Post-match: The Post Presidency :: Trump Faces The Music Thread

A cult develops into a container for a certain amount of power. The head of it dies. Someone else takes over and either takes it in the same direction-- the Kims-- or in a different one--Stalin. It is still the same cult, at least for the purposes of this discussion IMO-- just under new ownership. The amassed power can be pointed any direction precisely because it is a cult. And so the Roman Catholic church can get from driving the moneylenders from the temple to selling indulgences in a few easy steps without anyone noticing the change, and Leninism become Stalinism fairly seamlessly, and Brigham Young turn the cult's energies to the creation of Deseret...

I'm no Turkey expert either but this much I think is inarguable: the Ottomans were an empire with primogeniture succession; only over and over if the first born lacked imperial drive or interest the most ruthless and talented in the bloodline, be he sibling or cousin would overturn the "weakling" and take charge. It became an honored tradition of government and produced many centuries of talented if ruthless government. Not sure if it was 9 generations or 12 or 13 but it was a great long time before the slide downhill to "the sick man of Europe" status began with, IIRC, Sulieman the Sot.

 

He said two things.

One is that cults rarely die with their leaders. I don’t think that’s true and provided examples. If it’s “rare,” prove it.

He also said that “sometimes” they get larger. What are the examples of that? I’m sure we can find an anomaly here or there, but “sometimes” is a word that has a meaning in English, and that meaning is not “I can find some rare exceptions via Google.”

I mean, there’s Jesus as a counter example, but a) that goes back 2000 years plus b) there were like a dozen guys like Jesus at that time and place and Jesus is the only one whose cult grew.

 

Here’s one that might fit…John Birch. My understanding is that a cult was created around him, not that he had a cult that grew after his death, but I figure @taosjohn can break that down better than Wikipedia. I don’t think that fits but it might.

 

From what I'm seeing on BigSoccer, Joe Paterno.

 

John Birch was the first American killed in the Korean conflict.

Anti-Communist nutters organized by the Welch brothers of grapejuice fame-- or prominence-- organized a society around the notion that this made him an American Horst Wessel. But they neglected to write a song, and didn't sweep liberal America away, so George Welch went on to head the American Nazi Party, and become the model for a Vonnegut character.

Birchers are and were distinctly cultlike and a pain in the ass, but never were, I think, of sufficient consequence for their line of succession to mean much...

John Birch of course never knew about the society and AFAIK never endorsed its concerns or expressed any politics of his own. He was just an All-American boy who got in the way of a bullet.

 

I had a Bircher teaching my 9th grade civics class. In retrospect, I'm seriously grateful for that because now I have grounds for being skeptical about people who argue that teachers are super-duper influential on students' political opinions.

 

So what?

The ones that grow become facts of life and no one is comfortable considering them cults-- Catholics, Mormons, Islam, Bahai, the Janissaries, Millerites, Know Nothings, Copperheads-- there's one born every minute, and like sea turtles, the ones the gulls don't get are fewish but apt to prosper.

 

The thing about a wife is that almost all wives need one...

 

The Copperheads were a cult with a leader, and didn’t die when the leader died?

Agree to disagree. That’s way too broad of a definition for my tastes. I think a category that includes both the Copperheads and the Branch Davidians, both the Ottoman Empire and the People’s Temple, isn’t useful for analyzing anything. Way too many differences and not enough similarities for my taste.

 

Weren't the early Catholics definitionally a cult that, over the centuries grew into something else? Didn't they start as an extreme Jewish sect (or cult) until they broke off and became Christians? I could be wrong as my understanding of that period is minimal.

 

Here’s a more accurate depiction

 

Arguably, yes. Fortunately we don’t have a lot of written records for that period outside of Paul, and he was not part of the Jerusalem church. So we don’t really know.

But if we’re talking about what’s likely to happen post Trump, again, there were literally double digits worth of these guys in roughly that time and place, but nobody worships them because their cults didn’t live on after them. I think it wasReza Aslan’s “Zealot” that discusses those men at some length. So in the context of Trump, you’d bet on him being one of the other 10+ potential messiahs, you wouldn’t bet on him being Jesus.

 

And the guy that invented and monopolized making these:

 

Trump isn't a cult leader. He's a cult of personality. Like Mussolini and Kennedy.

 

They'll tell you one and one makes threeee

 

I exploit you, still you love me

 

You mean Marshall Applewhite's group, "Heaven's Gate"?

How do you know they aren't actually on the Hale-Bopp comet right now?

 

Those tabs are handy for putting them on the lead edge of a roll of tape.

 

They will evolve, just as the Tea Party evolved.

 

Well, he's right on one of those things: Nobody knows more about debt than him, based on first-hand experience