The wily politician did not like what he saw, or rather what he did not see, exactly — the truth being carefully hidden — but what he deduced to be at work: a conspiracy led by Democrats involving collusion among malefactors ranged from the highest courts to the state legislatures, the local officials, and the media, with the American republic a single Supreme Court decision away from losing its cherished liberty and sliding into slow-motion despotism. Abraham Lincoln also very much wanted to be elected to the Senate, and his charging Stephen A. Douglas and his fellow Democrats with conspiracy would be an effective piece of oratory in the grand American tradition.
With not only the immediate opponent awaiting him in mind but also with his rhetorical sights on Dred Scott author Chief Justice Roger Taney and Democratic grandees Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, Lincoln addressed the delegates of the Republican convention and proclaimed:
When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen — Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance — and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few — not omitting even scaffolding — or, if a single piece be lacking, we can see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared to yet bring such piece in — in such a case, we find it impossible to not believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.
Revisiting the debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which undid the Missouri Compromise by opening up the possibility of expanding slavery in the territories, Lincoln noted that the supporters of the act had claimed to be working not in the interest of slavery per se but in the interest of popular sovereignty, the principle that the people of any state or territory may determine for themselves how to manage their internal affairs, including the question of whether to practice slavery. Lincoln scorned this interpretation: The supporters of the bill had rejected an amendment that would have expressly declared the right of the people of a territory to exclude slavery, if they chose.
Why reject that, Lincoln demanded, if the question really was one of popular sovereignty? And why had the timing of court decisions been “held up,” suspiciously benefiting the Democrats in elections? “We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert,” Lincoln said. But it was, he argued, obvious enough.
Lincoln told that crowd that, illuminated by his analysis, “several things will now appear less dark and mysterious than they did when they were transpiring.” The plot, he argued, was of long standing. The Kansas-Nebraska advocates had kept hidden their true purpose. “The people were to be left ‘perfectly free’ ‘subject only to the Constitution.’ What the Constitution had to do with it, outsiders could not then see. Plainly enough now, it was an exactly fitted niche for the Dred Scott decision to afterward come in and declare that perfect freedom of the people to be just no freedom at all.”
Lincoln dwelled on the Dred Scott case, in which Taney and the other justices had declared it unconstitutional for a territory to exclude slavery but had remained silent — conspicuously so, to Lincoln’s mind — on the question of whether a state could exclude slavery. Other cases moving through the courts suggested the question. “In what cases the power of the states is so restrained by the U.S. Constitution is left an open question,” Lincoln said, “precisely as the same question, as to the restraint on the power of the territories was left open in the Nebraska act.” Connect the dots, sheeple! “Put that and that together, and we have another nice little niche, which we may, ere long, see filled with another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a state to exclude slavery from its limits.” At which point, all would be lost, and the slave power would reign triumphant in the United States — forever.
A single line from that speech, a quotation from the Gospel according to Mark, has made it into the public memory: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” But the conspiratorial mode of analysis expressed therein skipped the American mind altogether and insinuated itself directly into the American soul.
Lincoln’s conspiratorial understanding of politics is part of an ancient American tradition, one that precedes the American Revolution, to say nothing of Parler and Facebook. It is baked into every apple pie, and it lurks beneath purple mountains’ majesty. It is sown like jimsonweed among amber waves of grain.
The Declaration of Independence justifies the Americans’ armed revolt as an emergency measure, taken in response not to a mere disagreement with the king or his government but to a plot, “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object,” part of “a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism,” a conspiracy “having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” Early Revolutionary leaders such as Oxenbridge Thacher talked of ministerial plots and suggested that Americans faced a “design formed to enslave them.”
See if this sounds at all familiar: “The conviction that [they] were faced with a deliberate, anti-libertarian design grew most quickly where the polarization of politics was most extreme and where radical leaders were least inhibited in expressing and reinforcing general apprehensions,” Bernard Bailyn writes in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, in a chapter titled “A Note on Conspiracy.” In John Dickinson, “the most cautious and reluctant of Revolutionary leaders,” Bailyn finds a politician who “understood so well the psychological and political effects of thinking in precisely these conspiratorial terms.” He quotes Dickinson’s observations on the reign of Charles I and its incremental tyranny. Each of the king’s acts might have been acceptable on its own, but not when understood as “parts of a system of oppression. Every one, therefore, however small in itself, became alarming as an additional evidence of tyrannical designs.” Jefferson would write much the same thing in the Declaration. Edmund Burke made similar conspiratorial accusations in Thoughts on the Present Discontents. As Bailyn notes, both the opposition in England and the American colonials were convinced that the trouble was the result of what William Pitt the Elder called “the secret influence of an invisible power.”
