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.
Wiley Book Reviews - A Lot of People Are Saying:
In this fascinating and well-written book, Nancy Rosenbaum and Russell Muirhead plunge into the murky universe of conspiracy theories and assess their negative impact on the institutions of American democracy.
The difference between old and new conspiracism arises in the latter's scorn for theory.While the phenomenon itself is old, the authors claim, we
face a new, more virulent variant, "the new conspiracism."
- In the old days, entrepreneurs wrapped their claims in pseudo-science.
- Nowadays, "bare assertions, innuendo, and ominous questions are enough to get the new conspiracism going" (p. 42).
As the story goes, "there is something true somewhere," or there is no smoke without fire (p. 43).
This "true enough" is characterized by;
- intentionality (malevolent actors are always plotting in the dark),
- proportionality (causes are much broader than the actions themselves),
- confirmation bias (facts are modified to conform to conspiracists' worldviews), and
- scapegoating the other (tribalism) (pp. 47-57).
Rosenblum and Muirhead distinguish between
- laid entrepreneurs, some of whom are loonies, and
- conspiracy entrepreneurs driven by money, influence, & celebrity
The most nefarious consequence of conspiracy theory is its "malignant normality," which delegitimizes and denigrates American institutions (p. 71).
The solution that the authors advocate is "*speaking truth," first and foremost by political representatives. For example, they cite John McCain's rebuke of a Republican party supporter who expressed her distrust of Barack Obama, his opponent, during the 2008 U.S. presidential elections allegedly because he was Arab.
Then, in the book's epilogue, the authors project a worst-case scenario and suggest measures that will be needed to thwart a conspiracy assault.
.............
This scenario's eerie resemblance with the assault of January 6, 2021 on the U.S. Capitol, just a year after the book's publication, sends chills down the spine. But there are a few chinks in the armor. Couched almost entirely in the U.S. context, Rosenblum and Muirhead could have described in a few sections how the same phenomenon reverberates across the globe. While most falsehoods originate in a particular context, conspiracy theories rapidly spread to the rest of the world through the Internet. The phenomenon is thus glocal" (a mix of global and local).
Similarly, the book's focus on political issues, although a legitimate choice (at least for conciseness and because fake news re-emerged first in the political realm), require a caveat. Health-related conspiracy theories, the leading cause of vaccine hesitancy globally, fiddle with scientific evidence (Carrieri et al., 2019). The avalanche of conspiracy theories surrounding hydroxychloroquine, the COVID-19 treatment mooted by the iconoclast French microbiologist Didier Raoult is a case in point (ABC, 2021; Colson et al., 2020).
The last point to reflect on is the authors' work of conceptualization. While it is their purview to choose conspiracy theory as a master frame, the proliferation of coterminous terms such as disinformation, misinformation, and fake news warranted a broader conceptualization as these concepts overlap and differ. Lazer et al. (2018) have suggested a helpful procedure based on two markers: intentionality and formal editorial processing. It follows from this that, unlike mainstream news, information disorders (e.g., misinformation, fake news, conspiracy theories, disinformation) lack formal news editing based on fact-checking and distinction between facts and opinion. Among these information disorders, all except misinformation have the intention to mislead by providing false information. Fake news alone mimics standard news including in its formal elements. None of these observations, however, diminishes the book's heft. Rosenblum and Muirhead's work is a coup de maitre.
Wiley Book Reviews - A Lot of People Are Saying:
The New
Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gove.12658
During the past few years at least, there has been a growing discourse on the ‘end’ or ‘crisis’ of democracy. Not least among the concerns leading to such dire insights is the emergence of conspiratorial, fake news or post-truth campaigning as a mainstream political tool. Obviously, lies, appeals to something other than fact and truth, as well as conspiracy theories, have been around before the present moment. Hence, it is the task for academics and commentators postulating such seismic shifts to demonstrate where and in what ways the change has taken place. That is precisely what Russel Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum aim to do in their new book, A Lot of People Are Saying, through conceptualising what they call the ‘new conspiracism’.
