In fairness, in the 18th century actual conspiracies were the only real mode of politics. In the pre-democratic era there was no legal public space for second-guessing the monarch, so political discussion had to take place in private spaces, mainly limited to aristos or upper bourgeois. In ancien regime France, for e.g. your options were the secret fraternities, like the freemasons, or the slightly less boozy (and openly insurrectionary) salons. The two gendered forms of private political discussion were complementary in many ways, but the actual business of plotting enemies demises was mainly done in the "revolution starts at closing time" bro-hood drinking clubs. Napoleon used the freemasons as his unofficial political party structure. And anyone to the left of the Bonapartist war machine leaned on the Carbonari/Charbonniers, etc. All of the early socialists were masons, carbonari, etc. Blanqui may have been the most extreme example, but all late 18th / early 19th C political actors were involved in actual conspiracies-as-politics. That doesn't really speak to the continuing appeal of conspiratorial ideation as a widespread popular tendency in the here-and-now, but back in the day it was less paranoia and more established custom and practice
Jul 16, 2023·edited Jul 17, 2023Liked by John Ganz
What about the old Marxist idea that of all systems of oppression, capitalism and its wage-slavery are the hardest to understand? The middle/working classes don’t understand that they are exploited labor, not simply free agents in the labor market. When you can’t really explain so well to yourself or your family and friends why life never seems to go very well for you and so much of your labor is wasted and your job sucks, and your children are getting into drugs and alcohol, and so forth.
Our social and cultural norms say that you’re given all sort of natural resources so that you can lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. And, so, it’s your own fault if things don’t go well for you. But there is something in that that doesn’t seem right to you because so much of what it takes to achieve “success” seems inaccessible and monopolized by the “suits” and others of the “washed.”
In this state of being, it’s no wonder that paranoia strikes deep. It’s no wonder that one and one’s family and friends have to create narratives and understandings that don’t align with what we elites think of as reality or as “normal.”
I would propose that Trump’s approach to governing — to middle/working class and poor people —seems no different in its operation than what they have experienced from our country’s governance forever: Trump acts for these people or, at least puts on a good show of doing so, just as our “normal” system of governance acts for those in the elite.
So this becomes not so much about autocracy versus democracy. It’s more about two different styles of plutocratic governance that use formalistic democratic processes and ”The Rules of Law” and Accepted Truth to maintain our particular capitalist system of exploitation. ANd these things being essentially equivalent in their experience, it’s not surprising that the WC/MC and poor would rather have the Plutocrats working for THEIR benefit -- and against that of the “libs” and Deep State that has given them such a bad deal for so long.
This, in the end, is still a struggle with the exploitative dynamics of advanced capitalism. A win for “Truth” and “The Rule of Law” in this especially fraught era -- as we, the privileged, have normalized these for our own benefit over the course of our history -- would be a great loss for the prospects of democracy going forward.
If we learn nothing from the plight of the MC/WC and poor in this moment -- and fall into subscribing to insubstantial theories of paranoia, stupidity, etc. -- we will deserve the dystopia that we are creating. The middle/working class and poor are telling us something we don’t want to hear: we have betrayed them, we don’t deserve their respect, our norms need to be blown-up and recast, our Truths need to be tested not against privileged, bourgeois ideation, but against the realities of the lives of the vast majority of our people.
If we can begin to learn this, then we can begin to look to a future where democracy is more than a cover for ever-more elaborate and obscure forms of exploitation.
Not sure if this is what you intended, but I don’t think Trump and Kennedy speak to the same constituency at all. Kennedy’s median supporter seems to be the lumpen-intellectual whose principal emotional interest is the need to feel smarter than the mob (while being simple-minded) and whose material interest is in keeping regulatory bodies (governmental, academic, financial) out of his market opportunities. Kennedy’s destabilizing lunacy and paranoid fantasies serve both interests, with the bonus that they actually lend him a certain authenticity. More conventional authoritarians like Cruz or DeSantis suffer from the Nixon malady - you know at some level that even they don’t believe a word they say. Kennedy projects the authenticity of the truly mad, which is useful.
Unfortunately, class powerlessness has not proved a good predictor of Trump support. His constituency does not lie among immigrant single mothers working minimum-wage service sector jobs.
Trump had four years to actually "act for those people." I would suggest that he didn't even put on "a good show of doing so." In fact, all that he accomplished tended to be for the benefit of the extremely wealthy. Yet he still commands the adulation of people who are, as you say, the unwashed or forgotten. Meanwhile, Joe Biden, in 2+ years as president, has actually improved peoples' standard of living, forgiven student loan debt (until a Republican SCOTUS stopped him), and done more to address inequality than Trump. And yet his approval rating remains low. I'm not sure that using a Marxist critique actually helps here.
During the first Gilded Age, a wave of populism swelled up to fight back against moneyed interests. Marxists were certainly a part of this wave. The movement quite successfully enabled the income tax amendment, which was one of the fixes, and not completely satisfied until FDRs New Deal and its new social safety net.
It really troubles me that Trump seems to have ridden that populist wave that might have otherwise been a force for a sea change in income redistribution, which I think we really badly need. It is Hard to see how this populism can be a force for decency, it has been so manipulated. But I think the impulse for change is there. Its just hard to see how a leader might harness it
I would argue that 40 years of Reaganomics (Trickle-Down Economics) and Neoliberal Globalism worked to economically eviscerated the middle and working classes, effecting a massive transfer of wealth to the 1-5% for decades, while undermining the viability of communities and even whole counties, especially in the heartland. Despite ongoing promises, Democrats in governance participated just as much in this as Republicans.
So Trump ended-up governing on the basis of “A plague on both their houses.” And that, plus his particular personality, is the basis of his success. He successfully rages against the system because both parties have failed the middle/working classes.
It’s going to take a lot more than a couple of years for Dems to win the trust of many of these heartland Americans, especially given the way Trump so brilliantly make politics for them into a big, cathartic and ongoing WWE showcase. “The masses” are actually having fun with Trump. Trump’s theater is cathartic. As their leader, Trump gives them hope that, if he gets back in power, “heads will roll” (like they were supposed to on Jan 6th) — and that will be fun too.
I think Marx still matters because, to me, he explains how the massive middle/working class disaffection has been stoked by more than a generation of Trickle-Down economics pursued by both parties and how Trump has intuitively understood and tapped into that disaffection, and married it to our unfortunate ongoing regional legacies of racism, white nationalism, and/or Christian fundamentalism.
It’s a mess. I do think that what Biden is doing is right economically. Invest directly in “the heartland.” Bring back good jobs, rebuild viable and vital communities, restore dignity to working people. But this takes a while and must be sustained.
