Trumpism: “an all-encompassing belief system, extreme devotion to the leader, reluctance to acknowledge criticism of the group or its leader, and a disdain for nonmembers.” Actually, that’s four key features of any cult, it just also applies to Trumpism. newrepublic.com/article/152638…
One thing this article doesn’t hammer as hard as it should is Festinger’s observation in WHEN PROPHECY FAILS that empirical refutation in the face even of a failed specific prediction is not enough to break people from a cult.
Instead, they have to have a sympathetic support group that can help them get past their having been a cult — which, one can only imagine, is a psychologically excruciating thing to have to cop to.
So what does that mean politically, in a situation where 25-35% of the country is effectively enrolled in a kind of cult? It implies that what is needed is a deeply sympathetic rather than mocking approach to their situation, to help them get over it.
“The problem for the modern left is that none of this is emotionally satisfying [and] also rings as profoundly unfair. Why would a group hat still enjoys the momentum of historic privilege be handheld through an era of demographic change?” 
And the only response to that is one I have offered here many times: the hardest and most unfair part of any authentic liberation struggle is that one is obligated not just to liberate oneself, but also to liberate one’s oppressor.
Absent that commitment to liberate one’s oppressor, the best possible (but also quite unlikely) result will simply be to replace one order of oppression with another — and that is no moral progress at all.