The new conspiracism for the authors is precisely what it says on the tin: a new type of conspiracist thinking, distinguishable through its lack of sense. Effectively,
- if traditional conspiracism relies on conspiracy theories, then new conspiracism is best defined as conspiracy without theory. The authors espouse the well-established view that traditional conspiracism provides a tool for dealing with shock, anxiety, insecurity and disbelief by providing order and certainty by way of allegedly uncovering hidden truths, world orders and nasty plots that can be blamed for something. At the same time, traditional conspiracism is inclusive and empowering in encouraging people to embark on detective work to uncover hidden things. Meanwhile,
- the currency of new conspiracism is, in the authors’ opinion, exactly the opposite – disorientation without the search for ‘truth’. Moreover, instead of careful searching for hidden ‘facts’ to substantiate the traditional conspiracy theory, new conspiracism operates on the basis of mere insinuation (as in the title phrase, ‘A lot of people are saying…’) or mere exclaimed assertions. In other words, while traditional conspiracism still embraces the rules of conventional epistemology (giving ‘evidence’, substantiating claims, etc), new conspiracism does away with mainstream rules altogether.
In the place of ‘evidence’, however dubious, Muirhead and Rosenblum trace a new source of new conspiracist authority – repetition. Essentially, if a claim is repeated, tweeted and shared numerous times, then it indeed becomes true that ‘a lot of people are saying’ something, and that fact alone becomes sufficient to sow doubt, if not to prove the point. In addition to setting a low bar for demonstrating veracity, new conspiracism is also convenient for the claim-maker as ‘bare assertions, ominous questions, and innuendo’ are elastic and can be pulled in every direction depending on the situation, while purporting to be merely asking questions ‘evades ownership of the claim’ (39). As a result of such vagueness and plasticity, new conspiracism is also revealed to have a relationship with the out-group that is very different from traditional forms. Moreover, while the followers of traditional conspiracy theories, encouraged by the alleged ‘facts’ they purport to have discovered, can afford a feeling of righteousness and the drive to correct others, new conspiracists tend to simply deny others’ standing on an ad hominem basis while simultaneously distorting the very knowledge criteria that has underpinned our societies.
Whereas traditional conspiracism is seen primarily as a quest for explanations, the new conspiracism is presented as essentially a way to vent unarticulated emotions. As the authors claim: ‘For angry minds it offers the immediate gratification of lashing out, of throwing verbal stones.’ This, once again, relates to persuasion and the elaboration of claims: new conspiracism is attractive as a form of venting precisely because of the low bar of veracity, whereby ‘if one cannot be certain that a belief is entirely false, with the emphasis on entirely, then it might be true – and that’s true enough’ (43). Hence, detailed disquisitions can be dealt away with completely and negative political emotions unleashed. Moreover, this perfect storm is also seen as being strongly related to the revolution in communications that has replaced gatekeeping with popularity, the latter again privileging quick emotion-laden exchanges.
There is, however, an important nasty underside of new conspiracism, at least as Muirhead and Rosenblum see it. By eroding trust not only in people but also in entire institutions and political systems, the new conspiracism is seen in the book as a threat to democracy itself. Politicians, institutions and expert bodies are framed by perpetrators of new conspiracism as simply unworthy of trust and obeyance (or even too dangerous for that, as in the Hillary Clinton paedophile ring claim). Moreover, new conspiracism is anti-democratic in another important way: it is radically anti-pluralist. It posits a singular ‘true’ people against untrustworthy elites. However, the latter point seems to be more like a blend of traditional conspiracism and populism rather than a distinctly new conspiracist condition – something that the authors do not address. Still, partial support for that claim can perhaps be drawn from the authors’ assertion that since political parties are among the institutional victims, public debate (inasmuch as it can still be called a debate) becomes premised on conflict and battle, but without the structured competition and legitimation of difference that traditional party competition provides.
The Enduring Allure of Conspiracies:
Conspiracy theories seem to meet psychological needs and can be almost impossible to eradicate. One remedy: Keep them from taking root in the first place.
The United States of America was founded on a conspiracy theory.
In the lead-up to the War of Independence, revolutionaries argued that a tax on tea or stamps is not just a tax, but the opening gambit in a sinister plot of oppression. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were convinced — based on “a long train of abuses and usurpations” — that the king of Great Britain was conspiring to establish “an absolute Tyranny” over the colonies.
“The document itself is a written conspiracy theory,” says Nancy Rosenblum, a political theorist emerita at Harvard University. It suggests that there’s more going on than meets the eye, that someone with bad intentions is working behind the scenes.
