Conspiracy Theories

We are obviously living in an age of conspiracy—one of those great flare-ups of conspiracist thinking that are recurrent in American history. Once-fringe theories about global elite sex-trafficking rings and child murders, and even enormous space lasers,—all of them riddled with centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes hiding in plain sight—have migrated into the mainstream of one of America's two major political parties. As Francis Fukuyama recently observed, in a passage I've quoted now in multiple contexts: "There is a qualitative change in the nature of partisanship [...] reflected in poll data showing that a majority of Republican voters believe some version of QAnon theories about Democrats drinking children’s blood."

As Fukuyama rightly recognizes, this is a partisan phenomenon (only one of our two parties currently makes room for these cracked theories at the highest levels, and it is impossible to both-sides the issue). It is all too tempting, therefore, to see it as exclusively that. We can portray this as a delusion or psychosis that is rooted in the collective psyche of the Republican party alone—and viewed from that angle, there are in fact a few potential explanations for it that are inviting. 

One that has long come to mind for me is the phenomenon of projection. In their discussion of the roots of anti-Semitism in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno argue that this form of prejudice has long served gentile Europe as a means of exorcising its own guilt-feelings. The true ritual murder, the authors argue, committed almost seasonally down the ages, was the anti-Semitic pogrom. That is the site where children (and others) were actually killed in cold blood. Unable to accept the conscious weight of their own brutal actions, however, people exteriorized them by projecting them onto others—in fact, onto the very victim of those deeds. 

Richard Hofstadter (who was notably influenced by Adorno's psychoanalytic work on the "authoritarian personality") finds something similar at the heart of American conspiracist thinking (which he famously dubbed the "paranoid style" in American political life). He argues that conspiracy theories function as a way to displace guilt-feelings about the aggressive instincts that dwell within the individual human by attributing them to some group that is defined as wholly other. People take what is dark and unacceptable inside themselves—their own drive for power, their own capacity for cruelty and brutality—and project it onto an imagined enemy or utterly evil outside force. 

The identity of this external foe has shifted over the course of American history, as Hofstadter notes. Masons and Mormons have been subjected to the projection treatment. In other phases of U.S. history, it has been immigrants and Communists. In the contemporary Q-Anon discourse, the moral panic tends to center on liberal billionaires like George Soros and other financial elites, often coded in the conspiracy theories as Jewish, and on the asylum-seekers hoping to gain refuge at our borders, who are often portrayed as the agents (perhaps unwittingly so) of some master scheme at the hands of this shadowy cabal. 

Once we understand the psychology of projection, and note the targets involved in this case, it is easy to see how the Republican party might come to serve as a breeding ground for precisely this sort of conspiracist thinking. 

In recent memory, Republican political officials conspired to inflict very real and concrete harm upon thousands of children—specifically through the "zero tolerance" policy of separating refugee minors from their parents at the border, in a conscious effort to deter asylum-seekers from petitioning for safety. The policy drew global attention and condemnation. For months, it was inescapable in the news cycle. No doubt many on the right developed some barely conscious and suppressed guilt-feelings about this policy. But some people (in any group) will also lack the psychological wherewithal, maturity, or whatever else is needed to atone for these feelings and incorporate them into their sense of self in a way that allows for growth. 

So what then do they do instead? They project them onto the Other. They imagine that it is not themselves, but their political enemies who are victimizing children. Not they who tortured people by tearing their loved ones from their arms, but the rival political party that ritually murders infants and drinks their blood. ("Not I am a fake, but America's phoney!" as E.E. Cummings imagines a leftist intellectual saying in a satirical poem, when confronted with the fact of his own lack of talent—a fine illustration of the mechanism of projection.) 

And then, to remove the last element of guilt from their conscience, they go a step further. They say that it is precisely the victims of their own earlier policy who are the true guilty parties. Asylum-seekers are in on the scheme, they say! They're part of the conspiracy too! They, not us, are the ones who are torturing children!

This, as I say, is one possible and in part convincing explanation of the phenomenon we are witnessing. It accounts for why this particular form of conspiracism would have taken root in the Republican party, at this particular moment of history. And I think there is probably a lot of truth to it.

