How the new
conspiracists are undermining democracy―and what can be done about it
Conspiracy
theories are as old as politics. But conspiracists today have introduced
something new―conspiracy without theory. And the new conspiracism has moved
from the fringes to the heart of government with the election of Donald Trump.
In A Lot of People Are Saying, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum show how
the new conspiracism differs from classic conspiracy theory, why so few
officials speak truth to conspiracy, and what needs to be done to resist it.
Classic
conspiracy theory insists that things are not what they seem and gathers
evidence―especially facts ominously withheld by official sources―to tease out
secret machinations. The new conspiracism is different. There is no demand for
evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close examination of shadowy
plotters. Dispensing with the burden of explanation, the new conspiracism
imposes its own reality through repetition (exemplified by the Trump
catchphrase "a lot of people are saying") and bare assertion
("rigged!").
The new
conspiracism targets democratic foundations―political parties and
knowledge-producing institutions. It makes it more difficult to argue, persuade,
negotiate, compromise, and even to disagree. Ultimately, it delegitimates
democracy.
Filled with
vivid examples, A Lot of People Are Saying diagnoses a defining and
disorienting feature of today's politics and offers a guide to responding to
the threat.
Conspiracy theories are dangerous—here’s how to crush
them
An interview with Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell
Muirhead, authors of “A Lot of People Are Saying”
Open Future
Aug 12th
2019
BY N.C.
GONE ARE
the days when conspiracy-mongers had to find shards of evidence and contort it
to convince people. Now, just their malevolence is needed. If a concocted
scenario can’t be proved, then perhaps it can’t be disproved either. That is
toxic for a stable society and politics. So how did we get here, and how do we
get out?
Nancy L.
Rosenblum of Harvard University and Russell Muirhead of Dartmouth College are
the authors of “A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the
Assault on Democracy” (Princeton, 2019). Though conspiracy theories have always
existed, they note that today something is different and dangerous: “Conspiracy
without the theory.”
“Its
proponents dispense with evidence and explanation. Their charges take the form
of bare assertion,” they explain in an interview. “It is a powerful force, with
the capacity to animate popular fury, to delegitimise political opposition, and
to hijack government institutions.”
As part of
The Economist’s Open Future initiative, we conducted an interview over email
with both authors. They considered how conspiracy theories have evolved, and
what society can do to prevent or defang them. (Spoiler alert: defend
institutions and apply common sense). Following the interview is an excerpt
from the book on what is at stake if we fail to do so.
* * *
The
Economist: Conspiracies have always been a part of life and politics. Is it
more of a thing now, and if so, why?
Nancy
Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead: Conspiracy theory has always been part of
political life. So long as those who exercise power are secretive and
self-serving—and so long as democratic citizens value vigilance and even a
degree of mistrust—it always will be. Some theories are far-fetched, but
sometimes the dots and patterns that support a conspiracy theory prove the
charge.
What we’re
seeing today is something different: conspiracy without the theory. Its
proponents dispense with evidence and explanation. Their charges take the form
of bare assertion: “The election is rigged!” Yet the accusation does not point
to any evidence of fraud. Or take Pizzagate, the claim that Hillary Clinton is
running a child sex-trafficking ring in a pizzeria in Washington, DC. It
doesn’t connect to a single observable thing in the world—it’s sheer
fabulation. And in America, this new conspiracism now comes directly from the
president, who employs his office to impose his compromised sense of reality on
the nation.
The
Economist: The internet was supposed to be a check on untruths; now it seems
like a catalyst. Is there a way to harness the net to tamp down on
conspiracies?
Ms
Rosenblum and Mr Muirhead: The new media—social media of course, but even basic
things like internet message boards—challenge the traditional gatekeeping
function of editors and producers. Today anyone can say anything to everyone in
the world instantly and for free. And because validation of conspiracy claims
takes the form of repetition and assent, even the most casual “likes” and
“retweets” give authority to senseless, destructive charges (“a lot of people
are saying”). We are seeing the political effects of this change and one of the
first things we’re seeing is the spread of a politically malignant form of
conspiracy without the theory.
Can the
same technology that disseminates charges like “fake news” or the “deep state”
also disempower it? Can political representatives and citizens who grasp the
effects of conspiracism, the way it delegitimises democratic institutions,
exile it again to the fringes of political life? No one has figured out how to
do this yet, short of some form of public- or corporate-censorship of egregious
conspiracy-entrepreneurs like Alex Jones or, what is now unthinkable, censoring
irresponsible political officials who endorse conspiracist claims.
The
Economist: You argue that conspiracists mostly belong to the far right in
America. Why not the far left?
Ms
Rosenblum and Mr Muirhead: There are plenty of conspiracy theories on the
left—centred on dark money, finance, the secret machinations of capitalists,
the military and so on. But the new conspiracy without the theory is coming
mainly from the right. That’s in part because it takes aim at the regulatory
state and at credentialed experts (economists, climate scientists), and so
aligns with absolutist anti-governmentalism as well as with those who view
expertise as intrinsically elitist.
