Here in the United States we're watching the Cult of Trump expand its hold on people who used to be independent thinkers and believers in democracy, but now have become total sycophants to a man who stands for nothing except his authoritarian impulses.
This shows that cults come in different forms, not just of the religious variety. Unfortunately, we humans are prone to excessive loyalty toward our own "tribe." When this happens, truth is sacrificed on the altar of self-interest, something that has been on full display ever since Trump appeared on the national political stage, yet is even more clear now that he's become president for a second term.
I won't bother to recite all the crap that Trump has buried the country in during the first week of his presidency. Some examples are:
-- Pardoning all of the January 6 insurrectionists, including hundreds who were found guilty of assaulting police officers.
-- Illegally firing 18 inspector generals in federal agencies whose job is to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, so that Trump and his billionaire buddies can indulge in their own waste, fraud, and abuse.
-- Ordering that all federal health agencies stop communications with both the general public and health workers just as bird flu is becoming a more serious problem.
Nonetheless, I want to believe that most of those who voted for Trump either didn't think that he'd do all the bad stuff that was promised during his campaign for president, or didn't pay sufficient attention to those authoritarian promises, choosing instead to focus on his commitment to bring down the price of groceries, strengthen the southern border, and deport undocumented immigrants.
Last month I wrote several posts about Tim Urban's creative and engaging book, What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies. (See here and here.) Today I finished the book. I liked it a lot, even though Urban devotes a lot of pages to criticizing what he calls Social Justice Fundamentalism, as contrasted with Liberal Social Justice, which he favors, and fewer pages to similar excesses by right-wing zealots.
That's because he wrote the book during the Biden administration, when the Cult of Trump wasn't nearly as obvious as it is today. So I enjoyed finding criticisms of Social Justice Fundamentalism that apply equally to the Cult of Trump. I share some of them below because they're a useful guide to cults of all varieties, political as well as religious.
Click on the links to my previous posts about the book to learn, or refresh your memory about, how Urban describes various approaches to truth, ranging from the highest (Scientist) to the lowest (Zealot), and the difference between our Higher Mind and Primitive Mind.
Again, just substitute "Cult of Trump" for "Social Justice Fundamentalism" and you'll see that Urban's criticisms of the latter apply equally well to the former.
I said earlier that my problem with Social Justice Fundamentalism isn't the ideology itself. I strongly disagree with most aspects of SJF, but there are hundreds of ideologies floating around today's world that I don't like. My problem is with SJF's tactics -- the fact that it's an expansionist golem [an entity with strict conformity internally and an Us vs. Them mindset externally] that attempts to spread itself not through persuasion but through bullying, smear campaigns, loyalty oaths, guilt by association, and other coercive measures.
...When it comes to the state of our politics, negative sentiment like grievance and outrage are shorthand for righteousness in SJF, while positive sentiments like optimism and gratitude are taken as a sign of false consciousness, callous privilege, or both. When positivity is shamed out of the conversation, the air ends up filled with gloom, resentment, and nihilism -- not sentiments that energize people to fix problems.
...SJF speaks instead to people's Primitive Minds using the "with us or against us" language of "common enemy" rhetoric -- while stigmatizing common-humanity rhetoric like "there is only one race, the human race" as bigotry. Common-enemy rhetoric creates division and limits the movement's size and ability to make enduring change.
...We talked about the way high-rung politics sees people as a mess of gray complexity, an evolving jumble of virtues and flaws. Through a high-rung lens, all people are worthy of compassion, and no one is above criticism. On the low rungs, people are either perfectly righteous 1s or morally reprehensible 0s.
...The Lower Right and Lower Left both are illiberal. They're both anti-science. They're both hypocritical. They're both authoritarian. They're both bigoted. The political uniform that low-rung movements wear is just a facade under which lies a golem with all the trademark low-rung qualities. If one golem is causing more trouble than the other during any given year, it speaks not to that golem being worse but to that golem having more power to do damage at that time.
...My problem isn't with progressivism or conservatism but the fact that, at the moment, Americans are being deprived of the high-rung version of both by low-rung groups wearing blue and red uniforms.
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