Scapegoating
Tribalism, we’ve said, fuels the new conspiracism. And tribalism is intimately related to scapegoating. The form scapegoating conspiracism takes is bare assertion, as when Trump declares, “The Mexican Government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States … criminals, drug dealers, rapists.”42 The scapegoated targets of conspiracist charges are hated. They arouse animus and fury. The charge is simple: they bear responsibility for the nation’s troubles. The origin of the term scapegoat is biblical—in a Mosaic ritual, one goat is chosen to be the symbolic carrier of the sins of the people.43 Although scapegoating today is secular not religious, it bears the ancient traces of moral fervor and sanctimony.
Scapegoating conspiracism responds to resentment and feelings of powerlessness by singling out a segment of the population as the cause of cruelly disappointed expectations. Rapid social change and loss of social status render people ready to target a particular group as the cause of their misfortune. The humiliation of losing status, of losing economic security, of losing a sense of racial dominance and superiority all feed anger and the desire to blame. There is this, too: the humiliation of powerlessness—of being unnoticed and unheeded. And all of this has been deliberately inflicted by a cabal of malevolent elites and the undeserving groups they champion. So, where historians see long-term processes of social and demographic change, conspiracists see the handiwork of a despised group. These conspiracist formulations are simplistic and reductive. Scapegoating conspiracism is an “ideological misrecognition of power relations.”44
In democracies, conspiracists have often fastened on secret groups for scapegoating. The reason is obvious: in an open society, any underground association suggests malicious intent. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Freemasons were charged with covertly controlling the press, manipulating the economy, and directing government. Everywhere, Jews are a favorite object of scapegoating conspiracism; the message of the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published by Henry Ford, is repeated over and over, and it is with us still: the Jews are plotting to dominate the world. Conspiracists saw the papacy and Catholic priests as secretly working to weaken Protestantism. Conspiracists see the forces of atheism as threatening Judeo-Christian culture. Or they charge that Muslims are plotting to replace the Constitution with sharia law or to engage in terrorism. Just about any conspiracist cohort in the United States could adopt for itself the name of the late nineteenth-century anti-Catholic conspiracist group—the American Protective Association.
We’ve said that conspiracism conjures an explanation for grievances proportionate to indignity and resentment. And its satisfactions are aligned with the new conspiracism. Scapegoating conspiracism gives resentment a target. And scapegoating conspiracism is wholly negative. It does not offer an improvement in one’s situation but rather the satisfaction of pulling others down. It expresses righteous anger. And like the new conspiracism, scapegoating can overcome lethargy. It is stimulating. It is a form of vicarious action.
Scapegoating can be combined with assaults on political opponents—clearly so when the opposition is cast as supporters of a despised group. We see Trump bringing three of his stock conspiracist claims together—scapegoating of Mexican immigrants, voter fraud, and the Democratic Party as a conspiratorial group aimed at destroying him and the nation. “Democrats are the problem,” he tweeted. “They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country like MS-13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!”45 This is presidential conspiracism, unique in its destructive power. It is the subject of chapter 3.
3
Presidential Conspiracism
Presidential conspiracism is potent because the presidential office is itself so powerful. Executive authority has increased in response to national emergencies and presidential (and popular) frustration with Congress. As important, since Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the American presidency has been a rhetorical presidency. The president is expected to speak directly to the people, to articulate a national purpose, to develop a legislative program, and to lead a party that carries the president’s vision forward. Before Teddy Roosevelt, presidents were expected to be restrained and distant, more like guardians of the Constitution than like popular leaders. Over the course of the twentieth century, the latent rhetorical power of the office was liberated in the name of presidential leadership.1 “Rhetorical power,” as the political scientist Jeffrey Tulis says, “is a very special case of executive power.… It is a power itself.”2
Presidents shape the national agenda and they also have the capacity to confer recognition: who is seen as a full participant in the life of the nation, what causes and which groups get seen and noticed and honored, which stories and explanations make sense of who we are and where we are going. So when conspiracism moves into the White House, it functions to divide the country against itself. Trump’s conspiracism encourages people to disparage the ideal of national unity and to replace it with something more suspicious, more hateful, and more ferocious.
Of course, division, hatred, and violence are often center stage in politics. “The latent causes of faction,” as James Madison wrote in the Federalist, no. 10, are “sown in the nature of man.”3 Nothing is more difficult in politics than bringing people together to cooperate for their mutual advantage. And bringing people together requires inspiring them to see themselves as a people, in spite of the differences of interest and identity that divide them. We see this at the founding, when the task of unification was so urgent. After remarking on the blessing of “one connected, fertile, wide spreading country” in the Federalist, no. 2, Publius (here, John Jay) wrote, “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.”4 This description of identity was a misrepresentation then, as it is now—consciously so, as we know from reading Madison’s Federalist essays on factions in America. Publius would have known that Catholics predominated in Maryland and Congregationalists in Massachusetts, the slave economy in Georgia and independent farmers in Maine.
