Abstract
The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States has helped usher in a new era of uncertainty throughout the world. By conventional criteria, which include expertise in politics, respect for constitutional norms and a deep engagement with policy, he is spectacularly unqualified for the job. Yet millions of Americans voted for him, and many still support his agenda. Why do they do so, and how did this happen?
Steven Hassan offers a unique take on these questions. He writes as one of the foremost experts on cults in the world, and as a former member of the Unification Church (aka the Moonies) in the 1970s. Hassan argues that Trump acts like an archetypal cult leader, albeit one that we associate more with an array of pseudo religious groups such as Scientology (famous for having Tom Cruise as one of its leading members) than we do with politics. It follows that his most zealous followers are completely convinced that their unique ideology is indispensable if the world is to be rescued from destruction. They act like members of a cult. It is a provocative argument.
Most of us are relatively unaware of what distinguishes cults from ‘normal’ organisations. Hassan begins his book by asking ‘what is a cult?’ Drawing on the seminal work of Robert Jay Lifton (1961), who studied the techniques used by the Chinese authorities to ‘brainwash’ American prisoners of war (POWs) during the Korean war, he identifies eight key organisational practices that induce cultic fervour on the part of a group’s devotees. Trump, he argues, excels in many if not all of them. Here, I will identify just some of the key examples, and how Hassan argues that they apply to Trump.
‘Milieu control’ involves an intense control of the information that is available to people. Only sources of information sanctified by an inspired leader are to be trusted. The rest are impure, corrupting and are to be despised – in Trump’s terms, they are ‘fake news’. Cult members are fed a daily drumbeat of propaganda that satisfies their emotional need to believe and which is immune to falsification.
Closely related to this is ‘the demand for purity’. The world is reduced to simple black and white terms, where there is an absolute right and an absolute wrong answer for every question. Total loyalty to the leader’s vision is a pre-requisite for continued membership of the group. But even those who buy into the group’s ideology are held to exacting standards of loyalty and obedience that, with the most willing will in the world, few can sustain. This is certainly indicative of Trump’s inner circle. Hassan points out that his time of writing at least 46 people appointed to 24 cabinet posts had been fired or resigned since the President took over – a rate of attrition that I suspect is unique in US history.
Lifton, studying how Communism was presented to US POWs, wrote of what he called ‘the sacred science’. This is where the group ideology is exalted as unequivocally and morally true, and perhaps offers an explanation for all of society’s woes. Its leader is depicted as either a spokesman for God or a secular equivalent, and hence is above criticism. Hassan’s book provides many examples of Trump asserting his unique expertise over multiple areas, including a level of scientific expertise that enables him to reject the evidence of climate change over the heads of the entire scientific community. On defence, he has declared: ‘I know more about offense and defence than (the generals) will ever understand’ (p. 43). Trump is, he assures us, ‘a very stable genius’.
Cult members also typically experience a ‘loading of the language’, in which thought stopping clichés reinforce their commitment to and participation in events and rituals that reinforce the power of the group ideology. Trump has excelled in this regard. His supporters became habituated to the unthinkable during the presidential election, routinely chanting ‘lock her up’ when Hilary Clinton’s name was uttered, and ‘build the wall’ at any mention of Mexico. I can’t think of any precedent for a US presidential candidate advocating the imprisonment of a key opponent during an election. That it became ‘normalised’ is an indicator of Trump’s success. His continued fondness for mass rallies, replete with the mind-numbing rituals of repetition, repetition and more repetition, gives him fresh opportunities to engage his base, and also to reinforce his own obvious sense of malignant narcissism. Trump creates his own social reality, promotes an in-group of followers, establishes his own allegedly unique credibility as a seer with plausible answers to people’s problems and dangles the notion of a new promised land before them. His rallies are eerily reminiscent of many cult gatherings, in which an exalted leader harangues the faithful for hours at a time, in a display of mutual affirmation that reinforces their dominant belief system.
All this clearly begs a question: why was he so successful? Chapter 4 in Hassan’s book is titled ‘America, a country wired for manipulation’, and offers his take on this question. He writes: ‘The Great Recession of 2008 created economic hardships so severe that many people have not fully recovered. This is especially true of the American heartland, where Trump has many supporters. Many feel betrayed by government, religion, science, and big business’ (p. 65). People prefer certainty over uncertainty, and answers to their problems rather than a counsel of despair. It is into this void that Trump stepped, offering simplistic answers to complex problems. Hassan shows how Trump manipulates people’s behaviour and belief systems, to provide some sense of comforting certainty in a world that many of them believe has gone mad.
To this I would add the following. Hassan highlights how what he calls our 24/7 society has forced many into a state of sleep deprivation. Forty percent of Americans get less than seven hours sleep a night. He notes that critical thinking is difficult when you are exhausted. Accounts of the gig economy and how people work in Amazon, call centres and for Uber (e.g. Guendelsberger, 2019; Rosenblat, 2018) show that millions of people are one pay cheque away from penury, and have the despairing conviction that ‘the American Dream’ their parents may once have believed in has become an American nightmare. These are fertile conditions for cult leaders of any description.
And Trump takes full advantage of it. Hassan cites a typical 2016 Trump campaign ad: ‘Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupted political establishment, with a new government controlled by you, the American people’. Making them feel heroic by association he goes on: The only people brave enough to vote out this corrupt establishment is you, the American people. I am doing this for the people and the movement, and we will take back this country for you, and we will make America great again. (p. 172)
For those with nothing left to lose, this is an alluring message, and one that politicians such as Hilary Clinton conspicuously failed to compete with.
Ultimately, what is to be done? Hassan provides a detailed account of how many people recover from membership of cultic groups and the approaches that do and don’t work with them. He advises his readers against ostracising even virulent Trump supporters, and instead advocates that family members and friends engage them in dialogue. As he argues: ‘By attacking or belittling Trump’s followers, political and traditional media may be helping to maintain his influence over his base’ (p. 196). Note that this does not mean kowtowing to Trump’s ideology or refusing to challenge his lies. It does mean that it is counterproductive to personally criticise individuals for falling under his influence: ‘How could you be so stupid? What’s wrong with you?’ Hassan suggests that gradually acquainting people with information about how cultic mind control works, and how Trump has used it, may help open up different avenues for critical thinking. He offers some fascinating examples of where this has occurred.
But at a macro level he fully acknowledges that there are parallels between what Trump represents and the rise of fascist ideologies and movements in the 1930s. There is nothing normal in what we see before us at the moment, and action by multiple actors is required to move us beyond it, including by organisational scholars. In my view, we as a discipline been grievously negligent in addressing really big and important questions in our work. This includes what caused the Great Recession and what can be done to avoid it happening again. It may be easy to mock many of Trump’s supporters, and to feel a glow of self-satisfaction as we do so. But unless we engage more thoroughly with the macro problems that he has taken such advantage of, we will be neglecting our responsibilities as intellectuals, and may be complicit in much worse to come.