However, there is also a sense in which it is too pat. I think it probably tells us why Republican conspiracists latched onto theories involving George Soros and asylum-seekers at this point in time (since they were guilty of victimizing asylum-seekers, what better way to externalize their guilt about that fact than to vilify a philanthropist whose global humanitarian work supports the rights of asylum-seekers and refugees, among others?); however, it doesn't tell us why we have these periodic flare-ups of conspiracist thinking at all, or why they sometimes take other forms or attach themselves to other perceived villains. 

Hofstadter's "paranoid style," after all, is not the exclusive property of any particular political faction. I said above that the Republican party is unique among our two major political parties in openly catering to conspiracist thinking at the highest levels—and this is true; however, this should not prevent us from seeing that there are potential conspiracists within all political movements. And if Democratic elites and national political figures more openly pandered to these tendencies within their own base—as Republican elites and national figures have done with theirs—they could probably succeed in activating them within elements of the Democratic coalition. 

Parts of the Left, that is to say, are no less drawn to a worldview that thinks in terms of Manichean absolutes, and which sees in the problems that beset themselves and the world not a set of misfortunes or accidents or disconnected misdeeds, but a unified conspiracy—evidence of the hidden hand of a coordinated and totally evil cabal. 

The left-wing tendency to exaggerate the role of "dark money" in politics can all too easily shade into this kind of thinking. It's not that people are entirely wrong. We absolutely should seek stronger campaign finance regulation and the like. But the narrative that a handful of wealthy Republican donors are solely responsible for the rise of the American right misses the mark. It would be convenient if it were true; but the truth is often inconvenient. In this case, the reality is probably that far more of our fellow Americans than we would like to believe are drawn to appeals based in racism, ethno-nationalism, and white identity politics, and we don't need to point to any billionaire funders to explain why these ideologies are potent and dangerous forces in our political life. 

There are other ways in which conspiracist thinking manifests itself on the left; all of them, however, have a single element in common: populism. This is a theme that emerges clearly from Richard Hofstadter's account of the "paranoid style." When these periodic bouts of conspiracism crop up in American life, they do not always occur on the left or the right. But in whoever's hands they appear, they take on this same populist hue. (It is fitting, therefore, that Hofstadter's most extended discussion of the subject concerns the turn-of-the-century "Populists" themselves.)

Likewise, today, it is amongst the populist Left that one is most likely to find shades of conspiracist thinking. One thinks, for instance, of the subset of the Left that has been aptly named the "dirtbag Left," elsewhere as the "alt-Left." They are the segment of the anti-imperialist Left that has become so one-dimensionally focused on the (real) threat posed by the power of U.S. political and foreign policy elites that they willingly allow themselves to shade into Trump-style polemics. Think of Glenn Greenwald, and how his obsession with painting Hillary Clinton as the root of all evils went from pro-Bernie talking point to eventually putting him in the company of Tucker Carlson and right-wing "deep state" conspiracists.  

Some elements of the alt-Left are even willing to make these connections explicit. An article in the Daily Beast quotes Matt Taibbi, one of the high priests of the sect, as stating the following: "the underlying thought, that it’s a coalition of Trumpists who are taking on these elitists who want to take over the rest of society—there’s a core of, like, emotional truth animating the QAnon theory."

The trouble with both this quote and the mode of thinking it reflects—as Hofstadter notes about prior iterations of the "paranoid style"—is that it is harder than one might expect to pinpoint exactly where it goes wrong. Obviously, QAnon theories are factually incorrect and preposterous. Democratic elites are not sitting around murdering infants and drinking children's blood. Taibbi is not saying they are, however; he is saying that elites hold too much power over other people's lives (which is true), and this lends to QAnon an element of "emotional truth."

