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this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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What's terrifying about MAGA isn't Trump, it's who comes next.
A second term for Trump will be terrible, but it'll end fairly quickly as I don't think he's going to live another 10 years.
However, if you take a look at the "Next generation" they are all copying trumpism but just making it a bit more crazy. Vivek is the poster child for this behavior. They are finding more and more than just abandoning pretext and saying the quiet part outloud doesn't lose elections.
The only way to stop this is having the GOP lose over and over and over again. After Biden's presidency the GOP cannot see power for at least another decade otherwise it will just snowball into more extreme craziness (it may do that anyways as the insane base will keep moderates out of office).
Trump has also stated he wants to be a dictator on day 1. This plus all of the other anti-democratic stances of the Republicans has me convinced that if Republicans win in 2024, there isn't going to be another real election in the US. It'll either be so corrupt, abbreviated or "managed" that it's effectively Russia, or there will be an "emergency" that delays a national election indefinitely.
And then when we stop following the laws and the election is cancelled, we'll see if the second amendment actually matters.
2nd amendment won't matter unless a very specific thing happens: the entire government and executive branches, namely the military, collapses. It really depends on what the military does and enforces domestically. Whatever government the greater military props up wins and nothing individual citizens do can compete with that.
If everything collapses, famine will be the prime mover. And if you're not part of a roving band of armed looters or an entrenched armed community, you're screwed.
Cults of personality tend to die when the leader at the center goes away (by jail or death or something else). There are exceptions, but it's what tends to happen.
You can see this in the lackluster performance of down ballot candidates who get Trump endorsements. The cult wants Trump, the singular man. They don't turn out to put his lackeys into power. Some of them still win because they're in safe red districts, but they don't win as hard as they should.
It's a lesson Caesar's Legion in Fallout New Vegas taught us. A cult built around a charismatic leader often collapses into infighting when the leader dies. They follow the man, not his ideals. It may not happen right away, but it will given enough time. The followers will start to disagree on small things, some will be scooped up by some other charismatic grifter. In the end the movement fractures.
Not disagreeing with you necessarily, but I just love how you used a fictional example to learn from, which could be total bullshit since fiction is just that, made up.
The same thing happened with Alexander the Great.
Or we can look at a real world example. Scientology.
What? Which ones?
I'm actually drawing blanks. Perhaps it's survivorship bias but to me it seems like most cults of personality stick around if there's no force actively shutting them down, generally with violence.
Nazi germany, for example, didn't end because hitler died. It ended because the allies and the soviet union occupied germany for decades squelching any Nazi sentiment. Ditto for Japan with the Hirohito (who himself was in a long line of royals that still continues just with muted power). You can look at mormonism where the founder was killed by a mob, that's still very much alive. Or Scientology where the leader had a heart attack. Heck, even the moonies are still around.
Without a heavy societal push, cults of personality very often linger.
Oneida Cult. It dispersed almost immediately when the founder was arrested, and all that remains is the silverware manufacturer. Quite a few other examples in upstate New York in the 19th century, which was a very popular place to start weird new religious movements. There were tons of them, but you only hear about a handful that survived--Mormons, 7th Day Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses are about it.
Nazis did fight right up to the point where Hitler died. He was the one pushing them to fight until every man, woman, and child in Germany was dead. Hitler died on April 30, and the official surrender happened on May 2. Nobody was actually interested in continuing to let Germany burn.
So yes, it's a matter of survivorship bias. You know the counter examples because they stayed around, but they're exceptions.
They may linger, but they never have the power they used to. If they do, they have to rebuild from scratch, which is more or less what Trump does with white supremacists.
I guess this is what generally concerns me about trump. I don't think he'll be replaced while he's alive. However, the apparatus that made him a god amoung racists is still in place and hasn't substantially been changed since he left office.
What's frightening to me is it just takes the rightwing grifters to rally on another god king to ultimately start this problem anew. We have an entire "media" ecosystem that's now learned that fascism is actually kind of cool.
The only hope, it seems to me, is that his supporters tend to be old people that will end up dying around the same time he does.
