That democratic regimes are in trouble worldwide is common wisdom today. Not by chance, academics and pundits alike are advancing novel theories to explain why we seem to be witnessing dark times for democracy. Russell Muirhead’s and Nancy Rosenblum’s book can be seen as one of these intellectual efforts. The specificity of their approach lies in the proposition that a new form of conspiratorial thinking is one of the major threats to democracy today.

Before raising some critiques of the book, I would like to describe its central argument, which is quite novel and interesting indeed. According to Muirhead and Rosenblum, the new conspiracism is different and much more dangerous than classic conspiracism. The latter is characterized by the elaboration of theoretical arguments and empirical inquiries that permit one to make sense of the political world. Put briefly, classic conspiracism hinges on the development of theories that present a comprehensive narrative of events, whereby allegedly secret machinations are identified and explanations for political phenomena are offered. By contrast, the new conspiracism advances no theory because it “dispenses with the burden of explanation. Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture: ‘A lot of people are saying…’ … What validates the new conspiracism is not evidence but repetition” (p. 3). This new type of conspiracism— which the authors label “conspiracism without theory”—comes not out of the blue but is rather the byproduct of structural transformations of contemporary societies, in particular the revolution in broadcast technology. The latter “has displaced the gatekeepers, the producers, editors, and scholars who decided what was worthy of dissemination. The way is opened for conspiracy entrepreneurs who initiate and disseminate a seemingly infinite array of wild accusations” (p. 40).

There is no doubt that the distinction between classic conspiracism and the new conspiracism is not only quite interesting, but also helpful when trying to understand Donald Trump and his continuous efforts to create his own reality. The book analyzes many fascinating episodes that vividly exemplify the ways in which Trump’s presidency adopts the new conspiracism to attack its opponents and mobilize its supporters. However, Muirhead’s and Rosenblum’s approach is centered on the case of the United States and at times has parochial tendencies. Of course, undertaking a detailed analysis of one case study is no misstep per se. As John Gerring (Reference Gerring2004) has persuasively argued, case studies can be very powerful for the development of new theories that can be used to analyze other realities. Unfortunately, such is not the case with Muirhead’s and Rosenblum’s book, because the authors provide an analysis of the current situation in the United States that in my opinion fails to grasp the distinctiveness of the current US political system from a comparative perspective. Given that the authors put little effort into situating Donald Trump’s coming to power and his administration in a broader comparative fashion, they are unable to shed enough light on issues that are crucial to better understanding the critical situation in which US democracy finds itself today.

The main area in which the absence of a comparative approach to analyzing the US political system becomes evident is in the understanding of the Republican Party presented in the book. Although most of the examples of new conspiracism are centered on Trump and his presidency, the authors do point out instances orchestrated by key figures in the GOP, such as Ted Cruz (pp. 104–6), James Inhofe (p. 107), Rand Paul (pp. 102–3), and Marco Rubio (p. 91). Muirhead and Rosenblum argue in passing—rather than in a systematic way—that in the United States the new conspiracism “has a partisan penumbra that aligns with the extreme right” (p. 148). Seen in this light, the new conspiracism that US democracy is experiencing today did not start with Trump, but rather with the transformation of the Republican Party into a far-right political entity. Because US observers are not accustomed to studying their own reality in comparative perspective, they often pay little attention—or sometimes completely ignore—the fact that the GOP today is anything but a mainstream right party (Roberts Reference Roberts, Weyland and Madrid2019). This means that the new conspiracism that the authors identify is probably something inherent to the populist radical right but is not as compatible with the mainstream right. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that in Europe key figures of Christian Democratic parties, such as Angela Merkel in Germany, or of Liberal parties—Emmanuel Macron in France—would be willing to adopt the new conspiracism. On the contrary, the connection between the new conspiracism and populist radical-right leaders such as Bolsonaro in Brazil, Erdoğan in Turkey, or Orbán in Hungary is quite evident. Nevertheless, Muirhead and Rosenblum pay insufficient attention to the singularity of the Republican Party in comparative perspective. For instance, the authors are right in claiming that John McCain was one of the few figures within the GOP establishment to openly criticize the new conspiracism (p. 150), but they forget to mention that none other than John McCain nominated Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate for the 2008 election. This is not a minor point. By giving visibility to one of the main voices of the Tea Party movement, McCain ended up stimulating the transformation of the Republican Party into the party it is today (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser Reference Mudde and Kaltwasser2017).

Last, but not least, another problem of the book is that it provides little clarity about the sources of the new conspiracism in the United States. At moments one has the impression that this is a top-down phenomenon, because the authors maintain that GOP leaders invest time and energy in employing the “a lot of people are saying” mantra. However, the authors also argue from time to time that the new conspiracism is a bottom-up phenomenon, when they show that voters and entrepreneurs believe in, create, and disseminate “fake news.” This ambivalence is probably related to the fact that the authors hold that the new conspiracism follows both a bottom-up and a top-down dynamic. If this argument is true, then, dealing with the new conspiracism is a mammoth task, and the solutions offered by the authors in the concluding chapter (pp. 166–76) have little chance of success. After all, is it hard to believe that enacting democracy and speaking truth to conspiracy— the two responses proposed by the authors— are the ways to confront the far-right character of the Republican Party.