The effect is delegitimation. From the conspiracist standpoint, a victory for Democrats is not just a loss for Trump Republicans; it is the result of nefarious dealings, and it is dangerous. As a result, conspiracists cannot accept, as partisans must, that defeat is temporary. For them, there is no question of a cycle of elections bringing parties to power alternately or of parties sharing power. Rather, the opposition must be disabled from effectively occupying office. It must be rendered impotent. That was Steve Bannon’s consolation at a moment when he thought Trump could not win the election: “Our back-up strategy is to fuck her [Hillary Clinton] up so bad that she can’t govern.”19
Delegitimation of the opposition party is also carried on by disenfranchising its partisans. Partisan efforts to create structural electoral advantage for themselves have a long history. But voter suppression today is justified in conspiracist terms. The mechanisms of disenfranchisement include creating obstacles to registration, narrowing windows for voting, reducing the availability of polling places, requiring specific forms of identification, and purging voter rolls. These measures are meant to legally disenfranchise voters or to create voter confusion and intimidation. The moves are strategic—to entrench Republican majorities—but the effort is now inseparable from the conspiracist claim that unnamed forces are delivering millions of fraudulent voters to the polls. The putative “problem of voter fraud” is at the heart of Trump’s signature conspiracy tale about how he lost the popular vote.
This is delegitimation: representing the opposition candidate as a criminal and the opposition party as a whole as a dangerous enemy to be not only defeated electorally but in fact neutralized. This is not party politics as usual. It is a critical step in the undoing of a democratic system of parties and partisanship.
The culminating step is to impugn all political parties. In this view, Democrats are not the only ones with nefarious, concealed aims. Republicans are complicit. They are weak dupes or willful co-conspirators. Both parties own the rigged status quo. They form a duopoly. Conspiracists see collusion between parties equally responsible for marauding immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and the collapse of national sovereignty and identity.
Trump is perfectly cast to preside over this moment. Parties and partisans frustrate him. He is impulsive and would work without and around them, bully them, or disregard them. And no party or partisan is immune from his diffuse conspiracist claims. This third step toward the delegitimation of parties per se—delegitimation of the defining institution of democracy and our system of representation—is now discernible.
What is already in full-blown, Technicolor effect is the delegitimation of a system of representation that embraces political pluralism, a system requiring regulated rivalry, loyal opposition, and the bedrock democratic “agreeing to disagree.”
The Contrast: Progressive Antipartyism
The new conspiracist assault on parties feeds off a long history of antipartyism in America. But it has very little in common with the most important antiparty movement, Progressivism, whose wholesale attacks on the party system were justified as a defense of democracy. The antiparty charge has historically been made this way in the name of making the system more democratic. In this respect, conspiracist antipartyism is something new; it aims not to improve democracy but rather to delegitimate it.
Progressivism in the late nineteenth century decried parties as “perverters of the democratic spirit.”20 Parties and the interests they served amounted to a system of corruption, collusion, and fraud. Their antidemocratic instruments included party bosses, patronage, spoils, and voters who were not persuaded but bought. (In a twist, the suffragette Charlotte Perkins Gilman described political parties as institutional expressions of “inextricable masculinity” and anticipated that once women were enfranchised, “a flourishing democratic government [could] be carried on without any parties at all.”)21 Progressives connected the dots to reveal patterns of corruption. They called it muckraking. They revealed a conspiratorial combination of corporate monopolies and party bosses.
Their purpose was to wrest power from political machines, and in place of parties Progressives championed what they saw as morally improving institutions. Among them were nonpartisan local government and public commissions that relied on nonpartisan expertise. Acknowledging that political representation and elections might be necessary, Progressives promoted primary elections in which candidates were not identified with a party and voters were independents, not partisans. Above all, though, Progressives championed direct participatory action over political representation: initiatives and referenda, mechanisms to recall elected officials, constitutional conventions, and experiments in deliberative democracy by ordinary citizens. Progressives could talk about parties as perverters of democracy because they had a theory of democracy.
Conspiracist antipartyism today is not the product of sober confrontation with the limitations of party democracy. Indeed, it is divorced from institutional considerations of representation altogether. Nor do conspiracists uphold a purified image of democracy in which independents replace partisans; their appeal is not to voters who describe themselves as independents and claim to make their decisions about candidates case by case without consideration of the collective partisan “we.” The new conspiracism assaults parties and partisanship, but not for the sake of reform; it is wholly negative.
For our part, we think the Progressives went too far in their derogation of parties and partisanship. We don’t cede the moral high ground to independents and technocrats. And we do not champion direct participatory democracy. But despite our criticisms of this view, we recognize that Progressive antipartisanship was motivated by a desire to renovate democracy, to elevate it and purify it and make it more legitimate.
