Morning, everyone! Anand here.
You know, traditional political analysis is only so useful in understanding Trumpism — and furnishing tools to protect against it. That is because what we are living through is a phenomenon as much psychological as political. The insights about how to make sense of it and thwart it and transcend it sometimes come from unexpected places, therefore.
If what we’re living through is an abusive relationship with a narcissist-in-chief, ideas about how to survive might come from people who study such things at the intimate scale. If the MAGA movement that upholds Trump is more of a cult than a typical movement, we may need to learn from people who study cults.
That’s why we have been bringing you some non-traditional sources of analysis in recent months and weeks, and we do so again today. You’re not going to want to miss this insightful, lesson-packed, and, we hope, useful conversation with Alexandra Stein, a social psychologist, about how the MAGA cult works, what its vulnerabilities are, and six very practical things you can do right now to survive and resist.—AG
Senator Chris Murphy has identified something about today’s Republican Party that few have been able to name so clearly:
Republicans are rubber-stamping every nominee because they are in a cult. Trump is testing them, and to a person, they are all falling in line. Every one of them has made the choice to let everything proceed as normal. In a cult, you do whatever the leader tells you to do — even when it’s ridiculous, dangerous or risks harm to your own family.
Even if we haven’t joined the cult, we’re the family that now has to suffer the harms of this administration’s rampaging policies.
Psychologist Daniel Shaw talked to us just last week about how Trump has used the same tactics as narcissists do in abusive relationships to build power, and in the past psychiatrists like Robert Jay Lifton and philosophers and political theorists such as Erich Fromm and Hannah Arendt have pointed out the similarities between cult behavior, abusive relationships with narcissists, and life under totalitarianism.
Cult leaders and totalitarian rulers — with the answers, charming and ruthless — not only create chaos and fear but also cause dissociation in their followers, breaking their grip on reality and creating a world where only they have the answers, further bonding their followers to them — even entire societies. As Arendt wrote:
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
Social psychologist Alexandra Stein, the author of Terror, Love, and Brainwashing, which examines the way attachment theory — the study of how people build emotional bonds — can illuminate how cults and authoritarian societies work, has spent decades studying how charismatic leaders have manipulated the deep-seated ways people build emotional attachments to control and exploit them — and how their victims have been able to break free.
Stein, who like Shaw was herself a cult member (she detailed the experience in her first book, Inside Out), has worked since on techniques to resist cult recruitment and indoctrination. She has even addressed the issue of MAGA as a cult before, and gave written testimony to the House January 6th Committee, detailing the cultic tactics of the Trump movement and associated groups such as the Proud Boys.
Nastaran Tavakoli-Far talked to Stein to get her insight into the techniques being used by Trump and Musk to consolidate power, and to get some practical advice on how to approach this moment, how to talk to family and friends who have embraced MAGA, and what we can do, now, to protect ourselves and to combat the Trump administration’s chaotic transformation of American life.
Among the ideas in the interview below the fold:
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Fight, fight, fight. Do not negotiate with them
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Gather in real life
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Stay connected to yourself
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Stay connected to each other, preferably in real life
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Stay connected to MAGA people you know
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Speak up, make a stand, inspire others, and repeat
Stein’s message echoes Daniel Shaw’s and recalls the advice political strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio shared with us — and it all has to do with getting back to the very basics of building community: working against the alienation and isolation of capitalist culture, making connections, and learning to speak up — and to one another.
What are you thinking about regarding what’s going on right…
Read More: How to break MAGA’s emotional bonds