High-Crime Blind
Given its title, you might think Conspiracy Theory in America
is simply another addition to the long list of books criticizing
conspiracy theories. You probably expect the book to blame the
popularity of these theories on some flaw in American culture or
character. No doubt, you have encountered this view many times, not just
in books and magazines but also on radio and television.
The argument that conspiracy beliefs reflect cultural weaknesses that
are peculiarly American was first made by political scientist Richard
Hofstadter, who, in a 1964 essay in Harper's Magazine, said
popular conspiracy theories stem from the “paranoid style in American
politics.” This was a year after the assassination of President Kennedy,
but Hofstadter was not talking about that. He was referring to
right-wing fears of communism in the McCarthy era. Other authors over
the years have traced conspiracy beliefs to, among other character
defects, Americans’ racial prejudices, hostility toward immigrants,
distrust of intellectuals, and anxieties about social change,
concentrated wealth, and secularization.
In short, if you are at all familiar with the commentary on
conspiracy theories—and it would be hard not to be, given the media
attention conspiracy deniers and debunkers attract—you are surely
wondering what more could possibly be said on the topic. Actually,
however, the answer is, quite a lot.
This is because most of the criticism directed at conspiracy beliefs
is based on sentimentality about America’s political leaders and
institutions rather than on unbiased reasoning and objective
observation. Most authors who criticize conspiracy theories not only
disagree with the theories’ factual claims, they find the ideas
offensive. Among the most common conspiracy theories are allegations of
U.S. government complicity in terrible crimes against the American
people, crimes that include the assassination of President Kennedy and
the terrorist attacks of 9/11. For conspiracy deniers, such allegations
constitute outlandish slurs against America’s leaders and political
institutions, slurs that damage the nation’s reputation and may
encourage violence against U.S. officials at home and abroad.
This visceral reaction to conspiracy theories is understandable.
However, it often results in blanket dismissals that treat all
conspiracy theories as equally ludicrous and insulting. In fact,
conspiracy beliefs vary widely in terms of their supporting evidence and
plausibility. Some conspiratorial suspicions make sense and warrant
investigation, while others do not. For example, suspicions that
elements of the U.S. government somehow facilitated the assassination of
President Kennedy range from the theory that the murder was approved by
the vice president and other top leaders to the view that the
government just slipped up by failing to monitor Lee Harvey Oswald’s
activities during Kennedy’s visit to Dallas and then concealed this from
the Warren Commission to protect the FBI’s reputation. Although the
first suspicion has only modest evidentiary support (but might still be
true), the second allegation about the FBI’s failure to keep track of
Oswald and then covering this up has been fully confirmed. This does not
necessarily mean the Kennedy assassination was an “inside job,” but it
does cast doubt on the official account of the assassination as a crime
that could not have been prevented, and it raises the possibility that
the FBI’s culpability was more extensive than has thus far been
admitted. In any event, a common mistake made by conspiracy deniers is
to lump together a hodgepodge of speculations about government intrigue,
declare them all “conspiracy theories,” and then, on the basis of the
most improbable claims among them, argue that any and all
unsubstantiated suspicions of elite political crimes are far-fetched
fantasies destructive of public trust.
The literature’s hasty dismissal of antigovernment suspicions is not
merely an incidental attitude, a bias in the balance of opinion for and
against various contested claims. To the contrary, objective observation
and analysis have been foreclosed by the very terms employed to frame
and conceptualize the subject matter. Most important in this loaded
language is the phrase “conspiracy theory” itself, or more specifically
the meaning attached to it in use and application.
A Curious History
The term “conspiracy theory” did not exist as a phrase in everyday
American conversation before 1964. The conspiracy-theory label entered
the American lexicon of political speech as a catchall for criticisms of
the Warren Commission’s conclusion that President Kennedy was
assassinated by a lone gunman with no assistance from, or foreknowledge
by, any element of the United States government. Since then, the term’s
prevalence and range of application have exploded. In 1964, the year the
Warren Commission issued its report, the New York Times published five stories in which “conspiracy theory” appeared. In recent years, the phrase has occurred in over 140 New York Times
stories annually. A Google search for the phrase (in 2012) yielded more
than 21 million hits—triple the numbers for such common expressions as
“abuse of power” and “war crime.” On Amazon.com, the term is a book
category that includes in excess of 1,300 titles. In addition to books
on conspiracy theories of particular events, there are conspiracy-theory
encyclopedias, photographic compendiums, website directories, and
guides for researchers, skeptics, and debunkers.
