A Lot of People Are Saying
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Political mistrust is typically targeted. It does not aim at institutions and political processes wholesale. And as long as mistrust turns on particular elements of government—the responsiveness of representatives, for example, or delivering what citizens need—it is corrigible. It can be repaired with the resources democratic institutions provide. Mistrust can be assuaged with less remote and more responsive representatives, for example, or by constraining the influence of private money in elections—in short, by a return to fairness and competence in areas that matter to citizens.
Even diffuse and widespread mistrust, which is a sign of anxiety about democracy, stops short of the judgment that government institutions and democratic politics have neither meaning nor value and are not authoritative. That is the difference. Where mistrust is a necessary element of democratic accountability and widespread mistrust is a sign of democratic failing, delegitimation is an active assault on democracy. Delegitimation exists when a political opposition that is mistrusted comes to be seen as a public enemy, for example.
We are learning what delegitimation looks like. Authorities are cast as hostile elements—worms in the bowels of the nation. Officials are “so-called” officials (for example, “the quote ‘president’ ” Obama). They are demeaned and undermined, threatened, and declared criminal or traitorous. The set of assumptions undergirding regular and open political opposition and party competition is overturned. Knowledge-producing institutions and the information and reasoning they provide are rejected wholesale. Delegitimation drains authority from the institutions and practices that make democracy work.
And yet, again, the new conspiracists don’t offer even a rudimentary account of what would be legitimate in the sociological sense—of what would invite citizens to see their government as basically fair. If legitimacy is understood more robustly, in its philosophic sense—as institutions and procedures that have authority because they produce just outcomes—the new conspiracism is seen to lack even a rudimentary theory of justice. All we have is this: institutions, practices, policies, and political officials are not what they seem, but what should be put in their place is undefined. Perhaps nothing at all. The motto of the new conspiracism might be “Only delegitimate.”
The Russia Investigation
Let’s look more closely at the Russia investigation, which lays bare the contours of the new conspiracism and its drive to delegitimate regular practice. In 2017 Robert Mueller, the special counsel, was tasked with investigating Russian interference in the presidential election to assist Trump’s candidacy. From the outset, the White House and friends in Congress and in the media began a concerted campaign to delegitimate the investigation.
Initially, this took the form of an especially virulent partisan attack on the FBI and Mueller’s team of career professionals. Never mind that principals at the Department of Justice were Republicans; the charge was that the special counsel team and officials at the FBI were Democrats and “politically motivated,” incapable of objective consideration of the facts.34 Kellyanne Conway, who serves as counselor to the president, put it this way: “The fix was in against Donald Trump from the beginning, and they were pro-Hillary.… They can’t possibly be seen as objective or transparent or even-handed or fair.”35
Over several months, the effort to delegitimate the special counsel’s investigation changed from charges of partisan bias to a full-blown charge of conspiracy. Trump supporters began to use the term coup; banners on Fox News read, “A Coup in America?” On Fox News, Jeanine Pirro asserted that never in presidential election history had there been “as great a crime or as large a stain on our democracy than that committed by a criminal cabal in our FBI and the Department of Justice who think they know better than we who our president should be.” Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee kept up the mantra in his newsletter and on Twitter, “It’s an attempted coup d’état!”36 Here is conspiracist delegitimation in a nutshell: a cabal within the FBI and Department of Justice was attempting to bring the president down.
The shift from partisan bias to full-blown conspiracy owes to the high drama surrounding an investigation that includes the president of the United States. Charges of political bias had become so anodyne as to lose impact; something more was needed. The shift is not simply tactical, though. The incessant infusion of conspiracist claims into public life had prepared many officials and citizens to receive the amped-up charge of an imminent coup d’état. Undeveloped, undocumented, and unreliably reported in a temper of unalloyed aggressiveness, this charge of a coup at the highest levels of government delegitimates the investigation. It also delegitimates central agencies of government like the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice. Ultimately, delegitimation envelops the government as a whole.
What Is the Appeal?
People are curious about what is hidden in politics—whether the private lives of public figures or the “real” story behind political events. The move from secrecy to revelation feeds this hunger. Conspiracism has this appeal. As historian Timothy Snyder cautions, the danger is that “discussion shifts from the public and the known to the secret and the unknown. Rather than trying to make sense of what is around us, we hunger for the next revelation.”37 The warning is particularly apt when it comes to the new conspiracism, for claims that things are not as they seem multiply wildly and opportunities to dive into the dark unknown are always right at hand in the media and via social networking. The new conspiracism, with its serial artificial crises, is exciting. It offers distraction from the tedious, frustrating, and often futile business of attending to known but difficult problems and political demands.
