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.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) in Washington, D.C., January 3, 2021 (Erin Scott/Reuters) 
