After the Civil War, Southern white men plunged into a campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing against the former slaves. The Democrats—then the party of white supremacy—blinked away the violence, which one Illinois newspaper described as “bogus outrages” manufactured by Republicans. Still, for all its tribal horrors, the politics of that era remained tethered to a rough if contested reality—a sharp contrast to our own tribal days (Morone Reference Muirhead2020).
Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum have never been alarmists. Muirhead’s last book was a brief for partisanship, and Rosenblum famously saw the spirit of Tocqueville stirring even in dubious groups like armed militias (Muirhead Reference Rosenblum2014; Rosenblum Reference Rosenblum2008). But now they have written a fretful warning about democracy in peril. An unprecedented form of conspiracy mongering has exploded onto the political scene, they write, with new conspiracists flinging around charges without evidence, without proof, without theory. President Barack Obama is a Muslim from Kenya! Millions of illegal voters cast ballots! Hilary Clinton (and Bill Gates and Oprah) run a child sex ring out of the Comet Ping-Pong pizzeria! The bogus claims are validated by nothing more than repetition—by retweets, Facebook likes, and roars at rallies.
A Lot of People Are Saying offers us a tour (de force) through the dark side of political speech, carefully demarcating the boundaries between the new conspiracism and the more familiar shadowlands of lies, demagoguery, bullshit, and old-fashioned conspiracies. Muirhead and Rosenblum offer a fascinating relative defense of traditional conspiracies (they slip into a couple themselves, for example, blaming dark money for Republican environmental attitudes). And they adroitly spin out the perilous consequences of the new conspiracism: disorientation, an assault on expertise, the sneering rejection of compromise, and an erosion of democracy itself.
Muirhead and Rosenblum have identified a new kind of speech, found it rooted in social media, and warn that it corrodes our very community. Their book is a bracing read that illuminates our politics and our times. But I want to step back and ask four questions about the roots of the new conspiracism and the role it actually plays in American politics.
Does the new conspiracism really matter? Try a thought experiment. Imagine that the new conspiracism did not exist at all: there were no birthers, no Pizzagate, and no looming invasion of Texas. President Trump and his ilk would be reduced to more traditional bloviation—lies, bigotry, spin, innuendo, and exaggeration. Would anything be different? As Muirhead and Rosenblum note, citizens respond to the new conspiracism as a signal of tribal identity. And for that, it seems to me, old-fashioned lies and demagoguery would serve just as well. Perhaps the crazy conspiracies are simply one manifestation of the deeper problem, a tribal clash convulsing the nation.
Where does the new conspiracism come from? Muirhead and Rosenblum do not dwell on the Republican Party’s long journey into this miasma. Back in 2004, journalist Ron Suskind was startled when an aide to President George W. Bush (probably Karl Rove, although he denies it) scoffed that reporters were trapped in the “reality-based community” where “solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” You can toss your “empiricism” and “enlightenment,” chuckled Rove. “We create our own reality.” Much of what Muirhead and Rosenblum describe was disorienting us two decades ago (Suskind Reference Suskind2005).
Where does the new tribalism come from? Our dilemma lies, ultimately, in an unprecedented twist in America’s ferocious culture wars. Traditionally, each party embraced (and, alternately, spurned) a different liminal group. The Democrats welcomed immigrants and stuck ballots in their hands almost before they had recovered from their ocean crossing; the Republicans (and, before them, the Whigs) once upon a time housed abolitionists and gender rights activists. No party ever gathered all of these so-called minorities into one political coalition—until the Democrats slowly did so between 1936 (when African Americans began to switch parties) and 2000 (when Asian Americans did). Republicans gleefully responded by gathering whites, nativists, and social conservatives all fearful of declining status. For the first time, the parties now mainline the deepest cultural conflicts in American history right into politics (Morone Reference Muirhead2020).
The Census Bureau tossed a statistical stick of dynamite into the mix after the 2000 census: the United States would likely become majority minority in a generation. As Mickey, Levitsky, and Way (Reference Mickey, Steven and Lucan2017) argue, no democracy has ever had to negotiate a change in its racial or ethnic majority. Ultimately, A Lot of People Are Saying documents one consequence of the tribal war that accompanies the transition to what may be a new American majority.
What about the Democrats? There is another division running through American society that reinforces the tribal conflict and exacerbates the new conspiracism. A global economy powerfully rewards college graduates trained to think abstractly—and leaves everyone else behind. Today, political speech reflects the same stark divide between the haves and have-nots.
Democrats design and defend their policies in wonky, economistic language—good luck parsing Clinton Care or Obamacare or cap and trade or the Transpacific Partnership without a lot of education. The technocratic turn in policy excludes broad publics from the democratic conversation and stimulates this latest recrudescence of the long populist, anti-intellectual tradition. Of course, governance requires expertise. But enacting democracy, as Muirhead and Rosenblum urge us to do, requires clear talk about programs and values.
Muirhead and Rosenblum brilliantly excavate a new kind of speech, driven by tribalism, with a long history among Republicans, and unwittingly exacerbated by wonky Democrats. The authors offer a fair start at resistance by urging us to “enact democracy.” Doing so will require the party of government, its many advisers, and the kinds of people who read journals like this to talk about policy in the straight language of values, choices, and obligations. Technical details are indispensable, but we let them eclipse straightforward discourse at our own peril—as A Lot of People Are Saying so clearly shows.