Curiosity, titillation, and entertainment aside, what is the appeal of bare assertion, innuendo, and ominous questions? Especially as it does not explain anything, what does the new conspiracism offer? Part of the appeal is performative aggression. The new conspiracism delivers dark claims, though the fabrications are erratic, vague, and undeveloped—more angry assertion than revelatory narrative. For angry minds it offers the immediate gratification of lashing out, of throwing verbal stones. It is a particularly gratifying form of vilification precisely because the more unfathomable the accusation, the greater the degree of disorientation, incredulity, and rage it provokes in its targets. Conspiracist accusations leave the rest of us, officials and citizens alike, baffled, our sense of reality threatened, our responses tentative and, it feels, inadequate. Disorientation is one of the dangerous effects of conspiracism, and producing this reaction is one of the new conspiracists’ declared pleasures.
The new conspiracism also holds out the satisfaction of knowingness: “Accidents are planned, democracy is a sham, all faces are masks, all flags are false.”38 They are an elite, a “cognoscenti.” Perhaps that is the wrong term, though, because cognoscenti has a prosaic meaning today: being particularly well informed about a particular subject. Conspiracists are more like the inner circle of an esoteric group or sect. But as we show, it is knowingness at low cost.
The new conspiracism’s characteristic forms—bare assertion, ominous questions, and innuendo—are permissive. They have the appeal of elasticity and irresponsibility. Because of its vagueness, “a lot of people are saying” can embrace an expanding universe of conjured plots and public enemies. And “just asking questions” evades ownership of the claim. The author of any single conspiracist charge is often indeterminate; charges can arise spontaneously as a tease on a radio talk show or an anonymous throwaway on some fringe website. Regardless of whether conspiracists identify themselves or remain anonymous, a charge leveled without evidence that takes the form of vague innuendo avoids responsibility for what it asserts.39 It suffices to announce, “I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough.”40
There is one more appeal: sheer negativity signals defiance. With their virulence and destructiveness, the new conspiracists, especially the president, assign themselves the status of outsiders. They are not politicians. They demonstrate th
at they are not devoted to the art of governing—which is welcome to those who think government itself is illegitimate. The defiance of norms conveys an antipolitical authenticity. It carries the promise to tear down the edifice and effect some indeterminate radical change. We see that there is an appetite for conspiracist delegitimation. At least until the consequences hit home.
Why Now?
We know that conspiracism is always present: there is always an occasion to suspect that, for pernicious reasons, things are not as they seem. Conspiracism has always had a foothold in certain domains of political culture, especially those at the outermost political fringe. But what explains the new conspiracism, and what makes it a political force?
Deep and long-standing discontents are at work in the background. There is the generalized antipathy to political elites, or the establishment, that marks a range of democracies on both sides of the Atlantic.
There is also the hostility to government that has characterized contemporary conservatism, for which the assertion, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” has become a truism.41 We look at this closely in chapter 4.
Social resentment and feelings of humiliation also fuel the new conspiracism. People are prone to target groups whom they imagine are responsible for a rash of grievances, and conspiracists call up and sharpen these inchoate sentiments and home in on targets of blame.
The dynamics that fuel populist upheavals are also at work in the new conspiracism. But at the same time, as we discuss in chapter 3, the new conspiracism is not reducible to populism. It is an independent force with distinctive delegitimating effects.
One force behind the emergence of the new conspiracism is plain: the revolution in broadcast technology that allows anyone to disseminate what he or she writes or says without any intermediary and at no cost. This has displaced the gatekeepers, the producers, editors, and scholars who decided what was worthy of dissemination. The way is opened for conspiracy entrepreneurs who initiate and disseminate a seemingly infinite array of wild accusations.
Our focus is less on the conditions for the new conspiracism than on its effects: delegitimation and disorientation in the political world. And these effects are possible because democratic institutions have already been weakened. For decades, party organizations and knowledge-producing institutions have been under assault. Long before the new conspiracism appeared, intensified political polarization had turned politics into a zero-sum game in which members of rival parties could scarcely cooperate or even agree to disagree. It had produced depictions of the mainstream press and the scientific community as skewed by political bias. This set the stage for the delegitimation of the party system itself. And it set the stage for rejecting the necessity of specialized knowledge for governing.
In chapter 2, we look at the logic of the new conspiracism. And we point to the political significance of the fact that what seems merely “true enough” is itself enough—enough reason to subscribe to conspiracist claims.
2
It’s True Enough
Do people really believe that President Barack Obama was born in Africa? Do people truly think that Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager ran an international child sex-trafficking ring out of a pizzeria in Washington, DC? Or that the United States Army was planning to invade the state of Texas in the summer of 2015, declare martial law, and disarm the population?