Initially, conspiracy theories were not an object of ridicule and
hostility. Today, however, the conspiracy-theory label is employed
routinely to dismiss a wide range of antigovernment suspicions as
symptoms of impaired thinking akin to superstition or mental illness.
For example, in a massive book published in 2007 on the assassination of
President Kennedy, former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi says people who
doubt the Warren Commission report are “as kooky as a three dollar bill
in their beliefs and paranoia.” Similarly, in his recently published
book Among the Truthers (Harper's, 2011), Canadian journalist
Jonathan Kay refers to 9/11 conspiracy theorists as “political
paranoiacs” who have “lost their grip on the real world.” Making a
similar point, if more colorfully, in his popular book Wingnuts,
journalist John Avlon refers to conspiracy believers as “moonbats,”
“Hatriots,” “wingnuts,” and the “Fright Wing.”
The same judgment is expressed in more measured terms by Cass
Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule in a 2009 journal article on the “causes
and cures” of conspiracy theories. Sunstein is a Harvard law professor
appointed by President Obama to head the Office of Information and
Regulatory Affairs. He and Vermeule claim that once a person buys into
them, conspiracy theories are resistant to debunking because they are
“self-sealing.” That is, because conspiracy theories attribute
extraordinary powers to elites to orchestrate events, keep secrets, and
avoid detection, the theories encourage their adherents to dismiss
countervailing evidence as fabricated or planted.
In a book on technology and public opinion, Sunstein argues further
that conspiracy-theory groups and networks are proliferating because the
highly decentralized form of mass communication made possible by the
Internet is altering the character of public discourse. Whereas
television and radio provide platforms for debating competing viewpoints
on matters of widely shared interest, the Internet tends to segment
discussion into a multitude of small groups, each focusing on a separate
and distinct topic. Sunstein argues that this splintering of discourse
encourages extremism because it allows proponents of false or one-sided
beliefs to locate others with similar views while at the same time
avoiding interaction with competing perspectives. In Sunstein’s words,
“The Internet produces a process of spontaneous creation of groups of
like-minded types, fueling group polarization. People who would
otherwise be loners, or isolated in their objections and concerns,
congregate into social networks.” Sunstein acknowledges that this
consequence of the Internet is unavoidable, but he says polarization can
and should be mitigated by a combination of government action and
voluntarily adopted norms. The objective, he says, should be to ensure
that those who hold conspiracy theories “are exposed to credible
counterarguments and are not living in an echo chamber of their own
design”.
In their law review article, Sunstein and Vermeule expand this idea
and propose covert government action reminiscent of the FBI’s efforts
against the civil rights and antiwar movements in the 1960s. They
consider a number of options for countering the influence of conspiracy
theories, including public information campaigns, censorship, and fines
for Internet service providers hosting conspiracy-theory websites.
Ultimately rejecting those options as impractical because they would
attract attention and reinforce antigovernment suspicions, they call for
a program of “cognitive infiltration” in which groups and networks
popularizing conspiracy theories would be infiltrated and “disrupted.”
A Flawed and Un-American Label
As these examples illustrate, conspiracy deniers assume that what
qualifies as a conspiracy theory is self-evident. In their view, the
phrase “conspiracy theory” as it is conventionally understood simply
names this objectively identifiable phenomenon. Conspiracy theories are
easy to spot because they posit secret plots that are too wacky to be
taken seriously. Indeed, the theories are deemed so far-fetched they
require no reply or rejoinder; they are objects of derision, not ideas
for discussion. In short, while analyzing the psychological appeal of
conspiracy beliefs and bemoaning their corrosive effects on public
trust, conspiracy deniers have taken the conspiracy-theory concept
itself for granted.
This is remarkable, not to say shocking, because the concept is both
fundamentally flawed and in direct conflict with American legal and
political traditions. As a label for irrational political suspicions
about secret plots by powerful people, the concept is obviously
defective because political conspiracies in high office do, in fact,
happen. Officials in the Nixon administration did conspire to steal the
1972 presidential election. Officials in the Reagan White House did
participate in a criminal scheme to sell arms to Iran and channel
profits to the Contras, a rebel army in Nicaragua. The Bush-Cheney
administration did collude to mislead Congress and the public about the
strength of its evidence for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. If some
conspiracy theories are true, then it is nonsensical to dismiss all
unsubstantiated suspicions of elite intrigue as false by definition.
This fatal defect in the conspiracy-theory concept makes it all the
more surprising that most scholars and journalists have failed to notice
that their use of the term to ridicule suspicions of elite political
criminality betrays the civic ethos inherited from the nation’s
Founders. From the nation’s beginning, Americans were fearful of secret
plots by political insiders to subvert constitutional governance. Those
who now dismiss conspiracy theories as groundless paranoia have
apparently forgotten that the United States was founded on a conspiracy theory.
