A Lot of People Are Saying

by Nancy L. Rosenblum

  But the strategy of speaking truth, even when it makes a difference, is insufficient if it is not accompanied by political action. The idea that all one needs to do is describe things as accurately as possible points to an unexpected symmetry between the new conspiracism and the strategy of speaking truth: both hold that declarations are enough to save the nation or change the world. For new conspiracists, it’s as if invoking a malignant plot is enough. All the energy is in declaring, repeating, and affirming ruses. Exposing per se is all the work that needs to be done. The point of symmetry lies here, in the thought that exposing the faults in conspiracist claims is all that need be done. There is little reason to put all our faith in the efficacy of exposure, if unmasking and revealing don’t prompt additional action. “What is the basis for assuming that it [exposure] will surprise or disturb, never mind motivate, anyone to learn that a given social manifestation is artificial, self-contradictory … phantasmatic, or even violent?”31 When conspiracism begins to appear normal, and when it hijacks institutions and inverts democratic processes, relegitimating democracy requires more than speaking truth. It demands a reassertion of standard democratic ways of going about the business of politics.

  Enacting Democracy

  Speaking truth to conspiracism is an effort to contain its effects. But refutation is one thing; relegitimation is another. Reversing the damage done to the meaning, value, and authority of democratic institutions is its own challenge. What we call enacting democracy is a way to not merely contain the force of conspiracism but also to relegitimate democratic institutions. Performed over and over, it has a cumulative effect. It is not what busy officials normally do. In fact, it is difficult to find examples of it because it simply has not been seen as necessary. But enacting democracy is what they can and should do now.

  By democratic enactment, we mean more than faithful adherence to the regular political and legal processes of constitutional democracy. In addition, it entails a literal articulation of how each step in the process of legislating, prosecuting, regulating, or investigating (or even campaigning) adheres to fair processes. Enacting democracy entails attesting to the value of these practices. It explains what regular processes are about and, in the course of explaining, demonstrates and avows commitment to them. We’re talking about politics as pedagogy.

  Enacting democracy is more than giving justifications for decisions. To be sure, justification is the focus of a great deal of academic democratic theory, especially theories of deliberation. These focus on offering reasons that all can accept as the standard for decision-making—as if all of democracy were an extended legislative debate about particular policies. But democracy is also about institutions, not just deliberation. It involves delineated lines of authority and regular processes. We’ve shown that conspiracism distorts institutional practices. Under these conditions, enacting democracy—upholding regular processes and explaining them—is essential.

  Relegitimation is a slow, extended affair. For it to take hold, citizens need to witness exhibitions of institutional integrity. An exemplary instance of enacting democracy occurred after Trump created the spurious Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The commission was tasked, in effect, with confirming his conspiracist claim that massive voter fraud, on the order of three million illegal ballots, accounts for his loss of the popular vote. Trump’s signature claim has no basis in fact and has been conclusively rebutted. With minor exceptions and the expected errors in record keeping (failing to differentiate people with the same name, failing to remove deceased individuals from the rolls, failing to record moves out of state, and so on), voter fraud allegations investigated by states, by social scientists, and by journalists have been discounted. As one team of political scientists put it, “The best estimate of the percentage of noncitizens who vote is zero.”32 Another group of researchers reports that “the expansive voter fraud concerns espoused by Donald Trump and those allied with him are not grounded in any observable features of the 2016 election.”33

  Kris Kobach, the Republican Kansas secretary of state who is identified as “the man behind Trump’s voter-fraud obsession,” and who is a fierce champion of punitive voting restrictions, was appointed vice-chair of the commission.34 His history of inventing legal obstacles to registration and voting, of disenfranchising voters over technicalities, and of intimidating would-be voters should have been disqualifying.35 But we are no longer surprised by the hijacking of institutions for conspiracist purposes or the manufacture of ad hoc arenas for “investigating” conspiracist allegations. The commission is a prime example of a “quixotic search for nonexistent evidence.”36

  What followed was an encouraging enactment of democracy as resistance to conspiracism. The commission demanded that every state turn over its complete voter files (including every voter’s name, address, date of birth, voter history from 2006 on, party identification, voting records, military status, overseas citizen information, prosecution for electoral crimes, and felony convictions, as well as the last four digits of each voter’s Social Security number). It also announced an intention to make this information public. Almost every state refused to hand over its data. Some states sent only publicly available information; others would not comply at all. New York governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, said his state “refuses to perpetuate the myth [that] voter fraud played a role in our election.”37 The commission has also been sued by a privacy watchdog group and civil rights and voting rights groups. Those who resisted the commission and explained why—governors, secretaries of state, and citizen groups—enacted democracy. It was effective: in January 2018, the president precipitously disbanded the commission.