If conspiracy theories are as old as politics, they’re also — in the era of Donald Trump and QAnon — as current as the latest headlines. Earlier this month, the American democracy born of an eighteenth century conspiracy theory faced its most severe threat yet — from another conspiracy theory, that (all evidence to the contrary) the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Are conspiracy theories truly more prevalent and influential today, or does it just seem that way?
The research isn’t clear. Rosenblum and others see evidence that belief in conspiracy theories is increasing and taking dangerous new forms...
...Uscinski’s research suggests that conspiracy thinking is more or less evenly distributed across the political spectrum, with Democrats becoming more vocal about conspiracy theories when Republicans are in power, and vice versa. Democrats tend to be suspicious of corporations and conservatives. Republicans are more likely to be suspicious of communists and liberals. In a chapter memorably titled “Conspiracy Theories Are for Losers,” Uscinski and Parent write that conspiracies are a way for those who’ve lost or lack power to explain their losses, channel their anger, close ranks and regroup.
A new — and dangerous — form
Rosenblum argues that Trump epitomizes a new type of “conspiracy without theory” that relies on sheer assertion and repetition rather than evidence and reason. (Rosenblum is coeditor of the Annual Review of Political Science.) Trump’s baseless tweets that the election was rigged, she says, stand in contrast to Kennedy assassination conspiracists obsessing over bullet trajectories or 9/11 conspiracists diving into data on the temperature at which jet fuel burns. “This conspiracy thinking that’s going on today takes a very different and novel and dangerous form,” she says, because it seeks to delegitimize political rivals, government agencies, the press and others who might stand in the way. “It unsettles the ground on which we argue, negotiate, and even disagree,” she and coauthor Russell Muirhead wrote in their 2019 book, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. “It makes democracy unworkable — and ultimately, it makes democracy seem unworthy.”
One of the most influential ideas in conspiracy theory scholarship is that people who identify themselves as politically conservative are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. In a widely cited 1964 essay in Harper’s Magazine, Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter argued that a “paranoid style” runs through conservative political movements of the twentieth century, fed by distrust of “cosmopolitans and intellectuals.” Uscinski says his polling research finds no evidence that conservatives are more prone to believe in conspiracy theories than liberals, but other researchers still think there’s something to this idea.
In a recent series of studies, van der Linden and colleagues conducted online surveys of more than 5,000 Americans from across the political spectrum, asking them to rate their political preferences and respond to questions that were developed by psychologists to measure conspiratorial thinking and paranoia. One survey item, for example, asked participants to rate on a scale of 0 to 100 their agreement with the statement: “I think that events which superficially seem to lack a connection are often the result of secret activities.”
People at both extremes of the political spectrum were more prone to conspiracy thinking than those in the middle, but conservatives tended to be more conspiratorial than liberals, the researchers reported in Political Psychology last year. “We think this is convincing evidence … of these differences between liberals and conservatives,” van der Linden says. “I wouldn’t say it’s a large effect, but it wasn’t tiny, either.”
This difference, he thinks, may be rooted in group psychology. “There’s a lot of research that shows that, whereas the liberals are a bit more extroverted and rebellious and so on, conservatives tend to be focused on managing uncertainty and threat and in-group values,” he says. Conspiracy theories are one way to make sense of events that seem overwhelming and may feel as though they threaten the groups and values that people most identify with, he says. “It’s definitely a mechanism to try to restore a sense of agency and control over the narrative.”
Van der Linden is quick to note, however, that liberals aren’t immune from conspiracy thinking. Conspiracy theories about technology seem more popular among liberals, for example, including ones involving pharmaceutical companies and genetically modified crops.
Mind Hacks
One reason that conspiracy theories find fertile ground in the human mind has to do with epistemology — the philosophy of how we know what we know (or think we do).
Because any individual can know only a tiny sliver of the world firsthand, we have no choice but to accept a great deal of information we can’t verify for ourselves.
Most people believe (correctly) that Antarctica is very cold and populated with penguins, despite never having been there.
The assumptions and cognitive shortcuts we use to decide what’s true make sense most of the time, but they also leave the door open for bad information, including conspiracy theories.
- Since most of the information we encounter in everyday life (at least outside of social media) is true, that creates a bias toward accepting new information, says Nadia Brashier, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Harvard.
