Surviving the cult of Trump

Please forgive the essay-length indulgence. Sometimes the mind just needs a vomit.

Finding it difficult this week to process another Trump presidency. To the extent that it makes me sympathetic, and not for the first time, of those who sell-up and disappear off-grid, to be alone with their guns and, or so I like to think, herd of fainting goats. Better that than having to somehow wriggle my way through the Shawshankian excremental nightmare that will be Trump 2.0. It’s had me thinking, too, about the power of denial and how this, when paired with the comforting embrace of wilful self-delusion, may help explain the current state of madness. But first, a little cultural theory razzle dazzle.

In their trippy, sometimes accessible, mostly bewildering book Anti-Oedipus, master confusionists Deleuze and Guattari ask: why do some people choose fascism, and more specifically, ‘how could the masses be made to desire their own repression?’ It’s a question both old and inescapably contemporary, and clearly of interest to those seeking to manipulate others into handing over their brains. It’s especially pertinent when one considers how easily we seem to be ticking-off symptoms, like someone playing the world’s least enjoyable game of bingo. The point being made in Anti-Oedipus, when you finally discover it, is that fascism does not seduce with cruelty alone; it flatters, it soothes, it tells people exactly what they want to hear. It soothes by offering simple, often violent, explanations to complex problems. It’s covert AND overt in this regard, and promises an end to fear in exchange for obedient dependence. In short, it is not simply imposed from the outside; it is also desired, sought.

A few years back and for reasons that escape me now, I read Madeleine Albright’s book ‘Fascism’ on, well, fascism. It opens with a warning: every generation must reckon with its own version of fascism, the suggestion being that the impulse to fascism it is etched into our collective DNA. Not some distant, isolated aberration but something latent, embryonic, waiting for the right (or wrong) conditions to flourish, like a cicada, only fascist. Freud might have called it Thanatos, the death drive—the impulse to self-destruction, at times vicious and self-loathing, that rises out of our fears to be weaned on the insecurity and hyperawareness of our own startling precarity. I think about this often. Too often. We know, for instance, what the fascism of the 1930s/40s looks like, but would we recognise it today so easily if it showed up in a designer t-shirt with TV star swagger preaching retribution and the prosperity gospel? I ask because…

And yet, I’m told it’s a bit uncouth, a bit “basic” to squawk about fascism, even as the world’s richest, neediest man openly courts out-and-out fascists across Europe while Trump busies himself pardoning Nazi cosplay sovereign citizen-types, The Proud Boys. Usually when I hear someone allude to fascism, I tend think of Rik Mayall’s alter ego “Rick” from The Young Ones, forever bleating on about Thatcher and the ‘fascist Tory bastards,” but it’s easy to forget that beneath this sadly dated satire there is a serious point being made. Fascism doesn’t always show up in Jackboots – and when it does it’s already well past too late - so we must guard against the casualisation, the normalisation of destructive thinking and the fuckwits who champion this poison as a brave new frontier.

Hannah Arendt tells us fascism thrives where atomised individuals collide with mass movements, where people feel powerless and adrift, trapped in crises too vast to comprehend. In those moments they reach for simple answers, someone to blame, and a totemic figure of power in which to place their faith. Its visible signs—the grotesque nationalism, the suppression of dissent, the violent exercise of state power—are only the surface phenomena. Beneath, the psychological and social conditions are what matter. Adorno and the Frankfurt School, which I’m told had nothing to do with the production of the famous sausages that bear its name, diagnosed the pathology decades ago: propaganda isn’t just information, it’s an atmosphere, a constant, low-level war against reality itself. Crank up the volume and suddenly we’re in fascism’s uncanny embrace. Does the rhetoric of palingenesis—the promise of national rebirth, of lost greatness restored—sound familiar? The moral panics, the historical revisionism, the frantic, all-encompassing nostalgia—these aren’t just incidental; they’re the mechanism itself, and it’s on every channel.

And then there’s the denial. The desperate, almost childlike desire to believe that nothing is really wrong. That the world isn’t irreversibly broken, that the systems of power haven’t already been coopted and retooled to more effectively empower the already powerful. In light of this, Deleuze and Guattari’s question could be reframed as: why do people choose delusion? Why so eagerly hand over control of their rational minds to an alliance of tech billionaires, conspiracy grifters, and senile attention seeking reactionaries? The answer, I suspect, lies in the sheer horror of the alternative. Better the comforting simplicity of a lie than the excruciating complexity of the truth.

