Surrealpolitik: Conspiracy Theory in America

Dismissing suspicions of elite political criminality as harebrained "conspiracy theories" is an alarming development in modern American history. For it not only signals a shift in American civic culture away from the nation's traditional distrust of power, but also may mark the end of America's historic reliance on the political science of the nation's Founders when confronting new challenges in democratic governance. (page 53)
Tags: [Culture, Conspiracy]

[The Founders] thought representative democracy was vulnerable to, in their language, "conspiracies against the people's liberties" by "perfidious public officials," and to "tyrannical designs" by "oppressive factions." (page 55)
Tags: [Conspiracy]

John Dickinson, a militia officer during the Revolution and a delegate to the US Constitutional Convention of 1778 explained in one of his letters to friends in Parliament that, as wrongs against the colonies accumulated, americans began to connect the dots and recognize ulterior motives in the pattern of Great Britain's actions. "Acts that might, by themselves, be excused," began to be regarded "as parts of a system of oppression." This is the essence of conspiratorial suspicion, which reconstructs hidden motives from confluent consequences in scattered actions. (page 56)
Tags: [Conspiracy]

[The Founders] expected factions to plot to subvert the constitutional order because they considered human beings prone to collusion for financial gain and power. If tyranny came, Madison warned, it would be in the form of a consolidation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers in the hands of a single individual or group. The Founders worried most about the potential for power to become concentrated in the executive because of real or pretended threats to national security. Hence the Constitution includes numerous provisions designed to restrain the executive from entangling the nation in international conflicts. (page 58)
Tags: [Conspiracy]

During his second term as president, Jefferson voiced his belief that Burr was leading a conspiracy to form a separate nation by breaking away western lands from US control. Fortunately for the nation's future, Jefferson was not dismissed as a harebrained lunatic...Burr was tried for treason [but] acquitted on the basis that he had not committed an overt act to aid America's enemies...but the trial vindicated Hamilton's allegations that Burr was dangerously ambitious and untrustworthy and Burr's reputation was ruined. (page 64)
Tags: [Conspiracy]

For the next hundred years [after the Burr trial], American statesmen regularly voiced suspicions regarding antidemocratic conspiracies when circumstantial evidence suggested hidden intrigue. Nineteenth-century conspiracy theories included, among others, Andrew Jackson's allegations of a "corrupt bargain" between John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay to give the presidency to Adams in 1824; Abraham Lincoln's charge, made on the floor of the House of Representatives, that President Polk had fabricated a reason to initiate the Mexican-American War; claims by the chief prosecutor that the assassination of President Lincoln had been organized and financed by top leaders of the Confederacy; the theory that the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was intentionally drafted by railroad-connected Congressmen to precipitate court rulings granting the rights of individuals to corporations; and suspicions that, contrary to the government's claims in launching the Spanish-American War, the U.S. battleship Maine had not been sunk by a Spanish mine but had been deliberately sunk by U.S. or Cuban operatives to precipitate the war. (page 64)
Tags: [Conspiracy]

Nuremberg marked the first application of the legal concept of conspiracy to crimes of the state and of political organizations. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) was authorized by its charter to try the Nazi defendants for "participating in the formulation or execution of a Common Plan or Conspiracy" to wage aggressive war. Adopting the legal concept of conspiracy, the tribunal's charter stipulated that everyone who had been a party to the plan or conspiracy was responsible for all crimes committed in the plan's execution...The IMT did not use the term "state crimes" or "crimes against democracy," but its jurisdiction and judgments prefigured the SCAD construct. The indictment said the defendants intended to use false-flag terrorism, faked invasions, and similar tactics to turn democratic Germany into a police state by fomenting social panic and mobilizing mass support for authoritarian government and war. (page 71)
Tags: [Conspiracy]

The lesson that Americans, Germans, and others should have drawn from the evidence presented at Nuremberg is that modern liberal democracies are vulnerable to being hijacked by authoritarian leaders willing to carry out ruthless conspiracies. When leaders claim to need extraordinary powers to deal with threats, citizens should look carefully at the threats and consider the possibility that the threats are contrived. (page 73)
Tags: [Conspiracy]

How did the existing literature on conspiracy theories, not to mention the many public officials and pundits who deploy the conspiracy-theory label in public discourse, manage to overlook the conspiratorial suspicions of the nation's Founders, especially when the Founders' fears of antidemocratic plots were stated in the Declaration of Independence, elaborated in the Federalist Papers, and written into the U.S. Constitution? How could the literature fail to notice that the Allied powers after World War II prosecuted and convicted Nazi leaders for conspiring to subvert representative democracy in Germany and wage wars of aggression? The literature attacking conspiracy theories has been blind to all this because most conspiracy deniers have accepted the conspiracy-theory label and its pejorative connotations uncritically. It would probably be too much to expect greater awareness of the CIA's conspiracy-theory propaganda program, even though it was made public in 1976, but many scholars and journalists still deserve criticism for failing to ask when and under what conditions norms against conspiracy belief emerged in elite discourse. Instead, generally they have embraced these norms and have simply assumed that conspiracy theories are patently irrational and pernicious. This has led journalists and scholars alike to search for the historical roots, not of contemporary elite norms against conspiracy theorizing, but of the supposedly delusional, conspiratorial mind-set. (page 74)
Tags: [Conspiracy]

