A Lot of People Are Saying

by Nancy L. Rosenblum

  Like much of the new conspiracism, QAnon began with conspiracy entrepreneurs. Investigators at NBC traced its source to two message board moderators at 4chan who reached out to Tracy Diaz, a conspiracy entrepreneur whose videos had a small YouTube following. Diaz posted videos about the conspiracy and her stock rose: as she said, “Because I cover Q, I got a fan base.” Her videos, viewed over eight million times, became her source of income. Meanwhile, the 4chan moderators built a following as well. They moved discussions to Reddit, from which they then jumped to Facebook, which in turn steered a much larger audience to 4chan. And they started a 24/7 YouTube channel that offered viewers all QAnon, all the time, and that they used to collect donations.13

  QAnon is so preposterous, it is tempting to ignore it. As critic Tim Smith-Laing put it, QAnon “is so Byzantine in the labyrinth it has constructed around itself it’s laughable.”14 QAnon’s following was not large. But as celebrities like Roseanne Barr and Curt Schilling endorsed QAnon, it grew. Its reach was amplified when followers who showed up at Trump rallies with signs and shirts saying “We Are Q,” got national press coverage. QAnon shows the new conspiracism moving from once obscure message boards to the most visible public spaces of democratic life.

  The details of QAnon illustrate how the new conspiracism has brought us into a fight over the basic elements of reality and prompt the disorienting recognition that common sense is no longer common. What we see at a Trump rally where people hold up Q signs is not only the fact that we inhabit different realities but also an indicator of the intention of some to make their distorted sense of reality a public affair. QAnon is not dispassionate; it is the fighting face of the most bizarre conspiracist narratives in politics. What if QAnon or a concoction like it spreads? What if the question QAnon followers ask at the Trump rallies—“Are you with us?”—takes hold in electoral politics? What if the demand is made of candidates and officials to affirm this compromised account of reality? What if challenges to common sense increase and increasingly shape political life?

  We think that QAnon represents an ephemeral element at the fringe of popular political culture. Still, we see in it the new conspiracist claim to own reality, and we see how verification is a matter of repetition and assent. We see the assault on common sense. Our own sense, however, is that common sense can prove more formidable than the forceful ascent of the new conspiracism might have us believe.

  Common Sense as Resistance

  The very thing that is at stake here—common sense—is also a resource for protecting democracy against conspiracism. It always has been. The idea of common sense has a political history rooted in the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, inserted into the Declaration of Independence in the form of “self-evident truths,” and popularized in the most important American revolutionary tract, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.15 Paine’s great pamphlet offers us a model of common sense as the basis of democracy and as the touchstone of resistance—in his case against the malignant normality of colonial rule.

  Paine addressed his pamphlet to ordinary Americans throughout the colonies; an estimated 150,000 copies were circulated. His task was to persuade the people that the goal of the revolution should not be limited to repealing oppressive policies. Rather than reconciliation, the revolution should aim at independence and a democratic republic. “Common sense is firmly on the side of the people and thus opposed to the rulership of kings,”16 Paine wrote, and he dissected all the inaccessible, mystifying elements of monarchic and colonial ideology. “Under how many subtleties, or absurdities, has the divine right to govern been imposed on the credulity of mankind,” he wrote, and set out to dispel these subtleties and absurdities. He was the consummate rhetorician of common sense, turning royalist obfuscations upside down—“There is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.”17 And against the traditionalist British claim that age confers wisdom, he commended youth as the seed time of good habits.

  Paine fueled American political outrage by teaching that the British claims to rule were an assault on Americans’ common sense, understood as the plain good sense of the many as opposed to the mystifications of an inherited nobility and the Crown. Common sense belongs to the people generally and contrasts with the obfuscation, hypocrisy, dogma, and demand for deference that come from authorities who use their claim to esoteric knowledge to prevent ordinary people from questioning their authority. It refers to shared experience as the basis for those things everyone can be expected to know. The first accent is on common, then, the sense of things shared by the great mass of people. Like philosophers of common sense before him, Paine insisted that a true grasp of things is accessible to everyone. All that Americans needed to understand the reality of their political situation—the malice directed at them and what must be done—was plain speech and deliberation among themselves about what was going on and what common sense directed them to do.

  Paine’s accent falls equally on the second element of common sense—on sensibility—which points to common sense as an emotional and motivational force. The feelings of outrage Americans felt against the British, who oppressed them and against whom they were already in bloody conflict, were not only justified but irreversible. Once lost, deference cannot be regained. Enemy “extinguishes every other name and title,” Paine wrote.18 Common sense made political independence emotionally inevitable. Early in American history, then, common sense was invoked during a crisis of political legitimacy, and its import was self-protective and democratic. And from then to now, assaults on common sense have aroused in many strong emotions and something like visceral resistance.