I'll also say that I don't think the study of cults (or more accurately to the terminology of the field, high control organizations and the BITE model) are very well developed. They're focused on identifying them, and helping individuals leave and reacclimate to the larger society. There's very little research on how high control organizations end, why the cults of personality that survived in the long run managed to do so, or tactics that could be used to dissolve them on a greater scale.
Here's the thing, I'm not sure I'd totally classify Trumpism as a high control org. It certainly has aspects of it, but it probably more closely resembles the hippy movement of the 60s (from which many cults did spring). The only real core belief is how awesome trump is. Beyond that it's a bunch of fringe and frayed beliefs based whatever that individual might believe.
For example, I have black in-laws that are also trump supporters (yeah.. I know) who are convinced that Trump isn't racist AND that trump has this secret plan that would have made all black people fabulously wealthy, Had Joe biden not stolen the election. It was something that was always on the cusp of happening were it not for "the deep state".
I don't think this is a mainstream trump belief but I now have to wonder how many trumpist have these sorts of special whacky beliefs untethered from the reality of who trump is.
But then there's another phenomena that seems somewhat unique to trump which is, when he says something they do not like it's "He didn't say that. Oh, he did say that? Well he didn't mean that, it was just something he said for X reason". That is, they don't actually care about what Trump says or does, they care about what he represents. Trump can't really command his followers super effectively because half the time they are going to think he's "just being trump". This is also where it's scary because a number of his followers want violence and I don't think trump could stop them if they started down that path.
As a former Jehovah's Witness myself, I can see parallels here. There are often things believed by rank and file members that don't match up with what people at the top are saying.
For example, if you were to ask regular JWs what the doctrine says about the Big Bang theory, you would get an answer consistent with most fundamentalists Christians--that is, throwing it in the same bucket as evolution. However, I've also gone over the actual published material on the subject, and it's not actually obvious what the official stance is. Much of what has been written in official material is along the lines of "the Big Bang shows that science agrees that the universe has a beginning, just like Genesis says". It never quite comes right out and approves it, but it never strongly denies it, either. It's a major contrast from evolution, where the official stance is quite clear.
They seem to be fully aware that the rank and file think one thing, but the official doctrine in place is something else. I find that even many former members are surprised to learn this.
I bring this up to say that you might be seeing a similar thing among your relatives. There are all sorts of crazy Trump beliefs that derive from nothing the man has actually done or said. People will imprint their own thoughts and hopes into places where there is otherwise a vacuum of things the cult tells you to think.
Oh hey, I'm exmormon myself! Isn't it fun how these high demand religions drive you into researching what makes cults in the first place :D
We sort of have an analogy within mormonism though it's a bit different. For mormons, the issue is almost the opposite, rather than no ever having an official stance on things mormonism has had official stances on just about everything but then it's slowly walked them back and distanced itself from the wacky belief. However, that means that the rank and file still remember, hold onto, and retell things that the org itself would rather go away. For example, blacks and the priesthood. Mormons would much rather the doctrine and leaders weren't so explicit about the "curse of Cain".
Similarly, mormonism has gone everywhere from denying evolution to even denying astronomy (They used to literally believe that the sun was Heaven, the moon lesser heaven, and the stars even lesser heaven). That's actually why mormons were some of the first moon landing conspiracy theorists.
We do have some off track beliefs with little to no teachings, but mormons are a lot quicker to try and tamp down and eliminate those. For example, heavenly mother.
The end result is you do still have people teaching weird non-doctrinal (or previously doctrinal) while the church tries to back away and kill them off.
I know this is a bit of a sidetrack, but are you still in contact with anyone that's a JW and are they all Trumpers? Trumpism took mormons by storm, they are some of the most dedicated adherents to it. I'm wondering if the same thing happened with other high demand religions.
I don't have any particular contact with JWs. My impression is that the rules against contacting ex members among the Latter Day Saints is much weaker than JWs, who have a strong prohibition against it.
That said, JWs in general are supposed to be politically neutral, which means not voting and not explicitly taking sides. Now, during my time in, I heard plenty of people express opinions that would tend to land one direction or another, and I had similar opinions myself. Most of the ones I heard actually tended more towards the Democratic party than Republicans, but that might be because I grew up in a city and people absorb the opinions of other people around them.
