When Politics Becomes a Cult: Tribalism, Loyalty Machines, and the Groupthink We All Fall For

Part 4 of a 5-part series on cults, control, and the psychology of getting swept up. (Start with Part 1.)

I'm going to lose some of you in the first paragraph, so let me be as clear as I can up front: this is not a left-versus-right piece, and I'm not telling you who to vote for. I'm a therapist, not a pundit. Before I was a social worker I studied political science, because I've always been fascinated by what moves groups of people — and the single most useful thing I ever learned is that the pattern I'm about to describe doesn't belong to one party. It shows up wherever there's a tribe, a leader, and a shared enemy. Which, in politics, is everywhere. That's the whole point.

Politics might be the most socially acceptable groupthink there is. Nobody thinks it's weird that you'd reorganize your friendships, your family gatherings, and your sense of who the "good people" are around a political identity. We call that being engaged. And most of the time it's fine — even good. But the same machinery from Part 1 runs in politics with the safety off, and it can quietly turn ordinary civic passion into something that behaves an awful lot like a cult.

The series: Part 1 laid out the machinery; Part 2 took it to work; Part 3 to religion. This is Part 4 — politics. Then the hardest question of all in Part 5: the people who get swept up and do real harm — are they actually bad, and do we owe them a second chance?

Why political tribalism is the perfect host for groupthink

If you wanted to design a machine to hijack the human herd instinct, you'd build something that looks exactly like modern politics.

Start with us versus them, which isn't a bug in political tribalism — it's the product. Decades of social psychology show how little it takes to make humans form in-groups and out-groups, and how quickly we start extending loyalty to "us" and suspicion to "them." Politics supplies a permanent, high-stakes version: a team to belong to and a team to fear.

Then add groupthink — and here's a detail I love, because the psychologist who coined the term, Irving Janis, developed it studying political and foreign-policy fiascoes like the Bay of Pigs. His symptoms are the water we swim in during an election year: the illusion of unanimity (everyone on our side agrees, so dissent must be betrayal), self-censorship (you swallow the doubt about your own team so you don't help the enemy), and mindguards (people who shield the group from any inconvenient fact). Nobody has to enforce the party line. We enforce it on ourselves.

Add moral disengagement (Part 1's Bandura), which in politics gets a specific, seductive form: the other side is so dangerous that anything we do to stop them is justified. Once you believe that, your conscience goes quiet — because you've reframed your own team's bad behavior as a regrettable necessity in a war against people who are worse. Researchers have mapped exactly how this "moral disengagement" operates inside organizations, and politics is the most powerful organization most people ever join.

And finally, identity fusion — when "I'm a Democrat" or "I'm a Republican" stops being a set of positions you hold and becomes who you are, a criticism of the party lands like a criticism of your soul, and leaving the tribe feels like ceasing to exist. That's the exact fusion we saw in Part 2's toxic workplaces and Part 3's high-control churches, wearing a campaign button.

None of that makes you a cult member. It makes you a human being with a nervous system. But it's the raw material. And some political operations know exactly how to work it.

Why it gets you — even if you'd never call yourself a "follower"

You can be nobody's foot soldier and still get worked by this, because the levers are aimed at everyone. A few of the sharpest:

Fear, on a permanent drip. Every cycle is now "the most important election of our lifetime," and the other side isn't just wrong — they're an existential threat to the country, your rights, your kids. Fear is the most powerful lever in Part 1, and politics keeps it pinned. When you genuinely believe the barbarians are at the gate, almost anything your own side does starts to look justified, and almost any doubt starts to look like desertion.

Politics as the new religion. For a lot of people — especially those who left the high-control faith we talked about in Part 3 — politics quietly moved into the space religion used to fill: the moral community, the sense of good versus evil, the meaning, the belonging. That's not a slur; it's a description. It's also why political disagreement can feel sacred and non-negotiable in a way that a debate about tax policy really shouldn't. When something becomes your source of meaning, questioning it feels like heresy.

A trauma bond with someone you've never met. You don't have to know a leader personally to bond to one. A figure who alternately enrages you at the enemy and reassures you that only he can fix it — delivered straight to your pocket, all day — can become someone whose approval you crave and whose enemies automatically become yours. It's the same intermittent warmth-and-threat from Part 1, running parasocially, at scale.

And you're smartest exactly when you're defending your team. This is the humbling one: research on motivated reasoning keeps finding that we don't reason to the truth so much as reason toward the conclusion our group already holds — and the more intelligent and informed you are, the better you are at building the case for what you already believe. Your intelligence isn't a shield here. It's often the lawyer.