  In the eighteenth century, Paine’s Common Sense was a rallying cry and a resource in the fight against the willfulness and arbitrariness of a king who had his own view of political reality and who imposed it on the colonies. Today, common sense is a resource for fighting the new conspiracists, who also claim to own reality. When conspiracism takes hold in a president who has the scope of power captured by the phrase “the imperial presidency,” we are right to see presidential conspiracism as willful, arbitrary rule.19 We are right to invoke Paine and counterpose common sense to conspiracism. Paine’s confidence in common sense made American independence possible. Common sense is necessary to protect democracy today.

  Common sense operates at a deep level, undergirding our institutions and supporting our sense of being a people. Historian Gordon Wood argued that the success of the United States over time owes less to the great founding document of the Constitution or to the country’s institutional arrangements, as so many have argued. Rather, it owes to “the common sense of the American people throughout our entire history, and our continued success will depend upon that common sense.”20 We hear a note of democratic optimism whenever common sense is invoked—just as we invoke it now as a bulwark against conspiracist claims to own reality. There are ways to resist conspiracism, and they strike us as matters of common sense. They are speaking truth to conspiracy and enacting democracy, and they are the subject of chapter 7.

  SECTION III

  DEFENDING DEMOCRACY

  In a dark time the eye begins to see.

  THEODORE ROETHKE, “IN A DARK TIME”

  7

  Speaking Truth

  A chasm separates those who assent to the accusations of the new conspiracism and those who cannot comprehend conspiracism’s popular reception, much less its sway in halls of power, and who fear its consequences. We fear conspiracist assaults on the integrity of parties and elections and on the authority of knowledge-producing institutions. We fear the conscription of thought, violations of common sense, and conspiracists’ claim to own reality. At stake in speaking truth to conspiracy is the reassertion of common sense and the stanching of the delegitimation of democracy.

  If the stakes are high, so are the obstacles to refutation and repair. The closed conspiracist mind-set is immunized against contradictory evidence and argument, and invulnerable to correctio
n. Speaking truth to conspiracy is hobbled by the fact that so many officials accommodate conspiracy charges and remain silent.

  The most obvious answer to conspiracism would seem to be transparency: combat charges of secrecy with openness, so citizens can see and hear leaders at work. Since John Wilkes first published the proceedings of the British Parliament (and was sent to the Tower of London for doing so), faith in transparency has never wavered. Transparency has become a mantra invoked by ethicists, public officials, the media, advocacy groups that monitor government, and citizens hoping to hold representatives accountable.1 The demand for transparency is all the more powerful because the national security state classifies far too much material and creates a background of secrecy that only a few are permitted to penetrate.2 Doubtless this contributes to conspiracist tendencies to see what is secret as nefarious. Nevertheless, transparency works to prevent political corruption and misconduct. It is a deterrent. And transparency plays an indisputable part in facilitating political accountability. Transparency is now formally required in a variety of ways and extends to legislation, executive orders, regulations, court decisions, the data used in making decisions, the records of argument and reasons, and the authors of policy and names of those in opposition.

  Yet transparency does not work automatically; on its own, publicity will not cure corruption or enable political accountability, nor will it ensure that even the most absurd conspiracist claims will be refuted.3 Transparency “places it in the public domain, but does not guarantee that anybody will find it, understand it or grasp its relevance.”4 Everything made public must be brought to the attention of some part of the public. Everything must be interpreted. Who selects and frames interpretations? For what purpose, and what audience? The products of transparency can be manipulated and marketed, and conspiracists can twist and exploit the very materials transparency makes accessible.

  Conspiracism flourishes today in our comparatively open democracy in spite of the regulations that compel a great deal of transparency. Official sources of information that are meant to dispel conspiratorial beliefs end up enhancing them—this happens, for instance, when official sources contain redactions.5 But for conspiracists, documents released by government agencies or congressional committees are just more evidence of fabrication, hoax, and covers for impending coups. Transparency, the upside-down conspiracist argument goes, is itself a deception. In fact, however, conspiracism is not really a complaint about incomplete openness. It is not a demand for more transparency. When conspiracists attack “pretended transparency,” it does not mean that they want true transparency. Conspiracism is not fundamentally concerned with anticorruption or accountability, the two purposes transparency serves.

  Speaking truth to conspiracy is not a matter of making things more transparent. It is disarming when it is, because it uses verifiable information to support an interpretation of the actions of political men and women that makes sense of things to citizens. In the political theorist Pierre Rosanvallon’s terms, we need legibility, not just transparency.6

  So, who speaks truth to conspiracy, or should? What is effective truth speaking, anyway? What entrenched obstacles inhibit speaking out and, often enough, then renders it toothless? What else do we need to disarm conspiracism and repair its effects?