- And hearing a claim multiple times makes it seem even more true. “One of the most insidious influences on our judgment involves repetition,” Brashier says.
Dozens of studies have documented this “illusory truth effect,” mainly by asking participants to rate the veracity of trivia, rumors, product claims, fake news reports and other bits of information, Brashier and Duke University psychologist and neuroscientist Elizabeth Marsh write in a recent Annual Review of Psychology paper about how people determine what’s true. Even people who recognize a statement as false the first time they see it are more likely to judge it as probably true after seeing it multiple times, Brashier says.
Ordinarily, it’s rational to assume that the more times you hear something, the more likely it is to be true, she says. “But we’re seeing bad actors hijack these shortcuts that we use that make sense in a lot of situations [but] that can lead us astray in others.”
Conspiracy theories also take advantage of our tendency to look for patterns and explanations, says Karen Douglas, a psychologist who studies conspiracy thinking at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. Pattern detection serves us well in everyday life, Douglas says: It’s how we piece together how people typically behave in given situations, for example. Believing in a bogus conspiracy theory amounts to seeing a pattern that’s not really there.
In a 2018 paper, Douglas and colleagues recruited hundreds of volunteers online and quizzed them about their belief in various conspiracy theories, some well-known ones and some invented by the researchers. Participants who agreed more strongly with a sample of well-known conspiracy theories were more likely than others to also see meaningful patterns in a series of random coin tosses and in the chaotic, splotchy paintings of abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock. “It seems that seeing patterns in random phenomena such as coin tosses and abstract paintings relates to the tendency to see patterns in political and social events that are happening in the world,” Douglas says.
Such studies reveal a human tendency to attribute events to the intentional actions of others rather than to pure chance, Douglas says. Work by others has shown that we also tend to assume that when something huge happens, something huge must have caused it. This also feeds into conspiracy thinking, Douglas says. The assassination of John F. Kennedy was too momentous an event to have been pulled off by a lone gunman, conspiracists argue. Surely the US government was involved — or the KGB, or the Mafia.
Social and emotional factors are likely at play as well. “People are most susceptible to conspiracy theories when particular psychological needs are frustrated,” Douglas says. “Specifically, people need knowledge and certainty to feel safe, secure and in control, and to feel good about themselves and the social groups they belong to.” When these needs are unmet — say, amidst the fear and uncertainty of a global pandemic — conspiracy theories might seem to offer consolation, Douglas says.
But her research suggests that they might actually do the opposite. “Reading about conspiracy theories, instead of making people feel more powerful, makes people feel less powerful,” she says. It may even make people less likely to take actions that would give them more control over their situation. In experiments where volunteers read about conspiracy theories before answering questionnaires about their likelihood to engage in various behaviors, Douglas and others have found evidence that conspiracy theories reduce people’s inclination to vote, to vaccinate their children, or to help fight climate change. The people in such studies also express greater prejudice and a greater inclination to commit petty crime, at least in their responses to researchers.
“Our reasoning is that if people perceive that others are conspiring and doing antisocial things, then it seems OK for people to do these things too,” Douglas says. “Also, if they feel that the world is run by a select few and that everything is determined, why bother to go out and vote or engage with a corrupt system?” She adds, however, that more work is needed to determine whether these responses in conspiracy belief studies actually translate to antisocial behaviors in the real world.
Countering conspiracies
Talking a true believer out of their belief in a conspiracy can be nearly impossible. (The believer will assume you’re hopelessly naïve or, worse, that you’re part of the cover-up). Even when conspiracy theories have bold predictions that don’t come true, such as QAnon’s claim that Trump would win reelection, followers twist themselves in logical knots to cling to their core beliefs. “These beliefs are important to people, and letting them go means letting go of something important that has determined the way they see the world for some time,” Douglas says.
As a result, some researchers think that preventing conspiracy theories from taking hold in the first place is a better strategy than fact-checking and debunking them after they do — and they have been hard at work developing and testing such strategies. Van der Linden sees inoculation as a useful metaphor here. “I think one of the best solutions we have is to actually inject people with a weakened dose of the conspiracy … to help people build up mental or cognitive antibodies,” he says.