Most ex JWs go either towards Democrats or much further to the left.
Latter-day Saints have absolutely no prohibition against interacting with former members of the Church. Unfortunately, many former members leave under difficult circumstances and distance themselves from their friends who remain in the Church. We would love nothing more than to stay in contact with them and still be friends.
Many former mormons, like myself, are distanced by their "friends" as soon as they leave. It's a two way street and all the responsibility isn't on a single party.
Often times that "friendship" is contingent on church attendance and belief.
Have you ever asked a former member why they left? What did they say?
I helped a person rejoin the Church when I was a missionary. It was obviously not a representative experience, but he had left at a time in his life when he was angry at members of his ward for not supporting him the way he felt he should have been supported. At the time it seemed he had felt a bit more entitled to special attention than was reasonable (keeping in mind the Church has a lay ministry and we're all just regular people with regular lives outside of church), and he had also tried to have an affair with someone's wife, IIRC. He had requested his records to be withdrawn because he wanted members to stop contacting him. He was a lot different when I met him than when he left the Church, and had a lot of rough life experiences that emphasized the value it brought to his life.
I have not had any close friends or family leave the Church, so I haven't had any opportunities to actually have a discussion about it with anyone else other than online. Those online interactions have been mostly hate-filled and vitriolic by the former members.
Like most members of the Church, where I live I am a religious minority. It's far more common for people to ask me questions about my faith than for me to interact with former members.
Consider why you made the statement that former members distance themselves and that church members just want to be friends. You haven't actually experienced or seen that right? So what made you assume that is what is going on?
One of the more difficult parts about being a former member is the assumptions about why we left. Obviously, everyone is unique, but rarely have I heard an active member actually say the reasons I've most heard from my family and friends and online that have left.
It would be a bit like me spouting off the lies from an evangelical anti-mormon tract as if they were fact.
To be clear, I really do appreciate that you are being open and honest here. I'm not trying to be a dick or to deconvert you. I'm mostly just pushing for understanding of people that have different views from you. After all, to the root of this conversation and why I'm so against trump, it's that the politics he represents is ultimately that of intolerance. The best way to fight intolerance is to foster understanding.
Your impression is correct. I knew it was bad for exJW but hoping it wasn't still pretty universally bad.
Sorry to hear you had to go through that. I can't imagine how big of a mindfuck that would be coupled with the mindfuck of "everything I was taught was a lie". Just the latter was one of the worst experience of my life.
I hope you are in a much better place now.
Thanks! It's been over a decade now and I have new friends.
Plenty of us despise him, though, and one of the highest leaders of the Church has donated to the Democratic party in the past.
Oh wow, I need to update my mental facts here.
https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/trumps-problem-with-mormon-voters-is-getting-worse/
Early demographics for Mormons was something like 70% approval which had them as one of the most trumpy demographics. However, it looks like that approval has taken a significant nose dive. With a majority now disfavoring him.
If I can ask. Did you previously support Trump? If so, what changed to make you despise him? Also, in the up coming election what are you planning on doing (assuming both Biden and Trump are the nominees, which seems obvious at this point).
I have known anti trump Mormons, but my understanding is they were the minority (apparently not).
I have never supported Trump. I was serving my mission in 2016 when he was elected and I couldn't find a polling place to vote, and I sort of had a favorable impression of him at first just because my family are big Trump supporters. However, many of his policies and his hateful rhetoric are impossible to square with my religious beliefs, which I consider to be mostly centrist. I think most Latter-day Saints are in a similar boat. We are serious about our religion and aren't going to support a political leader who goes against many of our most deeply-held moral doctrines.
The most important thing we believe are the commandments given by Jesus Christ in Matthew 22:36-40. These are summarized as "love God with all your being" and "love everyone around you as well as you love yourself". I can't see how it could be possible to support Trump and sincerely believe in those commandments at the same time.
For me, however, the final straw was when Trump started speculating on live television about injecting light into people to fight the Covid virus. It was utter loony talk and I was completely disgusted. January 6th didn't surprise me at all (Trump was laying the groundwork for it a year in advance) and at that point I almost registered as a Democrat. Now that Trump has taken control of the Republican party I'm definitely registering as a Democrat before November.
