A Lot of People Are Saying

by Nancy L. Rosenblum

  Disorientation

  An obscure pizzeria in northwest Washington, DC, becomes, in the eyes of some, a center of international child sex trafficking run by Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. A summer military training exercise becomes, in the eyes of some, an attempt by the United States Army to impose martial law on the state of Texas. The murder of twenty elementary school students in Newtown, Connecticut, becomes, in the eyes of some, a US government action designed to advance gun control legislation. An election without any notable irregularities adverse to the successful Republican nominee becomes, in the eyes of some (in particular, the president himself), a “rigged” election.

  The frequency of such charges, the baffling quality of the narrative concoctions, and their free-floating nature, untethered as they are to anything observable in the real world, contribute to the new conspiracism’s disorienting effect. We are disoriented by the realization that what is absurd to some is true enough to others. And we are talking not about evaluations of particular policies, in the way that a new tariff policy might seem sensible to some and nonsensical to others, but rather about basic perceptions of political reality. We have become accustomed to partisan polarization, the gap in the way Democrats and Republicans evaluate public officials, public policies, and one another. The new conspiracism moves us from gap to chasm, for epistemic polarization ultimately dissolves our common sense of the world, as we discussed in chapter 6.

  A shared world of basic perceptions and a shared sense of elemental causation—of what counts as plausible or farfetched—allows us to make ourselves understandable to each other even when we disagree. Disagreement may be many things: passionate, troubling, unpleasant, destructive, or even illuminating and productive. But in itself, it is not disorienting. On the contrary, to have a clear sense of what you disagree with is to have a political orientation. Knowing what we are against is often a more stable point of orientation than knowing what we are for. But under conditions in which we cannot make ourselves understandable to each other, disagreement itself becomes impossible. There will still be government, and it may preserve democratic forms, but it will be a political world in which we cannot understand each other.

  Disorientation is a personal as well as collective condition. When those in power claim to own reality and impose their reality on public life, what happens to ours? What becomes of us as inhabitants of a common world that no longer seems a world in common? We experience anxiety, rage, and a sense of helpless confusion. Diagnosing disorientation is the first step in overcoming it.

  Delegitimation

  “I’m the only one that matters,” the president says, in the course of dismissing an accumulation of high-level vacancies at the Department of State, crippling the backbone of US diplomacy.7 He is pointing not only to his extraordinary interpretation of executive authority but also, and just as ominously, to the belief that he needs to know nothing more than the content of his own mind. He calls the free press the “enemy of the people” and provokes violent confrontations with reporters. We have no need of those who do the hard work to excavate facts—it’s all “fake news” anyway. He teaches his supporters to disdain experts—they all lend themselves to the service of global elites and to the deep-state conspiracy machinating against him. As for his opponents in elections? They too are enemies of the people. His opponent in the last election, the one he defeated in the Electoral College, should be “locked up.”

  This is the delegitimation of knowledge and the delegitimation of parties—and Donald Trump is only its most powerful agent. At every turn, the new conspiracism assaults the integrity and independence of knowledge-producing institutions. Perhaps because experts deal in specialized terms that often defy general understanding, they are politically vulnerable: they can be cast as a cabal. This is exactly what the new conspiracism does. Insofar as it delegitimates knowledge-producing institutions, conspiracism also incapacitates democratic government. And it does not proceed surgically; delegitimation extends across the board.

  The delegitimation of parties also incapacitates democracy. As we see it today, the process starts by attacking particular candidates and party leaders as criminal or treasonous, extends to partisan opposition in general, and ultimately assaults parties and partisanship wholesale. This takes us back to a time before the idea of the legitimate opposition took hold. It reverts to a time before the acceptance that open, organized political opposition is essential to politics in pluralist societies and to political accountability. And it does not accept the regulated party rivalry that ensures a peaceful transfer of office. It takes us back to a time when parties were seen as conspiracies. For the new conspiracists, that is just what parties are, and they set out not only to make partisans impotent but in fact to delegitimate them.

  Witnesses to the crisis of democracy often attempt to predict how democracies die or, in other terms, how they end. We do not think delegitimation is dramatic, like a political revolution, or sudden, like an executive order that in a stroke initiates a catastrophic or regime-changing policy. Conspiracist delegitimation is a way of hollowing out democracy. And it gives citizens new reasons to think that constitutional democracy cannot be made to work and is not theirs.

  This is happening now. The delegitimation of parties prevents people from coming together after elections. The rituals of unity—concession speeches, inauguration ceremonies, State of the Union addresses—no longer function. They no longer give the losing side confidence that regular succession will hold and that the next election could carry their candidate to office—not if each side thinks the other is an illegitimate participant in public life. The delegitimation of knowledge-producing institutions deprives decision makers of elemental information they need to govern well. As the quality of public decisions degrades, citizens justifiably lose confidence that democratic government can serve the public interest, or even just their own interest.

