I generally am averse to comparing fanatical political activity to the behavior of cultists. Although all forms of human loyalty have, perhaps, a touch of the irrational or arbitrary in their particulars, it’s still rational and not at all arbitrary to be loyal to something, rather than nothing. For instance: although I know that if I were born 15 years sooner, I’d have become a devotee first of all to Madonna rather than Britney Spears — and so therefore I know I am obviously biased when stating my preference (I do love Madonna, though!) — it’s hardly arbitrary for me to have fallen in love with a diva at all. The particular is an accident, but the form is not.

Similarly, it’s not irrational for people to admire or form attachments to their leaders. It’s good for a people to have honorable leaders they can admire, and I totally reject the idea that politicians are by their nature sleazy or disreputable. There are such things, despite what our age’s trendy cynicism would have one believe, as genuine statesmanship, visionary leadership, and merited glory. Anyone who doubts it can look to presidents like Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt. Such leaders are obviously rare, and in a sense, greatness requires an emergency situation for its genius to fully reveal itself — but men like Lincoln and Roosevelt would have been distinguished leaders in any era; the principles they embody are present in all genuine leaders, in smaller proportions.

So: I don’t like to compare the sometimes-fanatical but distinctively human excesses of the devotees of politicians to literal cult members. Most excess zeal is just that: an excess, a legitimate principle spun out of control. Even the critical language used to characterize ‘personality cults’ isn’t really meant in the same sense as the likes of Jonestown or Scientology.

But there are still overlapping patterns of thought and behavior that can help clarify certain episodes in politics.

 

Many people I know have expressed bewilderment that the avalanche of evidence for President Donald Trump’s rank corruption, ideological incoherence, and despicable conduct has not caused more of his apologists to defect. If anyone had told them in 2015 about January 6th, for instance, they’d have nearly all claimed that they’d react to such an incident in the same way former Vice President Mike Pence, who declined to endorse his former boss for re-election in 2024, has: with disgust and outrage. If anyone had told them in 2015 that several of Trump’s top-ranking cabinet officials — James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, and others — would deem him incompetent, moronic, and childish — those were their words — they’d nearly all have conceded that this would be very obviously disqualifying.

But few people know themselves, and when those events came to pass in context, they nearly all decided that their hatred for Democrats outweighed their willingness to call a spade a spade in their own party.

The truth is that it actually becomes harder over time, not easier, as evidence accumulates. When you’ve spent years angrily denouncing anyone who calls you a cult member, or a sucker, or a bigot for supporting Trump — years associating more and more exclusively with people who voted for Trump — years fighting Trump opponents through various crusades — a whole lot more is at stake than merely the question of whether it was truly a good idea to support Trump. Why do apocalyptic cult members fail to defect when the long-predicted date does not come to pass? Because it is not just a question of whether the apocalypse was ever really going to come. To admit that one has been deceived is also to admit that one spent years chasing one’s tail — that all the people who pointed and laughed were kind of right to point and laugh. Changing one’s mind after a decade of this means potentially alienating family and friends whose opinions you mutually reinforced through three presidential election cycles. It means your social group might change — maybe radically. It throws your values for a loop, leaving you questioning what else you may have been wrong about, what else you’re supposed to change. Who wants to go through all that? It’s why most Republican professionals who know better have spent the Trump years trying to ignore Trump and direct their attention toward the usual litany of left-wingers they mutually deplore, but for not quite the same reasons.

But there is more: not only are there ten thousand pressures resisting your exit, there are ten thousand pressures encouraging you to remain. All of the people you’ve agreed with to-date bombard you with rationalizations — and you’re unlikely to hear many competing narratives, given that your media of choice is by now all-in for the team. No agreeable alternative presents itself; a Republican troubled by Trump’s conduct will still find the Democratic Party to be a totally unacceptable option, and the Republican Party is Donald Trump. To defect means not just to abandon Trump, but to stand alone, often facing the scorn of the loyalists of both parties. Nobody will punish you for staying loyal.

Standing independently on conscience, in other words, means much than merely altering one’s beliefs. With how intimately politics is bound up with one’s broader identity — often serving as a sort of substitute religion — it means accepting a great deal of personal upheaval. The path of least resistance becomes overwhelmingly attractive in circumstances like these, and declining to follow along becomes a Herculean challenge akin to suppressing a habitual vice.

The stark reality is that when patterns of belief and conduct persist for this long, it requires an extreme, often traumatic event to rock people out of their hypnotic state. The window of time in which Trump could have been consigned to abnormality is over: he is by now one of the most consequential Americans in the history of the republic, commanding personal adoration like no Republican since Ronald Reagan. Something on the scale of what destroyed the Republican Party as it existed prior to Trump will be necessary, on the scale of what happened in George W. Bush’s catastrophic second term: a major financial crisis, a major foreign war that becomes a quagmire, an electoral wipeout — some combination of events on this scale. Nothing short of this intensity will suffice; anything else in the meantime will be rationalized. There’s a sense in which they can’t abandon Donald Trump otherwise any more than I can abandon Britney Spears.