On the night of March 23, 1997, Marshall Applewhite prepared to achieve his life’s mission. He had already supervised the successful “evacuation” of several followers. The leader of the Heaven’s Gate cult would be the last of the chosen few to join the alien spacecraft trailing the Hale-Bopp Comet speeding past the Earth.
As he mixed a lethal dose of phenobarbital into his apple sauce, did he experience doubt? Did he wonder whether his psychiatrists had been right? Maybe there were no aliens waiting to whisk him away. He had failed to uncover any empirical evidence to support his worldview. Perhaps that was because his worldview was flawed and false. No, he probably ate his poison and slipped the bag over his head with a smile on his face.
Republican Roy Moore, removed from the Alabama Supreme Court for his erratic behavior and banned from the mall for harassing teenage girls, has cloaked his campaign for the Senate in the language of “spiritual warfare.” As such, he is the most apt representative of the Republican Party in our age of cult politics. Moore is pitching himself as God’s candidate and his voters are slopping it up like poisoned applesauce. The party of “family values” is about to send a known sexual predator to the Senate because God wants them to. This would be startling, except they already used the same reasoning to put a known sexual predator in the White House.
The same magical reasoning infects Republicans tax reform plans. We are in the eighth year of continuous job growth, the eighth year of economic expansion, and the eighth year of a head-spinning stock market boom. Corporate profits are at record levels and the economy has been redlining at full-employment for almost three years. By any marginally credible economic reasoning, this would be an ideal moment to raise taxes, curb debt, make investments in public infrastructure, and just generally do the things one does at the peak of a long economic expansion.
At this moment, why are Republicans trying to slash taxes for the wealthy? Why would someone castrate themselves and commit suicide? Because that’s what the cult demands.