For a very
long time – longer than I’ve been alive – the standard way for someone on the
Right to begin a book or a speech, draw attention to a website, or launch a
political campaign has been to say that something is deeply wrong with America’s
present form of government.
It’s a cliché,
but it’s a cliché that carries a lot of weight. Entering right-wing politics without
declaring that America has gone astray from its founding principles, and that
the government is trampling on our liberties, would be somewhat like joining a
Pentecostal church but refusing to say that Jesus is Lord.
It isn’t
that you couldn’t do it – just ask Jeb Bush. It’s just that you won’t get very
far in either a religious or a political community if you don’t repeat and
expound upon the core tenets of that community’s faith.
Now,
among the people who are saying that something is deeply wrong with America’s
present form of government, there are a lot of variations of belief about just what
that something is. To people who aren’t on the right, this is often taken as
evidence that right-wingers are blowing smoke.
I don’t
see it that way. Rather, I think that the situation is more like the old story
of the Blind Men and the Elephant. If different people can spend years pondering
the decline of the American empire and come to different conclusions about what
is happening and why, it’s simply because the decline is so big and multifaceted
that a single person’s insights are never enough to understand it.
For
example, watching a pair of right-wingers arguing over whether central banking
or leftist jurisprudence is the true cause of their country’s loss of freedom
over the last century is somewhat like watching the blind man with his hand on
the elephant’s tusk saying to the blind man with his hand on the tail, “There’s
no truth to your theory that the elephant is like a rope; clearly the object that
it resembles the most is a spear.”
That being
said, there is one strain of belief, common among the Right, which I wholly and
unabashedly reject. I have no point of agreement with the people who
think that the biggest threat to our liberties and our country’s well-being is a
single, well-organized conspiracy working behind the scenes to subvert the US constitution,
and that, one day, this conspiracy will emerge from the shadows and subject us
all to a new and radically different form of government.
This is a
theme that is played with many variations. Conspiracy theorists disagree about what
the shadow group is, what sort of government it is trying to set up, which publicly-known
organizations are front groups for it (Skull and Bones, Council on Foreign
Relations, etc.) and why the shadow-rulers felt the need to pull off the
Kennedy Assassination, the 9/11 attacks, and so forth.
My plan
here is to discuss why I don’t believe these theories, and also to try to
answer the question of just what it is about the conspiratorial worldview that
makes it so appealing – and so wrong.
Consider,
to begin with, one of the (relatively) less insane conspiracy theories: the one that
claims that the United Nations is on the brink of taking over the United
States, suspending the Constitution of 1787, and imposing martial law.
If the UN
is on the brink of doing something like that, then they’ve been on the brink
for a very long time. Controversy over whether it was a good idea for the US to
create and join the UN has been an off-and-on theme in American politics since
1945. Before that, there was a similar controversy over the League of Nations at
the end of World War I.
In both cases,
the controversy started the same way: Americans were afraid of the establishment
of a supranational governing body which might compel the United States to go to
war without the consent of the US Congress.
The first
time around, the more cautious faction won out – the Senate voted against
ratifying the Treaty of Versailles, and the United States did not join the
League of Nations. The second time around, owing largely to a belief that American
isolationism was a factor in the rise of Nazi Germany, a great many Americans
reversed course and became enthusiastic supporters of the United Nations.
But not
everybody was happy about the new situation. Some American statesmen voiced
reasonable fears of what might happen if the UN, in which the Soviet Union
under Josef Stalin had an equal voice with the United States, began acting too
aggressively in its new role as the policeman of the world. Indeed, there were good
reasons, at the time, to think that a decision to grant plenary powers to the
United Nations might end with a Marxist concept of human rights being enforced
by the sword.
Except
that that isn’t the way that history played out. The first real attempt of the
UN to enforce its new ideals came with the partition of Palestine in 1947, which
would have divided the Holy Land into separate Jewish and Arab states while leaving
Jerusalem and Bethlehem as international cities. The plan didn’t work – the Arabs
rebelled against the UN, which proved unable to enforce its authority, the Jews
had to go it alone, and it’s quite the understatement to say that Israel has
had a tangled relationship with its neighbours ever since.
Then
there was the Korean War – this is the one that really scared Americans,
because it involved President Truman sending US forces into a conflict on the
basis of a resolution of the UN Security Council, without ever getting Congress
to declare war. Then, after the Chinese crossed the Yalu in October of 1950,
Truman’s refusal to allow General McArthur to strike any targets in China, not even
the Chinese ends of the bridges that the PLA was crossing to get into Korea, on
the grounds that doing so would be harmful to world peace, caused a lot of
consternation within the halls of Congress.
As it
turned out, Korea was indeed the beginning of a new way for the United States
to make war, but the UN had little to do with it. In future conflicts –
Vietnam, the Gulf Wars, Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc. – the President alone would decide
when, where, and against whom a war would be fought, without having to go to
Congress for declarations of war on specific foreign countries.
