Mad King disease

I remember Jonestown. I was shopping in a San Francisco thrift store in November 1978 when the news came over the store radio that hundreds of members of Jim Jones' weird cult had "drunk the koolaid" and, along with Jones, were dead in a Guyana jungle. So was a Congressman who had gone to investigate what was happening to his constituents. Staff and journalists had also been shot.

Jim Jones' followers, mostly older Black citizens, had been a visible presence in San Francisco. He'd bus them in to demonstrations for cheaper housing. The white hippies who made up the rest of the crowd were both welcoming and bemused at this addition to their numbers; then off the People's Temple folks would go, usually insulated from much interaction with rest of us. Jones' ability to deliver a crowd gave him a local political potency. Eventually Jones led his followers off to remote South America, and, in his madness, murdered them.

That's the sort of thing that can happen when a cult takes hold of a mass of people. We should be warned. 

Paul Waldman believes it is appropriate to think of MAGA as a cult. That resonates with me. And Waldman expects more madness all the way through the midterm elections.

When the cult goes bad

In cults like Jonestown, the leader’s own descent into madness pulls everyone down with him, and that’s pretty much what’s happening now. There may not be any way to avert a midterm blowout [written before the Supremes allowed Southern states to resegregate their elections mitigating the likely blowout], but a different president would at least be promoting policies that weren’t so directly and dramatically damaging to his party’s political fortunes. He wouldn’t be knocking down buildings and talking constantly about his ballroom, and he wouldn’t have started a war like the one we’re in and telling people that they just have to suck it up and tolerate $5 a gallon gas because things will magically get better.

But now you have two factors that together are dooming the party. First, Trump is basically decompensating; whatever ability he once had to attract and persuade people has withered away, and all that’s left are the most unappealing parts of his personality. He is gaining no new adherents; instead, he’s losing support among the electorate every day.

Second, he built the current incarnation of the GOP around absolute loyalty to him, enforced through the kind of petty revenge he’s still trying to carry out. With just a couple of exceptions (e.g. Rep. Thomas Massie, whom Trump is trying very hard to defeat), Republicans all decided that they would not only support him unequivocally but engage in regular rituals of public fealty, the result of which is that their own identities were subsumed and voters who are mad at Trump can reasonably take out that anger at anyone with an R after their name.

Put it together, and every Republican on the ballot is little more than an appendage of a mad king who grows more unstable by the day. ...

It's up to the rest of us -- we're the majority -- to work every way we can to enforce that we've had enough of the cult of the Mad King. And at the same time, to seek to break the spell holding so many voters in the cult.