The line between cooperation and conspiracy, between politicking and plotting, is necessarily subjective. But episodically throughout American history, in every century from the 17th to the 21st, some considerable share of Americans has fallen under the spell of a fantastical, fevered vision of conspiracy, usually with occult and Satanic elements. Most often, these conspiracy theories are politically oriented, but sometimes they pop up outside of politics, as in the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, the Satanic-day-care-abuse panic of the 1990s, and the Satanism panic touching rock music and role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons that immediately preceded that fiasco, echoes of which can still be heard in dark whisperings that the Harry Potter franchise is a Luciferian propaganda project. Richard Hofstadter famously called the associated political tendency “the paranoid style in American politics,” tracing its history back to the Illuminati panic that gripped the New England clergy in the 18th century. Hofstadter makes an important and often underappreciated point: Conspiracy theories attract lunatics, but their relevance extends far beyond the bughouse.
“I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind,” Hofstadter wrote in Harper’s as the Barry Goldwater movement was becoming a rising force in Republican politics. “In using the expression ‘paranoid style’ I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. . . . It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”
Senator Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society were hardly the first of their kind, Hofstadter wrote:
In the history of the United States one finds it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims.
Hofstadter cites among other examples an 1855 Texas newspaper editorial, typical of its time, claiming: “It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions.”
(The pope was unavailable for comment.)
The interpretation of any conspiracy’s details can always be retrofitted to immediate political needs. As Hofstadter notes, the anti-Masonic movement of the early 19th century represented a faction of Jacksonian-adjacent populist-democrats who happened to be opposed to Andrew Jackson himself, its politics “intimately linked with popular democracy and rural egalitarianism.” Hofstadter continues: “Although anti-Masonry happened to be anti-Jacksonian (Jackson was a Mason), it manifested the same animus against the closure of opportunity for the common man and against aristocratic institutions that one finds in the Jacksonian crusade against the Bank of the United States.”
It was a narrative effort to out-Jackson Jackson.
We the People vs. the dreaded Elite and Establishment, honest sons of the soil vs. rootless cosmopolitans — the parallels to contemporary conservative discourse do not need belaboring. And if the rhetoric and style of the Illuminati terror have survived into our time, there is a good reason for that: American society remains today divided on many lines that would have been familiar to Andrew Jackson or the Founding Fathers: town and country, farm and bank, domestic capitalists and cosmopolitan merchants, old natives and new immigrants. It is because the issues of immigration and international trade both speak to this great divide that they have loomed so large in populist politics and conspiracy theories.
The political split, though easier to study as a matter of history, is secondary, following from a division that is fundamentally cultural and poorly documented. As Hofstadter published his “Paranoid Style,” Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were ascendant on the right. Even as William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review grappled with the John Birch conspiracy peddlers, both Goldwater and Reagan were buoyed by that same conspiratorial energy, even if they mostly kept the kooks, the bigots, and the most obvious charlatans at arm’s length: “In politics, you have to go hunting where the ducks are,” as Goldwater put it, explaining the GOP’s abandonment of African Americans and its courting of white Southern Democrats who keenly felt the disconnect between elite northeastern institutional power and their version of “popular democracy and rural egalitarianism.”
Politics and culture move in parallel, sometimes tightly. Running for governor of California in 1966, Reagan observed: “I don’t care if I’m in the mountains, desert, the biggest cities of the state, the first question is, ‘What are you going to do about Berkeley?’ And each time the question itself would get applause.” Reagan the conservative activist had wanted to run a campaign on welfare, regulation, and taxes. But Reagan the actor knew what applause meant, and his audience demanded a cultural confrontation: the cowboy vs. the dirty hippies. Reagan obliged: On May 15, 1969, Governor Reagan sent the California Highway Patrol to put an end to the People’s Park protests in Berkeley, precipitating a violent confrontation. Reagan eventually called out 2,200 National Guard troops and occupied Berkeley. The Left was sure that the controversy would be the end of Reagan, but his popularity and his national stature were, in fact, elevated. There were more ducks out there than Goldwater had guessed. One month to the day after Berkeley’s “Bloody Thursday,” the politically charged, left-leaning satire of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which was canceled when it proved to be a controversial headache for CBS, was replaced by Hee Haw.
