After a fifteen-year sabbatical living in the woods, I returned to my hometown. A local sports bar and pool hall became my regular social spot, several days a week. The experience there has turned into the most fascinating sociological observation of my life — watching a political cult operate up close is illuminating and unsettling in equal measure.
I often describe it as the best entertainment in town, even as it sits alongside genuinely disturbing racism, closed-mindedness, and the well-documented patterns of cult behavior. This is contemporary America.
What strikes me most is the gap between how these people behave locally and what they say when discussing their worldview. With few exceptions, they're fine examples of what America promises — responsible, hard-working, and respectful to the people around them. They are not stupid or evil. But the moment the conversation turns to politics, the thoughtfulness gives way to a narrower, more hostile framing that looks a lot like cult thinking.
One particularly interesting feature: this group is often aware of real problems but consistently proposes the wrong solution. They understand, correctly, that both parties' representatives are bought and sold by big money — yet they enthusiastically support a billionaire president surrounded by billionaire allies who benefit directly from that same corruption.
To be clear about terminology: "cult" here refers to a cult of personality — the Stalinist or Maoist variety — not a Jim Jones or Heaven's Gate-style cult.
What follows are observations drawn from roughly four years of watching this dynamic up close.
Cult leadership cites GDP and stock-market figures as proof of success. Followers generally have no understanding of what those figures actually measure. The economy looks strong because of spending by the very wealthy and enormous investment in AI and data centers — investment with little intrinsic value for most people's daily lives. Everyone else is left to absorb the difference.
The word gets thrown around constantly, almost always pinned on the opposing party, with no real look at the historical pattern — postwar peaks, oil-embargo peaks, the Covid-era peak — that would put any single number in context.
Fear of "the other" is a classic tool of cult-of-personality leadership. Followers rarely stop to consider that, in their own daily lives, immigrants cause them no more inconvenience than anyone else — including other members of their own community. The fear itself is the point; supplying it is the leader's job.
Education is typically an early target of authoritarian movements, since an under-informed population is easier to lead. The administration has placed the Education Department under a former MMA executive with no relevant background, and research institutions have had funding withheld at the administration's direction. For followers, deferring to the leader is simply easier than independent thought.
Many in this group use words like "liberal," "socialist," and "Marxist" without a clear sense of what they mean. Productive public debate requires a shared definition of terms — and a real liberal education trains people to interrogate exactly those kinds of claims rather than accept them on faith.
I've heard the phrase "I won't change your mind, you won't change mine" used, unironically, as if it were a virtue rather than a description of closed-mindedness itself.
"The Biden crime family" is a common refrain. It's true that Hunter Biden used his father's position to enrich himself by a few million dollars. What gets ignored is the scale of the Trump family's financial entanglements — crypto ventures and related schemes funneling far larger, far less traceable sums into the family's orbit. There is no real equivalence between the two.
The cult of a charismatic leader is, historically, a reliable precursor to oppression. A few sources worth reading on how this pattern has played out elsewhere, and how it's understood academically: