"Cults are in style again. Or at least it's trendy to call things cults... America has always been haunted by cults...."

"...because modernity and then postmodernity have been disrupting American institutions for centuries. But in certain periods the disruption has been particularly potent. One was the Jacksonian era. Another was the upheavals of the 1960s and '70s. A third is the moment we're living through now. Each of those periods saw scads of new species germinating in the cultic milieu, and each of them gave us cult scares.... A decay in a society's dominant institutions can produce... an 'authoritarian reflex'... xenophobia and the desire for a strongman. Both are on display in the MAGA right. But secular centrists are also capable of longing for old certainties and for the institutional power that protected them—of looking at those unfamiliar alternatives sprouting around us, fretting that we've entered a 'post-truth era,' and calling for controls meant to herd everyone into the 'common reality' they imagine we shared in the past. That past never existed. The human race has always lived in a patchwork of sometimes drastically different mental worlds. But as those worlds mix and multiply, the old authorities become more anxious; and anxious people often project their fears onto an external enemy with a name. One of those names is that traditional American demon, the cult."

From "Cult Country/Is this a new age of cultism—or a new cult panic?" by Jesse Walker in Reason.