The Declaration of Independence claimed that “a history of repeated
injuries and usurpations” by King George proved the king was plotting to
establish “an absolute tyranny over these states.” Today, most
Americans are familiar only with the Declaration’s opening paragraphs
about self-evident truths and inalienable rights, but if they were to
read the rest of the document, they would see that it is devoted to
detailing the abuses evincing the king’s tyrannical design. Among the
complaints listed are onerous taxation, fomenting slave rebellions and
Indian uprisings, taxation without representation, and indifference to
the colonies’ complaints. The document’s signers claimed it was this
“design to reduce them under absolute despotism,” not any or all of the
abuses themselves, that gave them the right and the duty “to throw off
such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”
The Founders considered political power a corrupting influence that
makes political conspiracies against the people’s interests and
liberties almost inevitable. They repeatedly and explicitly called for
popular vigilance against antidemocratic schemes in high office.
Educated in classical political philosophy, they understood that one of
the most important questions in Western political thought is how to
prevent top leaders from abusing their powers to impose arbitrary rule,
which the Founders referred to, appropriately, as “tyranny.” Whereas
Great Britain relied on common law to define the powers and procedures
of its government, the generation that established the American republic
developed a written constitution to set clear limits on public
officials. Nevertheless, they understood that all constitutions are
vulnerable to subversion because ultimately they are interpreted and
administered by public officials themselves. The Founders would view
today’s norms against conspiratorial suspicion as not only arrogant, but
also dangerous and un-American.
The Founders would also be shocked that conspiracy deniers attack and ridicule individuals who voice conspiracy beliefs and yet ignore institutional
purveyors of conspiratorial ideas even though the latter are the ideas
that have proven truly dangerous in modern American history. Since at
least the end of World War II, the citadel of theories alleging
nefarious political conspiracies has been, not amateur investigators of
the Kennedy assassination and other political crimes and tragedies, but
the United States government. In the first three decades of the
post–World War II era, U.S. officials asserted that communists were
conspiring to take over the world, that the U.S. bureaucracy was riddled
with Soviet spies, and that the civil rights and antiwar movements of
the 1960s were creatures of Soviet influence. More recently, they have
claimed that Iraq was complicit in 9/11, failed to dispose of its
biological weapons, and attempted to purchase uranium in Niger so it
could construct nuclear bombs. Although these ideas were untrue, they
influenced millions of Americans, fomented social panic, fueled wars,
and resulted in massive loss of life and destruction of property. If
conspiracy deniers are so concerned about the dangers of conspiratorial
suspicions in American politics and civic culture, why have they ignored
the conspiracism of U.S. politicians?
Finally, there is something very hypocritical about those who want to
fix people who do not share their opinions. Sunstein and Vermeule say
conspiracy believers need to have their discussions disrupted, because
they are dangerous. But what could be more dangerous than thinking it is
acceptable to mess with someone else’s thoughts? Sunstein and
Vermeule’s hypocrisy is breathtaking. They would have government
conspiring against citizens who voice suspicions about government
conspiracies, which is to say they would have government do precisely
what they want citizens to stop saying the government does. How do
Harvard law professors become snared in such Orwellian logic? One can
only assume that there must be something bedeviling about the idea of
conspiracy theory.
Naming the Taboo Topic
In what follows, I shall attempt to reorient analysis of the
phenomenon that has been assigned the derisive label of “conspiracy
theory.” In a 2006 peer-reviewed journal article, I introduced the
concept of State Crime against Democracy (SCAD) to displace the term
“conspiracy theory.” I say displace rather than replace because SCAD is
not another name for conspiracy theory; it is a name for the type of wrongdoing about which the conspiracy-theory label discourages us from speaking.
Basically, the term "conspiracy theory" is applied pejoratively to
allegations of official wrongdoing that have not been substantiated by
public officials themselves.
