"Economic anxiety" as a journalistic placeholder ( 1 of 2)

Katie Couric has a YouTube channel where she has been doing a serious of interesting and serious interviews. Including some very relevant recent ones about Trump with Mary Trump and the former Acting US Solicitor General Neal Katyal. In a recent one, she brings up the effect of "economic anxiety" on making Trump appealing to some voters.

This interview with Stephen Hassan, a respected authority on cults, is also about Trump. It is somewhat oddly titled, since Hassan is a serious and widely recognized expert and director of the anti-cult Director of Freedom of Mind Resource Center, Former Cult Follower Describes How President Trump Has Created a Cult Following. 01/12/2021: 

Hassan has written a book, The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control (2019). In the interview, he talks about how Trump's "very deceptive appeals" have succeeded in producing so many devoted and uncritical followers who are willing to believe imaginary claims coming from him. After 4:5 comes his portion:

Stephen Hassan: But essentially in my research of over 40 years, people are in vulnerable moments in their life where they'll be more receptive to a recruitment message or recruiter. So: death of a loved one, illness, dislocation, losing a job - I mean, seriously, the pandemic - and the economic problems are huge susceptibility factors for the public going forward.

Destabilizing a country [or] a group's economic status is a major technique for doing mind control on people. Because you want to disorient people. You wanna confuse people. You wanna make people search for meaning and hope outside of the existing institutional structures.

So, the susceptibility of people now to look to, well, who knows the solution to the problem of how to make the world a better place now, unfortunately, the human mind responds to certainty. And cult leaders are very good at talking in a way that's very convincing.

[Clip of a Trump speech shown]

This kind of communication, kind of accesses people's emotional brain, not their critical thinking part, but their emotional brain of, "Well, maybe, he seems to sound confident. Maybe he can do something 'cause things are so bad."

Katie Couric: What you're saying is, he preyed on people's economic anxiety? [my italics]

This is an example of a star journalist using "economic anxiety" as a general catch-all phrase for vague discontent.

Because Hassan had just mentioned a variety of events and conditions that could create emotional uncertainty in individuals that might make them more vulnerable to a cultish appeal promising certainty and discouraging critical thinking skills.

Hassan goes on to talk then about the variety of factors that a politician can use to tell people, I'll give your certainly on this issue you care a lot about. He mentions the standard "cultural war" issues of religion, abortion, and guns.

In the second post on this, I'll look at another treatment of the "economic anxiety" trope by columnist Will Bunch. It's had a strange career these last few years.

On Hassan's comments, I would add that this type of observations is helpful. Because as we saw on January 6 when Trump directly incited a mob to invade the Capitol and hunt down Members of Congress to kill them base on genuinely groundless claims of election theft, there is a cultish element to the Trump movement.

On the other hand, we should be careful about any Trump-apologist narrative suggesting that the cultish aspects of the movement absolve him or his violent white supremacist goon squads because it means they didn't know what they were doing. I haven't heard that offered up yet. But someone surely will.