Thanks to some idle YouTube rabbit-holing, I recently heard this framed differently and in a different context: why do people join cults, even when they know better? One example is South Park’s ‘Trapped in the Closet’ episode from 2005, which joyously lampoons the Church of Scientology and its celebrity enablers. What I didn’t know was that in the immediate aftermath of the episode, amidst all the threats and litigation, the church actually gained as well as losing followers. Presumably - and incredibly – there were people who watched the episode, one that left zero doubt about the dubious and deeply unethical practices of Scientology, and decided that this was the cult for them. Sign me up they said. Amongst the possible explanations for this flagrant act of self-harm is that they chose to hand-over the reins of rationality for reasons of self-preservation. Regressive dependency was something they craved, needed.

In ‘Waking Up,’ Sam Harris recounts a conversation with a cult survivor who describes the appeal of returning, or more accurately regressing to something close to a child-like state of dependency. According to the survivor, one of their primary motivators in joining was a conscious or at least semi/sub-conscious desire to exist in a state of being where all important decisions were made for them, and where their time was almost entirely occupied in practicing devotional obedience and pursuing spiritual enlightenment. There was little remaining headspace to consider the wider ramifications of their actions, just noise, constant noise, and a strange sense of liberation. Those in a state of crisis are even more likely to seek out respite from a world that has left them damaged and vulnerable, and if there is the promise of an additional spiritual reward I can’t say for sure I’d act any differently.

Once inside, followers are typically instructed to cut ties with the outside world, most of all family and friends, those who might go to extraordinary lengths to extricate loved ones. Followers are also instructed to treat any criticism as an attack, to embrace totalising belief. It’s a surrender that masquerades as empowerment, and a trade that requires a person to abandon personal agency in exchange for the promise, the huckster’s promise, that all confusion will be swept away, that everything will, in the end, make sense, so long as you make the commitment.

One conclusion is that to actively seek unquestioning dependency there must be some form of wilful underlying regression feeding this desire for a sheltered, simplified existence as antidote to the helter-skelter of modern life. And it’s easy to see why this logic might apply to our present political moment. The evangelical Trump-Reform-QAnon-Musk etc nexus functions, or at least mimics the function like a cult: the same us-versus-them binary, the same gnostic promise of hidden truths, the same demand for unwavering faith. And like a cult, it demands an act of surrender that feels like empowerment because only the anointed have access to the truth, the secret knowledge, that will enlighten them. This remains the case even when what you’re being told doesn’t make complete sense, since the imperative is always to stick with the programme, to have faith, the answers are coming, and if all else fails, trust in your leader.

Not every Trump support is the kind of squirrely conspiracy nutcase we see on the TV, but I think we need to consider this a continuum, where the through-line is a retreat into denial. I suspect this helps to at least partially explain why people, seemingly wholesome folks, find themselves in thrall to these latest incantations – our generation’s version - of fascism. Do they, like those poor Scientology souls, believe that only by swearing allegiance to Trump and his acolytes will they be returned to a state of comfortable, unworried dependency, the nostalgic world of yesteryear when life was so much rosier, so much, well, whiter? It’s hard not to see the ugly supremacist side of the coin in these encounters with steroid nationalism, especially when race is so frequently apportioned blame for the nation’s ills, and where white men are recast as the true victims. Trump actually said that. But of course he did.

This made me think of Cypher from The Matrix and how, when faced with the terrible, unbearable grimness of The Real, he makes a deal with Agent Smith to be re-inserted into the Matrix. “I don’t want to remember a thing,” he insists, choosing instead total amnesia, total regression. Sitting in the glittering simulation of a Michelin Star restaurant forking filet mignon into his mouth he says, ‘I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realise? Ignorance is bliss.’ Could it be that we find ourselves at a similar decision point, one where such is the extent of our collective anxiety that many are being drawn ever deeper into comforting fictions at the expense of the social responsibility that we owe each other?