Deployed as a pejorative putdown, the label is a verbal defense
mechanism used by political elites to suppress mass suspicions that
inevitably arise when shocking political crimes benefit top leaders or
play into their agendas, especially when those same officials are in
control of agencies responsible for preventing the events in question or
for investigating them after they have occurred. It is only natural to
wonder about possible chicanery when a president and vice president bent
on war in the Middle East are warned of impending terrorist attacks and
yet fail to alert the American public or increase the readiness of the
nation’s armed forces. Why would Americans not expect answers when Arabs
with poor piloting skills manage to hijack four planes, fly them across
the eastern United States, somehow evade America’s multilayered system
of air defense, and then crash two of the planes into the Twin Towers in
New York City and one into the Pentagon in Washington, DC? By the same
token, it is only natural to question the motives of the president and
vice president when they drag their feet on investigating this seemingly
inexplicable defense failure and then, when the investigation is
finally conducted, they insist on testifying together, in secret, and
not under oath. Certainly, citizen distrust can be unwarranted and
overwrought, but often citizen doubts make sense. Americans are not
crazy to want answers when a president is assassinated by a lone gunman
with mediocre shooting skills who manages to get off several lucky shots
with an old bolt-action carbine that has a misaligned scope. Why would
there not be doubts when an alleged assassin is apprehended, publicly
claims he is just a patsy, is interrogated for two days but no one makes
a recording or even takes notes, and he is then shot to death at
point-blank range while in police custody at police headquarters?
Of course, some suspicions go too far. The idea that lizard-like
aliens from space are secretly infiltrating top positions in government
and business is ludicrous. However, the conspiracy-theory label makes
fun of conspiratorial suspicions in general. Consequently, the label discourages Americans from registering doubts about their leaders’ motives and actions regardless of the circumstances.
Any suspicions that public officials conspired to cause a tragedy or
allowed it to happen are dismissed without further discussion because,
supposedly, public officials simply do not engage in conspiracies.
Communication scientists Ginna Husting and Martin Orr, both of whom
are professors at Boise State University, have studied the use of the
conspiracy-theory label as a putdown. At the beginning of a
peer-reviewed 2007 article on the subject, they point out how the label
works rhetorically:
If I call you a conspiracy theorist, it matters little
whether you have actually claimed that a conspiracy exists or whether
you have simply raised an issue that I would rather avoid . . . I twist
the machinery of interaction so that you, not I, are now called to
account. In fact, I have done even more. By labeling you, I
strategically exclude you from the sphere where public speech, debate,
and conflict occur.
Husting and Orr go on to explain that the accusation of conspiracy
theory discredits any explanations offered for specific social or
historical events “regardless of the quality or quantity of evidence.”
The label has this discrediting, end-of-argument effect because
conspiracy theories have come to be seen as mere suspicions with no
basis in fact, not as reasonable inferences from circumstances and
evidence about matters of great importance.
In contrast, the SCAD construct does not refer to a type of allegation or suspicion; it refers to a special type of transgression: an attack from within on the political system’s organizing principles.
For these extremely grave crimes, America’s Founders used the term
“high crime” and included in this category treason and “conspiracies
against the people’s liberties.” SCADs, high crimes, and antidemocratic
conspiracies can also be called “elite political crimes” and “elite
political criminality.” The SCAD construct is intended, not to supersede
traditional terminology or monopolize conceptualization of this
phenomenon, but rather to add a descriptive term that captures, with
some specificity, the long-recognized potential for representative
democracy to be subverted by people on the inside—the very people who
have been entrusted to uphold the constitutional order.
SCADs are defined as concerted actions or inactions by government
insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes and undermine
popular sovereignty.] Examples of SCADs that have been officially proven
include the Watergate break-in and cover-up; the illegal arms sales and
covert operations in Iran-Contra; and the effort to discredit Joseph
Wilson by revealing his wife's status as an intelligence agent.
Many other political crimes in which involvement by high officials is
reasonably suspected have gone uninvestigated or have been investigated
only superficially. They are included in SCAD studies even when the
evidence of state complicity is contested, because excluding them would
mean accepting the judgment of individuals and institutions whose
rectitude and culpability are at issue. The nature of the subject matter
is such that official inquiries, if they are conducted at all, are
usually compromised by conflicts of interest. Hence the evidence must be
evaluated independently on its merits, and decisions must be made on a
case-by-case basis about which events are most likely elite political
crimes. Of course, as Husting and Orr point out, engaging the evidence
is precisely what the pejorative conspiracy-theory putdown is deployed
rhetorically to avoid.
SCADs constitute a special type of political criminality. Unlike
bribery, kickbacks, bid-rigging, and other, more mundane forms of
political corruption, which tend to be isolated and to affect only
pockets of government activity, SCADs have the potential to subvert
political institutions and entire governments or branches of government.
Committed at the highest levels of public office, they are crimes that
threaten democracy itself. Clearly, such crimes and the circumstances
that allow or encourage them warrant scientific study, both to better
understand elite politics and to identify institutional vulnerabilities
that can be corrected to make antidemocratic conspiracies less likely
and less likely to succeed. Hence, one would have expected elite
political crime, like white-collar crime, hate crime, and racketeering,
to have been singled out for research and theorizing by social
scientists long ago.
