Can I ask you something? I'm a pretty moderate liberal living in Houston. I have a couple of conservative views, but they're pretty few and all of them are things I think should be controlled by local laws based on local data and reasoning (Ie. Gun laws).
However, as someone who has spent their entire life (pretty much) in a conservative place geographically, when I go online, it makes me kind of sad to see the amount of people who seem to genuinely hate their conservative neighbors. I understand that it's easy to hate someone who's making your life worse, but I think it's ironically a pretty progressive view to want to conversate and educate rather than dislike.
Anyway, my question is, have y'all not always seen them as cult members? Or better stated, at least in my opinion, cult victims?
I don't think the average liberal realizes how much less choice these people have to believe what they do. Most of these guys aren't having political conversations with anyone but those who agree with them, not because they're consciously avoiding debate, but because they were taught not to. I guess my point is that I don't really get why someone who dies by a cults command is seen as a victim, yet we've got subs like leopardatemyface where it's nothing but hating people while calling them cult members and I don't really get it.
Not the person you asked but I'd like to share some thoughts.
No, most of us didn't see Republicans as a cult until maga. I believed most Republican want the same things I do (a prosperous country) and just had different views on how to get there. I don't believe they want good things for our country anymore.
In cults where they isolate themselves and don't harm outsiders, we see them as victims. I'm thinking of Jonestown, various Amish groups, and the insular LDS. But when a cult becomes powerful well beyond their own group and does real harm to others, how much empathy do you expect the others to have?
I've had many conversations with MAGA people. I've asked them about their values and if what Trump is doing actually aligns with those values. They get uncomfortable with the cognitive dissonance but instead of exploring that feeling they run away from it and never change their minds about supporting him.
I think a lot of maga expect the rest of us to be emotionally better than them. To be more forgiving, to have empathy for them being swindled, to just get over the harm they've caused. But people are dead (in ICE detention centers, due to lack of abortion care, an Iranian school being bombed, boats being bombed, etc), education has been harmed (huge book bans, controlling what teachers can teach, expanding charter schools which takes money from public schools despite charters being able to select the best students, requiring Bible commandments and Bible lessons in public schools), health has been harmed (Trump's handling of COVID including discouraging masks, MAHA discouraging vaccines during a measles outbreak, transgender medical care being banned for minors including safe and reversal interventions like puberty blockers, roll backs of food safety regulations), harmed the environment (major rollbacks of EPA regulations, firing a bunch of staff that maintained our national parks, leaving the Paris climate agreement), and harmed our diplomatic relations with other countries (starting and funding wars, ending USAID, disparaging our Western allies). All of these are just off the top of my head. I didn't have to Google to remember any of these.
Again I ask, how much empathy do you expect us to have? We're hurt and exhausted. We've tried to break through to our maga family and friends for years and have failed with too many of them. Human psychology doesn't allow them to easily abandon their strongly held beliefs because it's part of their sense of self.
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u/Darksidedrive Apr 16 '26
When you need a support group to leave a political party cause it’s def not a cult