The Right Demands Loyalty, The Left Demands Purity

A cult vs an exclusive club

A while ago, a fellow named Recovering Anarchist wrote quite a good essay titled “the right looks for converts, the left looks for traitors.” The basic point: people on the right try to actively search for people on the fence and draw them in. The left, in contrast, spends lots of time attacking members of their own side for not being duly committed to the cause.

For most of the period during which Joe Rogan has had any influence on politics, he’s been relatively left-wing. He supported Bernie Sanders and universal healthcare and called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide! Yet despite this, Rogan has always been much more popular with the right than the left.

AOC was apparently so opposed to Joe Rogan that she almost entirely stopped working with the Bernie Sanders campaign after they began favorably surfacing video clips from Bernie’s interview with Rogan. Around 2022, there was a coordinated effort by many on the left to get Rogan kicked off Spotify. This despite the fact that at the time Rogan had been much more enthusiastic in his endorsements of Democrats than Republicans and was far from a Republican partisan.

In contrast, when Rogan endorsed Trump, pretty much the entire American right got in line to sing his praises. The Republican party has a great degree of unity—all you need to do to be on their team is to bow before Trump, to kiss the ring. So long as you do that, you can advocate for policies like abortion that a sizeable portion of Republicans take to involve mass baby killing, and they won’t bat an eye. That’s why Tulsi Gabbard, far nearer in policy to Noam Chomsky than to Marco Rubio, has been welcomed into the Republican party with open arms—so has RFK Junior.

Now, RFK Junior is much too crazy to be in much agreement with many Democrats. Because of his vaccine brain worms and general opposition to science and evidence, the Democratic party will never endorse him. I don’t find that development to be so bad. RFK Junior has roughly the opposite political views I do; he’s a Luddite gribble of the fairly standard sort. His opposition to lab grown meat makes it so that I could not, in good conscience, feel as though he is on my team.

But if the Democratic party makes it so that anyone who isn’t liberal enough is disowned, while the Republican party embraces them, that’s a recipe for losing moderates and centrists to the Republicans. I think history has shown clearly that the Dems could have afforded to be a bit nicer to Joe Rogan and not to treat him like Hitler. Yes, Rogan is often poorly educated and spreads misinformation, but this is a property he shares with the median voter.

Now, I wouldn’t find this tendency so noxious if the Democrats only disowned morons and crazy people. While I’d still think it was bad politics, I could at least understand an aesthetic revulsion of being on the same side as morons and crazy people. But instead, it seems like the Democrats spend lots of their time attacking people who are smart, well-read, thoughtful, and left-wing, so long as those people aren’t left-wing enough.

Matt Yglesias, for instance, has been subject to a ridiculous number of attacks from those on the left just because he’s not far left enough. So has Nate Silver. Even though these people are obviously to the left of center, there’s been a concerted effort to disown them and prove that they’re really right wingers. But if you’re too far left to caucus with Yglesias, then you have no hope in hell of ever reaching the median voter. Demanding purity is a great way to score points with your equally extreme friends but a terrible way to do politics.

If, whenever any centrist expresses mild criticisms of the left, they’re embraced by the right with open arms and disowned by the left, they’re likely to become right-wing. If Rogan had been more popular with the left, if they had not treated him as the enemy, he might not have endorsed Trump and shed most of his left-wing views.

But as much as I’m annoyed by the left’s tactical errors on this front, it’s hard to be as disappointed as I am with the right. While the left has a tendency to be close-minded and intolerant, the right has descended into a full-on cult of personality that demands nothing in the way of principles. The right no longer has principles, just loyalty. You just have to bow your head before King Trump and they will reward you.

How do I know this? Well, what’s the single group most antithetical to right-wing values—a group that the right spends half their time hammering? Communists. So what would happen if some communists declared themselves MAGA communists? The cult of personality theory makes quite a clear prediction: they’d be welcomed into the party, along with Tulsi and RFK Junior. Ideology is irrelevant; the right barely has an ideology anymore.

We don’t have to speculate. This already happened. Some communists (one of whom I had a debate with many years ago) named Haz Al-Din and Jackson Hinkle began calling themselves MAGA communists. Despite being prolific liars and crazy people, the MAGA communists got invited onto Tucker Carlson’s show and were praised by Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Even though these people praise Iran and North Korea, they’re welcomed into the Tent. All they had to do was kiss the ring.

Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are far more conservative than Tulsi and RFK Junior. Certainly on policy they’re in far greater alignment with Trump than Tulsi and RFK. But they have been universally excommunicated by the Republicans because they were not willing to go along with Trump after he attempted a coup. They did not possess the one trait the Republican party values: loyalty to Trump. They were thus swiftly removed.

Trump clearly has neither principles nor anything resembling principles. The man is far likelier to presently have cancer than morals. Trump’s interactions with others—foreign leaders, members of the media, and politicians—are dictated by only one thing: their disposition to kiss his ass. For a while he seemed to be warming up to Zelensky, until Zelensky started being mean to him—Zelensky was thus kicked to the curb.

He doesn’t even seem to care if the people were just recently saying terrible things about him. His favorite people seem to be those who used to hate him, but bent the knee—recognizing that he was now the voice of the Republicans, that he now had the power, and they had better get used to it. Trump’s favorite people aren’t those like Boebert or MTG who started out kissing his ass, but those like Vance who had to bend the knee. He demands only subservience.

Trump has every disposition to become a cult leader. And the modern Republican party has become his cult—a cult around his personality. There’s no particular thing you must believe so long as you’re willing to prostrate yourself before Trump. The Democrats are, at their worst, a very different kind of organization—an exclusivist one where you have to believe exactly the right thing to join. Neither is ideal, but when push comes to shove, the side that’s obviously worse is the cult of personality built around the single most amoral man on the planet.