And, it also takes a lot of leadership at every level rebuilding trust by continuing to “center” the middle/working class. To me, our best hope in the short term is to convince many, many of these tens of millions of Americans that, while many of their grievances are absolutely valid, Trump and Trumpism (outright autocracy) is not the solution — and “others,” whether immigrants or gay people, etc. — are not the cause of their plight.
We have to prove that the solution is not a strongman, but the strongest possible commitment to the welfare of middle and working class people and communities. This means both strong leadership championing the MC/WC as well as a shift in public policy (currently called “Bidenomics”) that centers the MC/WC. It means having real impacts on their wellbeing that are felt locally and personally.
What we need to take away from this moment is the need to recast (at least Democratic) public policy into such a massive, compelling, generations-long commitment that it actually works to enable these Americans to achieve the “American Dream,” which should have been the focus all along.
We are stuck with the downsides of capitalism — especially the sides that work to keep people on the edge of the financial cliff, so as to keep working class wages (what has been built into modern classical economics as a foundation of the inflation monster) down and to maximize “stockholder” value. But the fight for truer democracy is the fight right now to better humanize capitalism through the sorts of policies that FDR initiated but that once again have come to much more strongly resort to such de-humanizing impacts on everyone, but especially the MC/WC and poor.
Not an original observation, but narrowly defining the problem of populist authoritarianism as a consequence of neoliberal capitalism also narrowly limits the range of solutions to include only New Deal-esque economic reforms. There’s a lot to be said for that, but it also elides the fact that post-WWII democratic consensus was not only based on a high growth/high tax model, it was also based on *not* talking about all the issues that have come to define politics since the 1970s - minority rights, race and gender issues, immigration, religion in public life. The usual suspects that are the flash points of contemporary political life.
Throughout the industrialized world with varying degrees of social democratic consensus, the model worked well and kept populist authoritarianism at bay - *as long as* the state didn’t define these problems, traditionally outside the scope of political discourse, as amenable to correction and intervention. It’s hardly contentious that it wasn’t economic failure or restrictions on democratic participation that cracked open the post-WWII consensus - it was *expansion* of participation through the civil rights and women’s movement and the anti-war movement that sowed the seeds of right wing revolt, which of course continues to this day.
All this to say that I think there are many other things going on with Trumpist/populist fascism than a narrow class disenfranchisement account can explain. People much smarter than me have been trying to figure it all out, which is why I read Ganz’s newsletter and have given up on a publication like Jacobin (not to mention their failure to publish anything remotely convincing or responsible about the war in Ukraine).
Agree that there are so many “other things” going on with Trumpism/populism but class disenfranchisement accounts for a lot of it. Disenfranchisement includes a universe of things that matter to individual and group agency, which is the promise of American life.
“If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”
Completely misunderstands Trump's base, which is *not the working class* but primarily *middle-class small business tyrants*, a class whose interests and, more importantly, resentments are best served by conspiratorial thinking. If early Americans turned to conspiracism did not have the tools to understand an increasingly-interdependent world, today we have the explanations staring us in the face. The fraught, unstable position of this petit-/moyenne-bourgeois makes them the only class who must both notice *and* ignore the blatant failures of capitalism - the large capitalists don't do the former, the working class doesn't need to do the latter. Conspiracy abandons empirical knowledge for the maintenance of a certain emotional/moral logic; for the middle class, that logic goes A. I, a very meritorious person, have succeeded, so capitalism must reward success, B. I, a very meritorious person, should be *more* successful, but pressure from both above and below threatens my current position, therefore C. There must be some coordinated effort from the higher and lower classes to dispossess me of my right to join the ruling class. (This logic most often speeds towards "It's the Jews' fault"). Other classes might join in on this, but treating it as a primarily working class phenomenon is incorrect and condescending.
Capitalism, wage labor, etc. might be "the hardest [systems] to understand," but only because of how thoroughly they implicate everyone living under them, with paychecks depending on our not understanding them, and the consequent flood of justifications available to give the beneficiaries license to disbelieve their own eyes. Despite your complaint about how "we elites" treat other classes as ignorant, you are the only one claiming that Marxist criticism is somehow too highbrow for workers to understand; if peasants in underdeveloped countries could figure it out, so can the American working class. Maybe skip the royal "We" in the future.
Sam, thanks for your contribution to this discussion. Not sure what data you rely on to make the assertion that Trump’s base is not the working class, but instead the petit-bourgeoisie or your related assertion that the middle/working class clearly understands what and who is responsible for their status. There are endless studies showing that there is a college-education/non-college educated divide that pretty well coincides with party affiliation and with Trump partisans. There is little evidence that our mC/WC understands their position, since there are few labor unions and fewer other sorts of MC/WC organizations dedicated to addressing the exploitation of workers.
I believe we are in close agreement about how capitalism incentivizes those of us in the privileged minority to either ignore MC/WC problems and struggles, or to implicitly or explicitly blame the victims. This is part of the basis of my own assertion that we privileged elites are/have been largely complicit in the economic evisceration and loss of agency and dignity of the middle/working classes.
If you are up for it, I would ask you to read my last few “Jon Thinks Out Loud” Substack posts where I talk about some of these issues further.
Trump was not the choice of the majority of the working class; the majority of the working class chose No One, because the working class doesn't vote. We don't need to play along with the conservative attempt to rebrand class as "educational attainment": Can an employee with a Masters fire the owner of the business with a GED? No, of course not. Education and income *level* are at best hints at someone's class status, but they are not substitutes. We look at income *source*, and those whose income comes from the ownership of physical assets - especially the 2nd generation, the heirs, dissolute and entitled, almost always tending towards reaction, a prime audience for fascism - preferred Trump.
I'm not exactly arguing that the relations of exploitation are *self-evident*; rather, that they are *out in the open* and *normalized*. It isn't a matter of searching through reams of classified data to find the true explanation for the immiseration of the working class and the instability of the middle. It's only a matter of retraining your eyes to see what's right in front of you: You work hard and make very little money, while there are people above you who barely work except for the job of yelling at you and they make millions. It's like searching under the rug for the source of a bad smell, because you simply cannot believe that your beloved puppy could have left such a stinky pile right in the middle of it.
To compare with another deeply-cherished conspiracy among the right: Child abuse (sexual abuse in general) is most likely in places with strong patriarchal norms, where one is taught never to question or disobey authority, even and especially when they tell you to disregard your own sense of personal boundaries and autonomy - and data about the agents of child abuse (fathers, priests, etc) make this abundantly clear - yet to accept this would be devastating to men who can only feel powerful by treating their family like their own private fiefdom; thus, the cause must actually be some secret cabal of pedophiles, the only cure the *strengthening* of "family values" (i.e. the father's right to unquestioned authority).
