Who is the Conspiracy Theorist?
There’s a lot of doubt these days about the president. Is he an agent of a foreign power? Will he undermine our democracy? How is any of this possible when the republic seemed so stable just a year or two ago? Like an ancient incantation chanted at midnight, these questions invite in the conspiracy theorist. They’ve connected all the dots, and they can tell you what’s really going on. But who is this person?
During the Obama years, it was common to laugh at the conspiracy theories of fringe conservatives. Their doubts led to them asking similar questions as liberals have now about Trump: is the President actually an American? Or is he a secret Muslim dedicated to imposing his foreign law? The leader of these theorists was a reality tv host from New York City, a rich boy who liked the attention he got by saying rude words.
Cosmopolitan elites found the whole business laughably strange, and explained away the theories as ignorant, racist delusion. Meanwhile, the common language of the conspiracy theory was propelling Republicans into power across the nation.
Now that the theorizing is coming from fringe centrists, it is harder to brush off the conspiracy theory. From the ease which it crossed the aisle and became the hobby of an entirely different demographic, we can gather that the conspiracy theory is not necessarily ideological.
Look around a bit and you’ll see that the conspiracy theory is everywhere in modern life. Even the most intersectional of identity and demographic categories in subcultures and professions across America have their conspiracy theories. Why do people do it?
Consider the certainty which diehard Hillary Clinton supporters were operating under until November 8th. This was Hillary’s year; it was finally her chance to rise to the position she rightly deserved. All the pundits and the statisticians spent months loudly proclaiming that she would certainly win. In the minds of her supporters, the victory of Hillary Clinton was already real; it just hadn’t happened yet.
On top of that, every aspect of the Clinton campaign stressed the identification of the voter with the person of Hillary Clinton. Her empowerment is your empowerment, and your empowerment is a moral necessity because you are woke and they are deplorable.
What an earthquake in their minds when all of it came to nothing. What an earthquake in my mind, and I understood that I was only voting for a mediocre neoliberal who would continue to prop up our failing institutions while bombing the Middle East. But there we were on November 9th, living in an entirely different reality from the one we thought was true.
People who were #WithHer identified so strongly with the candidate that they felt this loss as a real, personal disempowerment. The response to that was to try and take back power and agency by asserting the primacy of their moral universe. This moral universe, thanks to the opportunistic plasticity of the centrist, has exactly one characteristic: that Hillary Clinton is the center of the universe, the ultimate insider, that she is power and should likewise be in power.
So they say things like: “Hillary won the popular vote,” and, “Trump has no mandate.” But the Russian connection provides the most fuel for conspiracy by allowing the theorist to discursively construct an ongoing alternate universe in which the way (they believe) reality should be corresponds exactly to the way reality truly is, but the rest of us can’t see how it truly is because we have been tricked by a nefarious power. Hillary DID win the election and become our legitimate president — but because of Putin’s Russian hackers, she appears to have lost.
This is not to understate the fact that Russia did opportunistically exploit America’s political dysfunction for its own benefit. But whatever relationship existed between the Trump campaign and Putin’s government cannot possibly compare to the grandiosity of the fictions being peddled by people like Louise Mensch and Eric Garland, alongside legions of more minor theorists.
The narrative of the Russian conspiracy theory (distinct from more grounded inquiries into Russian involvement in the election) was probably set by Garland’s legendary game theory twitter thread. Incoherent as it is, the argument that he was attempting to make — that Putin is a mastermind responsible for every single blunder and mishap that has tarnished the reputation of the USA in the last few decades — has caught on among a new class of conspiracy theorists. They’re educated professionals, they’re socially liberal cosmopolitans, and they believe that the internet is overrun by Russian “trollbots” posing as Berniebros who are trying to undermine American democracy by criticizing Hillary Clinton.
Currently leading the charge is former British MP Louise Mensch, whose blog Patribotics has an awful name that could have been cut together by Dr. Moreau himself. Every post makes a new outrageous claim; the most recent as I write this asks “Did Donald Trump Commission Russia’s Hack of the US Election Himself?”
This theory that the Russian government is responsible for Trump’s victory is not unlike the conspiracy theory of Obama’s birth certificate. Of course the birther conspiracy was obviously false, a product of white supremacy; it lacked even the general relationship to truth that Russian conspiracists can claim. The absence of this document was proof for a portion of this country that he was not just foreign born but also a Muslim who was dedicated to imposing Sharia law. The theorists who made it felt unjustly disempowered because white supremacy had experienced this superficial glitch, and they could no longer racially identify with the power and person of the presidency. Therefore, he must be illegitimate.
It is their alienation from the power of the state that makes it suddenly appear foreign. This doesn’t lead to a political awakening in the theorist; they don’t suddenly take up arms for the cause of non-hierarchical free association. Instead, they double down on their memory of identifying with state power. That was the “true” state, in their mind, and what has replaced it is illegitimate, deceitful, and foreign.
That the powerful are illegitimate must be true: on this point the theorist will never compromise. Everything else in the theory is negotiable, and any way of reaching that conclusion is acceptable.
This theory is empowering. The very act of spinning out theoretical material positions the theorist as a moral crusader striking back against the nefarious power that has wronged them. Not only that, but it gives them a community of people who share their grievance. By constructing the theory they are able to continue living in the world-as-it-was, while the world-that-is is understood as an illusion.
You can learn a lot about the ideology of a given theorist by the specifics of their theory. The signifiers which populate the theory are nothing more than whatever common meanings the community of theorists happen to share. Who they target with their theorizing and how they justify it will tell you who they believe can legitimately hold power — whether that is “only Hillary” or “never a black man.”
The theory often starts out as a useful tool for understanding what’s going on. Russian hackers did influence the election, though not so much as American incompetence. This is what makes the conspiracy theory such an effect cognitive parasite: at the beginning, it looks just like every other way that we discursively attempt to make sense of reality.
But where useful intellectual projects define an area and then proceed by making more and finer distinctions within it, the conspiracy theory is constantly spilling outwards, annexing new texts into its omnivorous system. The explanatory power of the theory is assumed to be virtually limitless so that the theorist can return to it to make sense of any misfortune and feel better about their powerlessness.
As time passes, it becomes harder to ignore the theory’s inability to materially empower the theorist. When this happens they either give up theorizing or they throw Occam’s razor out the window and retreat into cerebral idiosyncrasy, couching their theory upon esotericism and imagination in order to detach from the mundane world that denies their agency.
The true marvel of the conspiracy theory is its ability to tread this line between enabling the solipsism of the individual theorist while also providing them with a discursive community of fellow solipsists. They may not believe in the same theories, but the theories are all similar — and the details don’t matter as much as the doubt.
Why do people make conspiracy theories? They’ve lost their sense of a stable foundation in the world, and they’re trying to recreate it. They reject the state of affairs which we have found ourselves in and construct a fantasy world where them and the people who share their grievance remain the moral heart of the world, despite their intractable loss of power.
