Conspiracy Theory

Weirdly, and long after I’d thought The Politics of Fear had run its course, a writer named Rod Lorenzen published a paywalled essay in The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about how fear-mongering and conspiracy theory work as tools of political manipulation that quotes extensively from the book. This pleases me no end, because I have been thinking that I more or less projected Trump’s chances correctly, meaning that I thought the odds that he would get reelected were fairly good.

Here’s a long quote from the piece:

Unlike science, economics and law, conspiracy theories are intuitive and easy to grasp and apply," writes Arthur Goldwag in his new book "The Politics of Fear: The Peculiar Persistence of American Paranoia."

"The reason you are suffering, almost all of them say, is because someone who is not like you wants to hurt you."

Conspiracy theories play on the fear of dispossession, Goldwag says. "They can even the playing field by giving uneducated people a sense of sophistication. They provide those who feel weak and powerless a way to regain the upper hand. And they give permission to hate, which relieves a person of the burden of loving your neighbor as yourself."

The authoritarian politicians who use conspiracy theories and lies often are trying to construct a counter-narrative to explain away their own shortcomings--scandals and failures--and, most of all, keep their supporters' sense of grievance, anger and fear at full boil.

"A large part of politics is getting people to think about things as part of a group," says Christopher Federico, professor of political science and psychology at the University of Minnesota.

Recently he told the American Psychological Association that "politicians using this strategy must first show that they (or their party) are best suited to address a specific issue. Once that is established, making people scared about that issue can cause them to seek comfort by joining the ranks of the group perceived as most capable."

More than 60 years ago, historian and political observer Richard Hofstadter referred to conspiracy theories as the paranoid style in American politics. No other term, he wrote, adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.

He characterized the political paranoid as a person who doesn't see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, since "what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil. What is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to the finish."

Since around 1900, Goldwag notes that a geographic fault line developed in the U.S. between city and farm, church and state, resulting in rural America becoming a hotbed of conspiricist discontent. "American populism was the inevitable result." he writes. It was a movement that "pitted frustrated farmers against the urban financial elites that increasingly controlled their destinies."

But conspiracy theorists were around a long time before that. They thrived in the anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic and anti-Black sentiment of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society, the Red Scare years of McCarthyism, and on into today's QAnon movement. Goldwag writes:

"What raises the paranoid style above mere bigotry is its systemic scope and illusive scientism--the belief that the hated other's malignancy is not just inborn and immutable but contagious, infecting everyone it touches, especially in the boardrooms of leading industries and at the highest levels of state."

At some point, Goldwag says, there is a point where authoritarian political leadership and cult leadership overlap.

Cult leaders and dictators both use programs of cognitive isolation and violence to keep their followers in a state of fearful dependency, he writes. Dictators control what their subjects see and hear using friendly news outlets and social media. Thinking in a cult does not depend on independent, verifiable data, in other words, the truth. Instead, followers get a highly detailed description of the enemy, who might as well be Satan himself.

All drama aside, Goldwag leaves us with an interesting question about those who follow conspiracy theories and those who peddle them:

"What's mysterious about populist conspiracy theories is not that they exist; the world we live in is rife with injustices. What's baffling is why the anger those injustices inspire is so often misdirected--and why people who claim to be as vigilant as they are for their rights and liberties cede them so readily to self-serving authoritarians."