But it was a misrepresentation designed to improve the country. The invocation of unity, which over time has been expanded to take account of minority groups and others who fell outside Jay’s notion of unity based on similarity, has been a defining element of presidential leadership. At its most forceful, it brings people together by persuading them to embrace an ideal of unity that goes beyond what the contemporary facts might warrant. Every modern president before 2017 took some care not to turn one part of the people against another. “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America,” Barack Obama said in the speech that made him a presidential contender. “There’s the United States of America.”5
By contrast, recall Donald Trump’s campaign announcement speech: Mexico is “not sending their best.… They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”6 Divisive conspiracism is a consistent feature of Trump’s presidency. At a New Hampshire campaign stop in September 2015, Trump was asked about the Muslim “problem” in the United States and the “training camps growing where they [Muslims] want to kill us.” The questioner was alluding to the rumor that Muslim communities in the US operate military camps to prepare members to conduct terrorist raids. Notwithstanding the absence of any evidence for the notion—and in spite of the fact that some Americans in the grips of the story have themselves plotted to attack Muslim communities7—Trump stoked the fear: “You know, a lot of people are saying that, and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there. We’re going to be looking at that and plenty of other things.”8
The power of the president as commander in chief, as the one singularly responsible for identifying imminent ex
istential threats to the nation, means that when the president scapegoats, it can seem patriotic to fear and hate and to act on these emotions. The president has the power to ratify scapegoating and normalize conspiracism—to render it a tool for politicians to use to attract support and sway opinion. Beyond that, presidential conspiracism becomes a rationale for degrading ordinary democratic institutions, creating what we will show is a “malignant normality.”
Presidential conspiracism is doubly unique. Trump has unique personal characteristics, for one thing. For another, the presidency allows him to act on conspiracism in ways unique to the office, with incomparably destructive consequences. Conspiracism allied with presumptive authority and institutional power means that the president’s claim to own reality is accompanied by the capacity to act on it. We are, in the words of poet C. K. Williams, “mortified by his absurd power.”9
Conspiracism, Populist Style
It is tempting to identify conspiracism with populism. The combination is seen in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s narrative of an attempted coup against his government constituted a full-blown conspiracy theory that he leveraged to justify cracking down on opposition parties.10 In the United Kingdom, the populist revolt against the European Union in the Brexit referendum was associated with conspiracism.11 Conspiracism and a populist style come together as they do in Trump, but it is a mistake to see them as inextricably tied.12 There are important differences. And conspiracism is an independent force with its own distinctive effects.
Although populism is an elusive label, we see a near-perfect expression of populism as a political style in Trump’s campaign announcement screed against “Mexican rapists” and in his repeated rhetorical appeal to the real Americans: “The only important thing is the unification of the people,” Trump says, “because the other people don’t mean anything.”13 He has not disassociated himself from a radically exclusionary definition of those people who do mean something. Populism can be defined in precisely these terms—the political assumption that the people are a homogeneous, unified whole and that this “we” is being betrayed by a cabal of elites at home and globally.
Populists claim to channel the will of the people. Every political candidate and party speaks for some people, of course, but populists designate themselves the real people, the virtuous heart and soul of the nation, and they experience failure to recognize their status as an injury as real as any material harm—as a humiliation. The crux of populism, then, is insistence on the sole legitimate authority of the authentic, spontaneous “voice of the people.” And populism may incline to suppress the residue, the alien fragments, the outsiders. Jan-Werner Müller puts what we call “holism” at the center of populism’s “inner logic.”14 The title of an acute study of populism puts it succinctly: Anti-pluralism.15
Sometimes populism and conspiracism share the inner logic of antipluralism. As populism is about the vindication of the real people against elites, so conspiracism aims at exposing a cabal secretly plotting to betray the people. For his part, Trump casts himself not just as a preternaturally strong leader but as a defender of the people against these cabals. He rouses supporters not only by reminding them of his improbable victory but also by insisting that he remains the victim of an ongoing conspiracy. His daily communications with his followers are flush with charges of secret machinations directed at him personally and as president, and, by the transitive logic of identity, at them, “his” people. Conspiracism is, for him, at the crux of populist discourse and of presidential communications to the nation.
Populism and conspiracism come together in Trump in a way that is hard to unravel. Yet if Trump merges conspiracism and a populist style, the pairing is awkward. Looked at closely, the fit can be strained. Where populism lauds the unconstrained, untutored, intuitive voice of the people, the new conspiracists have a special power to see nefarious dealings that others don’t. They have their own brand of elitism; they are a company of cognoscenti with special knowledge, identifying “false flags” and discerning the workings of a “deep state.” They are members of an inner circle with a privileged ability to decode the hidden causes of things. They are not the spontaneous, intuitive people of populist ideology.
