Book Review: Russell Muirhead, Nancy Rosenblum - A Lot of People Are Saying

I was predisposed to agree with Muirhead and Rosenblum's main thesis (roughly that "the relatively unmoderated chaos of the internet has allowed Republicans to spew more bullshit faster than ever before, accentuating a general crisis of confidence in institutions") before even reading the book, but reading their argument at length gave me a bit more to chew on. I'm not sure that the "new conspiracism" of the subtitle ("a conspiracy theory without the theory") is really so different than the old-school conspiracy theories they use as a comparison, since both "conspiracy" and "theory" are not so easily defined, and it's often hard to see a real distinction between stupid things people believe now and the stupid things they've always believed. However, I do think there is a good case that something has changed about how controversies are treated in the media, which allows for stupid beliefs to persist and even flourish in a way that they haven't been able to before, and therefore the sheer volume of persistent conspiracy theories that's accumulated has poisoned the well of public discourse. Muirhead and Rosenblum have impeccably logical explanations for how Donald Trump et al's style of habitually repeating malicious lies destabilizes institutions in a negative feedback cycle, and even though "cranky right-wing idiot" is a familiar archetype across both American history and the world stage, the fact that someone of his caliber was able to be elected President says more about our rotten institutions than it does about him. They're predictably less useful on the solutions front, but they're hardly alone in that.

Their thesis is that there is a difference between "classic" conspiracy theories and the "new conspiracism". Classic conspiracy theories identify an event or state of the world, posit an explanation for that event or state, and tie that explanation to a political theory. For example, JFK wasn't randomly killed by Oswald the lone nut, he was deliberately assassinated by the Mafia over RFK's prosecution of organized crime, or by the CIA over the Bay of Pigs fiasco, or by LBJ over his ambition to be President, and the resulting change of administration either directly or indirectly benefited the parties involved (they also have the fantastic example of the Declaration of Independence as a conspiracy theorist document, which is both hilarious and also a little goofy). In contrast, the new conspiracism is just an endless series of unfalsifiable negative assertions, where it's basically irrelevant if any specific claim happens to be true. Pizzagate is a representative example, where prominent Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John Podesta are supposedly running a child sex slavery ring out of the basement of a Washington DC pizza joint as fronts for a global network of Satanic elites, and the most maximally tortured possible reading of Podesta's hacked emails are used to find coded messages that confirm a worldwide human trafficking network and all these other nefarious deeds. If any particular detail doesn't seem to hold up to scrutiny, there's always another "but what about THIS?!" accusation that, unless exhaustively disproven, serves as yet more proof that Hillary Clinton and company are Sandusky crossed with Dahmer raised to the power of the Rothschilds.

So their main distinction between the new conspiracism and the old is that conspiracy theories are now unkillable, and in fact oddly nihilistic, since their proponents don't actually expect anyone to do much about these supposed crimes (e.g. QAnon adherents have to invent ever more elaborate explanations for why all these people are not in jail if they're so obviously guilty, whereas independence was the "solution" for the American revolutionaries). Instead of being able to say "actually, John Podesta's risotto recipe is just a risotto recipe, therefore it's not evidence of a sex dungeon in a pizza restaurant, therefore Hillary Clinton is probably not running a pedophile ring" in the same way as you used to be able to say "actually, the single bullet explanation is consistent with how JFK and Connally were seated relative to each other, therefore it's not evidence of multiple gunmen, therefore there probably weren't any shooters other than Oswald", the hapless normal person attempting to respond to this stuff will always be confronted by new accusations of vile perfidy with proof perpetually just over the horizon, an endlessly wearying vista of fever dreams to beat back. The rise of the internet has propelled this new conspiracism from the fringes to the center of our discourse, allowing unscrupulous figures like Donald Trump to rise to power on a tidal wave of bullshit, since we're all drowning in information and our pudding-like brains will just accept whatever confirms our prior beliefs, and even if in theory the left and the right should be equally susceptible to nonsense, right-wing new conspiracism is aimed directly at institutions themselves, which furthers even more the sense of a world adrift without any adults in charge.

Stated in that way their distinction sounds reasonable, but I'm skeptical if there's a true difference, or if the internet has just presented us with far more information to have to analyze while simultaneously destroying our attention spans and critical thinking skills. It's hard to say that new conspiracy theories like Birtherism or the products of the Arkansas Project are different and more unkillable than JFK conspiracy theories when the JFK conspiracy theory industry is still alive and kicking after over 50 years (the conspiracy merch vendors outside the Sixth Floor Museum all stand by their products). To their detriment, Muirhead and Rosenblum never try to actually define what the "unit" of a conspiracy theory is, so we can't really say if conspiracy theories have gotten more elaborate or implausible or unfalsifiable over time. Matt Taibbi once had a great article called "The Hopeless Stupidity of 9/11 Conspiracies" mocking the bizarre mental contortions required to even begin to make sense of the supposed 9/11 plot (which M & R oddly classify as an old-school conspiracy theory), but it's obviously never been the case that most people actually write down every step of the whole chain of logic in their pet theory from the very beginning, they'll just take it for granted that someone else has already done the legwork and build on that foundation. These days adherents share increasingly inscrutable conspiracy memes with each other on Facebook, but I'm sure the John Birch Society's tracts and pamphlets were not much different. I grew up watching The X-Files, an incredibly prescient show which they somehow don't cite even once, and watching it gave me appreciation for how fun it is to spin lurid tales of shadowy conspiracies, as well as how little sense most conspiracies make once you start looking at them critically, but even then, an overarching conspiracy that's incoherent as a whole can look very plausible on the day by day or episode by episode level.

