The politics of change in an age of cults...

It has taken me a while to process what will become the challenges facing us with the incoming administration. It has been a process not unlike grief with its stages ranging from shock and anger to acceptance. I am past the shock and have begun to accept that anger and depression are counterproductive— not ready for acceptance quite yet. So, I guess I am stuck somewhere in the middle. Getting “through it” as always requires a plan of action that entails understanding how we got to this point, and then defining the point we have reached. Like a Shakespearean drama, I wonder whether this is Act 3 or Act 5— climax or resolution.

Trump can be seen as a typical villain with his overt nose-thumbing to the common order and an almost inexplicable rise to power. When viewed from a dramatic lens, understanding his ascendance is less baffling. Villains rise and fall in the vacuum of societal breakdown. Order is restored through the villain's death or divine intervention in a literary world. We don’t live in that world but history has demonstrated plenty of rises and falls which have undoubtedly inspired authors and poets. The promised threat to Constitutional guarantees and social norms that is at the core of the MAGA movement represents the breakdown of social order we are all experiencing. Continuing to focus our energy on Donald Trump is unfortunately futile at this point. We lost that battle in November. His work is done. Restoring the social equilibrium he has upset requires a strategy that begins with understanding the forces that undermined and unraveled the social fabric we had thought was so tightly knit and resilient. Its fragility is what should command our attention.

Charisma

Much has been made, especially on the left, of Trump’s “movement” resembling a cult. Trump as cult leader is a quick and dirty explanation for the relationship he has with his followers. But it is also as good an explanation for the relationship those of us who loathe him share. In an intriguing article on charismatic counter roles, Paul Joosse quotes British sociologist Bryan Wilson’s wry observation about the fickle nature of charismatic leaders:

If a man runs naked down the street proclaiming that he alone can save others from doom, and if he immediately wins a following, then he is a charismatic leader…. If he does not win a following, he is simply a lunatic

^{— Social Forces, “Countering Trump: Toward a Theory of Charismatic Counter-Roles,” by Paul Joosse}

In fact, Wilson’s comment can be true in either case. Hitler, for example, can be viewed as both charismatic to his core Nazi followers and a lunatic to the rest of us. Trump's followers and detractors share equally strong feelings with an understanding that charisma can be bitterly divisive. I believe that this is where literature and sociology merge. Does charisma lose its spell when the “lunatic” is removed, when the leader is deposed? Putting aside divine intervention, history suggests that the demise of Jim Jones’s Jonestown and the Heaven’s Gate doomsday cults are not the norm. Hitler's end came as a result of the massive intervention of Allied troops which ended World War II and Hitler’s grip on Germany. Despite this, his movement lives on among a cultish minority who use their concept of Naziism as a vessel for their own brand of evil. Hitler’s movement lives on in them as an ideal.

Our obsession with Donald Trump and his antics may be justified but it is also ineffectual. Those on the right who advocate for an efficient order and a simplified government while inducing violence and chaos to perfect it fail to realize that they share their vision with totalitarian governments. In contrast, on the left civil disobedience is a time-honored response to injustice by disrupting the inequities within prevailing order using peaceful protest. Only one group, however, begins its intervention with an acceptance of its consequences. Trump’s charismatic power doesn’t come from anything he has done or said, but rather from his ability to conflate injustice with grievance in the minds. The dynamics of cult experience take over as followers become victims:

“Once a person has been fully indoctrinated into a cult - the process known as brainwashing - they become isolated from alternate sources of information, from other persons with diverse views, and from any close relationships with trusted others. A trauma, or disorganised bond is formed with the leader or group which in essence means the person experiences chronic relational trauma and a situation of "fright without solution". In a traumatised state such as this it becomes impossible to think clearly and especially to think clearly about the cause of the trauma - namely: the cult. This chronic trauma usually causes the follower to dissociate: to be unable to think about their feelings and their own experience. This allows the cult to explain their experience to them in the cult's terms, which are, by definition false and fictional.”

^{— Psychwire, “How to Identify a Cult,” by Alexandra Stein}

The current tack by Democrats is to denounce Trump and dispose of the movement by cutting off its head. It won’t work. We as a nation were lulled into believing we had defeated the inbred injustices of our past with half measures and ineffective commitment to expand on freedoms. It is obvious that we haven’t. The last election cycles have dredged up a persistent and widespread intolerance within our midst.

In November Democrats did not lose because Trump’s followers prevailed. We lost because we had lost faith in our principles. That’s where the battle begins for the next four years. Reciprocating in kind with hate, violence, and isolation may feel better, but will only prolong our national trauma. Stein’s article includes a pointed and enlightening description of the makeup of a cult leader. It is the closest description of the power and vulnerabilities Donald Trump shares with his followers:

“More recently Daniel Shaw discussed "traumatizing narcissism" as a feature of cult leaders. Cult leaders are driven by the need to control others and to control their environment - fringe benefits of this control include sex, money, free labour and so on, but the fundamental need is power and control. They see the world solely in terms of their own needs. It is difficult to assess them as getting a true biography is challenging due to their tendency to self-mythologize.”

^{— Psychwire, “How to Identify a Cult,” by Alexandra Stein}

The work that must be done begins among those who are “cult-adjacent”— those drawn to MAGA by their own frustrations with the current social order. It includes women and disaffected minorities for whom the complacency of political leaders and their lack of urgency for real and systemic change induces anger and resentment. They feel caught within the Goldilocks conundrum created by progressives and moderates. In this argument, progressives are right, change is inevitable. What remains as moderates ponder is the extent to which change can be managed without disillusioning those who demand it.

In the immortal words of Bob Dylan, the times they are a-changin’— whether we like it or not. Movements requiring an absolutist control of change are doomed to fail, but not without consequence. Change like the weather cannot be prescribed or managed. As Dylan so eloquently notes in his warning to the status quo, change is uncomfortable, messy, and disruptive— even change for the good:

The order is rapidly fadin'
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'

^{— The Times They Are A-Changin', Song by Bob Dylan}

The question is not whether but how we deal with it.