Showing posts with label Democracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Democracy. Show all posts

Monday, April 21, 2025

The End of Democracy?: The Judicial Usurpation of Politics: A First Things Symposium

 


The End of Democracy? Introduction

The Editors 

November 1, 1996


Articles on “judicial arrogance” and the “judicial usurpation of power” are not new. The following symposium addresses those questions, often in fresh ways, but also moves beyond them. The symposium is, in part, an extension of the argument set forth in our May 1996 editorial, “The Ninth Circuit’s Fatal Overreach.” The Federal District Court’s decision favoring doctor-assisted suicide, we said, could be fatal not only to many people who are old, sick, or disabled, but also to popular support for our present system of government.


This symposium addresses many similarly troubling judicial actions that add up to an entrenched pattern of government by judges that is nothing less than the usurpation of politics. The question here explored, in full awareness of its far-reaching consequences, is whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.


Americans are not accustomed to speaking of a regime. Regimes are what other nations have. The American tradition abhors the notion of the rulers and the ruled. We do not live under a government, never mind under a regime; we are the government. The traditions of democratic self-governance are powerful in our civics textbooks and in popular consciousness. This symposium asks whether we may be deceiving ourselves and, if we are, what are the implications of that self-deception. By the word “regime” we mean the actual, existing system of government. The question that is the title of this symposium is in no way hyperbolic. The subject before us is the end of democracy.


Since the defeat of communism, some have spoken of the end of history. By that they mean, inter alia, that the great controversies about the best form of governance are over: there is no alternative to democracy. Perhaps that, too, is wishful thinking and self-deception. Perhaps the United States, for so long the primary bearer of the democratic idea, has itself betrayed that idea and become something else. If so, the chief evidence of that betrayal is the judicial usurpation of politics.


Politics, Aristotle teaches, is free persons deliberating the question, How ought we to order our life together? Democratic politics means that “the people” deliberate and decide that question. In the American constitutional order the people do that through debate, elections, and representative political institutions. But is that true today? Has it been true for, say, the last fifty years? Is it not in fact the judiciary that deliberates and answers the really important questions entailed in the question, How ought we to order our life together? Again and again, questions that are properly political are legalized, and even speciously constitutionalized. This symposium is an urgent call for the repoliticizing of the American regime. Some of the authors fear the call may come too late.


The emergence of democratic theory and practice has a long and complicated history, and one can cite many crucial turning points. One such is the 1604 declaration of Parliament to James I: “The voice of the people, in the things of their knowledge, is as the voice of God.” We hold that only the voice of God is to be treated as the voice of God, but with respect to political sovereignty that declaration is a keystone of democratic government. Washington, Madison, Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, and the other founders were adamant about the competence”meaning both the authority and capacity”of the people to govern themselves. They had no illusions that the people would always decide rightly, but they would not invest the power to decide in a ruling elite. The democracy they devised was a republican system of limited government, with checks and balances, including judicial review, and representative means for the expression of the voice of the people. But always the principle was clear: legitimate government is government by the consent of the governed. The founders called this order an experiment, and it is in the nature of experiments that they can fail.


The questions addressed have venerable precedent. The American experiment intended to remedy the abuses of an earlier regime. The Declaration of Independence was not addressed to “light and transient causes” or occasional “evils [that] are sufferable.” Rather, it says: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government and to provide new Guards for their future security.” The following essays are certain about the “long train of abuses and usurpations,” and about the prospect”some might say the present reality”of despotism. Like our authors, we are much less certain about what can or should be done about it.


The proposition examined in the following articles is this: The government of the United States of America no longer governs by the consent of the governed. With respect to the American people, the judiciary has in effect declared that the most important questions about how we ought to order our life together are outside the purview of “things of their knowledge.” Not that judges necessarily claim greater knowledge; they simply claim, and exercise, the power to decide. The citizens of this democratic republic are deemed to lack the competence for self-government. The Supreme Court itself”notably in the Casey decision of 1992-has raised the alarm about the legitimacy of law in the present regime. Its proposed solution is that citizens should defer to the decisions of the Court. Our authors do not consent to that solution. The twelfth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Harlan Fiske Stone (1872-1946), expressed his anxiety: “While unconstitutional exercise of power by the executive or legislative branches of the Government is subject to judicial restraint, the only check upon our own exercise of power is our own sense of restraint.” The courts have not, and perhaps cannot, restrain themselves, and it may be that in the present regime no other effective restraints are available. If so, we are witnessing the end of democracy.


