Twenty-nine per cent of Americans believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Similar proportions believe that the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was mostly peaceful and law-abiding or was staged by anti-Trump forces to make him look bad. 20% of us believe that there is definitely or probably a micro-chip in Covid vaccine shots. We know from anecdotal reports that some hospitalized patients literally dying of Covid refuse to believe that the virus could be the cause of their impending demise.

I might be missing something, but I can’t think of a time in American history when so many people believed specific claims about our contemporary political and social life that were so obviously, demonstrably false, if not outlandish. Not just false, but dangerous—to our democracy and to our physical health. How did we come to this?

Of course, the phenomenon of mass delusion is not bi-partisan: the overwhelming majority of people who hold the foregoing false beliefs are Republicans. Mass delusion is a characteristic of cults, and I think it is useful to view today’s GOP as a cult whose development can be understood through an examination of the interactions over time of four sets of actors: Republican politicians in general, Donald Trump in particular, the GOP base, and the right-wing media.

As I argued in posts many years ago (for example, here and here) Republican craziness long predates Trump. Trump was the culmination of a decades-long, gradual descent of the GOP into a cult-like movement in which ideological first premises regularly displace a “conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science.”  The right-wing media played a critical propulsive role in this descent into madness. The blogger Kevin Drum attributes the degradation of American politics after 2000 almost exclusively to Fox News, which has worked tirelessly to stoke fear and outrage in white Christian America. Fox has indeed played a critical role in pushing the GOP ever further to the right, but talk radio, led by Rush Limbaugh, has had as large an audience and no less noxious messaging. The growth of social media in the past decade, along with the emergence of a variety of right-wing websites, helped fill out an alternative universe in which right-wing fantasies regularly triumph over the world of facts. This alternative universe was populated by much of the GOP base.  But a cult-like movement needs a leader. Trump understood this, and knew how to respond.

What distinguishes Trump most obviously from establishment Republican politicians is what his base thinks shows his authenticity: his uninhibited xenophobia and racism and his irreverent, nasty vulgarity.  But no less importantly, Trump distinguishes himself in his continuing readiness to tell and propagate outright lies. For example, except for a particularly extreme fringe, most Republican politicians at the national level won’t say outright that Trump won the election, but will hint darkly at “legitimate concerns” about election integrity.  They don’t actually praise the Jan. 6 insurrectionists; they will just downplay the importance of the riot and seek to deflect blame.  Still, no ambitious Republican politician will risk alienating Trump; as a result, practically an entire political party is complicit in enabling his deceptions.  So, mass delusion was brought to new heights by a cult leader willing to lie outrageously to a base whose credulous receptiveness reflected years of conditioning by their favored media.  The party establishment, initially repelled by the cult leader’s obvious unfitness, fell into line, where it largely remains

Every cult needs myths.  The foundational myth of the Trump cult is “I alone can fix it,” The Leader’s promise to a wildly cheering 2016 GOP convention.  The crowning myth is the myth of The Stolen Election.

What is to be done?  We can reasonably hope that demographic change will help eventually to turn things around. Fox’s audience, which largely overlaps with the GOP base, is disproportionately elderly. As they die off, they will be replaced by younger people who are relatively reality-based. Younger voters in 2020 went heavily for Biden. Republicans are certainly aware of the ticking of the demographic clock, which helps explain their eagerness to exploit the myth of The Stolen Election to rig the rules of the system in their favor.  They could well succeed.  The 2020 election was critical to the future of American democracy.  The elections of 2022 and 2024 will be no less so.

Note: I want to anticipate a reasonable objection to my use of the term “cult’ to characterize today’s GOP.  A cult is generally thought of as a fairly small movement whose core beliefs are not widely present in the general population. How can a party that gains nearly half the allegiance of the American electorate be a cult? So, I should make clear that I don’t regard the whole mass of GOP voters as cult members. In the past I’ve pegged the hard-core Trump base at about 25% of the population.  Even that arguably is too much to constitute a cult, so I admit my usage is a bit of a stretch.  But the critical cult characteristics of a shared, stubborn attachment to a set of irrational beliefs, together with a fervent, unconditional allegiance to a charismatic leader, do apply to that large a portion of our fellow Americans. For more discussion, see this and this.

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