Past is prologue: A few years later, millions of Americans would tune in to watch the antics of Archie Bunker, a loudmouth bigot from Queens, and say to themselves, “In your heart, you know he’s right.”
Do you remember when the cast of The Beverly Hillbillies duked it out in an ugly election in Pennsylvania’s ninth House district?
No?
The year was 1984, and Nancy Kulp, the gifted character actress who played Jane Hathaway, the bird-watching assistant to a snooty Beverly Hills banker, was nominated by the Democrats to challenge Republican incumbent Bud Shuster for a rural Pennsylvania seat. It was a kamikaze run. In spite of her fame — and she was very famous: The Beverly Hillbillies had been the most watched television show in the United States — Kulp’s campaign foundered from the beginning. And then it was hammered into the ground when Buddy Ebsen, the even more famous face of Jed Clampett, taped a campaign ad for her Republican opponent: “Nancy, I love you dearly,” he intoned in that winsome and homely voice, “but you’re too liberal for me.”
Pennsylvania’s ninth was a Ronald Reagan district back when being called “too liberal” by a famous Hollywood star was a career-ender. And, with two words from Buddy Ebsen, Kulp was finished in politics.
That was not a demonstration of political power — it was a demonstration of the power of celebrity. Celebrity is a by-product of narrative — it is what happens to an entertainer when the narrative fiction associated with him becomes so powerful as to overwhelm objective reality and his own personality. At some level, Americans wanted to believe — and so believed — that John Wayne was a cowboy and a war hero, that Leonard Nimoy was an ego-free rationalist, that Alex Trebek was a bottomless well of facts. Buddy Ebsen was — had to be — the salt of the earth, a decent country gentleman. In real life, he was an avid Newport yachtsman who favored lavender shirts and ascots, a former professional dancer who got his start on the stages of New York City.
Ebsen was periodically serious about conservative politics. Hollywood conservatives were, hard as it is to believe in 2021, a real force not that long ago: Southern California was natural Republican country, and the Screen Actors Guild was strongly anti-communist under the leadership of Reagan and others (the Gipper remains the only labor-union president ever elected president of the United States), to such an extent that 96 percent of its voting members endorsed imposing an anti-communist affidavit requirement in 1953. Ebsen hobnobbed with Republican bigwigs and publicly supported Goldwater, while his wife served on the organizing committee of Mothers for a Moral America, with Nancy Reagan and Pat (Mrs. William F.) Buckley. Ebsen and his wife would divorce in the wake of the 1984 campaign after nearly 40 years of marriage; she cited, among other factors, political disagreements stemming from her husband’s growing conservatism.
There wasn’t any particular reason for Ebsen to campaign against Kulp — she was nearly certain to lose the race — but he may have wanted to raise his own political profile. Kulp detested Reagan but was nonetheless encouraged by his example to believe that politics might provide a plausible third act for a derelict entertainment career. Perhaps Ebsen was thinking something similar. His acting career had petered out, and in his last regular television role he’d been relegated to the supporting cast of a short-lived series.
Kulp fumed about Ebsen’s intervention, complaining about the “distortions” that undid her political hopes: “A candidate is elected because they are perceived to be something,” she told the Associated Press. “I was perceived to be an ultra-liberal. If that is their perception — even if they like me — then I can’t win.” Ebsen, she sniffed, was “not the kindly old Jed Clampett that you saw on the show.”
That this needed to be said aloud — and it did — is instructive.
Of course Buddy Ebsen is not the men he played on television. But he certainly was perceived that way by many of the rural voters in Pennsylvania’s ninth. Ebsen had played a string of country characters: Clampett, most famously, but also the forlorn hayseed Doc Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, along with western roles in Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, Tales of Wells Fargo, Rawhide, Bonanza, and Maverick, among other series. Rural voters identified with him. Never mind that Kulp actually was from small-town Pennsylvania, while Ebsen, raised in Orlando, had no connection to Pennsylvania’s ninth at all. He was Jed Clampett, and she was Jane Hathaway.
And that made Buddy Ebsen’s endorsement count.