The machine, up close: "the Cuomo Way"

I'm going to give you two real New York examples, deliberately from opposite parties, because the entire point is that this isn't a team sport. Here's the first.

In August 2021, an independent investigation deputized by the New York State Attorney General — led by former federal prosecutor Joon Kim and employment lawyer Anne Clark — released its report on Governor Andrew Cuomo. The headline findings were about sexual harassment: the investigators concluded he had harassed multiple women and, in doing so, violated state and federal law. But the part that belongs in this series is what the report found about the culture around him.

In the investigators' own words, the Executive Chamber had "a culture — one filled with fear and intimidation, while at the same time normalizing the Governor's frequent flirtations and gender-based comments — [that] contributed to the conditions that allowed the sexual harassment to occur and persist." The report described a workplace "rife with fear and intimidation" and a "culture… of secrecy, loyalty to the Governor, and fear." One staffer told investigators it was "extremely toxic, extremely abusive… controlled largely by his temper, and he was surrounded by people who enabled his behavior."

Read that last line again and you'll hear Part 1: surrounded by people who enabled his behavior. That's the mindguards. That's the self-censorship. That's a whole building full of smart, capable people who — according to the report — were too afraid to be the one who broke the spell. Reporters who talked to former staffers heard the same thing, to the point that they called it "the Cuomo Way": "He wants people who are literally going to fall on the sword for him," one said; "we all would have taken a bullet for the governor." Staffers spoke only anonymously, the outlet noted, because they feared retaliation — which is, itself, the machinery still working from the outside.

Now the fairness this series lives on, and it's non-negotiable here: Cuomo has consistently and categorically denied the allegations — "I never touched anyone inappropriately or made inappropriate sexual advances," he said — and his attorney disputed the report point by point. He resigned in August 2021, but he was never criminally convicted; the one criminal complaint filed against him, in Albany, was dropped by the district attorney and dismissed in January 2022. The AG report is the finding of an independent civil investigation, not a criminal verdict. I'm including it not to relitigate his guilt or innocence, but because the report is a rare, on-the-record description of how a culture of fear and loyalty forms around power — and how it silences the very people who could stop it.

The machine, up close: "the Oyster Bay way"

Now the other party, and closer to home — because I live and work on Long Island, and we have our own case study.

For decades, Nassau County has been a national byword for machine politics, and the federal corruption case against former County Executive Edward Mangano and former Town of Oyster Bay Supervisor John Venditto put the culture on the record. Prosecutors charged a pay-to-play scheme in which the Town guaranteed roughly $20 million in private loans for a favored businessman in exchange for a stream of gifts. Mangano was convicted (his federal-programs-bribery counts were later vacated on appeal in 2025, while his honest-services fraud and obstruction convictions were affirmed — resentencing pending). Venditto was acquitted in the federal case and later pleaded guilty to a state charge — so I'll keep him precisely where the record puts him.

But the line that belongs in a series about cults came from the cooperating witness, former Deputy Town Attorney Frederick Mei, who pleaded guilty and testified. Mei described being investigated as "a rite of passage in Oyster Bay," and testified about "the Oyster Bay way." Sit with that phrase. Corruption so normalized that getting caught was a rite of passage — a shared culture, an in-group language, a way of doing things everyone absorbed until it stopped feeling like anything at all. That's moral disengagement (Part 1) as a local institution.

And it's not new. The template is old — the man who essentially invented the modern Nassau machine, party boss Joseph Margiotta, held no elected office yet ran both the county and town Republican committees so completely that his own aide testified "everything went through his hands." He was convicted in 1982 over a kickback scheme. A charismatic figure at the center, a machine of loyalty and patronage radiating outward, and a culture where you went along because going along was simply how you belonged and got ahead. Swap the party label and it's the same shape as everything else in this series.

The oldest machine of all

None of this is a modern invention. American "machine politics" was practically born in New York — Tammany Hall, the Democratic organization that ran much of 19th- and early-20th-century New York City on a simple, powerful exchange: loyalty for jobs. You supported the machine, the machine took care of you — a place to live, work, a helping hand — and in return it owned your vote and your silence. Patronage is just behavior control (Part 1) with a paycheck attached, and it built an operation so durable it lasted generations. The names and parties change. The mechanism — belonging and survival, traded for obedience — is ancient.

The feed is the new machine

Here's the update Boss Tweed never saw coming: the most powerful political machine in your life right now probably isn't a party at all. It's your feed.