One way he and his colleagues have been trying to do that (no needles required) is by developing online games and apps. In a game called Bad News, for example, players assume the role of a fake news creator trying to attract followers and evolve from a social media nobody into the head of a fake-news empire. The 15-minute game is meant to teach people how fake news spreads so that they can recognize it more readily. (In one of the activities, players create and promote their own conspiracy theory.)
To assess the game’s effects, van der Linden and colleagues recruited more than 14,000 people to play Bad News. Before and after playing, participants were asked to identify misinformation within a selection of real and made-up tweets and headlines. Playing the game improved players’ resistance to fake news, the researchers reported in 2019: When presented with dubious tweets and news headlines, they were more likely to rate them as unreliable. The researchers termed the improvement “small to moderate.” A follow-up study found that it persisted for at least three months after the game was played.
More recently, the researchers created a game based on Bad News that specifically tackles conspiracies and other misinformation related to Covid-19. Called Go Viral!, it was developed with support from the UK government and released in October. The World Health Organization and the United Nations have promoted the game as a resource for fighting misinformation, “so that we can hopefully reach millions of people around the world,” van der Linden says.
Stopping the spread
The critical question — pushing the vaccine metaphor to its limits — is how to achieve herd immunity, the point at which enough of the population is immune so that conspiracy theories can’t go viral. It might be difficult to do that with games because they require people to take the time to engage, says Gordon Pennycook, a behavioral scientist at the University of Regina in Canada. So Pennycook has been working on interventions that he believes will be easier to scale up.
His research suggests that people are pretty good at spotting fake news, including bogus conspiracy theories — but that doesn’t mean they don’t share fake stuff on social media. “People are sharing headlines that they could identify as being false if they bothered to think about it,” he says.
To counter this, Pennycook and colleagues have been developing ways to nudge people to think more critically about the information they share without explicitly telling them to do so. In one recent study conducted online, they asked 856 volunteers to rate how likely they would be to share various Covid-19 news headlines — some true ones from credible sources, others that were bogus or debunked — if they saw them on social media. Before doing this, roughly half the participants were asked to rate the accuracy of a single, politically neutral headline unrelated to Covid-19 (one had to do with a neutron star discovery, another had to do with Seinfeld coming to Netflix). Taking a moment to contemplate accuracy made participants nearly three times more discerning in what they decided to share, the researchers reported in Psychological Science last year.
Social media companies have started to deploy similar strategies: An example is Twitter’s recent rollout of a prompt that advises users to read an article before sharing it. Pennycook thinks that such moves are worthwhile. In a recent study, yet to be published, he and colleagues found that a 30-second video prompting people to think about accuracy cut viewers’ willingness to share fake news in half (at least as reported on a survey — the researchers weren’t able to track the actual social media behavior).
Even as researchers push to develop such measures, they acknowledge that eradicating bogus conspiracy theories may not be possible. Conspiracy theories flourished as far back as the Roman Empire, and they inspired an angry mob to storm the US Capitol just last week. Specific theories may come and go, but the allure of conspiracy theories for people trying to make sense of events beyond their control seems more enduring. For better — and of late, very much for worse — they appear to be a permanent part of the human condition.
Greg Miller is a science journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Or is he? Follow him on Twitter @dosmonos.https://knowablemagazine.org/article/mind/2021/the-enduring-allure-conspiracies
Even Conspiracy Theories Have Gotten Dumber
The Old Style Conspiracism
Maybe Americans are obsessed with conspiracy theories because our nation itself was forged in one. In the turbulent run-up to and aftermath of the Declaration of Independence, the word on the streets — and in the pamphlets — of the colonies was not that the Crown had instituted bad or unfair policies, but rather that everything was part of a master plan to enslave the States, full stop.
“Historians have uncovered nearly one hundred resolutions urging independence issued throughout 1776 by states and counties and towns, artisan and militia associations, and the provincial congresses of nine colonies,” write Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum in A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy, a new book from Princeton University Press. “The tone, language, and form are consistent. In each, a narrative of self-defense against enslavement is built from fragmentary evidence. Each lists ‘abuses and usurpations’ adding up to a tyrannical plot.”
Even when the underlying claims are false or verifiably nuts, the evidence for the conspiracies themselves is generally presented in a somewhat academic style, as facts supporting a thesis.
- Big Tobacco really did conspire to cover up evidence of the harmful health effects of tobacco, as
- Big Opioid (embodied by the Sackler family) appears to have done more recently.