Another American political tradition—pragmatism—is also antiparty, and it provides another contrast to conspiracist delegitimation. A perennial feature of American politics is the pragmatic call to “just fix it,” or, “How about being realistic and just solving the problem?” From this standpoint, parties seem like needless sources of gridlock, obstacles to getting things done. For his part, Trump valorizes action over discussion. As he says, “The problem with politicians is that [they’re] all talk and no action. It’s true. All talk, it’s all bullshit.”22 And he says, “Only I can fix it.” Trump’s boast doesn’t align with pragmatism any more than it does with Progressivism, though. Pragmatism is a collective process of democratic decision-making. It focuses on specific problems, policies, and outcomes, and it looks to specialized knowledge and expertise. Pragmatism is concrete, specific, and technocratic. The new conspiracist mind-set, in contrast, is intractably unpragmatic, uninterested in the intricacies of decision-making and policy-making. The new conspiracism is not about making democracy or government work at all.
The Partisan Penumbra
We’ve set out the steps conspiracism takes in delegitimating not this or that partisan or party but the system of political representation, which rests on the principle of regulated party rivalry and commitment to seeing the opposition as a loyal opposition. Still, our conclusion that the new conspiracism is antiparty may be jarring. After all, it is rightly charged to the president and many of his appointed officials, and it has the sometimes implicit, often pronounced, support of Republicans in Congress. The Left has its conspiracists, but they do not yet approach the new conspiracists in number or influence. Above all, the Left is not party to the delegitimizing thrust of the new conspiracism. Given this asymmetry, isn’t the new conspiracism itself partisan?
Ultimately, conspiracist delegitimation of parties and partisanship is not restricted to one political actor or one side of an issue, one ideology or one party. But in the more immediate near term, conspiracism is aligned with radical conservatism. This alignment is visible in the effect of the new conspiracism—the way it assaults government. We call this the new conspiracism’s “partisan penumbra.”
What explains the alliance of conspiracists and ra
dical conservatives is their mutual hostility to active government, in particular to the complex business of regulation and enforcement located in the administrative state. The administrative state, with its capacity to design and implement complicated, long-term policy, is the legacy of the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Because of this legacy, conservatives have always been wary of it, and radical conservatives opposed to it. The new conspiracism shares and amplifies this opposition. Bannon advocates “deconstruction of the administrative state.” The echo is audible in Trump’s presidential proclamation: the United States needs “a good ‘shutdown.’ ”23 The result, in this moment, is congruence between conspiracism and radical conservatism housed in the Republican Party with its slogan, “Government is not the solution to our problems. It is the problem.”
In its modest iteration, conservatism sought to correct the alleged excesses of New Deal liberalism. As Ronald Reagan explained, in his youth he shared the goals of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, but, as he saw it, the Democratic Party became more extreme. “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” Reagan pronounced. “The party left me.” It was also Reagan who gave Republicanism its antigovernment organizing principle. In its current iteration, conservatism seeks to reverse the New Deal legacy altogether. This more radical and destructive impulse was exemplified by Rick Perry when he insisted during the presidential campaign of 2011 that he would eliminate three federal agencies, but could only name two. The specifics do not matter—what matters is that government be dismantled.
Here is how conspiracism’s partisan penumbra—its alliance with radical conservatism—works. Antigovernment partisans in office run into a formidable obstacle: in practice, dismantling government programs is unpopular. People expect government to protect them from dangerous products, to monitor the safety of the water and food supply, to assist victims of natural disasters, to ensure access to health care, to regulate markets, to prosecute frauds, and so on. When Republicans campaign, they tout their commitment to fiscal responsibility, and Republican voters may echo the ideology of shrunken government and astringency, but not when it comes to any particular policy.24 “The typical conservative cycle runs from backlash [against liberal policies] to embrace [hardline conservative positions] to disappointment.” In 2017, while controlling all three branches of government, Republicans enacted enormous increases in government spending, “reversing the only major policy victory of the Tea Party insurgents in 2011.” The political scientist Matt Grossmann concluded, “The cycle is born of the infeasibility of conservative goals, especially the American right’s attempt to reverse the growth of the welfare and administrative state.” Radical Republican conservatism is “a reactionary backlash rather than an alternative governing program.”25
This is the radical conservative predicament: How to destroy the programs and the institutions that implement them, which people like and endorse? The answer is not to destroy them directly, but instead to delegitimate the infrastructure of the administrative state, and that attack is now effectively carried on in conspiracist terms. Trump is not any sort of recognizable Republican, but his actions align with radical conservatism: attacking the integrity and expertise of civil servants in agencies, hollowing out departments, firing scientists, data collectors, lawyers versed in administration and regulation. Conspiracism helps accomplish what conservatives in office cannot by delegitimating the people and institutions that deliver these policies. This alignment expands the market for conspiracism. It does for radical conservatism some of what it cannot do for itself.
In the moment, this allies many Republicans with conspiracism and gives it a partisan penumbra. But this is not to say that the new conspiracists see themselves as bound to the Republican Party or as promoting a partisan program. In the end, the new conspiracism is not a partisan project. The communities of special knowledge that conspiracists delegitimate—the doctors, economists, and engineers who regulate the safety of airplanes or steward the macroeconomy toward low inflation and sustainable growth—do not belong to one side of the partisan divide. They are what is necessary to make government capable and responsive to popular wants and needs. To undermine them is not to damage liberalism or progressivism or the Left or Democrats or errant Republicans but rather to damage democracy.