However, because powerful norms discourage Americans from questioning
the integrity of their top leaders, and because anyone who raises such
questions is likely to be seen as a “conspiracy theorist” who may be
mentally unbalanced, the topic has been almost completely ignored by
scholars. Social scientists have studied various forms of state crime,
but in almost every case the potential for public officials in liberal
democracies to subvert democratic institutions has been disregarded.
Political science research on Watergate, Iran-Contra, and other U.S.
political scandals has sidestepped questions about state criminality by
studying the use of congressional investigations and independent
prosecutors as political tactics in partisan competition.
Of course, a vast popular literature exists that presents a wide
range of conspiracy theories of domestic assassinations and other high
crimes, but the form of analysis employed, while careful and in many
ways insightful, is not really scientific. Amateur investigators have
uncovered important evidence overlooked by official inquiries, but, with
only one or two exceptions, they have failed to investigate the general
phenomenon of high criminality and instead have speculated about one
suspicious incident at a time. There is a body of work on the
assassination of President Kennedy, another on the events of 9/11, and
still others on the 1980 October Surprise, the disputed 2000
presidential election, and the anthrax letter attacks. To be sure, we do
learn a lot about each case; we learn a great deal, for example, about
the assassination of President Kennedy and the assassination of Martin
Luther King, but we learn next to nothing about assassinations in
general, such as their typical targets, tactics, and timing, nor do we
learn much about differences and similarities between assassinations and
false-flag terrorism as political tactics. By the same token, since we
learn little about the nature of elite political criminality in general,
we gain little insight into the extent, nature, and role of elite crime
and intrigue in American politics.
Perceptual Silos
The tendency to consider suspicious political events individually and
in isolation rather than collectively and comparatively is not limited
to the conspiracy-theory literature; it is built into the
conspiracy-theory label and has become a pervasive predisposition in
U.S. civic culture. For Americans, each assassination, each election
breakdown, each defense failure, each war justified by “mistaken” claims
is perceived as a unique event arising from its own special
circumstances. While Americans in the present generation have personally
witnessed many political crimes and tragedies, we see them as if
through a fly’s eye, situating each event in a separate compartment of
memories and context.
Even when obvious factors connect political crimes, the crimes are
thought of as disparate and unrelated. For example, John Kennedy and
Robert Kennedy were brothers; both were rivals of Richard Nixon and were
hated by Lyndon Johnson; their murders occurred less than five years
apart; both were killed while campaigning for the office of president;
and both appeared likely to win the upcoming presidential election.
Without their murders, neither Nixon nor Johnson would probably have
ever become president. Nevertheless, the assassinations of John and
Robert Kennedy are seen as entirely unrelated; parallels, if they are
recognized at all, are dismissed as coincidences. It is seldom
considered that the Kennedy assassinations might have been serial
murders.
In fact, in speaking about the murders, Americans rarely use the plural, Kennedy assassinations. In the lexicon, there is the Kennedy assassination (singular), which refers to the murder of President Kennedy, and there is the assassination of Robert
Kennedy. Clearly, this quirk in the Kennedy assassination(s) lexicon
reflects an unconscious effort by journalists, politicians, and millions
of ordinary Americans to avoid thinking about the two assassinations
together, despite the fact that the victims are connected in countless
ways and that they also deserve better—they deserve to be remembered as
brothers who stood for the same values and who were somehow struck down
by forces still beyond our grasp. This clever feat of keeping the
Kennedy assassinations singular and separate might be called linguistic
“compartmentalization,” for, by avoiding the plural of "assassination,"
we have unconsciously split and compartmentalized in our awareness
significantly related events.
For another example, consider how we compartmentalize our perceptions
of the disputed 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The election
breakdowns are not widely suspected of being repeat offenses by the same
network of political operatives employing the same tactics and
resources, even though both elections were plagued by very similar
problems, including inadequately equipped and staffed polling places in
heavily Democratic areas, computer anomalies in the tabulation of county
and state totals, highly partisan Republicans in charge of election
administration, aggregate vote tabulations benefiting George W. Bush,
and exit polls indicating that the other candidate had won rather than
Bush. The two elections are seen as separate and without any
forensically important parallels. No one called for statisticians to
review both elections for similar problems or signs of election
tampering. No one speaks of “the disputed Bush-Cheney elections,” or of
“the back-to-back election disputes,” or even simply of the plural,
“election breakdowns.”