  Worst-Case Scenarios

  What happens if the new conspiracism is sustained over many election cycles, over decades? What if the architecture of democracy is still standing but the meaning, value, and concern for the public good that lived within this framework have left the building?

  Let’s take a cold-eyed look at conceivable worst-case scenarios, beginning with disorientation.

  What if Trump’s admonition—“Just remember: what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening”—is repeated over and over, over time?8 A state of surprise and disorientation may not be personally sustainable. Some people will endure it and muster the resources to assert the shared grounds of common sense in their own lives and in public life. But others will avoid sustained disorientation by acquiescing in conspiracist narratives. They will adjust. They will accommodate. They will join the company of those for whom conspiracist charges are “true enough.” The most likely scenario for most, however, will be tuning out: retreating into private life and distancing themselves emotionally from every bit of news about public life.9 Call it resignation, or numbing.

  Consider next a worst-case scenario for degraded knowledge-producing institutions. A recent study by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences reports that, when asked what comes to mind when they hear the phrase “scientific research,” 52 percent of study participants were unable to give any response at all.10 Project that into the future, recognizing that the peril is not just ignorance—itself a fatal incapacity when science is crucial for meeting catastrophic situations like climate change—but rejection of support for science altogether.

  Malignant normality, we’ve argued, corrupts democracy by implicating officials who are just doing their jobs in the contorted reality of the new conspiracism. Malignant normality affects experts within government: their work is interfered with, their data are destroyed, and they are prevented from gathering new data. Their reports are ignored or rejected as hoaxes. Those who stand up for the integrity of their profession are hounded, sidelined, pushed out. The results can be disastrous—pandemics,
for example, or government budgets untethered to calculations so that they result in recessions, or policies so ineptly designed and insufficient to meet problems that the result is the further collapse of systems of health care.

  The worst-case scenario for political parties and elections is equally grim. Today the president of the United States asserts that his political opponents—the Democratic Party and its 2016 presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton—conspired to facilitate fraudulent voting and thus “rig” the presidential election. Fast-forward to a future election when Trump’s political descendant is running for the presidency. And imagine that this candidate, on election night, is declared the loser. Imagine that in the hours after the election result is announced, the candidate does what Trump threatened to do if the election did not go his way—he or she refuses to concede. “I cannot concede because this election, like the last one, was rigged. In fact, I did not lose … and I will never concede.”

  In this scenario, the partisan reticence we described kicks in. Members of Congress issue noncommittal statements insisting, “Irregularities need to be investigated.” The chief justice of the Supreme Court announces that he will not participate in the inauguration before getting to the bottom of these allegations even if the charges of a rigged election are free-floating, unspecific, and virtually impossible to investigate. But no matter; polls show that between 46 and 49 percent of the country—a number roughly equaling the percentage who voted for the losing candidate—believe the election was rigged.

  Worst-case scenarios prompt some observers to caution, “Prepare for regime change, not policy change.”11 Other forces may result in replacing democracy with a rival regime, but for its part, the new conspiracism is not driving us toward authoritarianism or illiberal populism or neo-fascism. It is hollowing out democracy, not constructing something else. It is delegitimating democratic institutions. It is disorienting citizens. The question it raises is, Will citizens continue to recognize their own government as democratic? And then there is the question, Will they care?

  What Next?

  Two responses mitigate and contain the corrosive consequences of the new conspiracism. First is enacting democracy: a strenuous adherence to the regular processes and forms of public decision-making. Democracy is “enacted” when officials explicitly draw attention to the importance of adhering to these forms and practices. The way to demystify governmental power is to make the processes of legislation and adjudication legible.12 Today, the one exercise of power that is clear is presidential decree—precisely the exercise of power the Constitution was designed to constrain.

  For its part, speaking truth to conspiracy counteracts its corrosive force. What matters most is that officials with a connection to voters, with ties to concrete communities and social groups—in other words, elected officials—speak truth to conspiracy. Partisans trust fellow partisans more than they do reporters, professors, scientists, and unelected officials. The partisan connection needs to be two-directional: both a channel for citizens to transmit interests, views, and sentiments to government and one for officials to educate them and make government legible. The partisan connection is among the most important purposes of representation, if also among the most overlooked. It calls for speaking truth to conspiracy.

  We see both responses to conspiracism at work. We see officials who insist on regular order and are determined to enact democracy. And we see some public officials—as well as the press, advocacy groups, civil society associations, and private citizens—determined to speak truth to conspiracy.

  Future generations will judge us, no doubt, when it comes to democracy’s will and capacity to provide a modicum of security and prosperity, to mitigate entrenched inequality, and to avoid catastrophe—to pull survival of the human habitat out from our careless destruction of the environment. Conspiracism is incapacitating and leads to political dysfunction; that is one reason to strike out against it. But will future generations care about democracy itself? Only if we resist the core conspiracist claim to own reality and its obliteration of common sense and a common political world. Democracy will retain its meaning and value only if citizens see it as the way to build that common world, and see their part in this project.

