The Conspiracy Theorists’ Election

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/magazine/the-conspiracy-theorists-election.html

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It’s possible to gaze back almost wistfully on all the moments in recent American politics that seemed, at the time, to constitute Peak Crazy, but look from today’s vantage point like false summits. Consider, for instance, the remarks Barack Obama gave at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, three days after releasing the long-form birth certificate Donald Trump had spent weeks demanding. “Now, I know that he’s taken some flak lately,” Obama said, with Trump in the audience, “but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth-certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on issues that matter — like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”

But of course, here we are in 2016, with the butt of Obama’s joke polling just single digits behind Hillary Clinton in the presidential race. Trump did finally concede in September that Obama was indeed born in the United States, perhaps just to make room in his stump speeches for even more extravagant conspiracy theories. He has insisted repeatedly that Obama, or Clinton, or both, personally founded the Islamic State. He called California’s five-year drought a myth propagated by environmentalists and suggested that Ted Cruz’s father might have been involved in the Kennedy assassination — something 7 percent of voters with a favorable opinion of Trump told one pollster they believed. In December he gave an interview to Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist whose talk show and websites reach an audience of millions. “Your reputation is amazing,” he told Jones. “I will not let you down.”

This was enough to earn Jones a line in the speech Clinton gave in Reno, Nev., in August, excoriating Trump’s “dis­credited conspiracy theories with racist undertones.” Trump’s worldview, Clinton said, is “what happens when you listen to the radio host Alex Jones, who claims that 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombings were inside jobs.” This year, the woman who once bemoaned a “vast right-wing conspiracy” arrayed against her and her husband is left trying to demarcate the real world from a toxic, imagined one.

Clinton’s denunciation of “the paranoid fringe in our politics” was a clear nod to “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” the 1964 essay by the liberal historian Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter described a miasma of “conspiratorial fantasy” that had coursed through American public life since the earliest days of the nation, a litany of feverish plots involving the Bavarian Illuminati, the Freemasons and Jesuit priests. These manias had always ranged freely across the political spectrum, but in the postwar period, Hofstadter wrote, “we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers” — from Joseph McCarthy’s congressional witch hunts to the John Birch Society to Barry Goldwater’s Sun Belt insurrection.

The movement’s anti-Communist fixations, Hofstadter argued, stemmed less from real threats than from a sense of dispossession — a conviction that the country’s turn away from traditionalism, its consent to regulation of the private sector and a vastly expanded federal government, couldn’t possibly reflect the will of its citizens, and must therefore be the work of enemies inside the halls of power. “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind,” Hofstadter wrote, “though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.”

Dispatching conspiracism as a pathol­ogy is tricky. We now know that by the time Hofstadter’s essay was published, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had proposed faking Cuban terrorist attacks, with real casualties, on United States soil; the C.I.A. had experimented on unsuspecting Americans with LSD; the F.B.I. had infil­trated and manipulated domestic activist groups. These schemes were mostly products of the same fanatical anti-Communism that Hofstadter decried, but in the Möbius strip of Cold War paranoia, where imaginary conspiracies begot real ones and vice versa, ideological positions could be hard to untangle: Some of Hofstadter’s own research on the far right was funded by an organization that was, apparently unknown to him, a C.I.A. front.

The investigations and oversight reforms Congress launched after Watergate exposed and curtailed the worst of these excesses, and the conspiracies that came to light over the following decades, like Iran-contra, mostly fell within the normal parameters of government behaving badly. So why did Americans’ belief in ever-more-implausible conspiracy theories grow steadily in the 1980s and especially the ’90s — decades when Americans had less to worry about than at any other point in the country’s modern history?

Context matters here: The ’90s was the decade of Oliver Stone’s “J.F.K.,” “The X-Files” and late-night Roswell documentaries — the decade in which conspiracism, safely removed from the exigencies of the Cold War and domestic upheaval, became a form of kitschy entertainment. It was an antipolitics well suited to a cultural era that favored irony and disillusionment and put quotation marks around words like “believe.” Richard Linklater’s 1991 film, “Slacker,” one of Generation X’s founding documents, has a very funny scene in which an awkward young man buttonholes a woman in a bookstore in what appears at first to be a pickup attempt, but turns out to be a numbing disquisition on Kennedy assassination theories.

It’s perfect — a conspiracy theorist might say a little too perfect — that Alex Jones began his career in the mid-’90s from the same Austin cable-access facility where Linklater edited “Slacker.” (Linklater, a fan, later cast him in two movies.) Jones may have risen to prominence with his post-Sept. 11 claims that the United States government blew up the World Trade Center, but his worldview really belongs to the conspiracism of the previous decade, with its comic-book universe of black helicopters and New World Order eugenics plots. In this universe, the Clintons constitute a galaxy of their own: Jones insists that Hillary is a “quadruple international spy,” a “demon” incarnate and a gravely ill epileptic whose handlers are trying to keep alive long enough to win the White House for Tim Kaine, a “puppet” who will “cover up for all the previous crimes the globalists have committed.”

Does Jones really believe all that? More important, does Trump? The most straightforward answer may be that conspiracy theories are popular, and Trump tends to like things that are popular. Conspiracy theories, like Trump’s post-truth provocation of a campaign, are less a coherent politics than a form of political entertainment. They impart a sense of excitement and order to a world where things usually happen for boring and arbitrary reasons. They are an easy belief system masquerading as a courageous one, befitting a fundamentally low-effort candidate.

Trump’s default response, when asked about one out-there theory or another, is: “We’re looking at that.” It’s the quintessential Trump formulation, with its blend of attentive flattery and barely concealed lack of interest, its blithe irresponsibility. A leader’s job, after all, is often to explain to his or her followers that everyone can’t have a pony, that government programs cost money, that the other candidate isn’t necessarily the avatar of an ancient evil out to enslave humanity. Few of Trump’s claims are wholly new to anyone who has watched Fox News or attended a congressional investigative hearing in the last five years, but their presence in the mouth of a presidential candidate is. It feels as if we’ve breached some crucial blood-brain barrier in the body politic. What comes next? We’re looking at that.