How the GOP Turned Into a Cult
Just a few years ago, name-brand conservative thinkers were worrying about America’s shortage of righteous lunatics
The storming of the Capitol, which we just rewatched as part of the evidence in the impeachment trial, was carried out by members of the cult led by Donald Trump — that is, the confederacy of cults (MAGA, QAnon, Proud Boys, Christian sects, etc.) that he assembled and leads. But cultish craziness on the right was enabled and encouraged for years by the respectable rational suit-and-tie elite fronting the Republican Party, who last week acquitted him and thus fundamentally excused the attack.
“If more and more of a political party’s members hold more and more extravagantly supernatural beliefs,” I wrote five years ago in my book Fantasyland, about the religious and crypto-religious madness coursing through American culture, “doesn’t it make sense that the party will be more and more open to make-believe in its politics and policy?” As a “far-right counterculture empowered its millions of followers and took over the American right,” I wrote, the Republicans, already America’s explicitly Christian party, “during the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century, the GOP turned into the Fantasy Party.”