It has been the case with conspiracy theories throughout history that human beings really do commit enough terrible rotten deeds to consistently lend these theories some appearance of credibility. U.S. financial elites really did run the economy into the ground in the 2007 crisis and force millions of Americans from their homes through investing in shoddy derivatives and other financial instruments that they knew had no real value to back them up. What's more, they did it for rotten and self-interested motives; they knew they could make a lot of money off of these subprime mortgages and the instruments derived from them and hoped to cash out before the chickens came home to roost. So too, the bungling of U.S. foreign policy elites really did lead to repeated catastrophes in the Middle East and North Africa that have forced millions to flee. These problems are not invented.

And that's not even to mention the sex-trafficking stuff that really does happen in our world. At the moment, the Matt Gaetz controversy is still raging; but there have been many others. Jeffrey Epstein of course comes to mind. 

I have always avoided knowing all that much about the Epstein story, to be honest, despite the best efforts of all media everywhere to thrust information about this sordid individual under our noses. Partly, this is for obvious reasons: I avoid reading about it because it is intrinsically odious and upsetting. 

But I also avoid it because I know it is too eerily similar to the conspiracy theories circulating out there to be at all comfortable to contemplate. I recall a recent conversation with a friend in which he joked that one could probably get a powerful rumor started online that Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut was really intended as a disguised warning to the world about high-powered pedophile sex trafficking rings operating in elite Manhattan circles. We talked for a while about how someone might make the case, and by the end of the interchange we had almost started to believe it ourselves. Plainly, there is a little conspiracist in all of us. 

The problem with conspiracy theories is plainly not that the sorts of terrible things they describe never happen in our world. Wealthy and politically-connected people in our society have engaged in the trafficking of minors. U.S. political and economic elites have pursued policies that resulted in the ruination of millions. People are not wrong to call attention to and condemn these things. They just exaggerate when they imagine that it was all part of a plan, or that it all comes from a single source, rather than simply being various manifestations of the dread possibilities that exist within every human collective, and indeed within every individual soul—the will to power, the capacity for brutality, thoughtlessness, selfishness, greed.

This too is what Hofstadter concluded from the moral panics he studied, in his essay on the "Paranoid Style." Some of them were indeed rooted in real incidents. The Mormon hierarchy did actually engage in all sorts of bad behavior, as Mormon historians have themselves documented. There were actually incidents, or at least one incident, in which a murderer was apparently exonerated because of his Masonic connections. No conspiracist writings are based on nothing, Hofstadter notes, and often enough indeed, they are based on real information. He writes: 

"Paranoid writing begins with certain broad defensible judgments. There was something to be said for the anti-Masons. After all, a secret society composed of influential men bound by special obligations could conceivabl[y] pose some kind of threat to the civil order in which they were suspended. [...] Again, in our time an actual laxity in security allowed some Communists to find a place in governmental circles, and innumerable decisions of World War II and the Cold War could be faulted."

The problem, Hofstadter saw, was the move from these "broad defensible" concerns to the projection of all evil onto the guilty party. The point is not that Masons never do terrible things. People, whether they are Masons or otherwise, do in fact do terrible things. The point is just that Masons are not unique in this regard. They are not the only ones who commit evil acts; nor are all evil acts attributable to them. The same must be said for, say, Hillary Clinton. To reject Glenn Greenwald's obsessive hatred for her is not to defend her or say that she is above criticism. It is simply to acknowledge that both she and Trump might be bad in different ways, and that Trump could in fact be worse (and obviously, he in fact is), and that all of this can be true without taking away from the fact that Hillary Clinton should be criticized. 

The evils of the world do not proceed from a singular source. They are a kaleidoscopic jumble, a concatenation caused by the random intersections of different bad circumstances, rotten motives, and the cruelty and indifference and selfishness of individual people. This is a less appealing world-picture than its more simplistic alternatives, but it happens to be true. As I wrote in an essay a few months ago on the early Saul Bellow novel, The Victim: 

"The rhetorical and emotive appeal of conspiracy theories and scapegoating is easy enough to understand. It reduces complex and multi-causal social problems to a readily-identified and undivided source. It relieves us, as Kirby Allbee discovers in Bellow's book—of any haunting feeling of personal responsibility. And finally, it gives people a sense that there is meaning and purpose behind the way things shake out, as opposed to mere Heraclitean flux. At the end of Bellow's book, Leventhal decides that life was 'a shuffle, all, all accidental and haphazard.' Kirby, however, must persuade himself it is a plot that has been rigged against him; and which—by the same token—can therefore be manipulated to his advantage[.]"

