Trying to understand the particular “age of conspiracy” that Americans find themselves in today is a quite puzzling problem. On the one hand, conspiracy thinking, broadly understood, is largely a benign political influence. Yet, on the other hand, we are undoubtedly living through a politically charged and conspiratorial world. One need only Google the following phrases to enter the active world of conspiracy theories today: “Pizzagate,” “QAnon,” and “Flat Earth.” How can we square this circle? For Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum, the authors of A Lot of People Are Saying, one way to make sense of this “disorienting” world is by understanding that there’s an “old conspiracism” and a “new conspiracism.” Put succinctly, whereas old conspiracism uses “theories” in an attempt to explain the world around us—by providing explanations for errant data, closure for unsolved cases, and the like—“new conspiracism” replaces evidence and theories of explanation with assertions and innuendos (p. 27). Where old conspiracists would try to reconstruct Lee Harvey Oswald’s time in Dallas, new conspiracists would simply allude to a political opponent being involved in JFK’s assassination. There is no evidentiary “there there” for the new conspiracist, only an assertion that “seems true enough” (pp. 55–56).

Where scholars looking into old conspiracism found a largely benign political influence, Muirhead and Rosenblum see significant political consequences with the rise of new conspiracism. It is their clarity on this point that really pushes the entire literature forward: conspiracy thinking by itself does not an authoritarian, populist, or neo-fascist make. Instead of a programmatic critique, new conspiracism erodes the political-epistemological foundations of liberal democratic constitutionalism. As Muirhead and Rosenblum put it, new conspiracists seize on the fact that “knowledge is not a set of static facts, but a negotiation.” Although old conspiracism certainly pushes the boundaries of what many would consider credible science— think of the “Scholars for 9/11 Truth” or “Flat Earth” conventions with panels and demonstrations—new conspiracism attempts to destroy the entire enterprise of Enlightenment science and “common sense” (pp. 122–23, 126, 127). For Muirhead and Rosenblum, new conspiracism is not dangerous because it is necessarily populist or nationalistic or authoritarian, but because it lays the groundwork for these “extremist” regimes by delegitimating the epistemological and ontological foundations of political liberalism and constitutionalism.

For most political scientists interested in parties, partisanship, and conspiracy thinking, the chapters and sections of the book where Muirhead and Rosenblum discuss the role that parties play in a healthy democracy and how they are under assault by “new conspiracism” are particularly important. Drawing on previous works on party and partisanship, Muirhead and Rosenblum make the compelling point that, even though there is a strong correlation today between new conspiracism and the Republican Party, new conspiracism is largely “antiparty” (pp. 76, 86). It is political insofar as it is a major vehicle for antiparty sentiment today, which undermines political parties—one of the major institutions for an effective democratic politics (p. 63). This is one of the major contributions to the literature: showing how conspiracy thinking relates to a certain kind of political identity that may itself be covered over in our normal measures (i.e., new conspiracists may be Republicans not because they are truly Republican but because the Republican elite have adopted the antiparty sentiment; pp. 95–98).

I take the crux of the book to be the following conclusion: “new conspiracism,” with its antiparty logic, wants to “end politics” by delegitimating pluralism as a necessary element of political life (p. 132). What Muirhead and Rosenblum describe as the political dangers of the “new conspiracism” mirrors the consequences of “political extremism,” as described in Rosenblum’s On the Side of the Angels (2008). In that book, Rosenblum paints the following picture of “extremism” and “extremist” politicians: “they pledge themselves to ignore the facts” (p. 406); “extremists tend to be indignant and inquisitorial and to brand opponents as abject, stupid, or traitors to ideals” (p. 409); and, finally, “with its single-mindedness, its violation of inclusiveness, comprehensiveness, and disposition to compromise, extremism is tyrannical and despotic” (p. 409). Likewise, in A Lot of People Are Saying, Muirhead and Rosenblum characterize “new conspiracism”—although not itself despotic—as paving the way for despotism and extremism by precisely ignoring facts, science, and experts and asserting a new reality (p. 170), branding political opposition as existential enemies (pp. 90–92), and undermining the institutions of parties themselves as anything other than the vehicle of the “true” (as opposed to “fake”) voice of the people (p. 86). What the extremist wants, “new conspiracism” delivers: it clears the ground for a new reality to be constructed on the ruins of the old pluralist regime—in short, the end of politics (pp. 122–23).

Of course, Muirhead and Rosenblum are no doubt well aware of the connections between their concept of new conspiracism and partisan extremism, but in the book it is not clear how these are truly separate concepts: in light of this account of extremism, “new conspiracism” is not so much a natural extension of “old conspiracism,” but instead is a powerful rhetorical tool in the extremist’s arsenal. Indeed, when Lincoln famously asserted in his first debate with Douglas that the South was conspiring to spread slavery all over the country and reassert it in the North, was Lincoln acting like a “new conspiracist”? Or was he an “old” conspiracy theorist giving voice to antiparty sentiment (see Rosenblum’s On the Side of the Angels, p. 105)?

This is not to say that what Muirhead and Rosenblum call “new conspiracism” is not an accurate description of contemporary America, or that their unique account of the assault that conspiracy thinking can have on democratic foundations is wrong. Rather, my point is that “new conspiracism” is not a warning of the future collapse of the democratic regime under extremist assault, but a confirmation that we are in the middle of that collapse. Regardless of the precise relationship between party extremism and new conspiracism, Muirhead and Rosenblum are right that liberal democracy needs to be defended—we perhaps only disagree about how much time we have left to prepare. They are also right that perhaps the most shocking failure of the liberal democratic system was that it produced a sense of complacency and relied perhaps too much on its post–World War II laurels (p. 166). They are also right—and this should be convincing to future researchers—to focus on the political-epistemological foundations of democracy as the weakest parts of the American regime. Whether it is the rise of a “new conspiracism” or the resurgence of party extremism, today’s American politics is indeed “disorienting.”