A Lot of People Are Saying
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The incendiary purpose of the conspiracy theory in the Declaration remains. On July 4, 2017, National Public Radio issued one hundred tweets that together contained the full text. Twitter followers identified as Donald Trump supporters were confused. They read the tweets as NPR instigating violence against the administration. “So NPR is calling for revolution. Interesting way to condone the violence while trying to sound ‘patriotic.’ ” “Your implications are clear.” “Glad you are being defunded. You have never been balanced on your show.” And the omnipresent charge: “Fake news.”14
Framing the Declaration as a conspiracy theory is to see it from only one—admittedly narrow—perspective and does not say all there is to say about the reasons to memorialize it. The Declaration is one of many instances of American conspiracism attached to major events—so many, in fact, that in his collection of conspiracist texts from the Revolution to 1971, historian David Brion Davis asks, “Is it possible that the circumstances of the Revolution conditioned Americans to think of resistance to a dark subversive force as the essential ingredient of national identity?”15
Shedding Explanation
The Declaration showed how the various abuses of Parliament and the Crown constituted in aggregate a settled design to extinguish liberty in North America: explanation was at the heart of the matter. The philosopher Brian Keeley says this is true for conspiracy theories in general: “A conspiracy theory is a proposed explanation of some historical event … in terms of the significant causal agency of a relatively small group of persons … acting in secret,” which is to say, “a conspiracy theory deserves the appellation ‘theory’ because it proffers an explanation of the event in question.”16
Yet the new conspiracism discards this defining purpose. Not only does the new conspiracism fail to offer explanations, there is often nothing to explain. Consider again the classic conspiracy theory that the US government helped plan and execute the 9/11 attack. However inaccurate, it helps explain the seemingly incredible fact that nineteen individuals unaffiliated with any state could successfully destroy the World Trade Center and attack the Pentagon.
In contrast, the new conspiracism sometimes seems to arise out of thin air, as with the claim that Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, ran a child molestation operation from the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington, DC (the “Pizzagate” conspiracy). Or that a routine military exercise in Texas in the summer of 2015 was the prelude to a national government take-over of the state (Operation Jade Helm, which we discuss at more length in chapter 7). The new conspiracists posit odious designs but not the how or why, and often not even the who. They do not marshal evidence, however implausible; there is no documentation of a long train of abuses all tending the same way. They do not make use of what Keeley calls the conspiracist’s “chief tool,” errant data.17
The typical form of the new conspiracism is bare assertion. Consider Trump’s repeated insistence that busloads of fraudulent voters were sent to cast ballots against him in the New Hampshire presidential primary. The primary was “rigged.” Yet there is nothing begging for explanation. Trump lost New Hampshire by fewer than 3,000 votes, true; but he won the election—a fact that nobody disputes. The outcome in the Electoral College would have been the same whether he won New Hampshire or not. Unless one thinks it defies belief to suppose that Trump could lose an election, there is nothing here that needs to be explained. Nor are there stray facts to account for. There is no corroborating evidence of irregularity—not even one reported case of a fraudulent voter impersonating a registered voter—something that might get noticed in a small state where fewer than 750,000 people voted and many precincts contain fewer than 1,000 voters. The bare assertion “rigged” does not pretend to analyze how these alleged illegal voters were identified, rallied, and delivered to polling places, or how the plot was covered up.
Another example of sheer allegation is “birtherism.” In referring to Barack Obama as the “quote ‘president,’ ” there is no theory of when the hoax of his American citizenship originated, or how it was perpetrated, or who falsified documents, or why. The new conspiracism satisfies itself with a free-floating allegation disconnected from anything observable in the world. It offends common sense.
