cannot assemble a group of lunatics” to follow you without eventually following them into lunacy.

Reminds me of the lyric from the song, “Bring in the clowns.”

Don’t bother–they’re here.

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