As important as democracy is, the symposium addresses another question still more sobering. Law, as it is presently made by the judiciary, has declared its independence from morality. Indeed, as explained below, morality”especially traditional morality, and most especially morality associated with religion”has been declared legally suspect and a threat to the public order. Among the most elementary principles of Western Civilization is the truth that laws which violate the moral law are null and void and must in conscience be disobeyed. In the past and at present, this principle has been invoked, on both the right and the left, by those who are frequently viewed as extremists. It was, however, the principle invoked by the founders of this nation. It was the principle invoked by the antislavery movement and, more recently, by Martin Luther King, Jr. It is the principle invoked today by, among many others, Pope John Paul II.


In this connection, Professor Robert George of Princeton explores the significance of the encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life). Addressing laws made also by our courts, the Pope declares, “Laws and decrees enacted in contravention of the moral order, and hence of the divine will, can have no binding force in conscience . . . . Indeed such laws undermine the very nature of authority and result in shameful abuse.” We would only add to Professor George’s brilliant analysis that the footnotes to that section of Evangelium Vitae refer to the 1937 encyclical of Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Concern) and other papal statements condemning the crimes of Nazi Germany. America is not and, please God, will never become Nazi Germany, but it is only blind hubris that denies it can happen here and, in peculiarly American ways, may be happening here.


We are prepared for the charge that publishing this symposium is irresponsibly provocative and even alarmist. Again, it is the Supreme Court that has raised the question of the legitimacy of its law, and we do not believe the Pope is an alarmist. We expect there will be others who, even if they agree with the analysis of the present system, will respond, So what? Unmoved by the prospect of the end of democracy, and skeptical about the existence of a moral law, they might say that the system still “works” to the satisfaction of the great majority and, niceties about moral legitimacy aside, we will muddle through so long as that continues to be the case. That, we believe, is a recklessly myopic response to our present circumstance.


Some of our authors examine possible responses to laws that cannot be obeyed by conscientious citizens”ranging from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution. The purpose of the symposium is not to advocate these or other steps; it is an attempt to understand where the existing system may be leading us. But we need not confine ourselves to speculating about what might happen in the future. What is happening now is more than disturbing enough. What is happening now is a growing alienation of millions of Americans from a government they do not recognize as theirs; what is happening now is an erosion of moral adherence to this political system.


What are the consequences when many millions of children are told and come to believe that the government that rules them is morally illegitimate? Many of us have not been listening to what is more and more frequently being said by persons of influence and moral authority. Many examples might be cited. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in a recent lecture: “A Christian should not support a government that suppresses the faith or one that sanctions the taking of an innocent human life.” The Archbishop of Denver in a pastoral letter on recent court rulings: “The direction of the modern state is against the dignity of human life. These decisions harbinger a dramatic intensifying of the conflict between the Catholic Church and governing civil authorities.”


Professor Hittinger observes that the present system “has made what used to be the most loyal citizens”religious believers”enemies of the common good whenever their convictions touch upon public things.” The American people are incorrigibly, however confusedly, religious. Tocqueville said religion is “the first political institution” of American democracy because it was through religion that Americans are schooled in morality, the rule of law, and the habits of public duty. What happens to the rule of law when law is divorced from, indeed pitted against, the first political institution?


“God and country” is a motto that has in the past come easily, some would say too easily, to almost all Americans. What are the cultural and political consequences when many more Americans, perhaps even a majority, come to the conclusion that the question is “God or country”? What happens not in “normal” times, when maybe America can muddle along, but in a time of great economic crisis, or in a time of war when the youth of another generation are asked to risk their lives for their country? We do not know what would happen then, and we hope never to find out.


