From continuity Remain to Trump supporters, in our fractious political times, “cult” has become the defining political insult. What has put this particular insult on so many lips?
Text by Will Wiles
“Cult” has become the leading political insult of our age. To read newspapers, news magazines and social media is to have the impression that cults are everywhere. In the UK, support for former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is called a cult, as is support for Boris Johnson. Brexit is a cult, but so is continuity Remain. Extinction Rebellion is a doomsday cult, and climate denialism is a death cult. Vaccine denialism is also a death cult, but then so is mask-wearing and getting your vaccine. Alleged cults abound – but why? If the diverse phenomena above are not cults, then what does it mean when they are described as such? What has put the word “cult” on so many lips, in so many contexts?
There may be a very simple answer, Donald Trump. The fanatical hardcore of his support might warrant the term, cult experts agree. In a 2018 interview with The Pacific Standard, Janja Lalich, a sociologist of cults, argued that there were “plenty of similarities – enough to be concerned about” between Trump’s base and “totalistic” cults, which exhibit excessive devotion towards their leader, reject and avoid all criticism, and feel disdain for non-members. Steven Hassan, a former Moonie turned expert on destructive cults, coercive mind control, and deprogramming, expands on the case in The Cult of Trump (2019). And in Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry (2019), veteran psychiatrist and cult expert Robert Jay Lifton sets cultic Trumpism in historic context, drawing on his research into other “thought reform” movements. In making these arguments, these books shed much light on what cults are and aren’t, and the nature of modern politics.
In Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump (2018), a fascinating study of the occult underpinnings of Trump’s politics and popularity, historian Gary Lachman examines the former president as a guru figure and an example of what late writer and thinker Colin Wilson called the “Right Man” (a term borrowed, in turn, from science-fiction writer A.E. van Vogt). The charismatic Right Man, Wilson said, “will never, under any circumstances, admit that he is in the wrong” and is characterised by “a deep, nagging sense of inferiority”. Any contradiction fills them with “murderous rage”. Such a guru figure is an important precondition for a cult; in addition, Lalich, Hassan and Lifton agree that to be considered a cult a movement must also exhibit control over its members’ beliefs, eliminating ideological distance between the member and the cult, and Lifton adds that exploitation of the membership by the leader is usually involved.
Lifton, who began his career studying “thought reform” in Maoist China, argues that Trump and Trumpism represent “an assault on reality”: “At issue is the attempt to control, to own, the immediate truth along with any part of history that feeds such truth.” This means that Trumpism is not strictly totalist – there’s no Trumpian Little Red Book setting out correct Trump thought, and his positions, although they draw on many existing strands of American nativist and far-right belief, are inconsistent and inconstant. The only fixed points are Trump himself and his “solipsistic reality”, in which whatever he happens to say is the truth.
Trump’s loss in 2020 has not halted the cult element in his support. Indeed, it has mutated into new and more dangerous forms, merging with QAnon, the bizarre belief system that began under his presidency as a way of organising the chaos of those busy four years into an orderly grand design to shatter the (Satanic, child-abusing) ideological enemies of the right and purify the American republic. After Trump’s defeat at the polls, QAnon shifted to a narrative that he had not been defeated at all, but remains president, working secretly on a master stroke that will smite his enemies, dispel the illusion of the Biden presidency and return him to power – a narrative that has proven disturbingly stubborn and widespread. While Trump himself is diminished and pathetic, his image in the eye of these supporters resembles the pseudo-Baldwins and pseudo-Fredericks described in Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, a classic 1970 study of medieval European apocalyptic sects: dead emperors, remembered as paragons of greatness and champions of the people, literally resurrected to put right the world. QAnon’s invocation of the “Storm”, the maelstrom that Trump will unleash when the time is right, is very much the “strong emotional commitment to apocalyptic world purification” that Lifton says provides “fuel for the cultist engine”.