A slightly different example of this phenomenon of
compartmentalization is offered by contemporary perceptions of, on the
one hand, the hijacked-airplane attacks on September 11, 2001, and on
the other hand, the anthrax letter attacks that began a few weeks later.
Today, 9/11 and the anthrax mailings are cognitively dissociated even
though initially they were thought to be closely connected. It made
sense to think they were connected because they shared many
characteristics: they occurred closely together in time; both were acts
of terrorism; both targeted private individuals as well as government
officials; and both exploited essential services (commercial air travel
and the postal service). In fact, for the first few months, the anthrax
letter attacks were blamed on the terrorist group that was assumed to
have carried out the hijacked-airplane attacks on the Twin Towers and
the Pentagon.
Soon, however, the FBI investigation reached the conclusion that the
anthrax came from a strain developed by the U.S. military at the Army
Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick,
Maryland. This discovery should have caused investigators and the public
to wonder if the events of 9/11 might likewise have been connected in
some way to the U.S. military. Alarm bells should also have sounded
when, shortly after the anthrax letter attacks were discovered, the FBI
authorized the destruction of a rare collection of anthrax samples at
Iowa State University. According to scientists, this made it much more
difficult to trace the anthrax in the letters to domestic laboratories.
However, rather than look for connections between the anthrax case, the
9/11 hijackings, and what appears to have been an effort to prevent the
domestic origins of the anthrax from being discovered, everyone just
dropped the anthrax attacks from consideration as a terrorist threat.
Talk of duct tape ended. In effect, the anthrax letter attacks were
quickly sealed off cognitively, and awareness of their domestic origins
did not have to be reconciled with what Americans later learned about
9/11—about the warnings President Bush received in his daily briefing in
August 2001; about the war games that were scheduled on 9/11, some of
which included hijacked airplanes and interfered with the response to
the real hijackings; about the expedited flights of Osama bin Laden’s
relatives . . . The list could go on. The point is that the domestic
origins of the anthrax became a side story, and yet, at the time the
anthrax letters were being received and people were being infected, the
anthrax attacks appeared to be an integral part of a war on America.
But once the anthrax was traced to Fort Detrick, the fear was
relieved and the crime was mentally cordoned off. There were no calls
for investigators to look for U.S. military personnel with multiple
connections to air defense, war games, and germ warfare. There was never
any effort to identify government officials who were involved in
national defense policy and who owned or had recently purchased stock in
pharmaceutical companies that manufactured medicines for preventing or
treating anthrax infections. To the contrary, rather than look for
people linking anthrax, 9/11, air defense, and biological weapons, the
investigation was narrowed to lone microbiologists who were considered
to be disgruntled, emotionally troubled, or opportunistic.
Causes and Consequences
It should be stressed that this way of thinking about elite political
crimes—this very common tendency to view parallel crimes separately and
to see them as disparate and unrelated—is exactly opposite the way crimes committed by regular people are treated.
If a man marries a wealthy woman and she dies in a freak accident at
home, people would be suspicious simply because she was wealthy and the
accident was improbable. If this same man then marries another wealthy
woman who dies in a freak accident at home, foul play would naturally be
suspected, and the husband would be the leading suspect in the wives’
demise. If the husband had taken out a life insurance policy on either
wife a few weeks or months prior to the accidents, it would be
considered circumstantial evidence of foreknowledge. If police failed to
recognize the obvious similarities in the wives’ deaths, they would be
considered incompetent, negligent, or bought off.
It is routine police protocol to look for patterns in burglaries,
bank robberies, car thefts, and other crimes, and to use any patterns
that are discovered as clues to the perpetrators’ identity and the
vulnerabilities to crime that are being exploited. This method of crime
analysis is shown repeatedly in crime shows on TV. It is Criminology
101. There is no excuse for most Americans, much less criminal
investigators, journalists, and other professionals, to fail to apply
this method to assassinations, election fiascos, defense failures, and
other suspicious events that shape national political priorities.
Why do we compartmentalize crimes involving political elites while
doing just the opposite with the crimes of ordinary people? At least two
factors discourage us from connecting the dots in elite political
criminality. One is the term "conspiracy theory," which is applied to
crimes that have major political consequences but not to other crimes.
The conspiracy-theory phrase encourages cognitive compartmentalization
because the phrase is not meant to apply to interconnected crimes. In
American public discourse, multiple crimes planned and committed by a
single group are generally called “organized crime,” not conspiracies.