As to the rest of this, it feels like plain old moralizing. Sure, I've probably benefited somehow from parts of the immiseration of the working class (esp. along racial lines, as a white guy); I've also probably been hindered by that immiseration, in a more general way. I've also worked with a few organizations to reverse that trend, not through some abstract guilt about my possible complicity, but through material assistance. If that's not the solution you're offering, I don't think this goes anywhere.
Thanks again for your response. Very interesting. I am not arguing that many small-owners, et al aren’t also avid fans of Trump/Trumpism. Of course they are. However, I don’t think that the articles you have posted actually contradict what I have asserted above. The relationship of voting behavior to class membership is pretty strong. The fact that white, working class men, especially are often not voters has little to do with whether, as members of the working class, they support Trump and Trumpism. The disconnect and disenfranchisement that non-voters feel is directly connected to the fact that these people do not experience a government that works for them. That’s because, by and large, it doesn’t. It is simply misleading for all of these studies to say that Trump’s working class support is not strong because many of the working class are disaffected and don’t show up in his vote totals.
In fact, the fact that they are so disaffected that they don’t vote supports the thesis that they are at the “plague on both their houses” stage and so do very much support Trump and Trumpism, especially in the absence, over the last four decades, of much in the way of direct and trustworthy “liberal” policies or efforts at centering the wellbeing of the MC/WC and poor.
Our “Wild West capitalism” keeps all but the wealthiest in an abiding state of stress and fear of losing their job or suffering catastrophic health issues, and falling into the MC/WC or even into poverty. And we have kept our safety net so sparse and unreliable that this is not some sort of paranoid fear. The result is an enormous class divide that has been brought to a head by the “Black Swan” event of Trump. Democrats need to figure out, and fast, how to counter this authoritarian capture of so much of our MC/WC. Biden has made an important start with his enormous investments in heartland communities that are building new infrastructure and creating good jobs. But it will require a lot more than this.
Trump and Trumpism makes tens of millions of disaffected Americans feel like they are valued again. They have fun together creating and re-creating “tribal” loyalties and growing this into a large confederacy. Having fun going to big rallies, sharing conspiracy theories, and partying and chanting like one does at football games or WWE contests is deeply meaningful and formative behavior. On our side, we offer nothing like this.
We non-authoritarians have to offer not just viable livelihoods, but also -- in the broadest sense -- lively ‘hoods! Absent a class-aware MC/WC, it seems that the best we can do in the short term is try to head-off an authoritarian soft coup and remaking the Democratic Party into a “party of the people.” If we can survive and win a few election cycles, then maybe the work of diverting this MC/WC disaffection into more progressive directions, including rebuilding the labor movement.
Jul 16, 2023·edited Jul 17, 2023Liked by John Ganz
First rate!
In the 1832 presidential election, the Anti-Free Mason party won 8% of the popular vote and carried Vermont....So, as you discuss in your essay, even in its most bizarre manifestations, this really ain't a new thing in America.
Ganz, this is a very impressive collection of arguments solidly grounded in history and philosophy. Bien fait, indeed, Trés bien fait I've sent it out to the usual suspects. I'm a retired philosophy prof and I think your roping in Descartes here is quite insightful, and curiously surprising. Tnx for that!
Jefferson of course was through and through Lockean; but then, Locke was through and through Cartesian. And transitivity holds.
I think sometimes this is where a larger comparative perspective helps. There have been a fair number of elections in majority-Islamic countries in the last 30 years where fundamentalist parties have won or performed strongly because they were seen as the most coherent opposition to an existing corrupt ruling elite (military or civilian) but not necessarily because a large majority were fundamentalists in any way--arguably that goes back to the Iranian Revolution. It's the *coherency* that matters, e.g., liberal oppositions to political classes perceived as corrupt or ineffectual tend to focus on proceduralism and technocracy in a way that feels incremental and situational, rather than systematic and coherent--the objection to corruption or incompetence is based on being less corrupt and more competent, which is more or less believable depending on who is fronting the party at that moment.
There are very similar dynamics going on in India atm with the BJP and Narendra Modi, i.e Hindutva is not actually that popular as an ideology among people at large, but the Sangh and its affiliates are at least seen as standing *for* something besides the corrupt and self-serving dynastic politicians.
Loved this post. It's especially interesting how the paranoias of the Enlightenment era seem to challenge straightforward dichotomies of 'wholesome Enlightenment' vs. 'unwholesome irrationality,' regressive conspiratorialism vs. progressive class consciousness, conspiracy as somehow atavistic vs. conspiracy as in some ways disarmingly modern, etc. That's not to imply that, if the dichotomies are flawed, the content deserves rehabilitation or a sympathetically 'leftist' gloss, ofc.
I'm interested in if you see any connection here with Arendt's "Truth and Politics" and the distinctions she draws between various forms of deceit - knowing lies vs. self-deceptions, lies as early modern statecraft vs. image-making for mass domestic consumption, some healthy paranoia toward 'reason of state' claims vs. a cavalier attitude towards truth itself, etc. Seems like it could be a relevant analytical tool here, in drawing out how the delusional insanity baked into American liberal democracy itself could relate to the very un-liberal ways it often manifests today. I also think she has an interesting account of solutions here, namely that it requires political action and not recourse to some neutral 'fact-checking' authority. Thanks again!
Fascinating, especially the irony of contrarianism and conspiracism having gone mainstream (again) and it’s unfortunate grounding, throughout American history. No need to apologize for your output. I like that you don’t inundate readers with content as if it were mass produced. Seems having other projects ongoing is a plus rather than hindrance. Or maybe I’m just a Ganz bro.
To your last point, Karl Popper, in “On the Sources of Knowledge and Ignorance” said that the optimistic doctrine of the Enlightenment, that truth was manifest so long as you sought it out and found it, was mirrored by a pessimistic explanation for why people did not believe the manifest truth: the conspiracy theory of ignorance. People actively working to keep the masses in the dark.
Rereading this and its truly brilliant. Thank you.
Noticing Descartes vs tech bro “living in a simulation” is also a theme I picked up on in my less cogent, more spiritually focused piece on my free blog, advising against nihilism. From a different angle for sure, but also some same themes.
Great post, thank you. I'm interested in your notion of rationalist paranoia, where one assumes too much agency and deliberate action on the part of others, and wonder if it might be usefully contrasted from anti-rationalist paranoia, where the Enemy is more an inscrutable alien force akin to a monster or profane curse. Even if they both amount to paranoid conspiracy, the latter seems to rely on a quasi-spiritual logic of purity or disgust while the former holds that "logic" in contempt.