Today, “fake” is the most familiar example of bare assertion: fake news, fake FBI reports, fake government statistics, even fake weather reports exaggerating the strength of a hurricane. “Fake” is more than the charge that the report is untrue—it is shorthand for manipulation and fabrication to a purpose, done covertly. It points to a conspiracy. Fakeness is not a matter of error, after all, but of malignant intent. With every use of the term fake, conspiracists insist on the reality of a plot to make up news stories, concoct fictitious intelligence reports, and manufacture data—deliberately, not wantonly. And the conspiracist response is not correction or setting things straight; “fake” is the entire response. There is nothing more.
Sometimes the new conspiracism piles bare assertion on bare assertion. In its elaborateness, it can superficially mimic the qualities of classic conspiracy theory: connecting the dots and identifying patterns. As in, for instance, the QAnon conspiracy—a mash-up of new conspiracist charges, including Hillary Clinton’s child sex-trafficking ring, a global network of Jews, and an inverted version of the Mueller investigation of Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential campaign. QAnon originated with an anonymous contributor (“Q”) to the website 4chan who purported to be a government agent with inside information about Trump’s master plan to stage a countercoup against the deep state. In its complexity, QAnon has the look of classic conspiracy theory, but it is a species apart. The new conspiracists are engaged in a fantasy decoding operation using scraps of intelligence (called crumbs) that pile bizarre elements on top of each other.18 Not only does the theory fail to explain anything—it also lacks elementary coherence and defies common sense.
In addition to bare assertion, the new conspiracism takes the form of an ominous question—for example, those that followed the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia: “How can the Marshal say without a thorough post mortem that he was not injected with an illegal substance that would simulate a heart attack,” William O. Ritchie, a former homicide investigator for the Washington, DC, police, wrote in a Facebook post. “Did the US Marshal check for petechial hemorrhage in his eyes or under his lips that would suggest suffocation? Did the US Marshal smell his breath for any unusual odor that might suggest poisoning?” Ritchie suggested a conspiracy: “My gut tells me there is something fishy going on in Texas.”19 No specific accusations are made, and no falsifiable assertions are ventured. The “just asking questions tactic” substitutes for argument, evidence, and explanation.20
There is one more form the new conspiracism commonly takes: innuendo. In the 2016 campaign, Trump repeated a National Enquirer article that suggested a connection between Senator Ted Cruz’s father and John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. As Trump said, “Even if it isn’t totally true, there’s something there.”21 Or, as Representative Bryan Zollinger (R-ID) said about the allegation that Democratic Party officials had lured white nationalists and antifascist protesters to Charlottesville in 2017 in order to manufacture a violent clash, “I am not saying it is true, but I am suggesting that it is completely plausible.”22 The power of the new conspiracism is that it is satisfied with an allegation being “true enough,” rather than true—which is the subject of chapter 2.
Shedding Political Theory
In addition to shedding explanation, the new conspiracism sheds political theory. It does not offer an account of what is threatened. It does not offer an account of the constructive political change that should follow from exposing the danger. Conspiracists have grievances, of course. They are powered by resentment and spite and righteous anger. But resentment and backlash are not a political theory.23 The new conspiracism is agitating, attributing terrible meaning to seemingly ordinary actions and events, and at the s
ame time politically sterile.
Conspiracists in the classic mode assume a protective pose not against this or that whisper, rumor, or cabal but against malignancy on a grand scale. They see conspiracy as the motive force in world events; indeed, history is conspiracy.24 In this respect, classic conspiracism is often apocalyptic; at stake is nothing less than the survival of Protestantism threatened by a worldwide papacy, for example, or capitalism threatened by a worldwide communist movement. The new conspiracism, in contrast, lacks a sense of history, scope, or scale. The new conspiracism is not defending ultimate values; often the stakes are low, of the moment, and no values are articulated at all.