But we see
no reason that the new conspiracism will be restricted to one party or point on
the political spectrum. It is a powerful force, with the capacity to animate
popular fury, to delegitimise political opposition, and to hijack government
institutions. Unless it is disempowered as a political tool, we may see it on
the left soon enough.
The
Economist: You fret that conspiracists will go global. How might they behave in
different countries—and what can countries do to prevent their rise?
Ms
Rosenblum and Mr Muirhead: The new conspiracism obliterates nuance and judgment
and replaces it with a distorted unreality in which some things are wholly good
and others (say, Hillary Clinton) wholly evil. This is its appeal. And
something with such political force will be taken up everywhere by those who
seek to abandon regular processes and disrupt established institutions, and
especially by those who reject the idea of a “loyal opposition.”
The
counter-force comes from the authority of knowledge-producing institutions
(that is, courts, expert-staffed agencies, research universities) on one side,
and democratic common sense on the other. Wherever conspiracism is reshaping
public life, two preventatives are vital: to defend the integrity of
knowledge-producing institutions and bolster confidence in the ballast of
common sense.
The
Economist: What does it take to neuter and dissipate a conspiracy narrative?
Can that even be done, or will they always live on like a dormant virus?
Ms
Rosenblum and Mr Muirhead: Some say we should fire with fire and return angry,
unsupported conspiracist accusations of disloyalty and illegitimacy in kind. It
is tempting. After all, conspiracism creates a divide deeper than partisan
polarisation—an epistemic divide over what it means to know something.
Conspiracism comes with a claim to own reality. That’s the scenario we worry
about most, one that obliterates a common world of facts and public reasoning.
But we
think the best way to reclaim reality is to fight this fire with water: scrupulous
recourse to argument and evidence and explanations that are available to
everyone and above all, subject to correction. We expect that most citizens
will fight the disorientation of conspiracist unreality and stand by the
common-sense world of reliable facts and arguments. It is the only basis for
translating political pluralism into vigorous disagreement that makes democracy
possible.
* * *
Believing
is believing
From “A Lot
of People Are Saying” by Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead (Princeton,
2019).
Democracy
in the United States and Europe is threatened in ways few imagined possible
only a short time ago. Many of us assumed that the democratic foundations laid
after World War II and consolidated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 were
unshakeable. Now they look less resilient. To some eyes, they appear fragile.
As defenders of constitutional democracy, we find ourselves on the defensive.
We thought that democracy had severe flaws, we recognized democratic deficits,
but we believed in the possibility of reform. Was our confidence in the
progressive arc of democracy premature, or naïve, or a sign that we were
complacent because we were being well served, or perhaps utterly unfounded from
the start? Did we underestimate antidemocratic forces brewing in society? The
signs were there. For many years, public opinion polls had documented
diminishing support for democratic institutions. In the past two years,
measures of civil and political freedom, which once had declined only in
autocracies and dictatorships, took a turn for the worse: in 2016, “it was
established that democracies…dominated the list of countries suffering
setbacks.” Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk give a name to this process:
“deconsolidation.”
We have
been startled into thought. The causes of political change can only be
understood with hindsight, and we have little dispassionate distance. For us,
right now, and not only in the United States, understanding begins with noting
that “there’s something happening here” and trying to grasp what that is.
Galvanized by events, lawyers document disregard for the rule of law and
constitutional limits; seasoned political observers record violations of
informal democratic norms such as tolerance and restraint; journalists chronicle
and correct the avalanche of official lies and falsehoods at the same time that
they contend with threats to the independence of the press; psychiatrists point
to dangerous patterns of overt derision and hostility toward individuals and
whole groups by the president and other public officials; and civil rights
organizations document an increase in hate crimes.
Scholars,
too, spring into reflection. Some look for lessons from the past. Drawing on
the history of democratic failings from Weimar Germany to Juan Perón’s
Argentina, political scientists identify the “guardrails” that keep democracy
on track and the warning signs of incipient authoritarianism. Political
theorists return with new urgency to old questions about challenges to the
moral foundations of constitutional democracy.
The new
conspiracism is but one entrant in the lineup of disruptive forces. In the
United States, it has moved from the fringe and has taken up residence in the
highest levels of government, and it makes an appearance in day-to-day
political life. Our focus has not been the entire domain of conspiracism but
rather those claims that strike at the heart of regular democratic politics:
rigged elections, plans to impose martial law, depictions of political
opponents as criminal, a Department of Justice planning a coup against the
president.