  Enacting democracy is vital even when it is not aimed at combatting specific conspiracist charges. Consider the US attorney who, in the face of political pressure to subvert regular practice, explained the legal process of criminal prosecution. On Halloween night in 2017, Sayfullo Saipov, a legal US resident, used a rented truck to strike cyclists, pedestrians, and a school bus in a terrorist attack in New York City. Eight people died and others were wounded. Trump went immediately on Twitter to say, “Send him to Gitmo!”—the controversial detention facility at Guantanamo, Cuba, that falls outside the regular justice system. The president called our system of justice a “joke” and a “laughingstock.” He demanded capital punishment for “the animal.”38

  The day after the attack, Joon H. Kim, the acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York, made a public appearance to explain to a stunned national audience the charges quickly brought against Saipov. He commended the FBI and other law enforcement agencies for their swift action. Agents had collected the perpetrator’s cell phones—“conducted pursuant to a court ordered wiretap,” Kim carefully added. Agents had interrogated the suspect and gotten a confession in what was, Kim carefully added, a “Mirandized interview.” He reminded viewers of the number of infamous terrorists who had been successfully prosecuted and sentenced through the regular federal system. He did not mention Trump or his delegitimating attacks on the system of justice.39 He did not have to. He enacted the role of responsible US attorney. He exhibited dignity and confidence in legal due processes.40 It was a moment of democratic pedagogy.

  Enacting democracy can require officials to confront delegitimating conspiracism personally as well as officially when they become its targets. Embattled FBI deputy assistant director Peter Strzok became a target of attack when private emails he exchanged with his girlfriend during the 2016 election became public and showed him casting aspersions on Trump (as well as other candidates). Strzok was drawn into the broader attack on the Justice Department and FBI leveled by the president and his congressional allies who saw the investigation of Russian intervention in US elections as part of a conspiracy within the government. They cast Strzok as part of that organized conspiracy. Called to testify before a hostile Republican-led House Judiciary and Oversight Committee, Strzok went beyond a defensive disavowal of personal wrongdoing. He
detailed the institutional safeguards—the entrenched procedures and hierarchy of accountability—that guard against politicization in the Justice Department: “At every step, at every investigative decision, there were multiple layers of people above me, assistant director, deputy director, director of the F.B.I., and multiple layers of people below me, section chiefs, unit chiefs and analysts, all of whom were involved in these decisions. They would not tolerate any improper behavior in me any more than I would tolerate it in them.” Strzok explained that the normal practices of the department would prevent any individual from indulging his or her personal political preferences. “The suggestion that I, in some dark chamber in the F.B.I., would somehow cast aside all these procedures, all of these safeguards and do this is astounding to me. It couldn’t happen.”41

  Strzok had become the canary in the coal mine: a measure of how the delegitimating force of conspiracism touches not only the Russia investigation but the entire Department of Justice. Of course, his description of close oversight within the department only confirmed conspiracists’ notion that the plot really did involve the agency as a whole, the “deep state.” Strzok, like other principals caught up in the conspiracy narrative, was aware of this: “I understand that my sworn testimony will not be enough for some people.… Many Americans are now skeptical of anything they hear out of Washington.”42 He did not expect his testimony to permeate conspiracists’ closed minds. He intended to educate open minds. Strzok laid out what citizens may not have known but need to know about how internal hierarchical organization and entrenched processes are designed to ensure that due process is followed and the rule of law upheld. This is a fraught example because, in part, Strzok was defending himself. But in the context of malignant normality, it is a compelling instance of how officials can enact democracy.

  Enacting democracy helps make government legible. As we said, fighting conspiracism is going to take more than transparency. Transparency has to do with publicizing the workings of officials, the day-to-day business of governing. Legibility is about making sense of power—identifying the holders of influence and the sources of their influence, understanding the material and cultural stakes of each political contest, and reading clearly who are the winners and losers of electoral and policy outcomes.43 Enacting democracy helps citizens see all this. Political representatives and administrative officials committed to the pedagogy we call enacting democracy can do a lot to put power dynamics into sharp focus.

  The business of classic conspiracism, warranted or not, was precisely to prove that the real configuration of power was concealed. The new conspiracism, with its innuendo and bare assertion, does not even try to make sense of power. And by delegitimating democratic institutions, the new conspiricism actually obscures power. When they work well, democratic institutions allow power relations to be correctly perceived. Officials who enact democracy take on the responsibility of ensuring that the clash of interests is visible; that the predictable impact of political decisions—the costs and benefits to different groups—is brought out for all to see. Enacting democracy makes politics legible. It is a force against conspiracism and its delegitimating effects.