Those who are mystified by the sudden (but not really so sudden) resurgence of conspiracy theory in American political life should begin by considering the fact that conspiracy theories and politics are subdivisions of the same category: entertainment. Conspiracy theories are part of American folk literature, a form of group storytelling. At the same time, they are our national high-fantasy literature. With apologies to George R. R. Martin, the closest thing to The Lord of the Rings that ever has been produced in the United States is QAnon. Its formal literary equivalents, such as Irving Wallace’s paranoid Cold War novel The Plot or Oliver Stone’s film JFK, lack the hearty peasant vitality of the folk-conspiracy form.
Buddy Ebsen, who played a lucky hillbilly on television, never ran for office. Donald Trump, who played a commanding business executive on television, did — and not just in 2016 and 2020. Trump’s first bid for the presidency was his abortive 2000 run on the Reform Party ticket. He was an entertainer-turned-politician recruited by another entertainer-turned-politician, the former pro-wrestling heel Jesse “The Body” Ventura, who himself had been inspired by another politics-adjacent entertainer, the future California Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, with whom Ventura had appeared in Predator and other films. Trump’s entertainment career included a successful game show, pro-wrestling appearances, movie cameos from Home Alone 2 to pornographic films, and the bizarre ongoing performance-art piece that is his life and political career. Trump has a remarkable talent for self-promotion (like Paris Hilton, he reengineered a sex scandal into a career as a celebrity), but his passion is conspiracy theories: 9/11, vaccines, Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and — currently most significant — every single election in which he ever has been involved, including the ones he won but especially the ones he lost.
Trump has not been a president — he has been a protagonist.
Trump’s decision to conduct himself as a dramatis persona rather than as the chief administrator of the executive branch of the U.S. government is based partly on lack of intellectual ability, partly on his disinclination for mastering difficult material, and partly on his manifest lack of interest in doing the job of the president. The political environment also favors it: Even as the two major political parties themselves have declined as institutions, partisanship as a form of actionable identity has grown metastatically. The Left’s successful political recruitment of the universities, the major news media, and some scientific organizations has discredited those institutions categorically in the estimate of the populist Right, heightening its preexisting anti-intellectualism. The complexity of contemporary policy debates is poorly suited to TikTok-age attention spans.
Social media, along with the emergence of a self-consciously countercultural right-wing news-entertainment apparatus, have lowered the social barriers to participating in conspiracy theories, and have allowed for the creation of a conspiracy-theory entertainment ecosystem that is both more narratively consistent than in previous eras and also capable of being tailored to particular audiences. That creates a kind of graduated scale of fantasy and respectability: If QAnon isn’t for you, there’s Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, or American Greatness or any other one of the other great garbage chutes of fevered fancy. Just as the modern pornography consumer doesn’t have to go to seedy theaters and bookshops, the modern consumer of conspiracy material can consume the worst of it from the privacy of his own home — no meetings to attend, no mimeographed pamphlets waiting to be awkwardly discovered by guests, no Jack Chick tracts lost between the sofa cushions. As with pornography, both the economic price and the social price of consuming conspiracy literature have been diminished by technology and, subsequently, the genre has been accommodated by a relaxation of social attitudes.
As with pornography, it doesn’t matter whether the story is plausible — realism is not the point.
For some men, fantasies are dearer than life. They will lie and retreat into delusion to protect those fantasies, as Donald Trump does, or they will murder to protect them, as his followers did at the Capitol. Do they really believe that Nancy Pelosi is part of a cabal of Satanic pedophiles? Mostly not. Most of them probably do not even believe the election was stolen. They believe that Pelosi deserves to be insulted, and that they deserve to be elevated over her and her kind socially and in terms of practical political power, but they cannot fit the square pegs of their resentment and ambition into the round holes of reality. And so reality is transformed into a plot, one that involves Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer, the faculty and staff of Harvard, the editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post, NASA, Mitt Romney, Mike Pence, John Roberts, Rupert Murdoch, George Soros, the United Nations, Jeff Bezos, and, if the story calls for it, Satan himself. And they’ll go on believing these stories for the same reason people believe George Washington confessed to chopping down his father’s cherry tree.
This article appears as “‘It Is a Notorious Fact That the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome Are at This Very Moment Plotting Our Destruction!’” in the February 8, 2021, print edition of National Review.
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