 Of course, what I describe here as the "emotive appeal" of conspiracy theories may be nothing other than what Matt Taibbi described above as an "emotional truth." His counterpoint to the above argument would perhaps be that the ability to step away from this "emotive appeal" and to reject conspiracy theories is itself nothing more than the product of a privileged outlook. It is because people like me and Richard Hofstadter do not (or did not) feel that we were at the mercy of cruel larger forces—that is, because we feel that we have some control over our own lives and destiny—that we can afford to scoff at populist conspiracy theories that attribute all evil and injustice to some singular, all-powerful, and malevolent force. 

This past week I was reading a novel by Russell Banks, Continental Drift, about the unexpected intersection of the fate of a displaced New England working class family and a group of Haitian refugees, and he makes an observation that struck painfully with me, because I realized it is precisely the counterargument that the Matt Taibis and the populist conspiracists of the world would make, in response to everything I have written above. And, moreover, I realized that they would partially be right. Writes Banks: 

"People who have no power, or believe they have none, also believe that everything that happens is caused by a particular, powerful agent; people who have power, people who can rest easily saying this or that event happened 'somehow,' call the others superstitious, irrational and ignorant, even stupid. The truly powerless are none of these, however, for they and perhaps they alone know that luck, bad luck as much as good, is a luxurious explanation for events. When you have even partial control over your destiny, you're inclined to deny that you do, because you're afraid the control will go away. That's superstition."

Good lord. It's a great passage, and it is, I say again, no doubt in large part true. It probably accounts for why conspiracist thinking always takes on such a populist cast, and why it is so much more prevalent, as a general matter, among people who have been deprived of social power, than it is among those who feel themselves to be in possession of their own lives. All of that can be true, however, without meaning that these conspiracy theories aren't dangerous. This is what Taibbi is missing when he speaks of an "emotional truth"—he is overlooking the fact that something can be emotionally compelling and appealing without being good—indeed, that it can for that very reason be rife with potential for abuse. 

In particular, this is because these types of conspiracy theories, and the projection of absolute evil on which they rest, are often turned against those with even less social power than the people who believe in them. Trump supporters—at least some of them—may feel correctly that they have been denied full power over their lives and placed at the mercy of elites. Yet they have used this situation to scapegoat people who are even more desperate and at the mercy of global economic and political forces than they are—namely, the millions of asylum-seekers and refugees displaced by global wars (in some cases U.S.-backed ones) and by neoliberal trade policies that have rendered their traditional livelihoods unsustainable. If there's anyone who has the right to feel they are the victims of a global cabal and at the mercy of larger unseen forces, it is surely they!

It is fitting, therefore, that Banks is talking in this passage about Haitian refugees. His novel was written in the 1980s, but it is eerily relevant today, when there is a new wave of Haitian refugees reaching our shores. They are being displaced by the heirs of the same Duvalierist political forces who drove out the people in Banks' novel. They are displaced by U.S.-backed corrupt politicians who have triggered a crisis of violence and organized crime in Haiti. They, of all people, have a right to feel themselves at the mercy of larger forces. And they would be right. 

Yet some of the same people who are expelling them and denying them entry to the United States—generally without even the bare minimum of the legally-mandated asylum screening, owing to the misuse of Title 42 public health authority that both Trump and Biden have inflicted—are believers in conspiracy theories which portray precisely them and their fellow refugees as the agents of an all-powerful conspiracy. 

Would that it were so! It would make it that much easier to regard with indifference the fact that our U.S. government, under both of the last two administrations, led by both of the two major parties, has been deporting them to danger without the slightest due process. It would make it much easier to displace our guilt-feelings for this fact by turning it right around and saying that the asylum-seekers and refugees are themselves to blame, that they are the bad ones, the agents of evil. But that does not make it so. The world is too complex, and evil too inchoate and various a thing, for it ever to afford us the satisfaction of belonging exclusively to those we perceive as Other.