Our Cults, Ourselves

Is the best way to understand the MAGA movement to binge-watch docuseries about charismatic leaders sending their acolytes to ruin? Tune in and find out.

by Rick Perlstein October 9, 2024

Last week, I quoted Donald Trump addressing women: “I want to be your protector … You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger.” On X, Kendall Brown observed, “This is nearly identical to how Warren Jeffs spoke to women in his cult.” Jeffs was the leader of a breakaway Mormon sect who went to prison in 2007 for child rape, leaving behind 78 wives and a helpless community he had ruled like a mad king.

In one of my first columns this year for the Prospect, I wrote of my frustration with how few products in the ostensibly “nonpolitical” corners of American culture wrestled with the traumatic descent of so many of our fellow citizens into right-wing authoritarianism. Almost all of the cultural output wrestling with the problem came at it allegorically: as science fiction, as fable, as historical cautionary tale, as stories in a future time or faraway place. Almost nothing has been set recognizably in our own political world. Nothing that dares name the thing.

SNIP
It could start with the truism that cult formation, as my binge-watch last week makes clear, works best among a population already primed for it: prosperity gospel evangelicals, psychedelic searchers, woo enthusiasts.
Or the modern Republican Party, since its capture by the conservative movement.
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-10-09-our-cults-ourselves/