  The two activities to repair the damage of delegitimation—speaking truth to conspiracy and enacting democracy—do not call for heroic virtues. Senator Flake’s speech about principled resistance was laudable, a fulfillment of an obligation he took on as a political representative, but it was not heroic. Losing an election or giving up a Senate seat is not a grave sacrifice. Nobody is being imprisoned, exiled, or killed. Electoral defeats and the electoral success of opposition candidates are modest, regular occurrences in democracy, and they should be seen that way. They define democracy. In the same way, US attorney Kim’s public statement was an ordinary, low-key, public explanation of law enforcement practice that was notable only because of the extraordinary situation. We are fortunate; so far we don’t need Albert Camus’s rebel or courageous resistance fighters battling tyranny. We just need honest witnesses who speak truth to conspiracism and pay attention to the pedagogical moments built into everyday political life. So far, however, we have too few.

  Conclusion

  THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY

  Democracy in the United States and Europe is threatened in ways few imagined possible only a short time ago. Many of us assumed that the democratic foundations laid after World War II and consolidated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 were unshakeable. Now they look less resilient. To some eyes, they appear fragile. As defenders of constitutional democracy, we find ourselves on the defensive. We thought that democracy had severe flaws, we recognized democratic deficits, but we believed in the possibility of reform. Was our confidence in the progressive arc of democracy premature, or naïve, or a sign that we were complacent because we were being well served, or perhaps utterly unfounded from the start? Did we underestimate antidemocratic forces brewing in society? The signs were there. For many years, public opinion polls had documented diminishing support for democratic institutions.1 In the past two years, measures of civil and political freedom, which once had declined only in autocracies and dictatorships, took a turn for the worse: in 2016, “it was established that democracies … dominated the list of countries suffering setbacks.”2 Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk give a name to this process: “deconsolidation.”3

  We have been startled into thought. The causes of political change can only be understood with hindsight, and we have little dispassionate distance. For us, right now, and not only in the United States, understanding begins with noting that “there’s something happening here” and trying to grasp what that is. Galvanized by events, lawyers document disregard for the rule of law and constitutional limits; seasoned political observers record violations of informal democratic norms such as tolerance and restraint; journalists chronicle and correct the avalanche of official lies and falsehoods at the same time that they contend with threats to the independence of the press; psychiatrists point to dangerous patterns of overt derision and hostility toward individuals and whole groups by the president and other public officials; and civil rights organizations document an increase in hate crimes.

  Scholars, too, spring into reflection. Some look for lessons from the past. Drawing on the history of democratic failings from Weimar Germany to Juan Perón’s Argentina, political scientists identify the “guardrails” that keep democracy on track and the warning signs of incipient authoritarianism.4 Political theorists return with new urgency to old questions about challenges to the moral foundations of constitutional democracy.5

  The new conspiracism is but one entrant in the lineup of disruptive forces. In the United States, it has moved from the fringe and has taken up residence in the highest levels of government, and it makes an appearance in day-to-day political life. Our focus has not been the entire domain of conspiracism but rather those claims that strike at the heart of regular democratic politics: rigged elections, plans to impose martial law, depictions of political opponents as criminal, a Department of Justice planning a coup against the president.

  David Runciman suggests that “the spread of conspiracy theories is a symptom of our growing uncertainty about where the threat really lies.”6 We have argued that the new conspiracism is itself a threat to democracy. In the context of what is referred to as the literature on “how democracies die,” we don’t propose the new conspiracism as a sufficient way of framing what is happening. The new conspiracism is not the engine of every crisis of democracy, nor does it figure in every crisis of democracy. Malignancy abounds, and not all degradations of democracy go together. The new conspiracism is more than simply an offshoot or epiphenomenon of other forces such as authoritarianism or strident populism. Once it secures a foothold in public life, conspiracism has independent force.

  While classic conspiracy theories arise all over the world, as of now the new conspiracism is most evident in the United States. Even where classic conspiracy theories abound, there is little evidence of the kind of
bare assertion and fabulist concoction that characterize the new conspiracism. But there is reason to think this will change. The developments we describe in the United States over the last decade are likely to come to the democracies of Europe, to India, and elsewhere. New communications technologies that eliminate the traditional gatekeeping functions of the media create an opening. Conspiracy entrepreneurs seize on this opening. So do opportunistic politicians. And the power that the new conspiracism can exert in politics is amplified, as we see, when political parties and other institutions are weakened and in disarray. Because all these factors are in play, the new conspiracism is unlikely to be contained to the United States.

  Wherever it arises, the corrosive effects of the new conspiracism are distinctive: to delegitimate foundational democratic institutions and, in a more personal mode, to disorient us. Although disorientation is so widespread that it amounts to a collective condition, it is also ours personally and individually.