A lot, maybe most, of Bernie supporters are entitled, privileged white assholes. The Venn diagram of incels, Gamergate fucks, trust fund babies, richie-rich “revolutionaries,” and upper middle class people who are mad that they have to pay their student loans back probably looks like a Spirograph drawing inside a big circle. (The big circle is people who are 100% giant assholes online.)
But I know there are other Bernie supporters. And though many of them also act like assholes online and sometimes in real life, they are not so privileged. They have real struggles, and the past several years have taken a real toll on them. There are also a few who maybe aren’t those people but feel for them.
So it isn’t surprising that a man like Bernie Sanders was able to come in and scoop those people up. Because that’s what a conman does. He runs cons on vulnerable marks. Only, in 2016, Bernie parlayed a modestly rewarding con into a hugely rewarding cult.
First let me say this: I know a little bit about cults. I was raised in a religious cult. Met my first husband in the cult. And even when I broke free of the cult mentally, I still felt trapped there by my circumstances.
Because of my background, I recognize a cult when I see one. And Bernerism is a cult. You may find that offensive or ridiculous. When I was PIMI (physically in, mentally in), I also found the notion that I was in a cult offensive and ridiculous. That’s just part of how it works.
The Cult Setup
Let me tell you a little bit about how a cult happens. First, the cult leader has to set up a system that has all the answers. This can be religious, financial, political, whatever. The more all-encompassing, the better—from the cult leader’s standpoint, of course.
Now, this is key: the system must offer the promise of a reward that is markedly better than what the targets’ current lives offer. It must purport to solve a big problem in a way that no one else can. Whether the problem is real or not does not matter. It only matters that the targets believe the problem is real and that the leader is the only one who can solve it. This exclusive reward—or rather, the promise of it—is the incentive to join the cult.
Next, the cult leader must find people to join the cult. These people will be the ones who have the problem the cult leader is promising to solve, who are aware of that need, who feel aggrieved by it. (Again, doesn’t matter if the problem is real or not, only that it feels real to the targets.) But this is the tricky part: the solution has to be so good, and the targets in so much pain, that their normal doubts are overcome.
We’ll talk a little more about those details in a minute. For now, let’s just assume that we’ve got our little cult up and running, and that the leader is beginning to get what they want, which is always some kind of power. But to maximize that power, we’ve got to grow the cult. How?
Growing the Cult
A successful cult is a kind of pyramid scheme. It typically grows by having its members proselytize or recruit in some way. In the cult I grew up in, that literally involved talking to strangers to try to convince them that we had what they needed: the way to get eternal life. It rarely succeeded, but when it did, it was nearly always because we found someone at a low point, often when they had just lost a family member or friend and were at their most vulnerable.
In the case of Berners, the recruiting is largely online, and the targets feel (accurately or not) that life is too hard and that they or people they love need/deserve overwhelming financial relief. A lot of these Berners are just assholes who want endless free shit, but some are people who really can’t seem to catch a break.
Once they’re in, all you have to do is keep them from breaking free once they discover the negatives. In my cult, they did that by convincing you that everyone outside the cult was going to die (including you if you left), and holding your close relationships hostage (because if you left, you lost contact with everyone inside, even most family). All Bernie has to do is control enough information to make sure people still think they’re gonna get their (mostly) financial unicorns.
And the cycle goes on and on.
Okay, but Is It Really a Cult?
But is Bernie’s big movement, his revolution, really a cult? I mean, if he really does have all the answers, it’s not, full stop. But if he’s bullshitting people, it is. We can agree to that, right?
Look, Bernie is lying. Just flat lying to people. He keeps saying, for example, that he’s going to use an executive order to legalize marijuana and expunge people’s records. Yeah, the president can’t do that. There’s a defined process for legalizing it at the federal level, and even if he sidestepped that, he can’t do shit about state laws and state charges. He’s just brazenly lying about it.
What about M4A? Yeah, even though he’s admitted several times now that it can’t happen right away, he still keeps promising it at rallies as if it can. Again, he’s lying. There’s no real path to M4A, absolutely no way it would get through Congress at this point, because it’s not that popular and it’s hella expensive. (Universal healthcare is another thing entirely; we can and should get there.)
What about free college and forgiving all student loans? Again, the president doesn’t have that power, Congress exists, and he doesn’t even have any idea how much that would cost. A plan with no price tag isn’t a plan, it’s a candy-coated sparkly unicorn fantasy.
He admits all these things when pinned down in interviews, and then he goes right back to lying to his supporters. Who continue to believe it because …
They’re in a cult.
But Like, a *Cult* Cult?
Yeah, a *cult* cult.
Let’s analyze this Reddit post from a Berner. I’ll compare/contrast it with the religious trappings from my own experience.
On Sunday, Pete Buttigieg dropped out of the Democratic presidential race. Soon after, Berners began trying to recruit Pete’s brokenhearted supporters. This post seems too obvious to me, but nonetheless, the person who wrote it has a knack for these things. They could probably run a cult someday. Because this shit threw me right back to my childhood.
“Pete dropped out and many of his supporters must be torn right now.”
This translates to “Let’s make our move while the marks are vulnerable.” That’s not how Berners will take it, but that’s what’s happening here, just as surely as we were told to always be prepared to discuss “hope for the future” with those who had recently lost a family member. At the time it seemed reasonable and even kind, but I now see it as ghoulish and predatory.
“Reach out to those who haven’t mentioned any second candidate or are undecided.”
Essentially, if they don’t say no, that’s a maybe, and always be selling, always be selling, always be selling. I remember that too, the admonition to keep (gently) pushing, to not wait for them to come to us, to take the message to them.
“Don’t go Chapo Trap House hard-sell energy on them. Be polite. Delete any rat emojis …”
Real talk: what that means is hide the bad stuff. Berners, especially on Twitter, are absolutely toxic and terrible about literally every other candidate. Chapo Trap House refers to a Berner podcast, the authors of which are just goddamn awful. Racist, sexist, homophobic, just fucking nasty. The Dirtbag Left, they call themselves. As for the rat emoji? That’s how they refer to Buttigieg. Fucking assholes. And even the Berners who start out decent quickly learn that it is not only okay to be assholes, it is preferred. It’s cool. It’s a sign that you’re IN. (If you haven’t seen that side of them yet, that’s because you’re still being marketed to.)
And yeah, when the cult I belonged to tried to recruit people, we didn’t talk about the bad stuff either, about how joining up could easily lead to you losing your family and friends, about how controlling the organization was, about how things that were completely harmless were classified as deadly sins.
Why I Wrote This
This was not a fun post for me to write. It’s almost 1 AM. I should have been in bed two hours ago. But I couldn’t not finish this.
I don’t know if I’m using the word correctly because as far as I know I don’t have PTSD, but when I saw that Reddit post today, I felt triggered. Anxiety. Stress. Bad memories.
When you’re in a cult, it seems so reasonable. So clear. No arguments that anyone makes can touch your surety. Except deep down, for some of us, they do. A little bit. That’s why you’re scared to look too closely at what you’ve been told. Because a tiny part of you is afraid to know the reality: that there are no easy answers, and that while things can be better, the pipe dream is never going to happen. There’s no fairy godmother. There’s no sparkly unicorn.
But as someone who’s been there and back, I’ll tell you this: it’s better outside. Even at its darkest, the truth is better than a lie any day.