Seen that way, maybe the path to non-paranoid thinking (measured vigilance?) could be framed as a sort of Aristotelian golden mean. Have you read much of John Dewey on inquiry, like Human Nature and Conduct? I am reminded of that and of The Public and Its Problems, his attempted response to Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion and its pessimism about democracy. Dewey tried to argue that rational deliberation depends upon cultivating pre-rational habits of good inquiry and that while the intransigent habits of the masses could be a threat to democracy, the malleability of habits through education was the answer. It might be an interesting source from a passionate defender of democracy who was a pragmatist about rationality.
I have been amazed by this for awhile. You have to believe something close enough to a conspiracy theory if not an outright conspiracy theory to debunk a variety of conspiracy theories. If you don’t want to believe the ‘Russia hacked the 2016 election’ theory, then you have to believe a conspiracy theory about how some people conspired to create the ‘Russia hacked the 2016 election.’ If you want to reject anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, you have to believe the massive misinformation is a conspiracy. If you want to understand conspiracy theories, you kind of have to look at various ways they get created, which often does involve conspirators.
The most hilarious conspiracy theory to me is that the CIA invented the term ‘conspiracy theory.’
Of course, it will depend on the definition of ‘conspiracy theory’ what counts as a conspiracy theory. It’s less troubling and disorienting if ‘conspiracy theory’ is by its nature false and incoherent. Some of the debunkings of conspiracy theories that require explaining as a conspiracy of right wing think tanks coming up with bullshit and spreading it (often using flotsam and jetsam from the grassroots) could certainly be true and provable. It might be question-begging to define ‘conspiracy theory’ as false and incoherent by its very nature but it’s less disorienting to suppose something is not a conspiracy theory if it is based on more standard evidential grounds. But as evidence becomes more easily manufactured by AI tools the warrant we have to believe the evidence will be weaker so things will become less and less provable on standard evidential grounds. (Documents and videos, etc. will be easily faked). We’re going to get much more nuts over time, and much more politically fragmented as a result.
At the moment, there is no way to understand our political discourse or even our politics without some kind of explanation that involves conspiratorial elements. What’s really fascinating about the current moment is how fast they are produced and how various and free-floating they are.
This MIGHT be because there is no overarching narrative at the moment that really works well. We don’t have a grand ideological justification for most of the political forms we see, or these justifications have broken down in various ways. Besides the new tools of disseminating conspiracy theories is a greater uncertainty about what we are doing and why, and a weaker sense of connection with others, which I think is probably what makes it so much easier to believe conspiracy theories--because we simply don’t trust anyone.
Especially with Trump-Russia and all its secrets and spy stories, we have been left in the dark as the public. Because there has been no real public accounting that passes any sort of intellectually honest sniff test. We need answers! This is critically important of course.
The Mueller Report was pre-empted, then a whole bunch of people pardoned, Manafort admits guilt in a conspiracy with a Russian spy but one involving witness tampering not collusion. Mueller told us he couldn’t charge a President with a crime, (which seems a kind of institutional executive branch conspiracy to me btw). Mueller told us Trump should be charged on leaving office but he wasn’t.
It would be great to have answers but we're probably never going to have answers. I TRIED. I listened to the Mueller report on audiobook. So you either believe the Russia conspiracy theory or you believe conspiracy to quash the results (which had to have happened, I think! But exactly HOW we may never know!) And by this point, as Ganz says, EVERYONE is crazy. You couldn't design a better method for eliminating solid ground if you tried--which is why some people like the conspiracy theory that it is manufactured. Honestly, I think there's no way out but to say 'who the feck knows?' about some things and provisionally believe the 'establishment' about the others. Wait for some good books with convincing accounts a few years down the line. If we try for certainty or to unpack the secret truth, that's when we are running the risk of falling down the rabbit hole.
I agree its quite hubristic to think you can know it all. But also I think there is enough to piece together that there was a conspiracy there regarding Trump-Russia, at least as it concerns Manafort.
I wrote about it here. Feel free to call me a conspiracy theorist, lol.
Ha ha no...I will read with interest--there's a version of 'here's what I think is going on that is facially like a conspiracy theory but you remind me that a good indication whether one is in la la land is the attitude of the person to their hypothesis.
This is really good! I remember being amazed, but not surprised when, four or five years ago, I learned that Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 had elements driven by antisemitic and anti-catholic conspiracy theories that would fairly easily slot into the QAnon worldview.
If you subtract the money, famous name, and political context, Kennedy’s public utterances are indistinguishable from what you would hear from a mentally ill homeless person on a random street corner. Even Trump is just a predictable criminal sociopath running a game. Kennedy is an endless slurry of incoherent, blubbering idiocy and madness, and the tech billionaire/libertarian “left’s” fondness for him buttresses plausibility for my own favourite conspiracy theory - that the end game is to undermine rational thought itself, and by extension the very possibility of any rationally planned and managed social order with distributivist priorities. Kennedy is probably crazy, but as a saboteur he has a certain utility.
I like the concluding thought: we're finally realizing our birthright.
Less theoretically, RFK has acknowledged he was a heroin addict for 11 years. In my experience, people who manage to get out from under an addiction often generate (had to generate) certain styles of thinking. Many seem to need to eliminate contingency, chance, and other similar forces that make it easy to look at the world and see meaninglessness. They had been all too aware of what it could feel like to exist in apparent meaninglessness, and they react by finding unbending certainty and by believing in Manichean or large-scale power struggles.
Believing in something is so important. Many needed spiritual support to get out of dark places. As an atheist with chronic pain and depression, I've my share of struggles. But what has allowed me resilience in absence of faith or any real belief in greater purpose other than what we make? I am privileged in many ways - this no doubt has been a bulwark. But I also grappled with existentialism at an early age and came to know how important loves ones are, as well as other forms of reinforcement..
My two brothers are deep down conspiracy rabbit holes, and so this whole are has been my personal obsession for some years. This is a wonderful piece that touches on so many things I think about all the time, with so many of my favorite references all in one place. Thank you.
Here’s a half-formed question that my be something for your mailbag:
Several times in here I feel like you bumped up against the suddenly-hot hypothesis of “elite overproduction” (Peter Turchin) as the (real? main?) driver of social instability.
Have you written about this somewhere I missed? What do you think about it. I buy it as one of many influencing factors, but I feel like it is being over-applied by the usual grasping pundits who trust too much in their own ability to logic their way through big questions (exactly like what you are describing in this piece).
