The Green Party Cult: How Political Zealots Ignore Broken Promises While Other Voters Hold Parties Accountable.

All parties cultivate tribal loyalty and hive mentality, but Green Party followers have taken it to cult-like extremes that prevent them from acknowledging contradictions.

Here’s a truth so obvious it barely needs stating: every political party lies. Labour promises transformation and delivers austerity. Tories pledge competence and deliver chaos. Lib Dems swear they’ll do something about tuition fees, then triple them the moment they smell power. This isn’t revelation—it’s how politics works. Promise everything, deliver what’s expedient, blame circumstances, repeat.

We’re watching this play out in real-time with Keir Starmer’s government. Big promises about growth, investment, fixing the NHS, and sorting immigration. Reality? Struggling on all fronts, getting blamed for everything from the weather to the price of milk, and discovering that governing is harder than campaigning. Standard political trajectory. Labour voters are disappointed but not surprised—they’ve seen this film before.

But here’s where it gets interesting: when you point out Labour’s broken promises, Labour voters will argue, deflect, maybe defend—but most will ultimately acknowledge the gap between rhetoric and reality. They might still vote Labour, might still prefer them to the alternatives, but they can see the contradictions. Their political loyalty doesn’t require complete blindness.

The Green Party has pushed this dynamic to a different level entirely.

Yes, all parties cultivate tribal loyalty. Yes, all parties have their true believers who’ll defend anything. But the Greens have cultivated something far more extreme than ordinary political tribalism. They’ve created a movement with all the hallmarks of evangelical religion—complete with unshakeable doctrine, persecution complexes, and followers so thoroughly groomed they couldn’t spot a contradiction if it arrived in a diesel-powered removal van to auction off their council housing.

Same Broken Promises, Different Response.

Let’s use Bristol as the laboratory, because it provides a perfect parallel comparison.

Bristol’s Green Party, during their opposition years, promised to build 2,000 affordable homes, with 1,000 being council homes. Standard progressive politics—housing justice, ending homelessness, all the right notes. They got elected in May 2024. Then in their first months of administration, they’ve been selling council housing, with the Cabinet approving the disposal of multiple council properties.

Now, this is exactly the kind of promise-versus-reality gap every party produces. Labour promises not to raise taxes, then raises taxes. It’s Politics 101: say what gets you elected, do what’s expedient once you’re there.

But watch what happens when you point this out.

With Labour, you get defensiveness, spin, maybe some technocratic explanation about economic circumstances. But fundamentally, Labour voters can engage with the criticism. They might not like it, might argue the context justifies it, but they’re operating in the same reality as you.

With the Greens? You get reframing so complete it borders on gaslighting. References to “strategic asset management” and complex housing strategies. The suggestion that you simply don’t understand the nuanced sophistication of transformative housing policy. The implication that criticising them means you don’t care about climate change.

The Green Party follower—the true believer, not the casual voter—literally cannot process that their party has broken a promise. The cognitive dissonance is too great, so it gets automatically reframed into something acceptable.

This is textbook confirmation bias taken to pathological extremes. Confirmation bias—the tendency to seek out and interpret information in ways that confirm existing beliefs—exists in all political supporters to some degree. But the Green Party has created conditions where this natural human tendency becomes so amplified it resembles cult psychology rather than normal political preference.

The Hive Mind Intensified.

This is the critical distinction: every party has followers who exhibit some degree of hive mentality. The Green Party has cultivated this to cult-like extremes.

All political parties benefit from tribal loyalty. Labour has its die-hards who’ll defend Keir Starmer through anything. Tories have their true believers who think the party can do no wrong. This is normal—humans are tribal creatures, and political parties exploit that psychology.

But it’s a matter of degree and intensity. Most Labour or Tory voters, when pressed, will acknowledge their party’s failures even while continuing to support them. They’ll say “yes, but the alternative is worse” or “they’re not perfect, but...” There’s room for criticism, disappointment, and pragmatic calculation.

The Green Party has pushed hive mentality beyond normal political tribalism into something more psychologically rigid. And they’ve organised it through what can only be described as a political polycule structure.

