The preeminent midcentury American historian Richard Hofstadter did not create a field of “conspiracy theory studies” with his mid-1960s article “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” but he set the terms for future discussion about the phenomenon, suggesting both that conspiracy theories are pathological and that they have long been a part of American populist movements. The phenomenon’s persistence and a new generation of academics’ interest in challenging Hofstadter’s framework inspired the emergence of a new interdisciplinary field over the past two decades, complete with conferences, cross-national comparative work, and academic monographs. The initial new wave came in the wake of Oliver Stone’s film JFK and television’s The X-Files, as well as the various theories surrounding Bill Clinton and the Clintons’ own pushback against the “vast right-wing conspiracy” organized against them. The 9/11 Truth movement carried the phenomenon into the new century, while the 2016 presidential election featured the ascendancy of Donald Trump, the leading spokesman for the so-called “birther” movement, as GOP nominee. The conspiratorial tendencies of American populism remain as pronounced as ever and cry out for further academic treatment.
Academic monographs of the new wave had skewed toward cultural historians and cultural studies scholars until the political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent produced American Conspiracy Theories. A descriptive work that eschews marginalizing conspiracy theories and prescribing reform, the book claims to take two important steps forward for the literature: a theoretical one that will offer “generalizable knowledge” (p. 9), which the existing literature fails to provide, and empirical data sets that, the authors claim, support their theoretical claims and can serve as a foundation and model for future work. The book’s lasting academic impact will rest on the extent to which its theoretical and empirical claims shape our understanding of the phenomenon.
The most important innovation of American Conspiracy Theories is its concept of “conspiratorial predisposition,” the notion that some individuals, for a variety of reasons, tend to believe in the existence of a conspiracy. The predisposition has no necessary politics, appearing among leftists and conservatives. The concept seems intuitively correct for anyone who has found him- or herself reading conspiratorial and radical literature, and it helps explain the remarkable stickiness of conspiratorial theorizing across generations and even centuries in American politics. No matter the fact that they have been broadly disproved or only narrowly confirmed, conspiracy theories and theorists stubbornly persist on the margins and, on occasion, in the mainstream. Combining literatures on the emotional response to political events, broad notions of ideology, and the sociology of group identity, the book can help us understand conspiracy theory as an omnipresent phenomenon.
As a work of political science, this book aims to move beyond mere description, however, into the question of cause. Here, it is less persuasive. Part of the problem is the question of agency: At the individual and group level, is a “predisposition” a choice or merely a response to external stimuli? The authors appear to suggest it is both: On the one hand, “conspiracy theories ignite when socialized motive meets political opportunity,” while on the other, they are “a manifestation of vulnerability, a symptom of heightened danger from powerful actors” (p. 17). Believers have been “inculcated to see the world through a conspiratorial prism,” and once they find “political circumstances [that] highlight vulnerabilities to a group’s position,” they allow their cognitive predisposition to see conspiracy to kick in (p. 20). In this regard, the authors repeatedly claim (tongue planted somewhat in cheek) that “conspiracy theories are for losers.”
This begs a key question, however: Is Donald Trump a loser? Is Hillary Clinton, when she speaks of the vast right-wing conspiracy? Is the Tea Party movement, at its more paranoid? Or are the “losers” merely their followers? This is a definitional question not of the content of conspiracy theories, which the authors provide, but of those who constitute the theorists—the hardcore authors and believers or the median Americans who may be willing to contemplate a conspiracy’s existence at different times and to varying degrees when they feel vulnerable (whether or not they are objectively vulnerable). The authors thus simultaneously seem to describe both a marginal and a mainstream phenomenon. If a majority of Americans are “predisposed” to conspiracy theory, then the authors’ conceptual work, and especially their notion that conspiracy theorizing is simply relegated to “losers,” seems miscast or at least confusingly labeled. Either we are all losers or conspiracy theories are as much a mainstream rhetorical device as they are a marginal political phenomenon. This is a complex question, for which political science’s empirical bent might help us figure out.
The answer, the authors claim, lies in their data sets. One is a poll of 1,230 Internet users—certainly an informative way into the issue. By itself, however, it is unlikely to provide the foundation for a new theory of conspiracy theorists, especially as it is limited to a particular sample of users at one moment in time that self-reports their beliefs and a limited array of their behaviors. A second, more fraught, study is of letters to the editor published between 1890 and 2010 in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune that appear to concern conspiracies, defined broadly. This is a qualitatively fascinating snapshot into fringe and mainstream concerns throughout the period, and the book’s list of sample plots from across 120 years offers a bizarre and sometimes hilarious history of periodic obsessions. But what do these letters tell us quantitatively? To the authors, they demonstrate that we are in a relatively quiet period for conspiracy theories, since fewer appear in recent years than in the past. But can we trust this as evidence? The authors’ literature review of other studies that have relied upon letters to the editor is quite unpersuasive for their historical argument, as the best of them focus on letters published in a narrow period of time that concern high-salience, single issues. Can we assume that as newspapers and the news industry have changed over more than a century, the selection process for their letters page remains identical or at least close? Are the published letters of one period as representative of public opinion and conspiracy belief as those of another? The authors barely analyze their third data set, a content analysis of news posts that mention “conspiracy theory” over a 12-month period between 2012 and 2013. A monograph that promises to at least make dramatic strides toward explaining a complex social and political phenomenon and to move the field beyond where previous qualitative studies have gone needs more support than this one provides.
Another problem is the authors’ understandable effort to appear nonpartisan and unaligned in stressing that conspiracy theories can come from the Left and Right. Their repeated equivalence of left and right and Democrat and Republican fails to adequately note how the powerful political institutions of the Right have demonstrated far greater willingness—whether during the McCarthy era or the present—to espouse conspiracy than those of the Left. Whereas only a handful of marginal Democrats embraced the 9/11 Truth movement, the GOP nominated Donald Trump (whose campaign ventured wider into conspiratorial territory than the birth certificate), and the vast majority of party leaders refused to denounce the theories he espoused during the campaign. Whatever one thinks of Bernie Sanders’ and Elizabeth Warren’s populist claim that the financial system is rigged against the working class, they are not equivalent to Donald Trump’s claims that the president was born in Kenya or that Ted Cruz’s father was present for President Kennedy’s assassination.
The first chapters are an excellent, level-headed introduction to the field, and their discussion of polling data is insightful and helpful. Political scientists should take conspiracy theories seriously, and the book’s final chapter rightly takes a humble approach to the notion that the phenomenon constitutes a pathology that should and can be “cured.” But the empirical studies do not persuasively support the authors’ claims to have solved the most vexing riddles concerning who believes in conspiracy theories and why. As a student of conspiracy theories who takes a qualitative approach, I look forward to further studies from these authors and other political scientists that can help us understand this complex phenomenon.