All of this is in novels like Foucault's Pendulum, but another example of that's near and dear to my heart is Alex Jones. Back when I was in high school, he had yet to make his unfortunate transformation from Austin's "lovable local nutcase" into a nationally infamous deranged hoax promoter, and I would sometimes listen to his radio show for kicks on my drive home from school. Alex Jones would think nothing of having a rant about how global warming was obviously fake and a UN plot to steal our freedoms and make America a fascist socialist police state segue smoothly into a rant about how global warming was actually all too real and would be exploited by crony capitalist elites like Bill Gates and the Bilderbergs to get third world countries hooked on GMO foods and surveillance technology. To a rational outsider, the coexistence of plainly incompatible conspiracy theories like that should give you pause - perhaps either hypothesis might be true, but both can't be true at the same time, and if someone persists in this simultaneous contradiction for too long, the safe bet is to discount their whole belief system entirely. And yet for many people, the opposite happens, and each individual pseudo-fact becomes just another data point that they can plug into their own private X-Files, drawing their personalized conspiracist constellations atop the infinite sky of suspicious stars.

After all, all conspiracy theories exist on a continuum of plausibility, and, unfortunately sometimes conspiracies are actually real. Pizzagate isn't real, but what about Jeffrey Epstein? Oswald may have been a lone gunman, but isn't it true that he had an enormous number of truly odd and questionable connections to important figures of the day, and hasn't the US supported exactly these kinds of shadow coups abroad? The whole world is a Pynchon novel that we're all trapped in, and when you start linking individual theories together there's no end to the mischief you can cause. A semi-normal person who started out believing in "plausible" conspiracy theories like the Clinton Foundation stuff and was predisposed to right-wing tribalism could easily be gradually led into the swamps of Pizzagate and QAnon, never to return, no matter how vigorously the original entry point was debunked, because once they cross the Rubicon everything they read just feeds into the unshakeable conviction that "Hillary Clinton is part of an evil cabal". A diagram of the supposed "Clinton body count" victims might look crazy to an outsider in the same way that the central conspiracy of The X-Files doesn't make much sense if you try to write the whole mythology out on paper, and yet at the same time the idea that Hillary Clinton has had dozens of people directly murdered is an effectively impossibly daunting mountain to scale for the brave soul who's trying to deprogram their Fox News-poisoned relative, especially when they won't trust any outside sources of information.

The problem of "epistemic closure" is another depressing facet of this phenomenon, perhaps the main one. Julian Sanchez first applied the philosophical term to politics in a 2010 blog post titled "Epistemic Closure, Technology, and the End of Distance" which has held up extremely well, even down to his specific example of how conservatives tuned out reality when the rest of the country objected to their being pointlessly cruel to a teenager (liberals are of course not immune to this tendency either, but it's obviously nowhere near to the same degree). There's a few books out there - Anna Merlan's Republic of Lies, Martin Gurri's Revolt of the Public - which delve more deeply into the logic of the collapse in public trust in media figures, but it's hard to see a good way out of this based solely on mass media literacy. Centralized big media companies have well-known flaws, but the solution to ossified corrupt hierarchies probably shouldn't be random people with blogs, except that it probably also shouldn't be unaccountable algorithms deciding what's trustworthy and what's not. The ceaseless, self-reinforcing rage storm that gets called "populism" is incompatible with a pluralist society, yet populist leaders (invariably grifters who feed on the stupidity of their supporters, as in Trump) just start to delegitimize any sources of disproof, since as the saying goes "you can't reason someone out of something they didn't reason themselves into".

Muirhead and Rosenblum effectively have no solution to our political structure circling the drain, beyond general calls to stand up for democracy and institutions, but I didn't really expect them to solve the result of decades of of determined efforts to build a right-wing alternate reality machine in a <200 page book. Last year Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and Kevin Arceneaux won an award for their paper "A 'Need for Chaos' and the Sharing of Hostile Political Rumors in Advanced Democracies", which bears directly on this problem. Their conclusion was that a big motivator for people who just really love stupid conspiracy theories was economic stagnation, which gets translated into a general "some men just want to watch the world burn" mentality. So theoretically a better economy coupled with electoral reform coupled with enforcement penalties for bad actors à la House Democrats' proposals in HR1 will somewhat reduce this poisonous conspiracism, except that ironically conspiracists also love voting for right-wing con artists who won't do anything at all to aid the economy and will in fact just entrench themselves further to use the levers of power to steal from the public commons. I think the best solution is to support liberal/progressive/left-wing political candidates who will break the stranglehold of the elites, but that's a lot easier said, even if a lot of people are saying it too, than done.