There is this difference too: nothing in populism entails an assault on argument, evidence, and common sense. One of the most striking features of the new conspiracism is precisely its assault on reality, which we discuss in chapter 6. Whatever its depreciation of constitutional constraints on the will of the majority or its dissatisfaction with the existing system of representation, populism does not seek to replace evidence, argument, and commonsense grounds of understanding with convoluted conjurings and unsupported assertions. Conspiracism is a distinctive threat, and it has distinctive effects that populism does not—delegitimation of democratic institutions and psychological disorientation. Political theorist Nadia Urbinati argues that populism, though hostile to political parties and to pluralism, remains within the confines of representative democracy.16 It is tied to elections and committed to majoritarianism. Populists have always cast themselves as reformers. But the new conspiracism is not reformist. It has a purely destructive arc.
Trump’s Presidential Conspiracism
Trump is the embodiment of the new conspiracism on frequent, sometimes daily, public display: the “deep state” planted a spy in his 2016 campaign; MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was involved in the death of one of his staffers; Justice Antonin Scalia might have been murdered (“They say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow”); and, of course, Obama was not born in the United States (Trump’s investigators “can’t believe what they’re finding”).17 From the day Trump took office, conspiracism had a home in the White House. For example, early in 2017 a military-intelligence-style document circulated among members of his National Security Council and others close to the president. Titled “The Echo Chamber,” the conspiracist document claimed to have uncovered a plan of “coordinated attacks” on the new administration’s foreign policy carried out by a covert network of former aides to Obama operating out of a “war room.”18
The president’s conspiracism is sometimes imported, as it was in this case, but often it is his own invention, a reflection of his own sense of reality. This is its most dangerous aspect. Trump appears to live in the reality he has created by interpreting the world through his own personal needs. His unreality often seems, even to observers who are not professional psychologists, to answer to a drive to represent the world in a way that affirms his sense of himself—a combination of victimization and grandiosity (the target of “the biggest hoax in history”). His torrent of conspiracist claims—the National Park Service concealing the true size of his inaugural crowd; the masses of illegal voters casting ballots for Hillary Clinton in a rigged election—posits a reality conforming to powerful personal imperatives. His victory in the Electoral College could not be the whole story because it did not correspond to his conviction that his win was monumental—the widest margin in history; he seems not to have been able to confront the humbling fact that he had fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. When on January 19, 2018, Congress could not agree on a budget resolution and the federal government was shut down, Trump’s comment was characteristically, breathtakingly self-referential: the Democrats orchestrated the crisis to detract from the anniversary of his inauguration!19 To his mind, the investigation into his campaign’s possible collusion with Russians during the 2016 election is a “witch hunt.” In dismissing or remaining silent in response to testimony of the chiefs of every intelligence agency, in demanding personal loyalty from federal law enforcement, the attorney general, the FBI, and the Special Counsel’s Office, he demonstrates that the requirements of national security do not figure prominently in his reality.
All this is aligned with unashamed aggressiveness and invocations of violence—not just violent rhetoric but encouragement of actual physical harm. During the presidential campaign he express
ed nostalgia for the “old days” when he would have been allowed to punch a protester in the face, and he offered to pay the legal fees of supporters who assaulted protesters. He also leveled this threat in connection with the possibility that Hillary Clinton would appoint a Supreme Court justice who would “essentially abolish the Second Amendment”: “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks.… Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.”20 His accelerating attacks on the press have required news organizations to attach security guards to reporters covering his rallies.
Trump’s conspiracism says a lot about him, personally: his cruelty and inclination to insult and cause pain, his recklessness, his impulsiveness, and his heedless failure to anticipate the consequences of his fabrications. It also speaks to the character of the new conspiracism, for Trump’s mind-set fits with a way of thinking that does not admit the existence of an independent world recalcitrant to our desires and wishes. The birther example illustrates this. Trump pursued it relentlessly, indifferent to the fact of the matter. This was his entrée into politics, and he persisted in it throughout the campaign, with just one demurral when it seemed useful. The lingering charge in his mind is “true enough.” Birtherism has become a touchstone for white identity politics, an element of tribal solidarity. But for understanding presidential conspiracism, the point is that it persists because Trump has no available source of knowledge other than what he imagines in the fierce, unceasing effort to assert his own reality. When a reporter asked him whom he talks with for information and advice, Trump was perfectly consistent: “The answer is me. Me. I talk to myself.”21
A Lot of People Are Saying Page 6