A Lot of People Are Saying
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A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE SAYING
A Lot of People Are Saying
The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy
Russell Muirhead
Nancy L. Rosenblum
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press
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All Rights Reserved
“Study of Two Pears” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WALLACE STEVENS by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
LCCN 2018957712
ISBN 9780691188836
eISBN 9780691190068
Version 1.0
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Editorial: Rob Tempio and Matt Rohal
Production Editorial: Debbie Tegarden
Jacket/Cover Design: Sandra Friesen
Production: Jacquie Poirier
Publicity: James Schneider
Copyeditor: Ashley Moore
To Oliver and Leo Rosenblum Palmer and Alexander and Lila Muirhead
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Introduction 1
SECTION I. THE NEW CONSPIRACISM 17
1 Conspiracy without the Theory 19
2 It’s True Enough 42
3 Presidential Conspiracism 59
SECTION II. DELEGITIMATING DEMOCRACY 79
4 Political Parties 81
5 Knowledge 101
6 Who Owns Reality? 122
SECTION III. DEFENDING DEMOCRACY 139
7 Speaking Truth 141
Conclusion: The Crisis of Democracy 166
Notes 177
Acknowledgments 201
Index 203
PREFACE
There are moments when we are startled into thought. Unanticipated threats have uncovered the fragility of democracy. One particular threat more than others seized our attention—what we call the new conspiracism. We have come to understand that conspiracism today is dangerous because it strikes at the basic institutions of democracy. But what startled us first was its power to disorient us. Conspiracism assaulted our understanding of reality. It insulted our common sense.
We wrote a few short articles in an attempt to understand what was happening. We asked ourselves, What makes the new conspiracism dangerous? What makes it new? Why now? Also, what is its appeal? And what can we do about it?
The subject required more detailed and thoughtful interpretation. We have looked closely at the thought of the president of the United States, the conspiracist in chief, and beyond him, at the full range of perverse charges that have become a regular feature of American politics.
We wrote this book to confront our own disorientation and recover our political equilibrium. We offer our account to others who are confused and disturbed by this malignant phenomenon distorting public life and endangering us all: the new conspiracism.
A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE SAYING
Introduction
The new conspiracism moved into the White House with the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2017. It seems that hardly a day goes by without a new charge of conspiracy, from “fake news” to “rigged elections,” from “enemy of the people” to a “coup” perpetrated by the Department of Justice. Conspiracist thinking that was once on the margins of American political life now sits at its heart. No president—indeed, no national official—has resorted to accusations of conspiracy so instinctively, so frequently, and with such brio as Donald Trump.
Presidential conspiracism is unique; it is shaped by the character of the man and by the authority granted to the executive office. But Trump is only the most powerful and dangerous conspiracy monger. He shares a state of mind with those who invent conspiratorial charges and, using new broadcast technologies, disseminate them with astounding speed and reach. He is joined by many people, even his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who are drawn to conspiracist claims, assent to them, and pass them along;1 by men and women in government who understand conspiracism’s destructiveness but submit to it, thinking to use it to their political advantage; by the many elected representatives who acquiesce and remain silent; by civil servants who, deflected from their regular business, accommodate themselves to serving conspiracism’s obscure purposes. Conspiracism has many adherents—some gullible, some sinister.
Conspiracy theory is not new, of course, but conspiracism today introduces something new—conspiracy without the theory. And the new conspiracism betrays a new destructive impulse: to delegitimate democracy.
Classic conspiracism—conspiracy with the theory—has not been displaced by the new conspiracism. Sometimes farfetched, sometimes accurate, and sometimes a vexing mix of the two, classic conspiracism tries to make sense of a disorderly and complicated world by insisting that powerful people control the course of events. In this way, for both people on the left and those on the right, classic conspiracism gives order and meaning to occurrences that, in their minds, defy standard or official explanations. The logic of classic conspiracism makes sense of things by imposing a version of proportionality: world-changing events cannot happen because of the actions of a single obscure person or a string of senseless accidents. John F. Kennedy’s assassination could not be the doing of a lone gunman. Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone could not defy the entire United States government and change the course of history.2 The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, could not have been the work of nineteen men plotting in a remote corner of Afghanistan.
And in insisting that the truth is not on the surface, classic conspiracism engages in a sort of detective work.3 Once all the facts—especially facts ominously withheld by reliable sources and omitted from official reports—are scrupulously amassed, a pattern of secret machinations emerges. The dots are woven into a comprehensive narrative of events. Warranted or not, classic conspiracism is conspiracy with a theory.