At about the same time that behavioralism was coming into vogue, another movement in philosophy and social science was taking hold in the study of ancient and modern political philosophy. Politically conservative, scholars in this movement advocated elite political intrigue in modern representative democracies to shore up mass patriotism and foster popular support for a vigorous confrontation with authoritarian rival nations. There is more than irony in the fact that scholars in one field were actively discouraging mass suspicions of elite political intrigue while scholars in another field were teaching elites that such intrigue is necessary. These unfortunately complementary movements in the academy, when combined in the larger society, may have made America preternaturally vulnerable to elite political conspiracies. (page 77)
Tags: [Conspiracy]

Popper is largely responsible for the mistaken idea that conspiracy theories are modern variants of ancient superstitions and nineteenth-century social prejudices, and that, thus rooted in irrationality and paranoia, are the seeds of authoritarian political movements. (page 78)
Tags: [Conspiracy]

Strauss did not use the term "conspiracy theory," but he advocated state political propaganda and covert actions to protect a society's traditional beliefs and ongoing illusions about its origins and virtues from unrestrained inquiries or, in other words, conspiratorial theorizing. (page 78)
Tags: [Conspiracy]

Strauss' thinking differed from much of Popper's analysis but saw scientific criticism of official accounts of important historical events as a precursor to totalitarianism because it undermines respect for the nation's laws and traditional beliefs; it ushers in, with philosophy and science, the view that nothing is true; and it unleashes tyrannical impulses in the political class as top leaders compete for popular support. Although Popper and Strauss arrived by different routes, they agreed that conspiracy theories can fuel totalitarian political movements that threaten respect for human dignity, popular sovereignty, and the rule of law. (page 78)
Tags: [Postmodernism, Conspiracy]

Both [Popper and Strauss] suggested that modern liberal democracies were vulnerable to totalitarianism because of societal tensions caused by scientific erosion of traditional beliefs that otherwise reinforced established laws and norms. (page 79)
Tags: [Rationality, Conspiracy]

By 1964, when the Warren Commission presented its dubious account of the assassination of President Kennedy to a stunned nation, U.S. mainstream social science, with its Popperian devotion to mid-range theory and behavioral research, lacked conceptual resources to recognize a possible coup or purge. Hence American scholars, unlike their European counterparts, voiced no criticisms of the Warren Commission's report. (page 80)
Tags: [Conspiracy]

Both Popper and Strauss suggested that candor about such matters [elite plots] could unleash distrust, intolerance, and authoritarianism in liberal societies, but Popper said this was because such theories are always false, while Strauss suggested it was because they are often true. (page 82)
Tags: [Conspiracy]

The generation of the American Revolution was imbued with the ethos of the Enlightenment, which expected freedom of speech and inquiry to fuel gradual but steady progress in knowledge, technology, tolerance, and civility...However, the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, World War II, and the Cold War challenged this optimistic vision of history... (page 82)
Tags: [Rationality]

Charles Beard argued throughout his career that American democracy had been repeatedly manipulated by political insiders for personal gain or to serve hidden agendas. He put forward three major theories alleging elite intrigue to rig political institutions. In 1913 he became famous among academics, and infamous among political and economic elites, with the publication of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. In it, he applied Marxian class theory to American government by tracing key features of the U.S. Constitution to the framers' economic backgrounds and personal financial interests. (page 89)
Tags: [Conspiracy]

Second, in 1927 Beard and his wife Mary put forward a theory of how political insiders had rigged the Constitution to benefit corporations. Wtihin the academy, the theory came to be called the "conspiracy theory of the Fourteenth amendment." The Beards claimed that railroad interests manipulated the amendment's drafting to open the way for the courts to say it granted the rights of individuals to corporations. (page 89)
Tags: [Conspiracy]

Third, the allegations that Roosevelt lied to the public and manipulated the United States into World War II were presented by Charles Beard in President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: Appearances and Realities. The book says President Roosevelt withheld intelligence about the impending attack from U.S. commanders in the Pacific until it was too late for them to act, and then set an investigation in motion that blamed the commanders for being unprepared while it absolved the president and other officials in Washington of any responsibility. (page 89)
Tags: [Conspiracy]