The astounding gulf between these beliefs and observable reality makes QAnon seem childish and absurd, but when Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol building on 6 January 2021, the danger that they posed to the fabric of American democracy became clear. There’s also a feature of QAnon that’s worth noting: its bizarre cosmology imagines a struggle against a cabal or satanic conspiracy of corrupt, paedophile, child-murdering politicians and media figures, and so explains the world by presenting it as being run by an evil cult.
Trump’s six long years on the political scene and the cultic features of his movement might do a lot to explain how “cult” became such a widely used term in political discussion. Not that all such comparisons can be taken at face value, of course: writers bandying around the word “cult” don’t always mean it in a strict sense, or even at all. It is often just lazy journalistic shorthand. “Cult” is a strong and short word, well-suited to headlines. In addition, calling something well regarded or inoffensive a cult makes for low-effort provocation. Hard work, positive thinking, and clean eating? All cults, according to a variety of recent New Statesman articles. Representative democracy, individualism and pencils? Cults all, in Times articles published this year. Similar lists could be drawn from any mainstream news title. In this context, “cult” is generally just a punchy synonym for “overrated” that has the added effect of insulting “cultists”, presenting them as brainwashed dupes or glassy-eyed fanatics. In the business of otiose commentary, that kind of saltiness is essential seasoning. (This helpfully distinguishes it from the other usage of the word cult to describe commercially unremarkable but persistently popular books, films, games and so on; in that usage, cult success is generally taken to be indicative of underlying merit, and a cult following is regarded as discerning. That’s very different.)
In the examples listed at the start, though, the people using the word cult did earnestly believe it applied to what they were describing, or at least they wanted their audience to believe that. Jeremy Corbyn’s support was routinely described as a cult throughout his tumultuous time as Labour leader, both in print and in online discourse, and with particular gusto by commentators from the centre and centre-left, from Tony Blair down. The former prime minister described the Labour party under Corbyn as a “glorified protest movement with cult trimmings”. (The word has been used to describe Blair’s own following as well.)
What of the other side of the aisle? “The great puzzle is that so many of the people who talked about ‘the Corbyn cult’ are so reluctant to face up to the fact of the [Boris] Johnson cult,” wrote Marina Hyde, politics whisperer to the liberal middle class, in the Guardian in May this year. “In many ways, Johnson is the much more classic cult leader. His decisions have led to the deaths of large numbers of people, and he’s got a lot of women pregnant.”
Hyde’s column is humorous, but others have made the same comparison with deadly seriousness. “Has the Conservative Party become a death cult?” asked Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London, in an Independent column in June 2019: “A few years ago that would not have been a question that it would have occurred to anyone even to ask.” But, after a poll of Conservative members that showed that a majority was willing to accept significant economic damage and the break-up of the United Kingdom as prices worth paying for Brexit, Bale said his question had become “hard to ignore”. But then Bale might be described as a “cult-like Remainer”, a phrase used by Trevor Kavanagh, former political editor of the Sun. And the 2016 referendum wasn’t alone in spawning alleged cults – Ewan Morrison criticised the “empty cult of Yes” in a September 2014 New Statesman article about the Scottish independence movement.
The “Qanon Shaman” who rapidly became the poster-boy of the storming of the Capitol in January 2021.
Are any of these phenomena truly cults? Corbynism was called a cult so persistently that the argument merits a little more consideration. While he obviously enjoyed addressing rallies of supporters, Corbyn claimed to be “deeply embarrassed” by some of the ardour he attracted. Bizarre fan art may have abounded, but the party did not make the figure of Corbyn the centre of much of its official publicity or campaign materials. Corbyn and his circle could be evasive and mendacious, but no more so than the average politician – there was no gleeful assault on reality itself. A core of Corbyn’s following could be extremely combative and unpleasant, often to the despair of his wider, softer support. Yet while Trump himself led the abuse of his opponents – it was a central and repellent feature of his first campaign – Corbyn did not. He was often accused of turning a blind eye to it, but was that accusation fair or did it hold him to a higher standard than other politicians? Left-wing MPs and media figures are subjected to unrelenting online abuse and offline threats and attacks, but this attracts less press condemnation, the party affiliations of the perpetrators not much examined, and the leaders of those parties not held accountable for it.