Tammany traded jobs for loyalty. The modern machine trades something subtler and more valuable — your attention — and it's better at the job than any ward boss ever was. The algorithm doesn't care about your politics; it cares about keeping you scrolling, and it has learned, from your own behavior, that nothing keeps a human scrolling like tribal outrage. So it quietly shows you the most infuriating version of the other side and the most flattering version of your own. That's Part 1's information control and milieu control — automated, personalized, and running 24 hours a day.

The result is an echo chamber you built one tap at a time, that feels exactly like being well-informed. You're seeing "the news," except it's the news sorted to confirm your team and enrage you at the enemy, because that's what held your thumb yesterday. No compound, no charismatic leader, no all-hands speech required — just a system that profits from your fear and sorts you into a tribe more efficiently than any political machine in history. The old machine needed a Boss Tweed. The new one needs only your attention, and it already has it.

The tell that makes it a cult: nobody's ever responsible

If I had to name the single feature that tips political tribalism over into something cult-like, it's this: no failure is ever anyone's fault.

Watch what happens when a policy blows up, a leader gets caught, a prediction fails. In a healthy group, somebody owns it. In a cult-like one, the failure gets absorbed and redirected — it was the other side's sabotage, it was fake news, it was a test of the faithful, it was actually a secret win. The one thing that never happens is the group looking in the mirror. That's the antagonistic move from the very first pages of this series: the refusal to take responsibility, the reflex to make the person who points at the problem become the problem. When a political movement can never be wrong — when every failure is proof the enemy is even stronger than you thought — you're not looking at a party anymore. You're looking at a closed belief system that recruits your fear and returns nothing you can check.

What healthy engagement actually looks like

Before the self-examination, let me be clear about what I'm not saying, because "it's all a cult, tune it out" is its own kind of trap — a comfortable excuse to stop caring about things that genuinely matter.

You can care intensely. You can vote, organize, march, and be righteously furious about real injustice — and still be completely free. Healthy engagement looks like holding your positions strongly while holding your certainty loosely. It looks like being able to say, out loud, "my side got that one wrong," without your whole identity cracking. It's getting your picture of the world from more than one tribe's sources. It's treating the person who votes the other way as someone who's mistaken, not someone who's evil. And it's caring enormously about outcomes without your entire sense of self riding on the scoreboard. The goal was never to care less. It's to stay a whole person while you care.

How to tell if your own politics has gone cult-shaped

Here's the uncomfortable part, and I'd be a coward not to say it: this isn't a them problem. It's a human one, and the honest work is turning the question on yourself.

So — gently — a few things to notice. Can you name a single thing your own side got wrong, out loud, without immediately adding "but the other side is worse"? When you picture the average person who votes the other way, do you see a human being with reasons, or a caricature? Is there anything your preferred leader could do that would actually lose your support — or has that number quietly become zero? Do you get your understanding of the world from more than one tribe's sources, or only from people who already agree with you? And when your side loses an election, does it feel like a normal turn of a very old wheel — or like the end of the world, the darkness falling, the enemy at the gates?

None of those make you a bad person. All of us slide toward some of them, especially when we're scared, and being scared about the direction of the country is not irrational. But if the honest answers are stacking up on the wrong side, that's worth knowing — not because your values are wrong, but because the machinery may have gotten hold of them.

Why this one lands in real life

I'll tell you why I bothered writing a politics chapter in a series about cults, from a therapist's point of view: because this is the one that's quietly wrecking families.

More and more, the estrangements people are grieving aren't about money or an old betrayal — they're about politics. A parent and an adult child who haven't really spoken since an election. Siblings who unfollowed each other and never came back. A holiday table that got smaller and quieter every year until someone finally stopped hosting. When a political identity fuses hard enough with a personal one, disagreement stops feeling like disagreement and starts feeling like danger — like the person across the table has been captured by the enemy — and the relationship becomes collateral damage in a war neither of them started.

You don't have to abandon your convictions to get out of that trap. You have to hold onto the one thing every high-control system wants to take: your ability to see the actual human in front of you, separate from the team they're on. Keeping that — staying a person who can disagree and still love — isn't weakness or "both-sidesing." It's the whole ballgame. And if politics has already cost you a relationship you miss, that grief is real and worth taking seriously, ideally with someone outside the fight.

Next time, in the final part, we sit with the hardest question of all. Across cults, companies, congregations, and machines, we keep meeting ordinary people who got swept up and did real harm. So: are they bad people? And do we owe them a second chance?