In fairness, in the 18th century actual conspiracies were the only real mode of politics. In the pre-democratic era there was no legal public space for second-guessing the monarch, so political discussion had to take place in private spaces, mainly limited to aristos or upper bourgeois. In ancien regime France, for e.g. your options were the secret fraternities, like the freemasons, or the slightly less boozy (and openly insurrectionary) salons. The two gendered forms of private political discussion were complementary in many ways, but the actual business of plotting enemies demises was mainly done in the "revolution starts at closing time" bro-hood drinking clubs. Napoleon used the freemasons as his unofficial political party structure. And anyone to the left of the Bonapartist war machine leaned on the Carbonari/Charbonniers, etc. All of the early socialists were masons, carbonari, etc. Blanqui may have been the most extreme example, but all late 18th / early 19th C political actors were involved in actual conspiracies-as-politics. That doesn't really speak to the continuing appeal of conspiratorial ideation as a widespread popular tendency in the here-and-now, but back in the day it was less paranoia and more established custom and practice
In the Americas, Black masonry provided a site of political action for Black men otherwise excluded from politics proper.
What about the old Marxist idea that of all systems of oppression, capitalism and its wage-slavery are the hardest to understand? The middle/working classes don’t understand that they are exploited labor, not simply free agents in the labor market. When you can’t really explain so well to yourself or your family and friends why life never seems to go very well for you and so much of your labor is wasted and your job sucks, and your children are getting into drugs and alcohol, and so forth.
Our social and cultural norms say that you’re given all sort of natural resources so that you can lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. And, so, it’s your own fault if things don’t go well for you. But there is something in that that doesn’t seem right to you because so much of what it takes to achieve “success” seems inaccessible and monopolized by the “suits” and others of the “washed.”
In this state of being, it’s no wonder that paranoia strikes deep. It’s no wonder that one and one’s family and friends have to create narratives and understandings that don’t align with what we elites think of as reality or as “normal.”
I would propose that Trump’s approach to governing — to middle/working class and poor people —seems no different in its operation than what they have experienced from our country’s governance forever: Trump acts for these people or, at least puts on a good show of doing so, just as our “normal” system of governance acts for those in the elite.
So this becomes not so much about autocracy versus democracy. It’s more about two different styles of plutocratic governance that use formalistic democratic processes and ”The Rules of Law” and Accepted Truth to maintain our particular capitalist system of exploitation. ANd these things being essentially equivalent in their experience, it’s not surprising that the WC/MC and poor would rather have the Plutocrats working for THEIR benefit -- and against that of the “libs” and Deep State that has given them such a bad deal for so long.
This, in the end, is still a struggle with the exploitative dynamics of advanced capitalism. A win for “Truth” and “The Rule of Law” in this especially fraught era -- as we, the privileged, have normalized these for our own benefit over the course of our history -- would be a great loss for the prospects of democracy going forward.
If we learn nothing from the plight of the MC/WC and poor in this moment -- and fall into subscribing to insubstantial theories of paranoia, stupidity, etc. -- we will deserve the dystopia that we are creating. The middle/working class and poor are telling us something we don’t want to hear: we have betrayed them, we don’t deserve their respect, our norms need to be blown-up and recast, our Truths need to be tested not against privileged, bourgeois ideation, but against the realities of the lives of the vast majority of our people.
If we can begin to learn this, then we can begin to look to a future where democracy is more than a cover for ever-more elaborate and obscure forms of exploitation.
Not sure if this is what you intended, but I don’t think Trump and Kennedy speak to the same constituency at all. Kennedy’s median supporter seems to be the lumpen-intellectual whose principal emotional interest is the need to feel smarter than the mob (while being simple-minded) and whose material interest is in keeping regulatory bodies (governmental, academic, financial) out of his market opportunities. Kennedy’s destabilizing lunacy and paranoid fantasies serve both interests, with the bonus that they actually lend him a certain authenticity. More conventional authoritarians like Cruz or DeSantis suffer from the Nixon malady - you know at some level that even they don’t believe a word they say. Kennedy projects the authenticity of the truly mad, which is useful.
Unfortunately, class powerlessness has not proved a good predictor of Trump support. His constituency does not lie among immigrant single mothers working minimum-wage service sector jobs.
Trump had four years to actually "act for those people." I would suggest that he didn't even put on "a good show of doing so." In fact, all that he accomplished tended to be for the benefit of the extremely wealthy. Yet he still commands the adulation of people who are, as you say, the unwashed or forgotten. Meanwhile, Joe Biden, in 2+ years as president, has actually improved peoples' standard of living, forgiven student loan debt (until a Republican SCOTUS stopped him), and done more to address inequality than Trump. And yet his approval rating remains low. I'm not sure that using a Marxist critique actually helps here.
During the first Gilded Age, a wave of populism swelled up to fight back against moneyed interests. Marxists were certainly a part of this wave. The movement quite successfully enabled the income tax amendment, which was one of the fixes, and not completely satisfied until FDRs New Deal and its new social safety net.
It really troubles me that Trump seems to have ridden that populist wave that might have otherwise been a force for a sea change in income redistribution, which I think we really badly need. It is Hard to see how this populism can be a force for decency, it has been so manipulated. But I think the impulse for change is there. Its just hard to see how a leader might harness it
I would argue that 40 years of Reaganomics (Trickle-Down Economics) and Neoliberal Globalism worked to economically eviscerated the middle and working classes, effecting a massive transfer of wealth to the 1-5% for decades, while undermining the viability of communities and even whole counties, especially in the heartland. Despite ongoing promises, Democrats in governance participated just as much in this as Republicans.
So Trump ended-up governing on the basis of “A plague on both their houses.” And that, plus his particular personality, is the basis of his success. He successfully rages against the system because both parties have failed the middle/working classes.
It’s going to take a lot more than a couple of years for Dems to win the trust of many of these heartland Americans, especially given the way Trump so brilliantly make politics for them into a big, cathartic and ongoing WWE showcase. “The masses” are actually having fun with Trump. Trump’s theater is cathartic. As their leader, Trump gives them hope that, if he gets back in power, “heads will roll” (like they were supposed to on Jan 6th) — and that will be fun too.
I think Marx still matters because, to me, he explains how the massive middle/working class disaffection has been stoked by more than a generation of Trickle-Down economics pursued by both parties and how Trump has intuitively understood and tapped into that disaffection, and married it to our unfortunate ongoing regional legacies of racism, white nationalism, and/or Christian fundamentalism.
It’s a mess. I do think that what Biden is doing is right economically. Invest directly in “the heartland.” Bring back good jobs, rebuild viable and vital communities, restore dignity to working people. But this takes a while and must be sustained.
And, it also takes a lot of leadership at every level rebuilding trust by continuing to “center” the middle/working class. To me, our best hope in the short term is to convince many, many of these tens of millions of Americans that, while many of their grievances are absolutely valid, Trump and Trumpism (outright autocracy) is not the solution — and “others,” whether immigrants or gay people, etc. — are not the cause of their plight.
