Ask a true conservative
believer, and they’ll tell you that it was the birth of a terrible
beauty. They’ll say the GOP’s true leaders, our nation’s future
leadership, revealed itself in all its splendid, futile glory—only to be
stabbed in the back by a “
If
you asked me, I would say that we witnessed a recrudescence of a
nihilistic tendency that has never been far from the surface in American
politics—a conservatism that is as far from the dictionary definition
of conservatism as Obama is from being a socialist. Last fall, on the
eve of the election, I
in
Salon that “America is becoming more multicultural, more gay-friendly
and more feminist every day. But as every hunter knows, a wounded or
cornered quarry is the most dangerous. Even as the white, patriarchal,
Christian hegemony declines, its backlash politics become more vicious.”
Was it vicious enough to strap a figurative suicide vest to its chest
and threaten the U.S. with default? If you had asked me at the time, I
would have said no. Little did I know.
Some of the Republican
jihadists who pressed for default feel so personally violated by the
presence of a black family in the White House that they would just as
soon burn it down as reclaim it. And some live in such a bubble of
denial—an alternate cognitive universe in which the poor lord it over
the rich and white Christians are a persecuted minority, in which a
president who was twice elected by an overwhelming popular majority is a
pretender, and a law that Congress attempted to overturn more than 40
times was “never debated”—that they have convinced themselves that a
default would have actually been a
thing, that it would have restored the U.S. economy to a sound foundation.
It is a triumph not so much of a conspiracy as of conspiracist thinking. As John Judis
last
week, even “lobbyists I talked to cited….Richard Hofstadter’s essay on
‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ to explain the rise of the
populist right. It’s the kind of reference you’d expect to read in a New
Republic
Lest
I be accused of falling for a left wing conspiracy theory myself, I
want to say a few words about “conspiracy theory” before I continue.
“Conspiracy theory” is a loaded and frankly a bad term, one that
unfairly besmirches any and all theorizing about conspiracies.
Bracketing
all thinking about conspiracies with tall tales and outright delusions
about secret societies whose leaders toast each other with blood drunk
out of human skulls is unfair and misleading. Some anti-government
conspiracy theories—that the Tonkin Gulf Incident didn’t happen as
reported, for example, or that the CIA was involved with international
dope dealers, are so far from being ridiculous that they turn out to be
true. The NSA
does have access to your emails. For that matter,
a certain amount of toasting with skulls (if not actual blood) has been
reliably reported to go on in some quarters.
Still, there are
theories and then there are theories. Scientists know the difference
between unfalsifiable ones like intelligent design and genuinely
scientific ones like evolution. Theories about political conspiracies
are harder to put to the test; absence of evidence, as Donald Rumsfeld
once said, is not evidence of absence. In fact it’s the whole point.
I
do think most people know the difference between a “conspiracy theory”
in its pejorative sense—say, that the Fed takes its orders from a secret
society of Jewish elders, who cause depressions and wars to further
their plan of ruling the world—and its literal sense, such as a serious
inquiry into Oswald’s relationship to the CIA.
Still, truth can be stranger than fiction and we need to respect that.
If
I were to tell you that a cabal of Congressional Republicans had been
quietly working with a roster of little-known political organizations
since the last election, many of them funded by a pair of shadowy
billionaire brothers, to bring the country to the brink of financial
ruin, I’d understand it if you thought I was talking about a conspiracy
theory. But really I’d be describing the sausage making that goes on in
politics today and the blurry lines between lobbying and influence
peddling—and even more than that, about the behavior of people who are
so blinded by rage, so driven by their own fever dreams about Obama’s
plot to turn the U.S. into a Third-World, multi-racial, socialist,
Muslim, atheist paradise, that they would pay any cost to ruin his
presidency.
But if there is still any question about what a bad
conspiracy
theory is, I’d like to submit as Exhibit A one proposed by an anonymous
author at the Canadian website Press Core, which was
promoted
a couple of weeks ago by World Net Daily columnist and Fox News
contributor Erik Rush (sometimes known as “the other Rush”) on his radio
show. Part of what makes it a classically “bad” conspiracy theory,
besides its tendentiousness, is its meanness. It’s like a push poll; its
sole purpose is to propagate a meme that demonizes and delegitimizes
the president. I think it also provides insight into the mindset that
characterizes far-right thinking these days.
The Navy Yard
shootings in D.C., this theory goes, was a false flag incident
perpetrated by the Obama administration to stop the Navy from arresting
the president for treason. The victims of the shooting, who were all
NCIS commanders, the story continues, had discovered that Obama was
planning an even more horrific false flag—he was going to explode a
nuclear device in Washington, D.C., to justify going to war with Syria.
Some of this “sounds like a conspiracy theory,” the other Rush admitted,
but “a lot of stuff that seemed to some of us like conspiracy theories
years ago turned out to be true over the last few months.”
One way
to judge a theory is to look at its source. Is it a generally respected
news gatherer or a propaganda mill? Scanning the headlines at Press
Core, I couldn’t help noticing
another article,
this one with the byline Paul W. Kincaid, the site’s editor. The piece
reveals that the Vatican, the U.N., and the Third Reich have been
working together on a covert and sinister plan to exterminate, and I am
quoting now, “as many as 3 billion people through Vatican unholy wars of
terror against Muslim and Jewish states, designer diseases, and
famine.”
