Interesting thoughts.
Cults exist in many diverse parts of society. This includes politics.
This sentences in your original post caught my attention. I know a few experts in the matter of cults. In fact, I'm spending my 4th of July weekend attending a conference on the topic. The experts I know, many agree that using cult as a label doesn't quite help educate the public about these groups (or effect). They provide a very interesting perspective regarding terminology, and they prefer to refer to them as "harmful groups", "high-demand groups", or "controlling groups".
Using those terms removes the religious tone that cults tend to have, so many other groups and relationships are included in their definition of a cults. It also help people who are hurting because of he negative effects of such groups, learn to take care of themselves and not fall in the hands of yet another similar (or worse) group or situation.
The experts I know run support groups, and the ones who attend come from a wealth of different groups, coming from every walk of life, politics, religion, there was eve a man who was in a Karate-related cult.
With that in mind, using cult as a label instead of treating seeing that there's an effect on people that certain things bring to them, doesn't paint a clear, complete picture. That's why sometimes it's difficult for some people to understand that agreeing with Donald Trump and believing in him is not necessarily cultic (cultish?) behavior.
Something else that I find relevant is that the experts themselves do not keep lists, nor do they name any specific groups as "cults". The reasons for that are two (1) there might be legal implications and (2) they concentrate in the effects of those groups, which is what I believe people should be talking about, not in the groups themselves.
Additionally, they list a few characteristics of high-demand, harmful, controlling groups:
- Lack of accountability
- Intense emotion and dissociative practices
- Attitude of superiority and isolation
- Lack of training
- Manifestations of "groupthink" with dissent not tolerated especially in the "inner circle"
- Intolerance of individual expressions of differences as well as commonalities
- Lack of transparency, no open communication
- Unhealthy conflict resolution
Keeping those things in mind, and looking at things from that point of view, I think it's a waste of time to talk about specific people, political parties, the liberal/conservative crap, or even the JWs, unless we are looking at the negative effects of what any of them can have on people.