  We echo the conspiracist in chief’s warning: “There’s something going on that’s really, really bad. And we better get smart, and we better get tough, or we’re not going to have much of a country left. O.K.?”13 But we turn the warning back on itself. We are paying attention. We are smart enough to enact democracy, tough enough to speak truth to conspiracism. Our formidable political challenge is to recognize that “it is not enough, in this war of hoaxes and delusions and perpetuated lies, to be merely honest. It is necessary also to be wise.”14

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1. Michael Flynn was an unembarrassed spreader of conspiracism, including the charge that Hillary Clinton was a pedophile. See Timothy Snyder, The Path to Unfreedom (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018), 239.

  2. The documents are likely to “help fuel a new generation of conspiracy theories,” according to Philip Shenon, a former New York Times reporter, cited in Michael D. Shear, “Trump Says He Will Release Final Set of Documents on Kennedy Assassination,” New York Times, October 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/21/us/politics/trump-jfk-assassination-classified.html.

  3. Martin Parker, “Human Science as Conspiracy Theory,” Sociological Review 48, no. 2 (October 2000): 191–207, 202. A recent example of conspiracy theorizing from the left is Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (New York: Viking, 2017), which uses documents and inference to shape a grand narrative: she attributes to public choice theorist James Buchanan, acting through Charles Koch, the “operational strategy” that made the Right successful over the last two decades, and attributes to Buchanan racist as well as conservative motives. For a scholarly assessment of the work, see Henry Farrell and Steven M. Teles, “When Politics Drives Scholarship,” Boston Review, August 30, 2017, http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/henry-farrell-steven-m-teles-when-politics-drives-scholarship.

  4. Bruno Latour speaks of “those mad mixtures of knee-jerk disbelief, punctilious demands for proofs, and free use of powerful explanation from the social neverland” in Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 230.

  5. The FBI may well have been tapping Trump’s phones, though Obama does not appear to have ordered it to have done so; see Eugene Kiely, “Revisiting Trump’s Wiretap Tweets,” FactCheck.org, September 22, 2017, https://www.factcheck.org/2017/09/revisiting-trumps-wiretap-tweets/.

  6. Christine Hauser, “Chobani Yoghurt Sues Alex Jones over Sexual Assault Report,” New York Times, April 25, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/business/chobani-alex-jones.html.

  7. Dustin Tingley and Gernot Wagner, “Solar Geoengineering and the Chemtrails Conspiracy on Social Media,” Palgrave Communications 3 (2017): article 12, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-017-0014-3. “Chemtrails are not real,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency and scientists; the trails are water vapor, the product of jet engines. Meanwhile, 2016 polling cited shows that 10 percent think the conspiracy is “completely true” and another 20–30 percent describe it as “somewhat true.”

  8. Jeremy W. Peters, “The Right Builds an Alternative Narrative about the Crises around Trump,” New York Times, May 17, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/us/politics/trump-scandal-conservatives-media.html.

  9. As David Runciman points out in How Democracy Ends (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 20.

  10. Polling suggests that conspiracism is indeed widespread: “Conspiracy theories permeate all parts of American society, and cut across gender, age, race, income, political affiliation, educational level, and occupational status.” So, for example, about a third of Americans believe the birther conspiracy theory that President Obama is not a native-born American but rath
er a Kenyan, cited in Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 5. Another study found that “while some people hold mostly crazy beliefs, most people hold at least some crazy beliefs.” Adam J. Berinsky, “Rumors, Truths, and Reality: A Study of Political Misinformation” (unpublished manuscript, May 22, 2012, version 3.1 on file with the authors), http://web.mit.edu/berinsky/www/files/rumor.pdf. See also the Chapman University Survey of American Fears, wave 3 (2016), in which 75 percent of respondents stated that they believed the government is concealing information about at least one of the nine conspiracy theories the poll inquired about; “What Aren’t They Telling Us, Chapman University Survey of American Fears,” Chapman University, Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, October 11, 2016, https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2016/10/11/what-arent-they-telling-us/.

  11. J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood, “Conspiracy Theories and the Paranoid Style(s) of Mass Opinion,” American Journal of Political Science 58, no. 2 (October 2014): 952–66, 953.

  12. John Dewey quoted in Jill Lepore, “The World That Trump and Ailes Built,” New Yorker, June 5 and 12, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/the-world-that-trump-and-ailes-built.

  13. For a detailed timeline of events, see “Flint Water Crisis Fast Facts,” CNN, last updated April 8, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/04/us/flint-water-crisis-fast-facts/index.html. A good overview is Anna Marie Barry-Jester, “What Went Wrong in Flint?,” FiveThirtyEight, January 26, 2016, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-went-wrong-in-flint-water-crisis-michigan/.

  14. Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), xv.