The term “conspiracy” is reserved for plots surrounding one major
criminal objective and for the networks that come together for that
purpose. The Mafia is not a conspiracy; it is an organization. A
conspiracy theory about the assassination of President Kennedy is
implicitly a theory about a temporary combination of plotters, not an
enduring assassination squad or lethal criminal organization. Therefore,
even if we think the assassination of John Kennedy was a conspiracy,
and we think the assassination of Robert Kennedy was a conspiracy, we
are nevertheless unlikely to see the two as connected, because the
conspiracy concept envisions them as isolated, self-contained schemes.
The second factor impeding us from drawing connections between
political crimes involving political elites is that looking for
connections requires being suspicious to begin with, and yet being
suspicious of political elites violates norms that are embodied in the
pejorative connotations of the conspiracy-theory label. As shown by our
speech habits and observation tendencies about assassinations, disputed
elections, and terrorist attacks, we are averse to talking about such
events as connected in any way.
This aversion is learned. Americans know that voicing suspicions
about political elites will make them objects of hostility and derision.
The verbal slaps vary, but they are difficult to counter because they
usually abuse reason. For example, in using the conspiracy-theory label
as a putdown, conspiracy deniers imply that official accounts of troubling events are something altogether much more solid than conspiratorial suspicions—as
if official accounts are in some sense without speculation or
presuppositions. In fact, however, conspiracy deniers and debunkers are
relying on an unstated theory of their own—a very questionable theory.
In the post-WWII era, official investigations have attributed
assassinations, election fiascos, defense failures, and other suspicious
events to such unpredictable, idiosyncratic forces as lone gunmen,
antiquated voting equipment, bureaucratic bumbling, innocent mistakes,
and, in the case of 9/11 (to quote the 9/11 Commission, p. 339), a
“failure of imagination.” In effect, official accounts of suspicious
events have answered conspiracy theories with coincidence theories.
Far from being more factual and plausible than theories positing
political crimes and intrigues, coincidence theories become less and
less plausible as coincidences pile up, which they have been doing for
decades in the U.S. It is like flipping a coin ten times and it always
falls on heads. In general, as SCADs and suspected SCADs pile up, the
odds of coincidence drop rapidly. The Bush-Cheney ticket winning in one
or two states despite exit polls indicating they had lost could have
been the result of random variations in exit poll samples. When the same
thing happens in state after state; when the difference between exit
polls and election returns almost always favors the same candidates, the
odds of this being by chance alone are astronomically low. This does
not necessarily mean the elections were stolen, but it does mean
something caused the election returns to differ from how voters said
they voted.
The CIA’s Conspiracy-Theory Conspiracy
If political conspiracies in high office do, in fact, happen; if it
is therefore unreasonable to assume conspiracy theories are, by
definition, harebrained and paranoid; if the Declaration of Independence
is a conspiracy theory; if the United States was founded on a
conspiracy theory that alleged King George was plotting to take away the
colonists’ rights; if the conspiracy-theory label makes it difficult to
see connections between political crimes that, in fact, may be
connected; if, because it ridicules suspicion, the conspiracy-theory
label is inconsistent with the traditional American ethos of vigilance
against conspiracies in high office; if, in summary, the
conspiracy-theory label blinkers perceptions, silos thinking, and is
un-American and unreasonable, how did the label come to be used so widely to begin with?
Most Americans will be shocked to learn that the
conspiracy-theory label was popularized as a pejorative term by the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a propaganda program initiated in
1967. This program was directed at criticisms of the Warren
Commission’s report. The propaganda campaign called on media
corporations and journalists to criticize “conspiracy theorists” and
raise questions about their motives and judgments. The CIA told its
contacts that “parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately
generated by Communist propagandists.” In the shadows of McCarthyism and
the Cold War, this warning about communist influence was delivered
simultaneously to hundreds of well-positioned members of the press in a
global CIA propaganda network, infusing the conspiracy-theory label with
powerfully negative associations.
The Rest of the Book
Conspiracy Theory in America is about the transformation
of America's civic culture from the Founders’ hard-nosed realism about
elite political intrigue to today’s blanket condemnation of conspiracy
beliefs as ludicrous by definition. This cultural reversal did not occur
spontaneously; it was planned and orchestrated by the government
itself. The impetus for the change originated in obscure debates in
political philosophy during World War II, and in the secret world of
espionage and intrigue that has become a permanent threat at the heart
of American government. The conspiracy-theory label intentionally
suppresses discussion of the issue of where, if at all, secrecy,
domestic surveillance, and government propaganda campaigns fit in
American democracy.
The rest of the book is divided into six chapters, each of which
focuses on a particular aspect of, or premise about, conspiracy belief
that is particularly important to the restoration of our anti-tyranny
sensibilities but has been overlooked in the conspiracy-theory
literature, public discourse, or both.
