Like Berthold Brecht’s allegorical tale of Arturo Ui, ruthless gangster who takes control over the Cauliflower Trust in 1930’s Chicago, Donald Trump’s rise should have been “resistible.” Trump’s behavior was outright preposterous; an outlandish TV personality running for the highest office of the global hegemon. The possibility of a Trump presidency was not taken seriously by the vast majority of political scientists, the media, and campaign professionals until he had cut down his Republican primary opponents, one by one, ridiculing and verbally assaulting them, even to the point of strongly suggesting that Ted Cruz’s father had been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. How did a political outsider, a celebrity real estate mogul, almost cartoonish in his reality television program, manage to capture the presidency? How did he manage to get away with such wild conspiracy theories?
One answer lies in the myriad studies that demonstrate the decline of trust in American politics and institutions since the 1960s. With Trump, this mistrust has metastasized into vital organs of the body politic (see Chapters 4 and 5). The conspiracy theories that are Trump’s political stock in trade resonated with substantial portions of the citizenry because alienated and resentful sectors in American society were “disposed” to believe them, and for the same reason they seemed after 18 months of his presidency very indisposed toward believing that their avenging angel against the political class deserves impeachment or censure. At the same time, can we say with any certainty that charges of collusion between the Trump campaign and operatives linked to the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin are not “conspiracy theories”? Should that term be used only for imagined conspiracies?
Despite the important role that conspiracism seems to be playing in politics today, political scientists have almost entirely eschewed serious study of conspiracies themselves. Within both the academic and journalistic worlds, a consensus has prevailed that the very term “conspiracy theory” should be reserved for populist ideology and is to be regarded as toxic to real understanding of social, economic, and political developments. However, in the last twenty years some new studies, ranging across a wide array of disciplines, feature more nuance about conspiracism and some debate about the singular perspective of conspiracism as a form of social pathology. Still today, however, this work is mostly relegated to the margins of academic discourse and punditry in the mainstream news. No few scholars, reports, columnists, and pundits characterize conspiracy beliefs somewhere on a continuum of misguided, at best, to highly dangerous, at worst. A good many of them reflect the viewpoint of Daniel Pipes, who thinks that the ideologies of fascism and communism are at their heart conspiracist and believes that conspiracist political culture is uniquely and pathologically embedded throughout the Middle East. 1 Indeed, it is not difficult to show that some of the most abhorrent anti-Semitic conspiracy theories circulate widely in the Middle East, including in the region’s mainstream mass media. However, both anti-Semitism and belief in conspiracies are widespread in the world. Only recently have social scientists begun to experiment with ways to measure generic conspiracism, as opposed to specific theories, across cultures. Even fewer are attempts to separate pathological conspiracism from conspiracy thinking that might be a rational political response to systematic injustices and inequalities in national and international politics.
Conceiving conspiracism as irrational is not confined to right-wing analysts, like Pipes. Chip Berlet’s independent investigative journalism, often done in collaboration with the Southern Poverty Law Center, is focused on right-wing conspiracism, which he sees as especially threatening to democracy. 2 But he also has little use for conspiracism on the left. Berlet regards left-wing conspiracism not so much as threatening but as a cul-de-sac for diagnosing and resisting pathological social and political movements, a position with obvious implications for Trumpism’s relationship with alt-right movements and its attraction of support and approval from hate groups. Another example of “at best” can be found in a widely quoted characterization of conspiracy theory as “the poor man’s cognitive map,” made by Frederik Jameson, a Marxist cultural theorist. 3 Jameson had little more to say about conspiracy theory, but the phrase resonated among radical critics as an affirmation that conspiracy theory should be regarded as a form of “false consciousness” that holds the oppressed class back from seeing the root of their exploitation in capitalism.
Rather than rejecting or embracing conspiracy theory, this book argues the need to problematize it; that is, we should subject conspiracy beliefs to examination on their logic and the weight of evidence, rather than a priori to reject all of them as false. Some conspiracy theories are bad theory and many serve to foster intolerance. Worse, in unfortunately not so rare historical cases they contribute to scapegoating, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide. Donald Trump’s rhetoric, failure to repudiate hate groups, and policies bear hallmarks of what historian Richard Hofstadter identified in his highly influential articles as a recurring tendency toward “the paranoid style in American politics.” 4 I agree with the warning that conspiracy theories, when they pretend to full explain major historical events and political turning points, can distract us from addressing larger social and economic forces that contribute to the conditions that encourage conspiracism. Addressing the threats to democracy posed by Trumpism requires that we grapple with the difficult work of building global and national economies that foster social inclusion, address the anxieties fostered by world migrations, and reform democratic institutions to foster more active and participatory citizenship than typical in liberal democracies. Accomplishing these tasks requires us to recognize that conspiracies are among the tools used by elites who resist these changes.
The Return of the Paranoid Style to American Politics
With reason, many Americans and citizens in other wealthy liberal democracy suspect that the gross inequalities and socioeconomic disruptions in our lives are not just unfortunate side effects of an a-political process of globalization but are actively fostered by wealthy and powerful elites who have little empathy for those who are losing out as a result of the inter-related processes of technological change and globalization. If they think that those who a winning are playing by a different set of political rules than they do, are they wrong?
Hofstadter’s foundational writings on the paranoid style emphasized that populism has typically arisen in times in which concentrated economic power and the exercise of imperial policies threatened popular sovereignty—or at least were perceived to do so. 5 Populism is not an ideology; it is a “discursive vessel,” a particular kind of rhetoric, which can be leftist, rightist, or even centrist. In the United States, populism has spawned the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement; Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders; and businessman Ross Perot. Perot achieved some political traction in 1992 and 1996 by opposing the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) as well as supporting gun control and electronic democracy, drawing about a fifth of the vote equally among liberals, conservatives, and moderates. 6 Nor should we think that political extremism and populism are provinces only of the “poor man.” Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset famously argued on the basis of analysis of voting in Weimar Germany that the social base for fascism was mainly the center, that is, the middle class. 7
One thing this book does not attempt is to catalogue and research the truth about the dozens of conspiracy theories that have appeared in the Trumpian era. My goal in this book is to situate them within a national context that has seen the weakening of liberal democratic institutions and within a global context that has seen the rise of populist resistance to globalization in a number of nations across the world. Trumpism s...