Classic conspiracism is embedded in a more or less explicit ideology or political theory. Nelson captures this astutely in his account of American revolutionary conspiracism: “Expect the worst from those in power” is a temper of mind, but what is the worst that we believe is being done to us? For that we need a conception of liberty, of law, of rights, of political institutions that are being subverted for conspiracy theory to attach itself to.25 The Declaration of Independence, as we have seen, was itself a conspiracy theory in the context of a broader commitment to equality, natural rights, and government by consent. The sometime messianic claim of classic conspiracists to expose the threat and save the country or the world is inseparable from a story of just what is threatened and—crucially—from a vision of what the saved, restored, rehabilitated nation should be: a republic, a nation without slavery, democratic elections free of covert influence. Even the most apocalyptic warnings of disaster and destruction are attached to some vision of revivification and rebirth.
A high point of conspiracist thinking tethered to political theory was Progressivism in the late nineteenth century. The apparatus of political parties and the interests they served amounted to a system of corruption, collusion, and fraud, the argument went. Think party bosses, smoke-filled rooms, patronage and spoils, and voters not persuaded but bought. Progressives ferreted out the facts “all tending the same way,” revealed patterns of corruption, and wove them into narratives of a covert combination of corporate monopolies and party bosses. We call it investigative reporting; they called it muckraking. The Progressives’ purpose was to break up the corporate forces combining to subvert democracy and to wrest politics from political machines. In their place, they championed nonpartisan local government, reliance on expertise, and, above all, direct democratic participation. Progressives’ conspiracy theory about schemes to capture democracy was inseparable from a theory of democracy. They had a political ideology and program of action.
The new conspiracism has no loyalty to any constitutional arrangement or program of political reform. To say that conspiracists have shed political theory is not to say that conspiracy narratives are walled off from partisan politics or without political consequences, clearly. But notwithstanding what we call the “partisan penumbra” in chapter 4, which aligns the new conspiracism with radical Republicans, the new conspiracist mind-set is not ideological. It is an exaggeration to say that “conspiracy theories have replaced ideologies at the heart of politics.”26 We only have to think of conflicts over taxation or health care to see that liberal and conservative, Left and Right, remain salient in politics. Yet the notion that conspiracism has replaced ideology does capture the fact that it lacks political theory, and its effects are wholly negative: disorientation and delegitimation.
Where classic conspiracism offers hopeful—sometimes utopian—accounts of what exposing the conspiracy can accomplish, the new conspiracism is not aspirational. Conspiracists offer no notion of what should replace the reviled parties, processes, and agencies of government once covert schemes are revealed. They are without political prescriptions or an ounce of utopianism. Even when the new conspiracism foresees an apocalyptic climax, as it does for Trump adviser Steve Bannon, there is no phoenix rising from the ashes.27
So conspiracists are not, in our view, agitating to transform democracy into something else—authoritarianism or protofascism or anti-liberal populism. There is no discernable agenda of “regime change.” The new conspiracism is without any coherent constructive political aim. It is destructive—and it is politically sterile.
Shedding Collective Action
Absent political theory, another divergence from classic conspiracism follows: there is no call for collective action to free the nation from the malevolent design to subvert it. The new conspiracists imagine that the plotters they expose have an effective organization and an indomitable capacity for action. But they evidence none of that themselves. Classic conspiracism is prescriptive. The Declaration of Independence called for a war of independence. It directed a course of collective action: to dissolve the political bonds that connected the colonies to Britain, persist in armed resistance, and claim for the colonies the status of independent states. Similarly, Progressivism turned to building the apparatus of direct democracy.
But in the case of the new conspiracism, what should follow from bare assertion, innuendo, and ominous questions? Voter registration drives? Criminal indictments? Noncompliance? Violent resistance? We don’t know, because there is no call to vote, litigate, resist, or arm. After the summary diagnosis of “Rigged” or “Something is happening here,” there is a yawning hole where organized political action should be.