Chapter 1 highlights the decisive role played by unstated and
untested conventional beliefs in determining what counts as a conspiracy
theory in the pejorative sense of the term. It turns out that, in the
hands of conspiracy deniers, what counts as a conspiracy theory depends,
not, as the label suggests, on an allegation’s form and subject matter
as a hypothesis about a secret plot, but on its relation to conventional
beliefs about the motives and integrity of political elites. Conspiracy
theories about the Mafia in America or politicians in Russia are fine;
the same theories directed at U.S. politicians are supposedly ludicrous
and paranoid.
Chapter 2 challenges the widely shared view that representative
democracy depends on public trust and civility, both of which conspiracy
theories supposedly erode. The chapter focuses on the important role
the Founders believed is played in representative democracy by
distrust—citizen distrust of their elected officials, and officials’
distrust of one another. The chapter examines the role of conspiratorial
suspicions in the political science of the Founders and in the
application of that science to the U.S. Constitution and to nineteenth-
and twentieth-century political reforms. Suspicion is written into and
energizes the constitutional system of checks and balances, which
displays the Founders’ method of dividing and separating powers,
dispersing vetoes, and requiring cooperation for authoritative action.
The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the legal concept of
conspiracy was applied for the first time to governments and political
organizations in the Nuremberg war crimes trials, which, in part, were
intended to instruct the German people about their responsibility as
citizens in a parliamentary democracy to be constantly vigilant against
efforts in high office to expand, extend, and consolidate power.
Chapter 3 shows that the intellectual foundations for the shift to
conspiracy denial were laid during and shortly after World War II. In
the early decades of the twentieth century, one of the nation’s leading
historians and political scientists was Charles Beard, who was famous
for exposing elite schemes to sew advantages for the wealthy into the
U.S. Constitution. In the shadow of the world war, however, two European
political philosophers—Karl Popper and Leo Strauss—placed much of the
blame for totalitarianism, World War II, and the Holocaust on forms of
conspiratorial theorizing that fueled social prejudice and undermined
respect for authority. As Popper and Strauss’ ideas entered universities
and influenced teaching and research, conspiracy theories of all kinds
came to be lumped together and condemned, including plausible suspicions
of crimes in high office.
Chapter 4 explicates the assumptions and implications of the CIA
propaganda program that spread the terms “conspiracy theory” and
“conspiracy theorist” and gave them pejorative connotations. The label’s
use and connotations are tracked in the New York Times and Time
magazine. Evidence is presented that connects specific negative
connotations of the conspiracy-theory label directly to the CIA program.
Chapter 5 turns to theory and research on State Crimes against
Democracy (SCADs) in the United States. SCAD research is introduced
alongside examples in the history of science where scientific
discoveries have overcome mistaken but seemingly irrefutable
perceptions, such as the perception that the earth is stationary rather
than spinning on its axis. The analysis of SCADs highlights a number of
commonalities in SCAD targets, timing, tactics, and policy consequences.
These patterns were previously unrecognized because of
compartmentalization in people’s perceptions of high crime. The SCAD
patterns point to military and military-industrial interests as likely
suspects in SCADs that foment social panic, encourage militarism, and
are associated with wars. SCAD timing, targets, and policy consequences
also suggest that the capabilities of national security agencies are
being drawn into U.S. domestic politics by the White House. The chapter
concludes by applying lessons from SCAD research to 9/11 and the anthrax
letter attacks, raising questions about possible U.S. foreknowledge,
the language of the war on terror, and the connection between the name
“9/11” and the U.S. telephone number for emergencies (9-1-1).
Chapter 6 considers the possibilities for strengthening popular
sovereignty and the rule of law in American democracy. The proliferation
of SCADs in the post–World War II era is attributed to several related
factors, chief among them the political class’s growing sense that both
the Constitution and the people are impediments to policies needed to
protect the nation in an age of weapons of mass destruction and ruthless
enemies. Also important is the popular view, seldom acknowledged
publicly but seemingly widely shared, that occasional government crimes
are acceptable if they help keep America safe. These ideas are shown to
be naïve and mistaken in assuming that liberty and democracy can endure
when enjoyed partially. SCADs are not occasional deviations from popular
sovereignty; they start wars, steal elections, shift the nation’s
direction, and foment fear and hatred. The chapter recommends statutory
reforms to encourage aggressive investigations of high crimes and allow
independent law enforcement professionals to do their jobs. In large
part this is what goes missing when top leaders appoint blue ribbon
panels and investigative commissions. When it comes to SCADs, the people
who insist that the laws and rules be enforced are frontline personnel.