That said, for the moment the partisan penumbra of the new conspiracism is indisputably conservative and Republican. While the Left is drawn to classic conspiracism, when it comes to the new conspiracism, it is a mistake to imagine symmetry between the Left and the Right.26 Left conspiracism is not about the delegitimation of democratic institutions. Though it may seem entrenched, the conspiracist alliance with radical conservatism is contingent, and ultimately the new conspiracism will devour its Republican fellow travelers. For conspiracism is a force that is antithetical to any governing philosophy and to any party. It is the acid that dissolves the institutions and processes—the parties, partisanship, and, as we see in chapter 5, the apparatus of knowledge-based policy—that make democracy work.
Weak Parties, Polarized Parties: Conditions for Conspiracist Delegitimation
The outcome of the conspiracist attack on parties is delegitimation. But escalating conspiracist assaults on parties do not arise in a vacuum. Parties are vulnerable targets. The organizational apparatus of both major parties had been weakened so that, by the time of the 2016 election, official party endorsements had little weight, and party leaders had little capacity to prevent a “hostile takeover” of presidential primaries by outsider candidates. In large part, the vulnerability of parties has to do with money. Wealthy individuals and independent groups spend vast sums advertising in support of candidates and issues as they see fit, so that party leaders and organizations no longer control access to campaign funding. They have lost much of their capacity to vet candidates and hold the party together for governing.
Something else has made parties vulnerable to conspiracist attack: political polarization. Democrats and Republicans in office have moved to the liberal and conservative extremes. And whether or not most citizens are more ideologically extreme than they have been (political scientists dispute this point), they are sorting themselves along polarized party lines. The result is a palpable and measurable polarization in politics and even, alarmingly, in social life. In a 2016 Pew Research Center study, majorities in both parties expressed very unfavorable views of the other party and found the other party a source not only of frustration but also of fear and anger. “More than half of Democrats (55%) say the Republican Party makes them ‘afraid,’ while 49% of Republicans say the same about the Democratic Party.” The proportions are higher among partisans who report “high political engagement.” “Thermometer ratings” of hot to cold are very low (“frigid”) for the other party’s candidate. Large percentages of partisans say the people of the opposite party are more closed-minded, immoral, lazy, dishonest, and unintelligent than other Americans.27 That helps account for a telling statistic: 49 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of Democrats said they would be “displeased” if their child married someone of the other party.28 Above all, growing numbers see the opposing party as a “threat.”29
For many partisans, the substantive grounds of division get eclipsed by the blazing fact of division itself. Then there is no place, no appetite, and no gratitude for the moderates and compromisers. Political polarization invites people to see their political opponents as intractable foes. This prepares the way for conspiracist delegitimation, which sees political opponents as enemies, as an existential threat. Weak party organizations and polarization are fertile ground for new conspiracist delegitimation of parties as a foundation of democracy.
The same partisan polarization has weakened knowledge-producing institutions, making them vulnerable to the new conspiracist delegitimation. In chapter 5 we analyze the conspiracist assaults on knowledge, from simple facts to communities of expertise to the free press. Conspiracism attacks not only knowledge but also skepticism: the capacity to recognize
that certainty is provisional and the capacity for self-correction. Both are essential for democratic government, both are virtues necessary for democratic citizenship, and both are targets of the new conspiracists.
5
Knowledge
Administrative and intelligence agencies of government, universities and research centers, communities of expertise, and responsible media all create, assess, correct, and improve the universe of knowledge essential to reasoning about politics and policy. Conspiracism assaults knowledge-producing institutions in ways that are both destructive to democracy and personally disorienting, for, ultimately, conspiracists alter what it means to know something: they claim to own reality, and they seek (with growing success) to impose their reality on everyone.
The new conspiracist mind-set blurs the line between misinformation and good information. It stubbornly asserts and reasserts “both demonstrably false claims and unsubstantiated beliefs about the world that are contradicted by the best available evidence and expert opinion.”1 The assault on knowledge begins with rejection of particulars but culminates in denial of the standing of institutions that produce information, beginning with government agencies—the intelligence agencies, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Congressional Budget Office, the National Institutes of Health, scientific advisory boards, bureaus of statistics, government auditors, and bureaucrats in the Internal Revenue Service. It wantonly discredits nongovernmental sources—scientists, social scientists, public health and education professionals, and research universities. It denies standing to public interest groups and media companies that serve as watchdogs of distortion in the flow of information and explanation. “So don’t make the mistake of dismissing the assault on the Congressional Budget Office as some kind of technical dispute,” the economist Paul Krugman cautions. “It’s part of a much bigger struggle, in which what’s really at stake is whether ignorance is strength, whether the man in the White House is the sole arbiter of truth.”2
A Lot of People Are Saying Page 9