This might sound like special pleading from a writer sympathetic to the Labour left, and maybe it is, but this shows the slipperiness of the “cult” accusation. If Corbynism was a cult, then any contemporary political project that attracts popular enthusiasm is a cult, or at least has a core of support that is cultic. We’ll overlook and justify this in movements we sympathise with and be disturbed by it in movements we oppose. A degree of cultism might even be a precondition of modern political success. In a dispersed media age, politics itself might be becoming more cultic, dependent on self-organising supporters to energetically project its messages on social networks, and argue with its opponents.
If more and more things really do resemble cults, then that obviously goes some way towards explaining why “cult” has become such a widespread insult. Does that also mean that we can maybe live with cults? That’s doubtful; indeed, I think that the increasing use of the word cult is a sign that we’re finding it increasingly hard to live with each other. Lifton notes that although cults are coercive and exploitative, the great majority of them are not outwardly violent. Instead, they have “a widespread dynamic of potential violence”, owing to the instability of their leaders, the devotion of their members, and their tendency towards belief in apocalyptic transformation. This potential is among the features of cults that renders them abhorrent to most people and reveals something about the reason people call groups and phenomena “cults” even when they aren’t: fear, or at the very least, mistrust.
Rising cult forces in modern life are reflected by media interest in past cults: Terror in the Jungle, co-produced by Leonardo di Caprio, looked at Jim Jones’ murderous People’s Temple in Guyana; Netflix’s Wild Wild Country looked at the Rajneeshpuram community in Oregon. Both were released in 2018.
Calling something a cult is a way of dismissing it, and its supporters. A cult can’t be argued with, so if you call something a cult, you don’t have to argue with it. The increasing use of the term is evidence of a wider breakdown in the ability to imagine the motivations of people we disagree with. Indeed, it arguably embodies some of the behaviour that it seeks to condemn: it recasts shaded questions of belief into stark black and white; it presents the audience a choice between a reasonable “us” and an unreasonable “them”; and it is threaded with fear. It also leads to the spectacle, as in a divisive issue like Brexit, where both sides accuse the other of being cult-like. That doesn’t necessarily mean that either side is right or wrong, as both sides could have cult characteristics or a cultic core. What it does show is that perceiving cults elsewhere is not evidence of non-cultic behaviour, as with the undeniably cultic QAnon and its fight against a vast brainwashing “cult”. And even the most harmful cultic movements in modern society, such as QAnon and anti-vaxxers, deviate from the classic model: they are not totalistic and do not have single controlling leaders. We’re faced with the horrifying propsect of something new: cultic culture.
Lifton counters the cultist mindset with what he calls the “protean self”, which is “characterised by openness, change, and new beginnings, and strongly resists ownership by others”. This is obviously a desirable state of being. But the problem is that a lot of people would flatter themselves that they already are such an individual, even if they are already prey to cultic thinking. It’s telling that accusations of cultism invested with most actual belief – that is, accusations that are not just a bad-faith effort to denigrate opponents – seem to come most intensively from the liberal centre of the media, populated by commentators who pride themselves on being free-minded, able to see both sides of an argument, opposed to extremism of all kinds, and alert to conspiracy theories and magical thinking. This impoverished rationalism, that sees cults under every stone (apart from the stones we like), is a form of conspiracism or magical thinking; besides imagining people we disagree with as pawns of a malign higher influence, it attributes unnatural power to their beliefs and arguments, giving them an ability to mesmerise support rather than convince. The cult is the conspiracy of the insider. It is the phantasm of an increasingly small and homogenous media class unable to see its own patterns of groupthink and hostility to outsiders.
There are real cults, and beyond them there are real cultic tendencies in modern life that should be identified and resisted. In other words, understanding cults is a vital part of safely navigating the modern world. Only applying that understanding outwards, at the people we disagree with, is to miss the key lessons offered by Lifton, Hassan and the others, however: what matters first is to apply those lessons to our own thinking, and recognise the cultist within.◉