One word I hear a lot these days is ‘disengagement,’ and I wonder now if this is part of a pathology of something altogether more troubling than post-pandemic blues. The obvious point is that this is an aspect of disillusionment and the atomisation that Arendt writes about.

And the crises keep mounting don’t they. The collapsing ecosphere. The erosion of democracy. The grotesque inequality. The absurdity of yet another Fast & Furious sequel and loss of David Lynch. And so people choose the comforting lie, that climate change is a hoax, and that their enemies are not the billionaires and faceless corporations strip-mining the planet, but the vaguely defined ‘woke’ elite, the people drowning in small boats, the differently abled, the trans community, the school teachers, those asking for equal pay, or access to union or healthcare, or simply control over their own body reproductive rights. Against a backdrop unceasing crisis it’s easy to understand the appeal of wanting to go back, to regress to a state of blissful, ignorant dependency. Understandable, but unacceptable.

To give just one personal example, the climate crisis scares the absolute shit out of me, and not just in terms of what it represents, but the sense of crushing inevitability arising from our manifest inability to even acknowledge that it exists. Preferable, perhaps, to live in a world where such devastating truths are the product of conspiracies and the secret machinations of the wokerati. More comforting to live in a world where rather than looking for alternatives to fossil fuels we simply “drill baby drill!” It’s frankly suicidal – a suicidal impulse that can only arise from profound delusion or a kind of extremely resilient defensive ignorance.

Cypher would agree, I’m sure, but then millions of people can’t simply be caught in the impulse of wanting to believe in Santa for one more year, can they, committed to resisting the challenges of maturity rather than accepting a changing world? Maybe, maybe not. But there is something to be said about the conspicuous immaturity of our current politics, that and its depressing effectiveness in enabling people to vote against their own common self-interest. What I perhaps didn’t appreciate was how much of this process has been a conscious one, and one that Trump and the billionaire opportunists are all too happy to exploit.

I do know that every time I hear a news anchor introduce a Flat Earther or cuts to the Q-Anon Shaman for comment I want to flee to the Cairngorms to restart my life as a tree. As such, I think my regressive impulse is to want to self-isolate and withdraw, to stopper my eyes and ears. But you can’t look away. Not really. It’s basically your civic duty to keep poking at the bin fire. At the same time, it’s also revealing how Trumpism has presented itself this time in the literal, unadorned language of retribution. It really is Fascism for Dummies, with Trump presenting himself as a vengeful saviour, which seems to me the personification of a fascist authoritarian. Download the App and Unleash the Avenging Trump for he will scour the earth of your imagined enemies.

It’s sometimes said of the American literary canon that the conman is a beloved and timeless archetype. A trickster with cartoon dollar signs spinning in his eyes, but most of all a survivor, hustling their way through another day. What’s on sale out the back of the wagon is always something you desire that exists – just barely - on the periphery of credibility and yet has sufficient plausibility to make you step out of the crowd to place a bet with the card shark or invest in some Trump crypto. What’s on offer is wishful thinking, bottled, and while you’re busy picturing how much your life will be transformed as a result of your hasty purchase, your pocket has been expertly picked.

What’s changed is that the more emboldened his exponents become the less guarded they are in outwardly stating their intent. There is a giddy, Black Friday hysteria to way his vengeful executive orders are being celebrated. More broadly, the behaviour we’re witnessing is so flagrantly and playfully anti-democratic it’s as though they are testing the limits of public tolerance to see just how far they can go without consequence, which turns out to be a depressingly long way, and the limit has not been reached. As Trump offers up another of his executive order sacrificial lambs you can see the sadistic wave of self-satisfaction rippling through the hardcore of his corporate cabinet picks, knowing that they’ve pulled-off one hell of a con, and one where it is the public themselves that are eagerly clearing the path ahead for their own exploitation.

All of which is a very long-winded way of saying that whether or not it was a Nazi salute is beside the point. Rather it is that Musk and Trump and these would-be masters of destruction have become so comfortable saying the quiet part out loud, that for many watching at home the wave/salute merely confirmed what was already known. And in that eerily quiet moment of ambiguous uncertainty another inch is stolen, another mile.

Maybe we need a new vocabularly, because used to be that calling someone out as a fascist was bad for business. Now they're using it as a punchline, an in-joke, a badge of honour.