And what
became of the United Nations? It was a big deal for about a decade, after which
it subsided into a largely ceremonial role. That doesn’t mean that its new role is useless –
there are benefits to having a deliberative body in which representatives of every
nation in the world can talk out their issues under an air of equality. But
nobody is ever going to go to war again because of a decision made at the UN. (I
say “because of” since the UN can still play a ceremonial role in authorizing
wars that were going to happen anyway).
Meanwhile,
in America, a lot of the things that the most ardent opponents of the UN feared
would happen under a world government ended up happening anyway under the
ever-morphing American government. Even without the UN wielding real power,
Congress still lost its authority over wars. The size and scope of the federal
government were dramatically expanded. Policies that would have been revolting to
nearly anybody in 1945 are now cheerfully supported by half the American
populace, and grudgingly endured by the other half.
The cause
of representative government in America ended up taking most of its blows on
the domestic front. Back in the 1950s, the Warren Court decided that, by
declaring itself the protector of every minority group who felt that its rights
were being violated by more democratic institutions, it could become America’s
Top Legislature (that’s what “interpreter of the constitution” is a euphemism
for). The Court then used that power to make a lot of dramatic changes to
the way America was governed, going quite a ways beyond suppressing the racial
injustices which originally motivated its power trip.
None of this
had much of anything to do with the United Nations. The UN seemed threatening
for a while, but the threats didn’t materialize, and the world moved on. The
important struggles for American liberty between 1945 and today mostly happened
in other contexts, and the supporters of limited government and the Bill of
Rights usually lost.
Conspiracy
theorists, unwilling to admit that they were wrong, have tried to frame all of
this in terms of the United Nations anyway. The people who make decisions
within the US government must be secretly controlled from somewhere,
they say, and any day now the UN troops will be marching down our streets and
herding us off to detainment centres.
The
problem with that mindset is that no theories that elaborate are actually
needed in order to explain the evidence. Or in other words, decision makers
within the US government are perfectly capable of acting the way they do
without taking covert orders from anybody else.
If you
want to understand why Supreme Court Justices rule the way they do, then read
their opinions. If you want to know how their worldview was formed, then just
look at where they went to law school, what media they read, and who they
hobnob with at the upper end of DC society. Then do the same thing with all the
lawyers and appellate judges who determine which questions will make it to the
Supreme Court.
The same
thing goes for the army of neoconnish State Department officials who make
America’s foreign policy. They are trained at specific universities, read
specific media, hobnob with likeminded people, and come out of it all holding a
specific worldview which just happens to give them a vastly inflated sense of
their own ability to improve the world by forcing their ideology upon it.
Repeat
the process with any other group of decision makers in American society,
whether their decisions relate to law, politics, education, business, finance, medicine,
the media, or whatever, and you will have an idea of what is going on.
There is
no shadowy, centralized control system. The United States is simply run by a
collection of human beings who act according to a combination of idealism and
self-interest to implement agendas which they themselves don’t see as sinister,
and which they aren’t trying very hard to conceal from the public.
Do
conspiracies happen? In the dictionary-sense of the word ‘conspiracy,’ yes,
they do. Over and over again, men of wealth and power conspire. They make plans,
in secret, to do legally or morally questionable things which they wouldn’t
have done if they had expected everybody else to find out. Sometimes, there is
a leak and a public outcry: think the Pentagon Papers, or the Iran-Contra
scandal, or all the lying and obfuscation about nuclear weapons in Iraq.
But the
main fact revealed by these scandals is not that the schemers are controlled by
any centralized force. Rather, it is that they are acting out of the same
combination of idealism and self-interest that drives normal government and
corporate activity, but with a bit more zeal/recklessness than is generally
acceptable.
Politicians
like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon obfuscated the fact that the US was
losing the Vietnam War because they knew that both of the other options – either
admitting defeat, or escalating the war like Goldwater wanted – would be bad
for their popularity. Ronald Reagan kept funding the Contras in defiance of
Congress because his idealism impelled him to support the global struggle
against Communism by fair means or foul. And so forth.
When I
criticize the conspiratorial worldview, I am not criticizing the idea that some
very unnerving things have happened in America in the last 70 years or so. I am
just criticizing the idea that they are happening according to some sort of
master plan, and that there is some sort of master planner whose machinations
could be resisted if more Americans were in the know.
It is
comforting to some people to think this way. It lets them feel more relevant than other Americans who aren’t aware of the conspiracy. And when a right-winger
sees his side losing at politics over and over again, conspiracy theories help him
feel like a victim of an evil mastermind rather than a member of a political
faction which consistently gets beaten because of its poor organization and
lack of courage.
And the
conspiratorial worldview is great for people who want to engage in provisional
living. If your feelings of patriotism revolve around making plans for what you
are going to do in the future, when an imaginary foreign occupying force shows
up in America, then guess what? Your patriotism poses zero threat to the forces
that are doing America in right now.
Just
think of what would have happened if one of the blind men in the old story had
said: “I’ve got it! I know all about this elephant critter! It’s about two
feet long, and it has four legs and a cold, leathery head, and its body is protected
by a hard, bony shell.”
You would
know, even if you were a blind man too, that he wasn’t feeling the same animal
that you were. And you would also know that if you ever wanted to figure out
what the elephant was really like, then you would be best off not listening to
him.
