One can see the process by which cultural meanings or cultural ideologies become "realities" most clearly in the rise of new religions like Mormonism, which I have extensively studied, Quakerism, which I have also studied, Anabaptists, which I have studied, the Oneida Community, which I have studied somewhat, Burned Over District evangelicalism, which I have studied somewhat, Shakerism, which I have studied somewhat, and the post WWII radical right, which one can't, thanks to it going mainstream since the 1980s, help but explore given its omnipresence on social media.
One of the new religious groups I have been studying recently is a right wing group that calls itself Praeger University. Because PU evidences that hybrid of Christianity, social Darwinism, the gospel of wealth, bah humbugism, and neoliberalism I am going to categorise PU a cult. PU is a cult because, just as Christianity was a cult to Judaism because it added new wine to old, PUism is different from the Christianities of the past despite containing older Christian elements within it. My observations are based on ethnographic analysis and, since I haven't done statistical analysis, random or otherwise, of PU my conclusions must remain tentative. I hope that despite this my observations are not only accurate and interesting but that they contribute to the study of right wing cults like PU.
Demographically, the PUers, as I call them, whether they are committed devotees of PU and their high priest, radio host Dennis Praeger, or whether they are fellow travellers of PU, are mostly male. This seems to be the case with a lot of the religiopolitical groups that were once marginal in American society and which have become more mainstream in American society since the 1980s, religiopolitical groups like the John Birch Society and the many neo-Nazi groups one finds across the US these days. Many of the "members", who are somewhat fluid, not surprising given the nature of postmodernity, and fellow travellers, are, I suspect, GenXers and millennials, whose lives have been disrupted by the economic changes driven by postmodernity including the decline of well paying and good benefit manufacturing jobs in the US and the rise of jobs in the low paying and low benefit retail or sevice sector of the American economy since the 1960s.
Economically, as I hinted, the devotees and ideological fellow travellers of right wing religious cults like PU have been displaced and dislocated by a postmodern economy that has seen the expansion of the service sector of US economy and the contraction of the traditional manufacturing sector of the economy which has fled overseas to take advantage of low labour costs in places like China and other semi peripheral nations. PU, like many religious groups, is registered as a charity and funded by the passing of the social media plate. Apparently most of the start up money for PU came from the Christian fundamentalist and fracking loving Wilks brothers.
Culturally, PUers and others of the right wing ilk appear to have what one might call a socially and culturally constructed manichean mind. Those with this social and cultural "(dis)order" think that what they believe is "good" while what the other knows is "bad". This is the I am OK, you are not OK, if you want to be OK you must be just like me syndrome. Others might call it, on the basis of the William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal controversial tête a tête on national TV in 1968, the scratch a right winger and you will find an ethocentrist or, in Buckley's case a fascist, beneath the surface complex.
So how does the manichean religious mind work? Well it works just like the religious manichean mind has always worked. Let me give you an example. Many PUers and other right wingers, in their blanket condemnations of left wing colleges and universities, ignore or elide the fact that Calvin College, a Christian reformed evangelical college, is similar to yet different from Amherst College, a secular college, in important ways. They ignore that Jesus College, Cantab is similar to but different from Ball State University in important ways. They ignore, in other words, the complexity of colleges and universities in the postmodern core nation world. Second, they ignore the fact that universities are home to a variety of different departments with a diversity of faculty in those departments. Engineers, mathematicians, physicists, biologists, and astronomers, for instance, are found in most broad curriculum based colleges and universities. If you believe PUers and right wingers, however, you would think that all of these folks are not only manning the red barricades but are actually in control of universities. The fact is, however, that college and university administrators with degrees in things like student personnel really run universities particularly in the US and UK outside of Oxbridge. They, by the way, run universities like managers run a department store. They run universities like retail establishments. The notion that universities and colleges are run by revolutionaries common among PU cultists and other right wing cultists is so delusional that some might argue that, as with those who believed themselves messiahs or prophets in the past and in the present, right wing cultists who today believe that colleges and universities are bastions of Marxism and socialism, the evil others par excellence in their theodicies, should perhaps be placed in mental health institutions. Perhaps they should thank their lucky stars that those "bleeding heart liberals", who right wing cultists in their theodicies wrongly conflate with Marxists, socialists, and nazis, downsized them in the late 20th century.
Another cultural aspect of PU and other right wing religio-political cults is their eschatology. Many Christians have claimed over the years and continue to claim, that the Crusades and Christian anti-Semitism, for instance, both of which were hazardous to human health, were and are not characteristic of "real" Christianity. Only when "real" Christianity comes will, they claim, time be no more, lions will lie down with lambs, and swords will be beaten into ploughshares in a post- or pre- apocalyptic Garden of Eden. Free marketeers, like their religious forebears, claim that contemporary versions of capitalism, specifically corporate capitalism, in core nations with their monopolies and cartels, their elite control of politics and politicians, and their ability to obtain subsidies, grants, and bailouts from American taxpayers, is not "real" capitalism. "Real" capitalism, free market capitalism, they fantasise, has never really existed and only when it does will, say true believers, the radiant paradisiacal capitalist future arrive making everybody in their free market capitalist version of the Garden of Eden rich in the process. The rub is, is that just as with the Christian apocalypse, which many have predicted on many occasions, the right wing free market cult apocalypse, though predicted almost as often as the Christian apocalypse, never comes. Such realities, however, rarely ever troubles true believers whose relationship with reality is tenuous at best. As a result the ideology constructs reality circle remains unbroken.
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