It's not hard to see. Trump courts christian nationalism pretty heavily and that allows a lot of religious people to overlook his foibles. Sort of a "Who cares if he's immoral, he'll let us have bible reading class in school".
Scientology is a religion, was always meant to be a religion. Trump isn't going down that angle. Ironically, he's too much of a narcissist to have the self inflection enough to become a religious leader.
With something like Trump, who else in the party is going to take up the banner? DeSantis? He got completely fucking disgraced this last year attempting that. Haley? She's a sociopath and nobody really likes her on either side. Trumps children? They're about as charismatic as a wet sock.
He has no legacy. He's it. It's the weakpoint of serial narcissists. Their empire collapses when they do, because they're too insanely jealous to share any secrets or power with anyone else.
Can't stop the power sharing once you are dead.
I've no clue who 2.0 will be. Could be someone not on the stage at the moment, could be someone like Jim Jordan or Matt Gaetz. There's lots of options to be sorted out after Trump dies.
I view it sort of like the situation with the major rightwing propagandists. When Rush Limbaugh died, that wasn't the end of rightwing propaganda, there were already new shitheads in the rafters like Tucker Carlson that'd eaten up the space.
With Tucker off the air, there's now Jessie Waters (or whatever) doing his part. Before that there was bill oriely.
Trump might not be setting up a dynasty but that's not really what I'm concerned about, I'm concerned about him setting up fascism that's willing to glom onto the next leader like it glomed on to him.
This is asking a lot imo. You’re asking everyone to be vigilant and I think the last 10 years have proven that a significant proportion of the voter population cannot be relied on to be vigilant, because they’re content in being myopic.
That seems to be the weak point of a republic. I just watched a video essay on YouTube about the politics of Star Wars and how the Republic fell to the Empire and I think the guy made a lot of good points and it included a call to action in our elections. I think Star Wars is known to have taken from the fall of the Roman Republic and there’s more recent examples of the death of a democracy in the Weimar Republic in Germany.
With the two real life examples, all it took was a prolonged period of decay (from inside and outside factors) to lead to the Roman Autocratic Empire and Nazi Germany. I’d argue the US was on this relative path before with the America First party that rose to oppose FDR in the 1930’s. All it may take is another bad world event to push people into being content with a populist autocrat like Trump.
I’m still hopeful, but we should all take the lessons of the past into account when deciding how to move forward.
Not to mention that the resistance is immensely fractured. I'm still not sure that we've seen an event heinous enough to galvanize the opposition past ideological boundaries. For many, stopping Trump is not yet enough to delay their potential political gains. Populism rides on the strongest human emotions, the easiest and vaguest enemies, and the simplest (wrong) answers. It's going to take a united effort, the sort that was brought about by the geopolitical situation in the FDR era, or I worry that we fail.
The "resistance" is clustering themselves into smaller and smaller areas and because of our shitty representative apportionment they lose political power when moving to populated places.
If we want to fix this we need to convince people that the amenities in cities aren't going to survive when the federal government mainly represents empty land and thinks those amenities are from Satan.
I'm not exactly going to fault persecuted people for fleeing their homes. It's not always about "amenities" as much as it is safety and belonging. I'm not against the idea that this dilutes our political power in our system, but I'm also not sure that it's the front I'm going to choose to fight on.
Absolutely. There are definitely people who need to leave in order to be safe.
But when I talk to people who don’t have that problem about living in flyover country their first response is “There’s nothing to do out there.”
Guess this one just hit close to home since I am one of the aforementioned runners. I do think that if someone is in the position to be able to contribute their vote in an area where it will make more impact, they should do so. I guess I just also understand not wanting to dictate so much of your life for a minor bump in a political cause, imperative as it might be. It's a hard situation all around.
TBF, the only thing that matters is if he lives another 4 years. 8 if he loses this election.
The implication is that if Trump wins, he won't be leaving in 4 years. He won't be leaving until death. Because that's what dictators do.
But doesn't that just mean they will go back to not saying the quiet part out loud? Doubt they will actually change and have someone decent as a candidate anytime soon.
Exactly. Conservatives do not change. They just change how loud they are about their bigotry.