So it is
with the people who claim that the United Nations poses a serious threat to
American liberties.
Conspiracy theorists attempt to reduce all causes to one (the UN, the Jews, the Illuminati or whatever), for the same reason that monotheists do (to God); because they are low-IQ, and hence cannot deal with reality's infinity of causes. The fewer the causes, the easier it is for them to conceptualize them, and natural endpoint of this process is to reduce everything to one thing/cause. I explain a lot more about this in my philosophy book: http://orgyofthewill.net
ReplyDeleteGood essay.
I'm glad you enjoyed my essay. I've got a few points of disagreement with you, though: for one thing, I don't blame people's willingness to accept conspiracy theories on stupidity. For that matter, I also don't blame the success of the young earth meme on stupidity either, as I explain here: https://www.twilightpatriot.com/2020/08/tuesday-news-roundup-and-some-thoughts.html
DeleteThe thing is, the average person is not stupid, the average person is of average intelligence. There are reasons why both of those worldviews are appealing enough for people to choose not to think them through, even when they have the mental capacity to do so.
Also, I don't think there's any good reason to believe that monotheists are any dumber than polytheists. Most of the monotheists I know don't see God as the cause of all things, except in the trivial sense - for example, the way a materialist might deem the Big Bang to be the cause of all things because the universe had to get started somehow.
Another excellent essay. Really, this is absolutely national-journal level class.
ReplyDeleteI think that one factor in American conspiratorial thinking is this: Americans, due to their geographic location, have little direct interaction with the world. Nor did they ever have a large network of colonies to administer. So they naturally tend to be provincial.
Of course, 'conspiracy theories' exist in other countries: usually the shadowy conspirators who are responsible for all evil are the Jews, the Vatican, the Freemason ... even, according to one argument I read recently ... the British!
And while low-IQ is not an explanation, as you say, the fact is that it's SO much easier to have a simple conspiracy to explain everything than it is to try to understand actual realty, where there are multiple players sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing.
And ... we shouldn't overlook actual mental illness. Perhaps 'mental illness' is not quite the right phrase here, but behavior which is closely congruent to that of a person suffering from paranoia.
Sixty years ago, Richard Hofstadter wrote a book about 'the paranoid strain in American politics'. I don't recall his explanation for this undoubted tendency, but many historians of America -- contrasting it to Europe -- point to the relative social stability of Europe, compared to restless America, with its always-expanding frontier, immigration, and destablizing institution of slavery.
The attraction of conspiracy theory to otherwise-intelligent people is astonishing. Robert Welch founded a kind of Anti-Communist Party USA -- a cadre organization of dedicated people, which knew how to mobilize numbers far beyond its own ranks through mass campaigns and front groups. But he was (rightly) excommunicated by William Buckley when he announced that President Eisenhower was a 'a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy' probably under the orders of his older brother.
With reference to the latter, its probably also true that any explanation of the attractiveness of conspiracy theories in the US must take into account the fact that, for a decade -- from about 1936 to 1946 -- America WAS subject to a 'conspiracy'. The Communist Party claimed to be a simple continuation of indigenous American radicalism: the heir to the Socialist Party (led by the entirely admirable Eugene Debs, a kind of secular saint) and the IWW -- the 'Wobblies', an American an organization as you could ever find. But in fact it was the direct instrument of the leader of the Soviet Union, and could, and did, turn 180 degrees literally overnight, in its political stance, if required to do so by the needs of its masters.
Continued ...And it had great influence: at its peak, it had 100 000 dedicated members, probably ten times that number of sympathyzers, including some in high places in the government and the cultural apparatus. It controlled 11 national labor unions -- one-third of the CIO -- and had great prestige in the Black community because of its championship of Black rights at a time when no one else was interested. Several congressmen were sympathyzers of the Party, and it had a lot of influence in some state Democratic Party organizations. (Thus the toast of Jim Farley (FDR's postmaster general)to "To the 47 states, and the Soviet of Washington!".[https://depts.washington.edu/labhist/cpproject/]
ReplyDeleteThe seemingly-unstoppable rise of fascism in Europe, with the Communists (both in power in the USSR and outside it) seen as its most implacable enemies, made many left of center people take the line of 'pas d'enemies a la gauche' -- no enemies to the left -- even if they themselves were not Communists and indeed were opponents of one-party states.
Since even today, people on the left downplay the significance of the Party in American life -- the New York City council recently voted to honor the atomic spy Ethyl Rosenberg! -- it's understandable that some people fall prey to the idea that political events can be explained as a conspiracy.
How they reconcile the fact that the most popular nominee for Chief Conspirator, George Soros, is a ruthless financial manipulator billionaire, with the idea that his conspiracy aims to fasten the socialist/communist yoke on us -- I don't know. It's closely congruent to the old anti-Semitic idea that Bolshevism was actually a Jewish plot, with Lenin being financed by Wall Street.
This sort of thinking, while good for a laugh, is actually a tragedy. At this point in history, more than ever, our side needs cold