We have to prove that the solution is not a strongman, but the strongest possible commitment to the welfare of middle and working class people and communities. This means both strong leadership championing the MC/WC as well as a shift in public policy (currently called “Bidenomics”) that centers the MC/WC. It means having real impacts on their wellbeing that are felt locally and personally.
What we need to take away from this moment is the need to recast (at least Democratic) public policy into such a massive, compelling, generations-long commitment that it actually works to enable these Americans to achieve the “American Dream,” which should have been the focus all along.
We are stuck with the downsides of capitalism — especially the sides that work to keep people on the edge of the financial cliff, so as to keep working class wages (what has been built into modern classical economics as a foundation of the inflation monster) down and to maximize “stockholder” value. But the fight for truer democracy is the fight right now to better humanize capitalism through the sorts of policies that FDR initiated but that once again have come to much more strongly resort to such de-humanizing impacts on everyone, but especially the MC/WC and poor.
Not an original observation, but narrowly defining the problem of populist authoritarianism as a consequence of neoliberal capitalism also narrowly limits the range of solutions to include only New Deal-esque economic reforms. There’s a lot to be said for that, but it also elides the fact that post-WWII democratic consensus was not only based on a high growth/high tax model, it was also based on *not* talking about all the issues that have come to define politics since the 1970s - minority rights, race and gender issues, immigration, religion in public life. The usual suspects that are the flash points of contemporary political life.
Throughout the industrialized world with varying degrees of social democratic consensus, the model worked well and kept populist authoritarianism at bay - *as long as* the state didn’t define these problems, traditionally outside the scope of political discourse, as amenable to correction and intervention. It’s hardly contentious that it wasn’t economic failure or restrictions on democratic participation that cracked open the post-WWII consensus - it was *expansion* of participation through the civil rights and women’s movement and the anti-war movement that sowed the seeds of right wing revolt, which of course continues to this day.
All this to say that I think there are many other things going on with Trumpist/populist fascism than a narrow class disenfranchisement account can explain. People much smarter than me have been trying to figure it all out, which is why I read Ganz’s newsletter and have given up on a publication like Jacobin (not to mention their failure to publish anything remotely convincing or responsible about the war in Ukraine).
Agree that there are so many “other things” going on with Trumpism/populism but class disenfranchisement accounts for a lot of it. Disenfranchisement includes a universe of things that matter to individual and group agency, which is the promise of American life.
“If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt
They believed that attacking China, immigrants, and Black people was doing great things for them.
Completely misunderstands Trump's base, which is *not the working class* but primarily *middle-class small business tyrants*, a class whose interests and, more importantly, resentments are best served by conspiratorial thinking. If early Americans turned to conspiracism did not have the tools to understand an increasingly-interdependent world, today we have the explanations staring us in the face. The fraught, unstable position of this petit-/moyenne-bourgeois makes them the only class who must both notice *and* ignore the blatant failures of capitalism - the large capitalists don't do the former, the working class doesn't need to do the latter. Conspiracy abandons empirical knowledge for the maintenance of a certain emotional/moral logic; for the middle class, that logic goes A. I, a very meritorious person, have succeeded, so capitalism must reward success, B. I, a very meritorious person, should be *more* successful, but pressure from both above and below threatens my current position, therefore C. There must be some coordinated effort from the higher and lower classes to dispossess me of my right to join the ruling class. (This logic most often speeds towards "It's the Jews' fault"). Other classes might join in on this, but treating it as a primarily working class phenomenon is incorrect and condescending.
Capitalism, wage labor, etc. might be "the hardest [systems] to understand," but only because of how thoroughly they implicate everyone living under them, with paychecks depending on our not understanding them, and the consequent flood of justifications available to give the beneficiaries license to disbelieve their own eyes. Despite your complaint about how "we elites" treat other classes as ignorant, you are the only one claiming that Marxist criticism is somehow too highbrow for workers to understand; if peasants in underdeveloped countries could figure it out, so can the American working class. Maybe skip the royal "We" in the future.
Sam, thanks for your contribution to this discussion. Not sure what data you rely on to make the assertion that Trump’s base is not the working class, but instead the petit-bourgeoisie or your related assertion that the middle/working class clearly understands what and who is responsible for their status. There are endless studies showing that there is a college-education/non-college educated divide that pretty well coincides with party affiliation and with Trump partisans. There is little evidence that our mC/WC understands their position, since there are few labor unions and fewer other sorts of MC/WC organizations dedicated to addressing the exploitation of workers.
There is also this, for example:
https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/who-are-trumps-supporters/
I believe we are in close agreement about how capitalism incentivizes those of us in the privileged minority to either ignore MC/WC problems and struggles, or to implicitly or explicitly blame the victims. This is part of the basis of my own assertion that we privileged elites are/have been largely complicit in the economic evisceration and loss of agency and dignity of the middle/working classes.
If you are up for it, I would ask you to read my last few “Jon Thinks Out Loud” Substack posts where I talk about some of these issues further.
Well, there's this: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/
And this: https://lwp.georgetown.edu/visitingscholars/wcp-social-class-and-trump-voters/
And this: https://www.inc.com/bob-house/poll-showed-trump-support-was-strong-among-small-business-owners.html
And this: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/trump-american-gentry-wyman-elites/620151/
Trump was not the choice of the majority of the working class; the majority of the working class chose No One, because the working class doesn't vote. We don't need to play along with the conservative attempt to rebrand class as "educational attainment": Can an employee with a Masters fire the owner of the business with a GED? No, of course not. Education and income *level* are at best hints at someone's class status, but they are not substitutes. We look at income *source*, and those whose income comes from the ownership of physical assets - especially the 2nd generation, the heirs, dissolute and entitled, almost always tending towards reaction, a prime audience for fascism - preferred Trump.
I'm not exactly arguing that the relations of exploitation are *self-evident*; rather, that they are *out in the open* and *normalized*. It isn't a matter of searching through reams of classified data to find the true explanation for the immiseration of the working class and the instability of the middle. It's only a matter of retraining your eyes to see what's right in front of you: You work hard and make very little money, while there are people above you who barely work except for the job of yelling at you and they make millions. It's like searching under the rug for the source of a bad smell, because you simply cannot believe that your beloved puppy could have left such a stinky pile right in the middle of it.
To compare with another deeply-cherished conspiracy among the right: Child abuse (sexual abuse in general) is most likely in places with strong patriarchal norms, where one is taught never to question or disobey authority, even and especially when they tell you to disregard your own sense of personal boundaries and autonomy - and data about the agents of child abuse (fathers, priests, etc) make this abundantly clear - yet to accept this would be devastating to men who can only feel powerful by treating their family like their own private fiefdom; thus, the cause must actually be some secret cabal of pedophiles, the only cure the *strengthening* of "family values" (i.e. the father's right to unquestioned authority).
