The Plots Against America

Ever since the historian Richard Hofstadter published “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in 1964, democracies have been stalked by a nagging anxiety about the capacity of irrational suspicions and wild accusations to destabilize the basic standards of civic life. In 2016 those fears came home to roost.

Many of the tropes of conspiracy theory through the ages have made a very public comeback. The “lying press,” the cosmopolitan elite, the banks, the “Establishment,” and, inevitably, the Jews all found themselves fingered for hiding the truth. There have been consequences. A month after Donald Trump was elected president, a man from North Carolina shot up a pizza restaurant in Washington, believing it to be the front for a Hillary Clinton-led pedophile ring.

A persistent puzzle about conspiracy theories is what makes them so dangerous for democracy: Is it the beliefs themselves, or is it the people who hold them? Hofstadter was ambivalent on this question. His essay sought to portray the paranoid style as a profound mistake, yet he also saw it as a marginal threat. Many of the ideas he described were crazy, but so long as the people who subscribed to them remained on the fringes of American life, the damage could be contained. What Hofstadter feared was contagion, spreading to the center.

Contemporary scholars continue to be divided over whether we should focus on the content of these beliefs or their prevalence. For the legal philosopher Cass Sunstein, conspiracy theorizing represents what he calls a “crippled epistemology,” which has the capacity to undermine the basic standards of democratic argument and evidence, with potentially catastrophic results for our ability to reason with one another.

The Post-Truth Issue

“Post-truth—adjective; relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” So says Oxford Dictionaries, announcing their 2016 word of the year. If we really have entered a post-truth era, as so many have written, what does that mean for the scholar and the student? For the citizen and the state? In our special issue, we wrestle with these and other urgent questions.

• Fighting Fake
• Facebook and Falsehood
• Google and the Misinformed Public
• Know-Nothing Nation
• Our Graduates Are Rubes
• When Truth Becomes a Commodity

By contrast, the political scientists Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent argue in their book American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford University Press, 2014) that the conspiracist mind-set is a function of political experience rather than mental disintegration. Conspiracy theories, in their words, are for “losers” — not because the people who believe in them have lost the plot but because their side has lost the election. When a Democrat is in the White House, a significant minority is likely to believe in foreign infiltration (“Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim”); when a Republican is in the White House, the suspicion shifts to the other side, this time of a conspiracy of moneyed interests (“Bush is an oil-industry stooge”). On this account, conspiracy theories act as a kind of safety valve for the temporarily alienated.

The experiences of 2016 have put both these interpretations in question. The problem with focusing on the content of conspiracy theories is that it can be hard to draw the line between irrational suspicion and legitimate mistrust. In an age when many voters have ceased to believe what politicians and other “experts” are telling them, describing a refusal to face the facts as a failure of reasoning simply fuels the problem it is meant to address. Moreover, conspiracy theorists may be right to insist that radical suspicion of public authority is not a democratic vice to be eschewed, but a democratic virtue to be encouraged when the public authorities have something they wish to hide.

Part of the problem with labeling all conspiracy theorists crazy is that there are real conspiracies out there, and sometimes it is only people who refuse to take official explanations at face value who can uncover them. Conspiracy theorists often start out from the same place as investigative journalists, whose own mind-set, in the words of the London Times foreign correspondent Louis Heren, comes down to: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” The difference is that conspiracy theorists don’t know when to stop. What makes fake news dangerous is not that it is so different from real news, but that it is in many respects so similar. It derives its plausibility from its ability to mimic convincingly the conventions that it undermines.

Another idea that 2016 has challenged is that conspiracy theories are for losers, for the simple reason that this time around the conspiracy theorists won. Trump’s assault on the citadels of public life began with his personal advocacy of the “birther” conspiracy about President Obama, which was a quick way to establish his bona fides with the Republican base. To that extent, his behavior fits the pattern described by Parent and Uscinski: He was using conspiracy theories to establish himself as a mouthpiece for the most alienated members of the American electorate. It is also true that he stepped back from “birtherism” as he got closer to the White House. But he has not stepped back from conspiracy theories — indeed, his half-hearted disavowal of the idea that Obama was not born in the United States came in the form of a claim that the Clinton campaign had been secretly behind the idea in the first place.

Trump’s campaign turned the conspiratorial mind-set into something like a governing philosophy. It posited suspicion of outsiders, accusations of elite interference in his affairs, and deliberate campaigns of misinformation by his opponents as the rationale for his own candidacy. His willingness to cast doubt on the probity of the electoral process after he had won the Electoral College — but lost the popular vote — is testament to his readiness to keep going with a winning strategy. This is the hallmark of the worst kind of conspiracy theorist: He does not know when to stop. It also distinguishes his approach from the legitimate questioning of authority that is essential to the functioning of any democracy. That sort of suspicion is essentially skeptical. Trump’s is entirely cynical.

Parent and Uscinski note that there have been earlier periods in American history when conspiracy theorizing has gone beyond being the preserve of the “outs” to encompass a wider cross section of the public. One such period was the late 1940s and early 1950s, when fear of Communist infiltration spread across the political divide. Another was the 1890s, when the populist reaction against the moneyed elites of the Gilded Age found converts among large swaths of the voting population.

Our own age resembles the 1890s. That, too, was a time of rapid technological change, of financial instability, and of near-ubiquitous mistrust of Washington deal-making. The difference is that although a populist, William Jennings Bryan, captured the nomination of one of the two main parties in 1896, his Democrats lost the general election. This time the populist won the whole thing.

In a valedictory interview with David Axelrod, President Obama has contrasted the current condition of the Democratic Party in the United States with both the Republicans and the Labour Party in Britain. The Democrats, he suggests, are in better shape than their rivals or equivalents elsewhere because they have not yet lost touch with fact-based politics.

But Trump’s victory poses a challenge to the underlying hypothesis: that fact-based politics will win out eventually. If it is true that conspiracy theories tend to be a means for electoral losers to channel their frustration, the arrival of a cynical conspiracy theorist in the White House might upset those calculations. Is it possible to oppose that cynicism by redirecting it back at its source, or will the appearance of fresh conspiracy theories about Trump merely reinforce the worldview that he wishes to purvey? Alternatively, if the way for the losers to reassert their identity this time is to cleave to the conventional standards of evidence, do they risk ceding the field of mistrust in politics to their cynical opponents?

Democracies can accommodate quite a lot of irrationalism. What is not clear is whether they can accommodate it when it emanates from the center. There are plenty of other societies in the world where conspiracy theorizing has become a governing philosophy: Putin’s Russia, Erdogan’s Turkey, increasingly Modi’s India as well. These societies mimic functioning democracies in some respects, but they also increasingly resemble their authoritarian alternatives.

There will always be fringe figures in any democratic society who believe the nonsense they read and decide to take matters into their own hands. It is shocking when it happens, but democracies can cope. Pedophilia and pizza parlors will be told apart eventually, and the contagion from that kind of paranoia can be contained. Much harder to know is what happens when the contagion of conspiracy theorizing spreads out from the heart of government. There may be no real historical analogies for that in the American experience, certainly not since the early days of the Republic. But the examples from elsewhere in the world at present are not encouraging.

David Runciman is a professor of politics at the University of Cambridge, where he is a co-director of the Conspiracy and Democracy project.