The new conspiracism is something different. There is no punctilious demand for proofs,4 no exhaustive amassing of evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close examination of the operators plotting in the shadows. The new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation. Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture: “A lot of people are saying …” Or we have bare assertion: “Rigged!”—a one-word exclamation that evokes fantastic schemes, sinister motives, and the awesome capacity to mobilize three million illegal voters to support Hillary Clinton for president. This is conspiracy without the theory.
What validates the new conspiracism is not evidence but repetition. When Trump tweeted the accusation that President Barack Obama had ordered the FBI to tap his phones in October before the 2016 election, no evidence of the charge was forthcoming. What mattered was not evidence but the number of retweets the president’s post would enjoy: the more retweets, the more credible the charge.5 Forwarding, reposting, retweeting, and “liking”: these are how doubts are instilled and accusations are validated in the new media. The new conspiracism—all accusation, no evidence—substitutes social validation for scientific validation: if a lot of people are saying it, to use Trump’s signature phrase, then it is true enough.
The effect of conspiracist thinking once it ceases to function as any sort of explanation is delegitimation. The new conspiracists seek no
t to correct those they accuse but to deny their standing in the political world to argue, explain, persuade, and decide. And from attacking malevolent individuals, conspiracists move on to assaulting institutions. Conspiracism corrodes the foundations of democracy.
Conspiracism’s Targets
Our concern is not with every conspiracy claim. We leave aside narratives with only a tangential connection to politics: the 2017 charge that the CEO of Chobani, the yogurt manufacturer, smuggled immigrant rapists into the country, for example.6 Such conspiratorial claims are always with us, tracking significant events. For example, the story that Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon was a NASA hoax designed to raise American prestige (the moon walk that people saw on television was a film directed by Stanley Kubrick, according to the conspiracy theory). Or the horrific conspiracist narrative that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was not real but rather staged by “crisis actors” or that it was a government inside job. And some conspiracist claims have no connection to politics, like the “chemtrails conspiracy,” which claims that “airplanes are spraying a toxic mix of chemicals through contrails, with supposed goals ranging from weather to mind control.”7
We focus on the catalog of accusations that go to the heart of regular democratic politics: rigged elections; secret plans by the federal government to use the military to abrogate states’ rights or to seize guns; an illegitimate president who is not a native citizen; a secretary of state who “created” the terrorist group ISIS and conspires to weaken and humiliate America in the world; a “deep state” that sabotages the government.8
Amid this storm, the new conspiracists return to two targets again and again; we focus on them for the same reason conspiracists themselves do—because they are foundations of democracy: first, political parties, partisans, and the norm of legitimate opposition; and second, knowledge-producing institutions like the free press, the university, and expert communities within the government.
The new conspiracism has what we call a “partisan penumbra,” an alignment with radical, antigovernment Republicans. Not all Republicans or conservatives join these ranks, but as we discuss in chapter 7, they rarely speak out against conspiracist claims. They exhibit partisan reticence. And while the Left participates in its share of classic conspiracy theories, it has not yet taken up the new conspiracism. What we have, then, is an alignment between the extremes of the Republican Party and the new conspiracism—a congruence founded in hostility toward government. These conspiracist claims persist in the United States even when Republicans themselves control government. Today, conspiracism is not, as we might expect, the last resort of permanent political losers but the first resort of winners.9 Trump refuses to accept the terms of his own victory and incessantly conjures machinations against him, including coups d’état from within his own administration.
But partisan politics is far from the whole story. For what unites conspiracists is not ideological attachment to conservative causes or to the Republican Party but something deeper: disdain for political opposition, regulated party rivalry, and the democratic norm of “agreeing to disagree.” Each conspiracist assault is specific to one candidate or policy or party, but it eventually extends to them all. It is not contained.
The other consistent target is the domain of expertise and knowledge-producing institutions. The new conspiracism rejects the specialized knowledge of congressional committees, government agencies, scientific advisory boards, government auditors, and civil servants in the Census Bureau. It discounts specialized knowledge outside government—scientists, social scientists, public health and education professionals, and any group, especially the free press, that serves as a watchdog alert to distortion in the flow of information and explanation.
The conspiracist rejection goes beyond the now familiar charge that a source of information is tainted by partisan bias. It goes further, to undermine the credibility of the whole swath of people and institutions that create, assess, and correct the universe of facts and arguments essential to reasoning about politics and policy (and everything else). Disdaining basic facts, the authority of expertise, and the integrity of knowledge-producing institutions, the new conspiracism is all encompassing. Again, the charges are cumulative: each conspiracy story has weight beyond its own particulars. The birther conspiracy, which turns on the claim that Obama’s birth records were doctored, that he was actually born in Kenya and therefore was an illegitimate president, is a discrete charge about one government record and one person. But the blizzard of accusations, taken together, weakens the legitimacy of sources of knowledge and their role in regular processes of legislation and administration.