As to the rest of this, it feels like plain old moralizing. Sure, I've probably benefited somehow from parts of the immiseration of the working class (esp. along racial lines, as a white guy); I've also probably been hindered by that immiseration, in a more general way. I've also worked with a few organizations to reverse that trend, not through some abstract guilt about my possible complicity, but through material assistance. If that's not the solution you're offering, I don't think this goes anywhere.
Thanks again for your response. Very interesting. I am not arguing that many small-owners, et al aren’t also avid fans of Trump/Trumpism. Of course they are. However, I don’t think that the articles you have posted actually contradict what I have asserted above. The relationship of voting behavior to class membership is pretty strong. The fact that white, working class men, especially are often not voters has little to do with whether, as members of the working class, they support Trump and Trumpism. The disconnect and disenfranchisement that non-voters feel is directly connected to the fact that these people do not experience a government that works for them. That’s because, by and large, it doesn’t. It is simply misleading for all of these studies to say that Trump’s working class support is not strong because many of the working class are disaffected and don’t show up in his vote totals.
In fact, the fact that they are so disaffected that they don’t vote supports the thesis that they are at the “plague on both their houses” stage and so do very much support Trump and Trumpism, especially in the absence, over the last four decades, of much in the way of direct and trustworthy “liberal” policies or efforts at centering the wellbeing of the MC/WC and poor.
Our “Wild West capitalism” keeps all but the wealthiest in an abiding state of stress and fear of losing their job or suffering catastrophic health issues, and falling into the MC/WC or even into poverty. And we have kept our safety net so sparse and unreliable that this is not some sort of paranoid fear. The result is an enormous class divide that has been brought to a head by the “Black Swan” event of Trump. Democrats need to figure out, and fast, how to counter this authoritarian capture of so much of our MC/WC. Biden has made an important start with his enormous investments in heartland communities that are building new infrastructure and creating good jobs. But it will require a lot more than this.
Trump and Trumpism makes tens of millions of disaffected Americans feel like they are valued again. They have fun together creating and re-creating “tribal” loyalties and growing this into a large confederacy. Having fun going to big rallies, sharing conspiracy theories, and partying and chanting like one does at football games or WWE contests is deeply meaningful and formative behavior. On our side, we offer nothing like this.
We non-authoritarians have to offer not just viable livelihoods, but also -- in the broadest sense -- lively ‘hoods! Absent a class-aware MC/WC, it seems that the best we can do in the short term is try to head-off an authoritarian soft coup and remaking the Democratic Party into a “party of the people.” If we can survive and win a few election cycles, then maybe the work of diverting this MC/WC disaffection into more progressive directions, including rebuilding the labor movement.
This is exactly the comment I hoped to see here, you articulated some of my responses to this article far better than I could have done.
Thanks!
First rate!
In the 1832 presidential election, the Anti-Free Mason party won 8% of the popular vote and carried Vermont....So, as you discuss in your essay, even in its most bizarre manifestations, this really ain't a new thing in America.
Ganz, this is a very impressive collection of arguments solidly grounded in history and philosophy. Bien fait, indeed, Trés bien fait I've sent it out to the usual suspects. I'm a retired philosophy prof and I think your roping in Descartes here is quite insightful, and curiously surprising. Tnx for that!
Jefferson of course was through and through Lockean; but then, Locke was through and through Cartesian. And transitivity holds.
I think sometimes this is where a larger comparative perspective helps. There have been a fair number of elections in majority-Islamic countries in the last 30 years where fundamentalist parties have won or performed strongly because they were seen as the most coherent opposition to an existing corrupt ruling elite (military or civilian) but not necessarily because a large majority were fundamentalists in any way--arguably that goes back to the Iranian Revolution. It's the *coherency* that matters, e.g., liberal oppositions to political classes perceived as corrupt or ineffectual tend to focus on proceduralism and technocracy in a way that feels incremental and situational, rather than systematic and coherent--the objection to corruption or incompetence is based on being less corrupt and more competent, which is more or less believable depending on who is fronting the party at that moment.
There are very similar dynamics going on in India atm with the BJP and Narendra Modi, i.e Hindutva is not actually that popular as an ideology among people at large, but the Sangh and its affiliates are at least seen as standing *for* something besides the corrupt and self-serving dynastic politicians.
Loved this post. It's especially interesting how the paranoias of the Enlightenment era seem to challenge straightforward dichotomies of 'wholesome Enlightenment' vs. 'unwholesome irrationality,' regressive conspiratorialism vs. progressive class consciousness, conspiracy as somehow atavistic vs. conspiracy as in some ways disarmingly modern, etc. That's not to imply that, if the dichotomies are flawed, the content deserves rehabilitation or a sympathetically 'leftist' gloss, ofc.
I'm interested in if you see any connection here with Arendt's "Truth and Politics" and the distinctions she draws between various forms of deceit - knowing lies vs. self-deceptions, lies as early modern statecraft vs. image-making for mass domestic consumption, some healthy paranoia toward 'reason of state' claims vs. a cavalier attitude towards truth itself, etc. Seems like it could be a relevant analytical tool here, in drawing out how the delusional insanity baked into American liberal democracy itself could relate to the very un-liberal ways it often manifests today. I also think she has an interesting account of solutions here, namely that it requires political action and not recourse to some neutral 'fact-checking' authority. Thanks again!
Fascinating, especially the irony of contrarianism and conspiracism having gone mainstream (again) and it’s unfortunate grounding, throughout American history. No need to apologize for your output. I like that you don’t inundate readers with content as if it were mass produced. Seems having other projects ongoing is a plus rather than hindrance. Or maybe I’m just a Ganz bro.
To your last point, Karl Popper, in “On the Sources of Knowledge and Ignorance” said that the optimistic doctrine of the Enlightenment, that truth was manifest so long as you sought it out and found it, was mirrored by a pessimistic explanation for why people did not believe the manifest truth: the conspiracy theory of ignorance. People actively working to keep the masses in the dark.
Rereading this and its truly brilliant. Thank you.
Noticing Descartes vs tech bro “living in a simulation” is also a theme I picked up on in my less cogent, more spiritually focused piece on my free blog, advising against nihilism. From a different angle for sure, but also some same themes.
https://radmod.substack.com/p/schrodingers-cat-fatalism-and-faith
Great post, thank you. I'm interested in your notion of rationalist paranoia, where one assumes too much agency and deliberate action on the part of others, and wonder if it might be usefully contrasted from anti-rationalist paranoia, where the Enemy is more an inscrutable alien force akin to a monster or profane curse. Even if they both amount to paranoid conspiracy, the latter seems to rely on a quasi-spiritual logic of purity or disgust while the former holds that "logic" in contempt.