True, the new conspiracism comes with an aura of noncompliance with illegitimate authority. There is more than a hint of threat against the malignant opposition, including the press. Up to now, the new conspiracism has inspired only a few disconnected individuals to act, such as the North Carolina man who entered the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in northwest Washington, DC, and fired his assault rifle in an effort to “self-investigate” the child-trafficking charge he seized on from websites propagating the Pizzagate conspiracy.28 While the new conspiracism does not prescribe collective action, the view that it produces “zombies” is too strong.29
Instead of collective action, the new conspiracists call for repeating and spreading their claims—“liking,” tweeting, and forwarding. Repetition takes the place of organized political action. What Trump, for instance, wants is not the architecture of an organized political party or even an organized movement but a throng that assents to his account of reality. “You know what’s important,” he said about his fantasy of illegal Clinton votes, “millions of people agree with me when I say that.”30 Affirmation of his reality is the key act, as if by itself that is enough to collapse the globalists’ world order, end “fake news” and “hoaxes,” and repair humiliating national weakness.
This helps us understand just how the internet is vital for the new conspiracists and how their use of it is different from classic conspiracists’. For classic conspiracists, the internet is a source of dots and patterns—information that fills in the narrative and solidifies their explanation of events. For the new conspiracists, all the energy is directed at repetition and affirmation. Repetition is the new conspiracism’s oxygen and, it sometimes seems, its whole purpose. With the internet, repeating charges takes no effort. Bare assertions are easily echoed and affirmed. Whereas explanation can be difficult, innuendo is simple. Even the character limit built into Twitter aligns with the new conspiracism’s avoidance of evidence and explanation. The medium invites emphatic, unelaborated assertion.
Social networking is the stage for performing “a lot of people are saying,” and for buttressing the claim by measuring the number of tweets, likes, and shares. The internet is the ideal medium for repetition and for signaling identification with others who spread conspiracist narratives. There are complications in trying to assess the scope of conspiracist claims solely by analyzing tweets and internet traffic. There are false accounts and fake sites and bots—programs that spread automated messages to a targeted audience, which accounted for 20 percent of the conversations about politics in the weeks before the election.31 “What bots are doing is really getting this thing trending on Twitter,” said one media analyst. “These
bots are providing the online crowds that are providing legitimacy.”32
Only Delegitimate
So, in its sheer negativity, operating unencumbered by political theory, ideology, programmatic aims, political organization, or a plan of action, where does the new conspiracism lead? It can do without political theory or ideology because its business is not protecting democracy, reforming democracy, or propelling transformation to another type of regime. Its product is delegitimation.
Here’s what we mean. Legitimacy has two senses, philosophic and sociological. The philosophic sense asks what kind of a regime, in principle, would be worthy of support. The sociological sense asks whether citizens in fact view their political order as worthy of their support. The new conspiracists are not talking about legitimacy in the philosophic sense. They have neither a theory of government nor of justice that would tell us what kind of regime is worthy of support. The new conspiracism drains the sense that democratic government is legitimate without supplying any alternative standard. It operates at the level of citizens’ attitudes and emotions, insisting that the defining elements of political order are not worthy of support. This is delegitimation—a process of falling off from an earlier judgment that government has rightful authority. Once having meaning, value, and authority for people, democratic institutions no longer do.
To be clear, delegitimation is not the same as mistrust. Mistrust of government is a perennial feature of democracy. It should be. It is an article of political faith that abuse of power is always a possibility and warrants vigilance. Rarely is undiluted trust possible, and nowhere in public life is it desirable.33 Liberal democracy is designed to provide assurances, circumscribing authority by means of laws, institutional checks, mechanisms of accountability, and transparency. Within this constitutional setting, Americans are often mistrustful of what they see as an unjustified imposition on some area of personal freedom, privacy, property, religious expression, or dignity. Certainly, conspiracism inflames mistrust, and particular conspiracy claims pander to popular fears of abuse of power. But many forces contribute to mistrust of government today, among them the corrupt influence of “dark money” in elections, the sense that representatives are not serving constituents’ needs or the national interest, and sheer incompetence in getting the public business done so that governing barely rises to the level of muddling through.