Little noticed amidst all the political punditry that followed Donald Trump’s improbable rise to power was the daily diet of conspiracy theories that he had engorged himself on and had thrown around for his base as red meat.
March of the neo-Nazis
Since January 2017, when Trump became President, many conspiracy theorists have emerged as amplified voices in the American public arena — including white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, and self-declared neo-Nazis — all of whom rely on a steady dose of conspiracies and enemies to sustain their movements. Nowhere was this seen more vividly than in Charlottesville, Virginia, a couple of weeks back when American neo-Nazis, their allies, and intellectual godfathers marched openly in a show of force.
Armed with 19th century social science claims about race, cultural uniqueness, biological superiority of the whites, and 21st century technology to spread their word, the neo-Nazis chanted (“Jews will not replace us”) and stormed into the national conversation. Notwithstanding the irony that many of the 21st century white nationalists (with ancestries from the Balkans and Southern Europe) would have had difficulty being identified as “white” in 19th century America, the present-day Nazis announced their intentions to build an apartheid-style ethno-state. Much of this rhetoric is intended as a public show of commitment for their base. But for now they did the next best thing: they went in front of cameras. They denounced with fervour any and all who didn’t agree with them as globalists, cosmopolitans, Jew-lovers, and cucks (“cuckolds” — sexual anxiety about race mixing is a persistent theme).
Later when asked to comment on (and hopefully condemn) the neo-Nazi march, Trump, instead of providing moral clarity and leadership, went down a rhetorical rabbit hole that was indistinguishable from the kind of mealy mouthed justifications that self-respecting adulterers deploy when caught. More telling, however, was Trump’s extraordinary reluctance to condemn these supremacists groups except when he was later forced to read out a written statement (a “hostage note”, as a wag described it).
In parts, Trump’s instinctive demurral is understandable. He and these groups consume the same media sources — sources where conspiracy theories grow faster than mushrooms after monsoons — to shape the worlds they inhabit. Together, they bathe in a wellspring of reactionary anger that sees the wreckage of their idealised past float by, thanks to the patient chipping away (by law and demographics) of the monolith of historically experienced white privileges. Trump’s instinctive willingness to offer up equivocations for fellow reactionary minds is a form of a bully’s empathy for those losing their monopoly of historically accrued power and social capital which is often mistaken for even-handedness. To expect Trump to ask whether monopolies of power in society are good in the first place is, by all accounts, to ask too much of him.
All this said, last week’s events in Charlottesville aren’t new in American history per se. Neither for its organised efforts to intimidate on racial lines nor the underlying sense of panic that marks white nationalist movements. In 1964, the political scientist, Richard Hofstadter, described American politics as marked by a “paranoid style”. From anti-Catholic movements in the 19th century, the “Red” scares of the mid-20th century, to the rise of Barack Obama, shifts in demographics of culture and power bases have periodically fuelled mass anxiety and exclusionary rhetoric. What follows is an extreme form of suspicion towards any discourse about society that emanates from ‘elites’ (universities, media, businesses). This suspicion is operationalised by counter-theories that seek to explain less but feed into, what Auden wrote elsewhere, “a climate of opinion”.
The more opaque a society’s institutions become, the more conspiracy theories become a mythology-from-below on how those institutions truly operate and who wields the real power. Conspiracy theories thus become a form of open-sourced cultural production of communicable paranoia that subgroups consume and reinterpret when faced with their own increasing sense of irrelevancy to historical forces at work. To such a view, as Hofstadter describes, “history [itself] is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power”.
Typically, this theatre of suspicion is played out at the margins, with the centres of power protected by the praetorian guards of the establishment. With Trump’s victory, however, a conspiracist and his retinue are now at the centre. Predictably, Trump’s only response has been to launch counter-conspiracies in the hope of annulling the effects of the imagined original conspiracy. Like some malevolent Quixote, he charges every day up against the American media, often accusing them of treason for disagreeing with him. This, even as he feeds real dragons of white nationalism with his blather.
A moral paralysis
The irony, however, is that power in the abstract — the currency in which conspiracy theorists transact — rarely resembles power in the concrete. A conspiracist in power is often defeated by the mismatch between reality and the claims of his pet ideas. What follows is a moral paralysis and rhetorical glibness. Predictably, after much criticism, when asked yet again about the neo-Nazi marches and accompanying violence, Trump’s answers were absurd: he blamed the media for being unfair to him by reporting his words accurately.