- The CIA really did dose unwitting experimental subjects with LSD. And on and on.
The New Style Conspiracism
What these “traditional” conspiracy theories have in common, whether true or false, is that they portray what are actual internally consistent theories involving rational(ish) actors. These are not, however, the focus of Muirhead and Rosenbloom’s book, which homes in on a more recent and more dangerous phenomenon.
The “new conspiracism,” as they call it, seeks not to lay out fully (or even half-) baked theories about who has engaged in what evil act, and why, but rather to spread a more knee-jerk and emotion-driven type of angry fear:
Above all, it seeks to undermine both individuals and sources of authority by simply repeating endlessly, via the megaphone of social media, unhinged claims laminated in the thinnest patina of evidence.
“Conspiracy theory is not new, of course,” Muirhead and Rosenblum write early on, “but conspiracism today introduces something new — conspiracy without the theory.”
As they explain:
There is no punctilious demand for proofs, no exhausting amassing of evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close examination of the operators plotting in the shadows.
The new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation.
Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture: “A lot of people are saying …” Or we have bare assertion: “Rigged!” — a one-word exclamation that evokes fantastic schemes, sinister motives, and the awesome capacity to mobilize three million illegal voters to support Hillary Clinton for president.
This is conspiracy theory without the theory.
- “When Trump tweeted the accusation that President Barack Obama had ordered the FBI to tap his phones in October before the 2016 election, no evidence of the charge was forthcoming.
- What mattered was not evidence but the number of retweets the president’s post would enjoy: the more retweets, the more credible the charge.”
Why do people spread this stuff? “Part of the appeal is performative aggression,” the authors write. “The new conspiracism delivers dark claims, though the fabrications are erratic, vague, and undeveloped — more angry assertion than revelatory narrative. For angry minds it offers the immediate gratification of lashing out, of throwing verbal stones.” Not a spotlight on a hidden truth, but rather a million algorithm-multiplied middle fingers. And at a time when America’s problems — inequality, polarization, political and wage stagnation — feel intractable, it makes perfect sense that people would be drawn to this sort of outlet for their frustration.
The new conspiracism is more than capable of spreading on its own, but it doesn’t help that even some political elites who surely know better haven’t exactly been forthright in debunking conspiracy theories lately. “I’m all for vaccines, but I’m also for freedom,” said Senator Rand Paul, a physician, during a 2015 Republican debate, when asked about the false link between vaccines and autism. That same year, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas actually helped to spread the bizarre Jade Helm conspiracy theory. And plenty of elected Republican officials either helped spread birtherism or gave wishy-washy answers when asked about it. Many of these politicians have clearly calculated that their policies and campaigns might benefit from their staying neutral at best on the veracity of certain conspiracist claims.
The three examples above can be seen as traditional conspiracy theories (though I’d argue birtherism is a hybrid), but the cumulative effect of elites abdicating their core responsibility of sorting truth from fiction is a profound distrust of authority and institutions of any sort.
The authors argue that that’s more or less the point of the new conspiracism: It’s fundamentally nihilistic. It seeks not to redress power imbalances or abuses but to undermine order itself.
This isn’t Revolutionary-era conspiracy theorizing, whose ultimate aim was to push the colonies into a full military rebellion against the British, leading ideally to self-rule.
The Declaration of Independence was a call for the Colonies to unite in resistance against a conspiracy of British subjugation and that Americans have continued to feed on conspiracy theories since the nation’s founding. Occasionally, those theories have even proven true, confirmed by a process that resembles detective work as well as journalistic enterprise.
One of the things that distinguishes “the new conspiracism” is that it is “conspiracy without theory. It sheds explanation, and it sheds political theory.”
These ever present conspiracies, often launched or spread by the current president, are more like viral rumors on how everything and everyone—Democrats, the press, the “deep state,” the FBI, the special prosecutor—are conspiring to thwart the will of the people and undercut the authority of the elected official. The authors’ closing warning quotes Trump: “There’s something going on that’s really, really bad. And we better get smart, and we better get tough, or we’re not going to have much of a country left.”
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/russell-muirhead/a-lot-of-people-are-saying/
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.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691188836/a-lot-of-people-are-saying
Interviews
Conspiracy theories are dangerous—here’s how to crush them
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.