A polycule, for those unfamiliar, is a network of interconnected romantic relationships in polyamorous communities. Multiple people, multiple connection points, overlapping commitments. Now apply that structure to political organising.

Your committed Green Party activist isn’t just a party member. They’re simultaneously involved in Extinction Rebellion, local environmental groups, progressive housing campaigns, anti-car coalitions, and climate justice organisations. Their friendship circles overlap with their activist circles overlap with their professional networks (many work in the NGO/charity sector). They might be romantically involved with other activists. Their social life, their sense of purpose, their career prospects, their romantic prospects—all enmeshed in this interconnected web of Green-adjacent relationships.

This creates something psychologically different from traditional party membership. When you join Labour, you’re joining a party. You can leave the party and keep your friends, your job, and your identity. When you join the Green movement, you’re entering a polycule—a web of overlapping personal, professional, social, and ideological connections. Leaving means unravelling your entire life.

The hive consciousness that exists in all parties becomes supercharged in this polycule structure. Because everyone in your network thinks identically, consumes the same media, attends the same events, and validates the same beliefs, the collective worldview stops feeling like ideology and starts feeling like objective reality. You’re not being told what to think—you’re surrounded by apparent consensus that this is simply how things are.

This is where confirmation bias becomes weaponised. Every piece of information gets filtered through this network, with only hive-confirming interpretations surviving. Information that contradicts the narrative either never reaches you (algorithmic bubbles), gets immediately dismissed (source is biased/corrupt), or gets reframed to fit the existing worldview (failure becomes “complex nuance” or “learning process”).

Post criticism of any party’s policy on social media, and you’ll get defensive responses. But post criticism of Green Party policy and watch what happens. Within minutes, multiple accounts swarm with identical responses: “You don’t understand the complexity.” “This is climate denial.” “Bad faith argument.” The response is more automatic, more uniform, more immediate than with other parties—because the hive immune response is more intensely developed.

The Psychological Toll: Allostatic Overload.

Here’s where it gets darker. Maintaining this level of cognitive dissonance—believing your party is uniquely pure while watching them produce the same failures as everyone else—creates what psychologists call allostatic overload.

Allostatic load refers to the cumulative burden of chronic stress on the body and mind. When you’re constantly having to reconcile contradictory information—“we’re the party of housing justice” versus “we’re selling council homes”—your brain works overtime to maintain the belief system.

This is exhausting. The brain is designed to seek consistency, and when reality persistently contradicts belief, the stress accumulates. You can either acknowledge the contradiction (which means admitting you were wrong, losing your community, rebuilding your identity) or you can dig deeper into the belief system, becoming more rigid, more defensive, and less able to process contrary evidence.

Most Green zealots choose the latter because the psychological and social cost of the former is too high. But this rigidity comes at a price: increased anxiety, heightened defensiveness, inability to think flexibly, and—crucially for democracy—inability to hold leaders accountable.

This allostatic overload explains why Green Party true believers often seem so tightly wound, so quick to anger, so unable to engage in good-faith discussion. They’re not just defending policies—they’re defending against the psychological collapse that would come from acknowledging they’ve invested their entire identity in performance rather than substance.

Labour voters don’t experience this to the same degree because their investment is more transactional than existential. When Labour disappoints, it’s annoying but not identity-threatening. When the Greens disappoint, the true believer’s entire psychological framework is under attack.

The Vulnerability Pipeline.

The Greens didn’t accidentally stumble into this more extreme structure—they’ve actively cultivated it, using tactics that would make a megachurch pastor proud.

Start with the undeniable truth: Climate change is real. Inequality exists. The system is corrupt.

Escalate to apocalyptic urgency: Not just “we have problems”—we have an existential crisis. Twelve years to save civilisation. This panic short-circuits critical thinking and creates the chronic stress conditions that lead to allostatic overload.

Offer exclusive salvation: Other parties are corrupted, compromised, part of the problem. We alone are pure.

Fuse identity with belief: You’re not just voting Green—you’re becoming Green. It’s your social circle, your moral framework, your purpose. This is where it diverges from normal politics. Tory voters don’t define their entire identity around being Conservative. Even most Labour voters maintain an identity separate from the party. Green Party converts often don’t.