  The Texas Takeover Conspiracy

  The first obstacle to contesting conspiracism is reticence—refusal to speak out. Consider, for instance, the so-called military takeover of Texas of 2015. Often, when conspiracy theorists charge the government with gross malfeasance—alleging, for instance, that the federal government plotted the bombing of the Pentagon and World Trade Center in 2001 or that John F. Kennedy’s assassination was the product of CIA meddling in Cuba—knowledgeable government representatives have defended an official version of the event, buttressed by evidence, investigations, and reports. But in the summer of 2015, when some Texans came to believe that the United States Army was plotting to invade the state, officials instead signaled their sympathy for those who suspected a conspiracy. The Texas takeover conspiracy began when the United States Army announced that it would be staging a summer military training exercise stretching across seven western and southwestern states. Called Jade Helm 15, the exercise was intended to train special forces to operate in unfamiliar terrain. The army released an unintentionally provocative map that labeled Texas, Utah, and southernmost California “enemy” territory and Colorado, Nevada, and most of California “friendly” territory; the “enemy” was red and the “friendly” territory, blue.7

  The unhappy coincidence, which the military should have foreseen, is that 2008 and 2012 election maps showed Republican states in red and Democratic states in blue. As a result, the announcement of the training exercise, along with the accompanying map, immediately excited conspiracist suspicions. Alex Jones expertly fertilized such fears with his insistence that the army planned to take over Texas, disarm the population, and jail key political leaders, who, in Texas, were Republicans. He later refined his charge to hold that the army was preparing the population for an eventual takeover by habituating people to the sight of soldiers and military equipment in civilian areas. By then the story had escalated: the United States Army was not merely going to invade and occupy Texas but was also going to disarm the population and impose martial law.8

  In itself, that a secretive army training exercise taking place in civilian areas—a plan accompanied by maps that mirrored the partisan divide in the country—might arouse suspicion is not altogether surprising. What was extraordinary was the reaction of numerous public officials. Leaders like Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, did not try to calm popular fears or resist conspiracist delusions with reasonable explanations based on their knowledge of events. Instead, officials signaled that they, too, had concerns. Abbott went so far as to task the Texas State Guard with monitoring the military operation on behalf of the state: “During the training operation,” Abbott wrote to the guard, “it is important that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed.”9 While Abbott’s letter elicited ridicule elsewhere in the nation, he was not the only official to go along with conspiracist stories.10 As Texas congressman Louie Gohmert said, “The map of this exercise needs to change, the names on the map need to change, and the tone of the exercise needs to be completely revamped so the federal government is not intentionally practicing war against its own states.”11 Abbott chose not to speak truth to conspiracy: as one Republican former Texas state representative wrote, Abbott should make decisions based on “facts and evidence” and stop “pandering to idiots.”12

  The governor’s complicity in conspiracism was rooted in the partisan connection. To the extent that his own supporters and constituents believed that the army was planning to invade Texas, Abbott was under pressure to show that he not only understood their worries but also shared them. And that is where the failure lies. To understand a worry is in some sense to acknowledge that the worry is reasonable. It takes rhetorical care to both communicate that one understands what people think and also correct it. By representing himself as sharing the worry of a military takeover, he failed to fulfill his responsibility to not only express an understanding but also correct a misunderstanding by telling his constituents that their fears are unfounded and dangerous. He abdicated his responsibility to maintain a partisan connection that works in two directions. The two-way connection transmits information not only from the citizens to government but also from the government to citizens.

  Most people stand at a distance from the institutions of government, especially when government acts on a continental scale. Washington, DC, is a long way from Midland, Texas—geographically and culturally. The partisan connection is the principal tether linking ordinary citizens and the national government—including the leaders who plan military exercises like Jade Helm. It is the responsibility of representatives to call on that connection—to strengthen the tether by acknowledging
popular fears, but at the same time, to speak the truth. Top to bottom, the governor, members of Congress, and state legislators failed in this obligation, and failed the people of Texas.

  The Partisan Connection

  Let’s look closely at the partisan connection and its significance for conspiracism. As we discussed in chapter 4, parties link the social pluralism we find in a free society to the formal institutions of government. They organize the pluralist array of interests and opinions and bring them into public life. To serve that purpose, parties have to connect to popular views on the ground. In part, this is a matter of organization: elected officials and party leaders are organized territorially to connect to constituents and partisan supporters at every level, from national arenas to street-corner society. They must be responsive not only to an undefined public but also to particular groups and associations, their constituents, their supporters, and potential supporters. Representatives need to look and sound as if they might share popular sensibilities. The more suspicious their constituents are of government, the more representatives will need to address their mistrust. They need to educate citizens about government and offer true explanations of public actions while refuting unwarranted ones. When it is unwarranted to think that the military is planning to take over Texas, democratically elected representatives need to say so, plainly. Yet at the same time these same leaders need to acknowledge the fears of the people they represent. They need to connect.