David
Runciman suggests that “the spread of conspiracy theories is a symptom of our
growing uncertainty about where the threat really lies.” We have argued that
the new conspiracism is itself a threat to democracy. In the context of what is
referred to as the literature on “how democracies die,” we don’t propose the
new conspiracism as a sufficient way of framing what happening. The new
conspiracism is not the engine of every crisis of democracy, nor does it figure
in every crisis of democracy. Malignancy abounds, and not all degradations of
democracy go together. The new conspiracism is more than simply an offshoot or
epiphenomenon of other forces such as authoritarianism or strident populism.
Once it secures a foothold in public life, conspiracism has independent force.
While
classic conspiracy theories arise all over the world, as of now the new
conspiracism is most evident in the United States. Even where classic
conspiracy theories abound, there is little evidence of the kind of bare
assertion and fabulist concoction that characterize the new conspiracism. But
there is reason to think this will change. The developments we describe in the
United States over the last decade are likely to come to the democracies of
Europe, to India, and elsewhere. New communications technologies that eliminate
the traditional gatekeeping functions of the media create an opening.
Conspiracy entrepreneurs seize on this opening. So do opportunistic
politicians. And the power that the new conspiracism can exert in politics is amplified,
as we see, when political parties and other institutions are weakened and in
disarray. Because all these factors are in play, the new conspiracism is
unlikely to be contained to the United States.
Wherever it
arises, the corrosive effects of the new conspiracism are distinctive: to
delegitimize foundational democratic institutions and, in a more personal mode,
to disorient us. Although disorientation is so widespread that it amounts to a
collective condition, it is also ours personally and individually.
Disorientation
An obscure
pizzeria in northwest Washington, DC, becomes, in the eyes of some, a center of
international child sex trafficking run by Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.
A summer military training exercise becomes, in the eyes of some, an attempt by
the United States Army to impose martial law on the state of Texas. The murder
of twenty elementary school students in Newtown, Connecticut, becomes, in the
eyes of some, a US government action designed to advance gun control legislation.
An election without any notable irregularities adverse to the successful
Republican nominee becomes, in the eyes of some (in particular, the president
himself), a “rigged” election.
The
frequency of such charges, the baffling quality of the narrative concoctions,
and their free-floating nature, untethered as they are to anything observable
in the real world, contribute to the new conspiracism’s disorienting effect. We
are disoriented by the realization that what is absurd to some is true enough
to others. And we are talking not about evaluations of particular policies, in
the way that a new tariff policy might seem sensible to some and nonsensical to
others, but rather about basic perceptions of political reality. We have become
accustomed to partisan polarization, the gap in the way Democrats and
Republicans evaluate public officials, public policies, and one another. The
new conspiracism moves us from gap to chasm, for epistemic polarization
ultimately dissolves our common sense of the world.
A shared world
of basic perceptions and a shared sense of elemental causation—of what counts
as plausible or farfetched—allows us to make ourselves understandable to each
other even when we disagree. Disagreement may be many things: passionate,
troubling, unpleasant, destructive, or even illuminating and productive. But in
itself, it is not disorienting. On the contrary, to have a clear sense of what
you disagree with is to have a political orientation. Knowing what we are
against is often a more stable point of orientation than knowing what we are
for. But under conditions in which we cannot make ourselves understandable to
each other, disagreement itself becomes impossible. There will still be
politics, and it may preserve democratic forms, but it will be a politics in
which we cannot understand each other.
Disorientation
is a personal as well as collective condition. When those in power claim to own
reality and impose their reality on public life, what happens to ours? What
becomes of us as inhabitants of a common world that no longer seems a world in
common? We experience anxiety, rage, and a sense of helpless confusion.
Diagnosing disorientation is the first step in overcoming it.
Delegitimation
“I’m the
only one that matters,” the president says, in the course of dismissing an
accumulation of high-level vacancies at the Department of State, crippling the
backbone of US diplomacy. He is pointing not only to his extraordinary
interpretation of executive authority but also, and just as ominously, to the
belief that he needs to know nothing more than the content of his own mind. He
calls the free press the “enemy of the people” and provokes violent
confrontations with reporters. We have no need of those who do the hard work to
excavate facts—it’s all “fake news” anyway. He teaches his supporters to
disdain experts—they all lend themselves to the service of global elites and to
the deep-state conspiracy machinating against him. As for his opponents in
elections? They too are enemies of the people. His opponent in the last
election, the one he defeated in the Electoral College, should be “locked up.”
This is the
delegitimation of knowledge and the delegitimation of parties—and Donald Trump
is only its most powerful agent. At every turn, the new conspiracism assaults
the integrity and independence of knowledge-producing institutions. Perhaps
because experts deal in specialized terms that often defy general
understanding, they are politically vulnerable: they can be cast as a cabal.
This is exactly what the new conspiracism does. Insofar as it delegitimates
knowledge-producing institutions, conspiracism also incapacitates democratic
government. And it does not proceed surgically; delegitimation extends across
the board.
Excerpted
from “A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on
Democracy.” Copyright © 2019 by Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead. Used
with permission of Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.
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