Seen that way, maybe the path to non-paranoid thinking (measured vigilance?) could be framed as a sort of Aristotelian golden mean. Have you read much of John Dewey on inquiry, like Human Nature and Conduct? I am reminded of that and of The Public and Its Problems, his attempted response to Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion and its pessimism about democracy. Dewey tried to argue that rational deliberation depends upon cultivating pre-rational habits of good inquiry and that while the intransigent habits of the masses could be a threat to democracy, the malleability of habits through education was the answer. It might be an interesting source from a passionate defender of democracy who was a pragmatist about rationality.
I have been amazed by this for awhile. You have to believe something close enough to a conspiracy theory if not an outright conspiracy theory to debunk a variety of conspiracy theories. If you don’t want to believe the ‘Russia hacked the 2016 election’ theory, then you have to believe a conspiracy theory about how some people conspired to create the ‘Russia hacked the 2016 election.’ If you want to reject anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, you have to believe the massive misinformation is a conspiracy. If you want to understand conspiracy theories, you kind of have to look at various ways they get created, which often does involve conspirators.
The most hilarious conspiracy theory to me is that the CIA invented the term ‘conspiracy theory.’
Of course, it will depend on the definition of ‘conspiracy theory’ what counts as a conspiracy theory. It’s less troubling and disorienting if ‘conspiracy theory’ is by its nature false and incoherent. Some of the debunkings of conspiracy theories that require explaining as a conspiracy of right wing think tanks coming up with bullshit and spreading it (often using flotsam and jetsam from the grassroots) could certainly be true and provable. It might be question-begging to define ‘conspiracy theory’ as false and incoherent by its very nature but it’s less disorienting to suppose something is not a conspiracy theory if it is based on more standard evidential grounds. But as evidence becomes more easily manufactured by AI tools the warrant we have to believe the evidence will be weaker so things will become less and less provable on standard evidential grounds. (Documents and videos, etc. will be easily faked). We’re going to get much more nuts over time, and much more politically fragmented as a result.
At the moment, there is no way to understand our political discourse or even our politics without some kind of explanation that involves conspiratorial elements. What’s really fascinating about the current moment is how fast they are produced and how various and free-floating they are.
This MIGHT be because there is no overarching narrative at the moment that really works well. We don’t have a grand ideological justification for most of the political forms we see, or these justifications have broken down in various ways. Besides the new tools of disseminating conspiracy theories is a greater uncertainty about what we are doing and why, and a weaker sense of connection with others, which I think is probably what makes it so much easier to believe conspiracy theories--because we simply don’t trust anyone.
Spot on.
Especially with Trump-Russia and all its secrets and spy stories, we have been left in the dark as the public. Because there has been no real public accounting that passes any sort of intellectually honest sniff test. We need answers! This is critically important of course.
The Mueller Report was pre-empted, then a whole bunch of people pardoned, Manafort admits guilt in a conspiracy with a Russian spy but one involving witness tampering not collusion. Mueller told us he couldn’t charge a President with a crime, (which seems a kind of institutional executive branch conspiracy to me btw). Mueller told us Trump should be charged on leaving office but he wasn’t.
It would be great to have answers but we're probably never going to have answers. I TRIED. I listened to the Mueller report on audiobook. So you either believe the Russia conspiracy theory or you believe conspiracy to quash the results (which had to have happened, I think! But exactly HOW we may never know!) And by this point, as Ganz says, EVERYONE is crazy. You couldn't design a better method for eliminating solid ground if you tried--which is why some people like the conspiracy theory that it is manufactured. Honestly, I think there's no way out but to say 'who the feck knows?' about some things and provisionally believe the 'establishment' about the others. Wait for some good books with convincing accounts a few years down the line. If we try for certainty or to unpack the secret truth, that's when we are running the risk of falling down the rabbit hole.
I agree its quite hubristic to think you can know it all. But also I think there is enough to piece together that there was a conspiracy there regarding Trump-Russia, at least as it concerns Manafort.
I wrote about it here. Feel free to call me a conspiracy theorist, lol.
https://radmod.substack.com/p/manaforts-collusion-post-soviet-machinations
Ha ha no...I will read with interest--there's a version of 'here's what I think is going on that is facially like a conspiracy theory but you remind me that a good indication whether one is in la la land is the attitude of the person to their hypothesis.
This is really good! I remember being amazed, but not surprised when, four or five years ago, I learned that Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 had elements driven by antisemitic and anti-catholic conspiracy theories that would fairly easily slot into the QAnon worldview.
A catchy diversion on the paranoid style in American politics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEbd76i1S6Q
They're so great. Still going at after all these decades.
Fantastic song!
If you subtract the money, famous name, and political context, Kennedy’s public utterances are indistinguishable from what you would hear from a mentally ill homeless person on a random street corner. Even Trump is just a predictable criminal sociopath running a game. Kennedy is an endless slurry of incoherent, blubbering idiocy and madness, and the tech billionaire/libertarian “left’s” fondness for him buttresses plausibility for my own favourite conspiracy theory - that the end game is to undermine rational thought itself, and by extension the very possibility of any rationally planned and managed social order with distributivist priorities. Kennedy is probably crazy, but as a saboteur he has a certain utility.
I like the concluding thought: we're finally realizing our birthright.
Less theoretically, RFK has acknowledged he was a heroin addict for 11 years. In my experience, people who manage to get out from under an addiction often generate (had to generate) certain styles of thinking. Many seem to need to eliminate contingency, chance, and other similar forces that make it easy to look at the world and see meaninglessness. They had been all too aware of what it could feel like to exist in apparent meaninglessness, and they react by finding unbending certainty and by believing in Manichean or large-scale power struggles.
Believing in something is so important. Many needed spiritual support to get out of dark places. As an atheist with chronic pain and depression, I've my share of struggles. But what has allowed me resilience in absence of faith or any real belief in greater purpose other than what we make? I am privileged in many ways - this no doubt has been a bulwark. But I also grappled with existentialism at an early age and came to know how important loves ones are, as well as other forms of reinforcement..
My two brothers are deep down conspiracy rabbit holes, and so this whole are has been my personal obsession for some years. This is a wonderful piece that touches on so many things I think about all the time, with so many of my favorite references all in one place. Thank you.
Here’s a half-formed question that my be something for your mailbag:
Several times in here I feel like you bumped up against the suddenly-hot hypothesis of “elite overproduction” (Peter Turchin) as the (real? main?) driver of social instability.
Have you written about this somewhere I missed? What do you think about it. I buy it as one of many influencing factors, but I feel like it is being over-applied by the usual grasping pundits who trust too much in their own ability to logic their way through big questions (exactly like what you are describing in this piece).
I too would be interested in a Ganz-take on Turchin if you have one.
(posted from my phone, so forgive the typos)