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Thursday, September 02, 2004
Conspiracy Theories
August 9, 2004
If there is a plot, shouldn’t you know about it? [George Alec Effinger, “All The Last Wars At Once”]
Time was, to suggest that a conspiracy was behind any significant development in public affairs or the related discourse would get you snorted aside as some kind of nut. People who prided themselves on their common sense would never allow themselves to be enmeshed in such a thesis. They might not offer a competing explanation for what the conspiratorialist was pointing at, but they’d dismiss his conspiracy theory without a hearing and with extreme prejudice.
Time was.
American political discussion is overrun with conspiracy theories today. They appear to have become the first, rather than the last, recourse of the most energetic people and organizations in politics. What this development portends for American political debate is unclear, but it cannot be good. The time has come to examine it closely.
Let it be said plainly: conspiracies have existed in the past, and will probably exist in the future. Indeed, they’ve played a role in several well known developments in American history. A rather significant conspiracy led by Aaron Burr was aimed at truncating our fledgling republic and establishing a kingdom to its south and west. A conspiracy plotted and executed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The New Deal, which ran so contrary to the Democratic Party’s 1932 platform and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign promises, was essentially a conspiracy by Roosevelt’s innermost circle of advisors. The massive Communist infiltration of the federal government during the Forties and Fifties cannot be called anything but a conspiracy. And so on.
But a political conspiracy must meet a set of stringent criteria:
- The conspirators must work together by intention.
- They must have a shared, very well defined purpose to which they’re all strongly committed.
- They have to agree on and prosecute coordinated actions to achieve that purpose.
- They have to operate in secret from necessity. That is, public exposure would be fatal to their goals.
- Since the pursuit of political power is a zero-sum game, were their political opponents to learn of the conspiracy, they would have an inherent interest in thwarting it, regardless of the beneficence or maleficence of the conspirators’ intentions. This reinforces the imperative for secrecy.
It’s possible—indeed, it’s more likely than not—that the critical difference between a set of conspirators and their putative opponents is in their level of venality. As regards their general politico-economic impact, the two sides might assess the conspirators’ goals identically. However, if one side is significantly more corrupt, it might deliberately favor policies that would lead to politico-economic deterioration, because of the possibilities it would yield for graft or political exaltation. The Nationalist Party in South Africa provides a case study. Its introduction of racially based labor and wage controls—apartheid—caused a major recession, which its leaders foresaw. However, they also foresaw that it would be possible to blame the collapse on factors other than the apartheid system itself. That made it possible for the Nationalists to retain power in the face of the recession their prescriptions brought about.
The foregoing considerations give weight to an accusation of conspiracy. Why else, after all, would Hillary Clinton have accused “a vast right-wing conspiracy” of being behind the accusations of sexual misconduct aimed at her husband the President? She wanted the most sinister implications to apply, even though the persons charging President Clinton with wrongdoing were doing so out in the open. How could they have done otherwise?
The modern conspiratorialist seems excessively ready to waive the requirement for secrecy. But without secrecy, a conspiracy devolves to just one more political action group with a specific agenda. It can be combatted by an equally above-the-counter group with opposed objectives.
The modern conspiratorialist also seems eager to dispense with the requirement for intentional collaboration. After that, a group of any size, whose members simply share an opinion about some matter of public policy, can be classed as a conspiracy. But this makes every group with an agenda a conspiracy, from a dozen local activists for a change in the zoning laws to a nationally organized party with millions of members. It destroys the analytical usefulness, such as it was, of the term.
These days, analytical precision is not the point of most political rhetoric; gaining an edge over the opposition is. So words with powerful connotations such as “conspiracy” are harnessed to the task of promoting one’s political goals or condemning someone else’s, even when they’re entirely inappropriate and badly misleading. Examples abound; the politically engaged reader will know of innumerable examples.
What one must not forget about conspiracy-shouters is their overriding need to impute evil motives to their opponents. Evil motives are required to gin up an energetic, hate-filled opposition whose motivation will not falter. In ordinary times, persons with divergent views on political subjects can disagree politely, even if they’re resolved immutably upon their positions. But in ordinary times, critical concepts such as rights and freedom are well and widely understood, and political disagreements are about marginal matters that don’t involve clashes of principle. Extraordinary times, times in which a civil war is plausible, pit irreconcilable principles against one another—the prerequisite for seeing, and painting, the opposition in the colors of absolute evil.
A rational man looks at a controversy such as the one over the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, or the now-hoary “sixteen words” dispute, with some puzzlement over the degree of animosity involved. Everything being said and done is happening in the open. The characters and life histories of all the participants are wide open for inspection. Conspiracy? Don’t be absurd. But the rational man reflexively avoids hate mongers regardless of their cause, too. Which suggests something sinister about the repetitive, consciousness-extinguishing vitriol of polemicists to whom every dispute must be elevated to the pitch of slavery or genocide, lest their audiences chuckle and turn away.
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