Conspiracism does not exist in a vacuum. It is one element among others that for decades have weakened democracy: “dark money,” rabidly polarized political parties, alarming rises in social inequality and social insecurity, and more. And conspiracism is one element among others that have weakened the authority of knowledge-producing institutions: misinformation campaigns, and charges of “partisan bias” leveled at universities, research institutions, and publishing outlets. But the new conspiracism is a special kind of assault, and it poses a distinctive challenge beyond its specific targets. It is disturbing and dangerous because it is a direct, explicit, and wholesale attack on shared modes of understanding and explaining things in the political world. It unsettles the ground on which we argue, negotiate, compromise, and even disagree. It makes democracy unworkable—and ultimately it makes democracy seem unworthy.
Delegitimation
The new conspiracists claim to reveal odious plots against constitutional order, the fabric of society, national values, and national identity—but not for the sake of affirming any precise constitutional understanding or social order. Conspiracist charges claim that institutions, practices, policies, and political officials are malignant, but what exactly should be put in their place is unstated. Perhaps nothing at all. The new conspiracism is the pure face of negativity. Delegitimation is its product.
Delegitimation is not the equivalent of opposing, discrediting, undercutting, or sowing mistrust (though all this is conspiracists’ handiwork as well). Delegitimation poses a unique threat to democracy: it rejects the meaning, value, and authority of democratic practices, institutions, and officials. Delegitimation is a process of falling away from the judgment that government has rightful authority. The people associated with these institutions, it is believed, no longer have standing to persuade or legislate, to reason or coerce, to lay claim to our consent or at least compliance.
The new conspiracism corrodes the legitimacy of democracy but does not hold up an alternative. There is no positive account of politics or justice in the background. It is not on the side of equality and it is not against equality. It is not on the side of tradition and it is not on the side of progress. In saying that the new conspiracism lacks political theory or ideology, we dissent from those who see a move to subvert democracy in order to transform it into something else—authoritarianism or protofascism or illiberal populism. For the company of conspiracists, there is no avowed and no discernable agenda of “regime change.”
The new conspiracism is politically sterile. It is de all the way down: destabilizing, degrading, deconstructing, and finally delegitimating, without a countervailing constructive impulse. It is as if whatever rises from the detritus of democracy is less important and less exciting than calling out the catastrophes and humiliations wrought by the malignant agents who claim to represent us. We’re witness to the fact that it does not take an alternative political ideology—communism, authoritarianism, theism, fascism, nativism—to delegitimate democracy. Angry, sterile conspiracism does the work.
Disorientation
The new conspiracism cannot be ignored or cabined off as simply quixotic or inconsequential. A part of us may step back and wonder at the sheer absurdity of this culture of conspiracy. Yet the insult to what we think of as political reality, to our common sense,
is precisely what alerts us to danger. Our overriding response is anxiety and disorientation.
The allegations of the new conspiracism are often baffling and agitating, and we acknowledge at the outset conspiracism’s intellectual and emotional toll. Bizarre and magnetic, coming at us with velocity, conspiracist charges compel the attention of reporters and commentators, social scientists and psychologists, and ordinary citizens. The attack on shared modes of understanding is fatiguing. The consequences of incessant charges of secret plots and nefarious plotters are political, but at the same time they affect us personally and individually.
Also unsettling is the knowledge that a large number of people assent to conspiracist charges.10 Affirmations of conspiracy seem to envelop us—and not only because conspiracism has moved into the White House. More than half of Americans “consistently endorse some kind of conspiratorial narrative about a current political event or phenomenon.”11 It is as if conspiracy-minded officials and citizens suffer what the philosopher John Dewey called “a conscription of thought.”12
The most striking feature of the new conspiracism is just this—its assault on reality. The new conspiracism strikes at what we think of as truth and the grounds of truth. It strikes at what it means to know something. The new conspiracism seeks to replace evidence, argument, and shared grounds of understanding with convoluted conjurings and bare assertions. Among the threats to democracy, only the new conspiracism does double damage: delegitimation and disorientation.
Some Conspiracies Are Real
Complicating our reaction to the new conspiracism is our recognition that conspiracies have sometimes been exposed in defense of democracy. Conspiracy theories have revealed the corruption of political officials in league with criminal forces and the covert machinations of hostile powers. By probing and uncovering the nefarious intentions and actions of agents opposed to the public welfare, conspiracy theory sometimes has been an instrument for reforming democratic politics. So we have good reasons not to dismiss the charge of conspiracy out of hand.