This story really astounded me, because it sees both Jews
and Muslims as victims rather than perpetrators. That’s not what you
usually read on websites of this kind, trust me. Some of the most
virulently anti-Islamic websites today, many of them run by Jews,
feature stories that could have been written by 1930s anti-Semites like
Elizabeth Dilling or Gerald Burton Winrod, except the word Shariah
replaces the word Kehilla, and instead of out-of-context quotes from the
Talmud about the necessity of lying to the gentiles they are pulled
from the Koran and refer to the supposed doctrine of
Tawriya. Of course a major theme at those sites is Obama’s suspicious sympathies toward the Muslim world.
The
theories that we file under the unfortunate rubric of conspiracy
theories are theories of everything. They have a kind of metaphysical
authority, and, in their confidence that everything is ultimately
connected, a scope and a moral framework that is almost theological.
Most
of all, they are reactive. Conspiracists are people who feel
threatened—in their pocketbooks, their status, or both. Conspiracy
theories explain what is happening to them and why, assigning blame to
an adversary who is consciously and deliberately carrying out an evil
intention.
Conspiracists use the word “evil” as a noun as well as
an adjective; they believe that their adversaries are literally demonic.
Much as a Kabbalist believes that God fashioned the world out of Hebrew
letters, many conspiracists believe that their enemies sign the
catastrophes that they cause in visual, numeric or symbolic codes.
They
look backward nostalgically to what they’ve lost, they look forward
with anxious expectation to a bloody reckoning. As a political candidate
once said in an unguarded moment, they cling to their guns and their
religion.
Conspiracism turns chaotic events into coherent
narratives—surprisingly often, one that hews to the storyline of the
“Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” an early 20
th-century
anti-Semitic pastiche that was cut and pasted together by Eastern
Orthodox defenders of the absolute monarchy of the Tsar.
Conspiracy
theories’ narratives unfold much as the storylines of massive
multi-player online games do. They take place in a universe that’s
bounded by hard-and-fast rules and peopled by broadly drawn,
cartoon-like characters. Whatever happens is either part of the
algorithm or something that one of the player gods has intentionally
caused to happen.
You see this kind of thinking when you read
claims that the Sandy Hook school shooting was staged by “actors,” or
that purport to identify the fake blood and prosthetic limbs in the
carnage after the Boston Marathon “false flag” bombing. Like the ancient
Gnostics, or the characters in “The Matrix” or “The Truman Show,” they
believe that God is a Satanic impostor—that the world is a deliberately
constructed illusion, the opposite of the place that its designated
authority figures purport it to be.
The Left, I freely admit, is
not immune to conspiracy theories. If many of the “false flag” claims
originate with quasi-Bircher populists like Alex Jones, they resonate in
some leftist quarters as well. Communist dialectics and the theory of
history that undergirds Premillennial Dispensationalism share some
attributes; party propaganda was as filled with paranoid conspiracy
theories (some of them true) as anything that the organized right has
ever produced. But I do tend to think that the very reactiveness of
reactionary thinking predisposes it to conspiracism a bit more. This is
why as many extreme ideas resonate within the Republican mainstream as
they do.
Conservatives, especially conservative white men of a
certain age, many of them living in the states of the Old Dominion and
the mountainous West, are feeling beleaguered in this fifth year of the
Great Recession. As conservative as his governance has turned out to be
in practice, the election of an African American president has tended to
exacerbate their feelings of victimization.
Public Policy Polling has issued a couple of
surveys on conspiracy theories this year. And belief pretty clearly breaks down along partisan lines:
- 34
percent of Republicans and 35 percent of Independents believe a global
power elite is conspiring to create a New World Order—compared to just
15 percent of Democrats.
- Fifty-eight percent of Republicans believe global warming is a hoax; 77 percent of Democrats do not.
- Sixty-two
percent of Republicans and 38 percent of Independents believe the Obama
administration is “secretly trying to take everyone’s guns away.” Only
14 percent of Democrats agree.
- Forty-two percent of
Republicans believe Shariah law is making its way into U.S. courts,
compared to just 12 percent of Democrats.
- More than
twice as many Republican voters (21 percent) as Democrats (9 percent)
believe the government is using “false flag incidents” to consolidate
its power.
- Forty-four percent of Republicans and 21
percent of Independents believe that Obama is making plans to stay in
office after his second term expires. Only 11 percent of Democrats
agree.
Most elected officials who traffic in conspiracy
theories are too rich and successful themselves to believe in them; they
deploy them opportunistically, to push voters’ emotional buttons. As
Michael Tomasky
wrote
in The Daily Beast last week, “The rage kept the base galvanized….The
rich didn’t really share the rage, or most of them. Even the Koch
Brothers probably don’t….But all of them have
used it. And they
have tolerated it, the casual racism, the hatred of gay people, and the
rest….because they, the elites, remained in charge. Well, they’re not
in charge now. The snarling dog they kept in a pen for decades has just
escaped and bitten their hand off.”
Back in the winter of 2012, a couple of weeks before my book “
The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right”
was published, I was at a party at my sister’s house, and she
introduced me to the husband of a friend of hers, a lawyer active in the
Democratic party. I told him how conspiratorial memes about the
Illuminati have echoed down to us from the 1790s, and how the influence
of fringe groups like the John Birch Society extends beyond marginal
figures like Alex Jones and Ron Paul and can even be discerned in the
GOP’s campaign rhetoric.
He just laughed derisively. “What
possible relevance do those nuts have today?” he said. “Nobody cares
about them.” Judging from the recent events in Washington, I think it’s
safe to say that his complacency was a bit premature.
No comments:
Post a Comment