I’ve run into several people here at DailyKos who insist that what we’re seeing on the right either isn’t a cult or at least shouldn’t be called such, because such a label is seen to be mere name-calling. We should be above that, right? Same with fascist as an adjective: it’s simply too caustic to use to name what we’re seeing.
Calling someone fascist is seen as equivalent to how those on the right use the word ‘communist’—the use of the word has the power to simply shut down debate. Besides, couldn’t ‘populist’ be substituted instead? That doesn’t have so many negative connotations. (Then we trail off into academic discussions.)
Similarly, ‘cult’ is always associated with movements we don’t like or that we perceive to be antisocial and dangerous, that whenever the word is used it’s because people simply don’t like what they’re seeing and they want to separate themselves from whatever is going on in that undesirable group.
’Cult’ is pejorative in connotation (as is ‘fascist’), but no other word better sums up what it is that we’re witnessing on the right. (Indeed, I would reference this paper that describes the psychological underpinnings of totalitarian systems, which very much parallel the same that are found in cult environments.)
Jason Stanley, author of How Propaganda Works and How Fascism Works, talks about how we use certain words to convey certain ideas.
The way fascists pervert language should not prevent us from using language. The word ‘fascism’ is important, or the concept is important, because it tells us what's going to happen. If we don't have a concept, if we don't have a conceptualization of the structure we’re facing, we can't make predictions. [...] If you don't have the word ‘fascism’, then you don’t have a model and a map of what's happening.
Janja Lalich, sociologist and cult expert, notes not only that MAGA/QAnon qualifies as a cult but that “cult” is a word that should be used, as it properly conveys to the hearer the nature of the phenomenon that we’re seeing.
You know, we call gangs gangs. So let’s call cults cults. There’s a long history of understanding what these groups are in sociology, in psychology, in anthropology. And to deny the use of that word is, I think, unfortunate. … I think when you use the word ‘cult’ as it should be understood, it means a group where there’s a certain degree of manipulation and exploitation going on and taking advantage of the members of that group.
Lalich also said the following about MAGA specifically, in an interview that occurred October 5, 2021 (when it looked like MAGA might be fading):
MAGA . . . it was a national cultic movement. It was a type of a cult, unlike anything we’ve seen before. I mean, I think this whole last four to six years we’ve seen cults on a national scale, and it’s a little bit different than what we’ve been used to (with what I now call run-of-the-mill cults, you know, the brick-and-mortar—there’s a headquarters, you know where the leader is, you know where everybody is). Now it’s a little more amorphous, because of the Internet. Obviously, the head of the MAGA cult was Trump, and people behaved like they were in a cult, both those in government and his followers. And he had slogans and the paraphernalia and a lot of the trappings of a cult. So, in a sense, yes. I guess I’d say yes [MAGA is or was a cult].
Now take the word ‘fascist’, the use of which Stanley defends. Another expert on the topic of fascism, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, describes an aspect of fascism that is crucial to understanding it:
Another thing [about fascist governments] is their governance structure. The structure is highly chaotic, with constant recycling of people. Even somebody like Pinochet, who seemed like, you know, the famous picture of him with the dark glasses, he seemed statuesque, he seemed stable. He restructured his government over forty times.
So, because nobody’s loyal enough, because of the same things we’ve lived through with Trump, this is classic. It’s constant chaos. And, in fact, some of them, like Qaddafi and Idi Amin, they really, psychologically, they thrived on chaos. And chaos is a psychological weapon.
In all these states, whether they wreck democracy or not, it’s constant scandal, constant outrage, constant chaos of one form or another, and it’s exhausting to people, even if their life’s not at risk as in a true dictatorship. It’s exhausting and, for authoritarianism, plays on us being exhausted from the chaos.
So not only does the structure provide clues as to what type of governance is before us—it gives us features we can identify—but also it alerts us to what to anticipate. This fatigue is a byproduct of fascism we can expect and thus for which we can plan. We can mitigate this pernicious effect.
Timothy Beal, chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Case Western Reserve University, spoke about QAnon and its resemblance to a new religious movement (in this context, that could be read as “cult,” albeit in more acceptable, academic language), characterizing QAnon as being in a style reminiscent of Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, and Waco:
One thing I want to really emphasize is that—I would argue, anyway—that, fundamentally and at core, these movements really are religious movements, even when they don’t talk about God or the Bible, or whatever. And I think when we ignore or play down or dismiss the religious dimensions of these movements, which oftentimes you’ll see in the op-eds and in political science analyses of them—“Well, that’s just a kind of superficial dimension to them”—I think that that’s a big mistake. I think that this is something that’s core to them and that we really can’t understand them unless we pay attention to the religious dimensions.
In describing new religious movements, he noted:
- They are highly systematic and intellectual as well as self-sealing.
- They tend to be apocalyptic.
- They’re locative—they locate their adherents, as in “This is where you are in history; this is where you are in the world.”
- They are extremely and explicitly dichotomous:
They tend to be what I [Beal] would call—I talk about this in my book about Revelation—othering machines. They work to identify ‘us’ versus ‘them’; and the ‘them’ is really monstrous-ized, is elevated to this kind of supernatural otherness that is beyond just, you know, somebody you don’t like or somebody you don’t agree with, but so Other and so diabolically Other and monstrously Other that we can do violence to them, and in fact it’s our obligation to. So this kind of othering that allows us to objectify and do violence to other human beings…. the core of it would be anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism, and that’s the Other behind the Others oftentimes in these movements.
What Beal reveals here is crucial to our understanding of QAnon, and our view would be impoverished without the structure of new religious movements—in this instance, cults—and being able to dissect the structure to see how these features relate and interlock.
We face something other than what we normally see in our political environment, and without this understanding much of our plans to confront this danger run the risk of missing vital features of what is sustaining the motivations of the people involved in MAGA and QAnon, their driving force. Such an understanding is essential to being able to neutralize and sap their energy.
Thus it’s imperative that we be able to use these terms—fascist, cult—in order to accurately identify the nature of the threat before us, so that we can devise effective countermeasures for each of the arms and segments of the movement and defeat each systematically and definitively.