Create echo chambers: Surround followers with information sources that only confirm the narrative, intensifying confirmation bias until alternative interpretations become psychologically inaccessible.

Compare this to how Labour operates. Labour says, “Vote for us, we’ll improve things a bit, make some mistakes, but we’re better than the Tories.” That’s transactional. You can evaluate it based on results.

The Green Party pitch is existential: “Join us in saving the planet. Be part of the righteous. Find your purpose.” That’s not transactional—that’s spiritual. And spiritual commitments don’t respond to evidence the way transactional ones do.

Why This Extreme Version Matters More.

Every government disappoints. Every party breaks promises. Every party has loyal followers who exhibit hive mentality and confirmation bias. This is baked into democratic politics.

The danger with the Green Party isn’t that they lie—it’s the degree to which they’ve created a follower base that cannot acknowledge they’re lying.

When Labour disappoints, enough Labour voters can push back, demand better, threaten to stay home next election that the feedback loop still functions—imperfectly, but it functions. Their confirmation bias hasn’t been weaponised to cult-like levels. Their allostatic load hasn’t reached the point where acknowledging failure threatens psychological collapse.

When Greens fail to deliver, their zealot base doesn’t push back—they explain it away, attack critics, and double down on faith. That feedback loop is more completely broken because acknowledging failure means threatening the entire polycule structure they’ve built their lives around. The confirmation bias is so intense that contradictory evidence literally doesn’t register. The allostatic overload is so severe that considering alternative interpretations creates unbearable psychological stress.

This matters because the Green Party is now governing Bristol City Council following their victory in May 2024, ending Labour’s decades of control. They’re in power in various councils across the country, and are increasingly positioning themselves as the alternative for disillusioned Labour voters. When they achieve power with a base that has taken hive mentality to cult-like extremes, you get faith-based governance—policy made by people who cannot acknowledge when things aren’t working because their entire social-emotional-professional ecosystem depends on maintaining the narrative.

The Dangerous Symmetry.

And yes, before the inevitable howls: the far-right exhibits identical dynamics. Different doctrine, same psychological structure. Moral absolutism, persecution complex, unfalsifiable beliefs, polycule-like networks of overlapping extremist organisations, weaponised confirmation bias, and followers experiencing allostatic overload from maintaining contradictory beliefs.

Both extremes have taken normal political tribalism and hive mentality to cult-like levels. Both create followers who cannot process contradictory evidence. Both treat disagreement as ‘enemy action. Both operate as interconnected webs rather than collections of independent thinkers.

The difference lies in the magnitude and direction of the harm. Far-right ideology explicitly premises itself on harming outgroups. Green Party ideology starts from a genuine crisis and proposes solutions that are merely incompetent rather than malicious.

The Way Forward.

The planet is in crisis. We do need urgent climate action. But we need it delivered by people operating in reality, not by zealots operating in faith, not by activists so enmeshed in polycule structures that acknowledging failure means social death, not by followers whose confirmation bias has been weaponised to cult-like levels, not by true believers experiencing such severe allostatic overload that considering alternative evidence threatens psychological collapse.

Every party breaks promises and cultivates tribal loyalty—that’s not news. What matters is whether their supporters retain enough critical distance to acknowledge reality and demand better, or whether they’ve been absorbed into networks of belief so intense that contradiction simply doesn’t register.

Until the Green Party can step back from the extreme version of hive mentality they’ve cultivated and develop a voter base capable of critical evaluation rather than collective reinforcement, they’ll remain what they’ve become: a political movement that’s taken normal tribalism to cultic extremes, producing the same broken promises as everyone else, but uniquely equipped to convince their followers that failure is actually success.

The planet deserves evidence-based policy. Democracy requires accountability. And voters deserve better than movements—Green or otherwise—that exploit normal human psychology (confirmation bias, tribal loyalty, need for meaning) and push it to pathological extremes, promising salvation they cannot deliver to followers too psychologically invested and too stressed by maintaining contradictory beliefs to notice they’ve been had.

But at least when Labour disappoints you, enough Labour voters can admit it to create some accountability. Try getting a Green Party zealot to acknowledge their council just sold the social housing they promised to build—you’d have more luck converting a megachurch pastor to atheism.