Yeah I feel you, dude. The right has some serious trust issues, and the less or casually informed members end up going down all kinds of rabbit holes. There's no shortage of things to be concerned about right now, so I often feel like this is a game of yelling your own concerns as loud as you can so they don't get drowned in the sea of other people yelling different concerns. My point with the cult thing is that nobody is in a cult. Reason and evidence will ultimately win the day, but until then in the sea of uncertainty, everybody has specific ideas that they even have the capacity to entertain, based on their unconscious interests and political priors. You might be a bad example as an independent, but how many people on the left would dismiss the idea of Russia hacking voting machines shortly after the 2016 election as ridiculous on its face- before any investigation occurred? How many republicans would bother even entertaining the possibility? People have much the same form- it's their content that's arbitrary. The MSM might come through with hard facts once in a while, but the overwhelming spin and bias puts everything they say into question. Whose fault is that? Would anyone on the left trust the media if it was 100 branches of Fox News, and only one CNN standing in contrast to it? Or would they trust the only news source speaking anything close to their own language? The media thing is a big mess, and a big problem. We need trust in....something/anything. The overton window must be reopened somehow. I know I'm doing my best, I assume we all are.
The unfortunate thing is most people, all along the political spectrum, are casually informed people. But the casual information on both sides of the spectrum wasn't as far out of the mainstream as it is now. Sure there was spin and commentary that was clearly biased. But for the most part, Fox News and MSN (when not on talking head shows) reported the same facts about the same events when they chose to cover the same things (which admittedly became more and more rare). This was still true during this past election as well. People on all parts of the spectrum still train to be professionals at particular types of work. Most people put the pride in being good at what they do over choosing to support one political party or another (only the muckrakers, pundits, spinsters, and other of that sort aim to distort).
When the leader of the free-world puts out unsubstantiated (and clearly self-serving) "information", mainstream media will report what he said or tweeted or whatever. But they are also obligated to say that the claims are unsubstantiated, because otherwise, casual people will tend to default to believing that what the president said is true...and then the caveat about claims being unsubstantiated makes the mainstream "against" him, I suppose.
At that point, another meta-game is played where he says that the mainstream is against him, and this has a draw to certain pathological emotional triggers that bypass reasoning. Mainly the people who get pulled in feel like victims of the world that isn't giving them what they feel they deserve. They feel like they are "special" people who know better than all the people who have made it their life's work to find the truth in their particular domains.
It used to be that we had government conspiracy theorists on the right, and anti-vaxers, as well as believers in "alternative medicine" (homeopathy, crystal healing, and general woo) on the left. Somehow Trump galvanized a large portion of the nut cases on the left to join him on the new right. This may, in someway, be impressive from a political perspective. But it is creating a party split where nut cases flock to one side over the other. Gaining political power by relying on joining in on the feelings of both being victimized, and "special" in combination (when clearly in contradiction to the agreed upon mainstream facts) I believe are very cult-like.
Cults do exist (Heaven's Gate, Branch Davidian, Jim Jones, Charles Manson...), so "Nobody is in a cult" I will take as hyperbole. I believe, by this, you are saying that it is always possible to see how people come to particular conclusions--no matter how far fetched. Perhaps this statement is true. But even if one can follow how a conclusion is reached, this fact does not make the far-fetched conclusion true or even reasonably plausible.
For something to be true, it needs to correspond to events that takes place in our reality. If you are thinking critically about the information that you get, with the aim of understanding the actual events that take place in our reality and the principles that govern them, it would be difficult to see you as part of a cult.
On the other hand, if you decide what is true based on what would be beneficial to you, what would be comfortable to you, what would make you feel more special than others, or any emotional impulse other than a desire to accurately find and report the events as they take place in our reality, or a desire to accurately find and report the principles that govern those events, then you are participating in rationalization rather than critical thinking.
Cult members have to rationalize to a significant extent to hold onto their beliefs.
As for prognosis, I hope you are right. I hope that in the long run reasonable, empathetic, critically thinking people will be back in control of both parties. I also hope that once this happens that there is not a cycle back to the way things are now. However, given my current state of knowledge, believing this prognosis would be rationalization. I also have no need to believe in a particular prognosis of the state of our Democracy.