We saw in chapter 1 that bare assertions, innuendo, and ominous questions are enough to get the new conspiracism going: as Trump said about the putative connection between Senator Ted Cruz’s father and John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, “Even if it isn’t totally true, there’s something there.”1 And we saw Representative Bryan Zollinger perfectly capture the ethos of true-enoughness in his suggestion that the Democratic Party might very well have brought white nationalists to Charlottesville in 2017 to create a violent clash: “I am not saying it is true, but I am suggesting that it is completely plausible.”2
The new conspiracism sets a low bar: if one cannot be certain that a belief is entirely false, with the emphasis on entirely, then it might be true—and that’s true enough. This is the logic behind “Even if it’s not totally true, there’s something there.” The new conspiracists do not necessarily believe what they say. But they do not disbelieve it either. As we have argued, classic conspiracy theory is about making sense of the world. But to assent in the way the new conspiracists do is something different. Their assent is forceful and has the stamp of certainty—the election was “rigged!” But when probed, the language of certainty often gives way to the language of “true enough.” And “true enough” is good enough politically. Because the weak ground of assent does not cause hesitation or humility. It is not a barrier to publicly asserting emphatic claims about reality. It does not inhibit conspiracists from claiming to own reality. And for conspiracists in power, it is not an impediment to imposing their reality on the nation.
Classic conspiracy theories are often self-sealed systems of thought that, once one is on the inside, permit no exit; in this respect they can constitute a “crippled epistemology.”3 The new conspiracism too is a closed system. It is epistemologically flawed and self-validating in a different way, however. It is unconcerned with explanation and encourages assent to and action on the basis of claims that are not disproved and are not impossible, and are therefore “true enough.” We will come back to this, but first let’s look at whether aspects of the “crippled epistemology” associated with conspiracism are ones that to some extent we all share.
The Paranoid Style
There is a popular tendency to see all conspiracists as caught in the grips of irrational psychological forces. Conspiracy theories are often thought to reflect a paranoid state of mind—a connection that originated in the historian Richard Hofstadter’s seminal essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” But to categorize all conspiracy theory as “crazy” is to misunderstand both conspiracism and Hofstadter’s argument.
For Hofstadter, “paranoid” is not a clinical diagnosis of individual mental disturbance. In his picture of conspiracism, conspiracists do not see themselves as singled out by a hostile world directing its animus specifically against them but rather see hostile forces directed “against a nation, a culture, a way of life.” Hofstadter calls this style paranoid, he explains, “simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”4
For Hofstadter, conspiracism arises from the tension between the belief that individuals shape history and the contemporary social-scientific view that large, impersonal forces shape history. As we saw in chapter 1, American revolutionaries saw events as entirely a reflection of the intentions of powerful individual actors. There was a moral coherence to their understanding of cause and effect in that they attributed desirable effects to good intentions and evil to bad intentions. The modern or social-scientific framework of explanation has shifted to impersonal forces and the aggregate actions of large numbers of people in politics, the economy, and society. The link between individual intention and consequence has been loosened. From the standpoint of contemporary assumptions about causality, conspiracists may appear, as they did to Hofstadter, as a retrograde minority in their insistence on the decisive force of agents with malignant intent. This insistence can seem like a distortion, one characterized in psychological terms as “paranoid.”5
Hofstadter studied the appearance and effects of the “paranoid style” in American politics because he saw it as a threat to democracy. Conspiracism threatened what he saw as the moderate and pragmatic requirements of liberal democracy. Because of what they are up against, and because of what is at stake, conspiracists incline to secrecy and aggression. They reject mediation and compromise. Conspiracists, as Hofstadter saw them, are averse to “the manner of working politicians.”6 We agree with Hofstadter’s assessment: the urgency that disdains any ordinary approach
to politics as inadequate is something classic and new conspiracism share. Yet there is this difference: the new conspiracism not only is averse to the mundane workings of democratic politics but assaults its institutions and practices wholesale.
Normalizing Conspiracist Thought
Rather than pathologize it, Hofstadter insists that, despite his use of the term, the “paranoid style” characterizes “more or less normal people.”7 Today, a growing company of cognitive and social psychologists look at the epistemic processes that characterize conspiracism and see them as ordinary and universal.8 In this view, conspiracism is not sui generis but rather an expression of basic thought processes that afflict all our thinking—“afflict” because these cognitive mechanisms, while ordinary, also invite error and distortions. Moreover, these built-in features of our minds are unconscious. We are not aware of the moves our mind directs us to make.