What is happening now is the displacement of a constitutional order by a regime that does not have, will not obtain, and cannot command the consent of the people. If enough people do not care or do not know, that can be construed as a kind of negative consent, but it is not what the American people were taught to call government by the consent of the governed. We hope that more people know and more people care than is commonly supposed, and that it is not too late for effective recourse to whatever remedies may be available. It is in the service of that hope that we publish this symposium.


Responses: 


The End of Democracy? Our Judicial Oligarchy

Robert H. Bork 

November 1, 1996

This last term of the Supreme Court brought home to us with fresh clarity what it means to be ruled by an oligarchy. The most important moral, political, and cultural decisions affecting our lives are steadily being removed from democratic control.

https://firstthings.com/the-end-of-democracy-our-judicial-oligarchy/


A Crisis of Legitimacy

Russell Hittinger 

November 1, 1996

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Supreme Court made abortion the benchmark of its own legitimacy, and indeed the token of the American political covenant. To those who cannot agree with the proposition that individuals have a moral or constitutional right to kill the unborn, or that such a right defines the trans-generational covenant of the American political order, the Court urged acceptance out of respect for the rule of law. “If the Court’s legitimacy should be undermined,” the Court declared, “then so would he country be in its very ability to see itself through its constitutional ideals.”

https://firstthings.com/a-crisis-of-legitimacy/


The End of Democracy? A Culture Corrupted

Hadley Arkes 

November 1, 1996

We were taping, early in May, a program for public television dealing with “same-sex marriage.” Opposite me was a professor of law, openly gay, who had just written a book in favor of gay marriage. The question before us was whether the states would be obliged to honor the marriage of homosexual couples if the courts in Hawaii delivered to the country that unsolicited gift. After all, the states bore a residual authority to object, on moral grounds, to certain kinds of marriages”as in the case, for example, of incestuous unions. But with the same claims to residual authority, some states in the past had objected on moral grounds to interracial marriages. That ground of objection had been removed from the states as soon as the courts became clear that policies of that kind were in conflict with the deeper principles of the Constitution. The question then was whether the Supreme Court was about to do the same thing in relation to gay marriage with the decision, then pending, in Romer v. Evans : The case was not about gay marriage, but it could undercut the authority of a state to withhold any privilege or franchise from people on account of their homosexuality. When the question was posed, the professor reacted with a blank stare. Of Romer and its implications”and its connection to gay marriage”he professed to know nothing.

https://firstthings.com/the-end-of-democracy-a-culture-corrupted/


The End of Democracy? Kingdoms in Conflict

Charles W. Colson 

November 1, 1996

In America today, we have very nearly reached the completion of a long process I can only describe as the systematic usurpation of ultimate political power by the American judiciary”a usurpation that compels evangelical Christians and, indeed, all believers to ask sobering questions about the moral legitimacy of the current political order and our allegiance to it. This is an inquiry undertaken reluctantly and, I hope, with due caution, for the stakes are very high. Among the questions we must address is whether millions of Americans are still part of the “We the People” from which democratic authority is presumably derived.

https://firstthings.com/the-end-of-democracy-kingdoms-in-conflict/


The End of Democracy? The Tyrant State

Robert P. George 

November 1, 1996

America’s democratic experiment has been remarkably successful. Constitutional democracy in the United States has survived a civil war, a great depression, and two world wars. Our nation has assimilated into the mainstream of American life generations of immigrants”many fleeing poverty and oppression in their native lands. We have made tremendous strides towards overcoming a tragic legacy of slavery and racial segregation. We have secured safer conditions for working people and a meaningful social safety net for the most disadvantaged among us. We have demonstrated that citizens of different religious faiths can live and work together in peace and mutual respect. America’s economic prosperity has made our nation the envy of the world. Oppressed peoples around the globe look to our Declaration of Independence for inspiration and our Constitution as a model of free government. In the great ideological struggles of the twentieth century, American ideals of personal, political, and economic freedom have triumphed over fascist and communist tyranny. Two cheers for American democracy!

https://firstthings.com/the-end-of-democracy-the-tyrant-state/

Monday, March 3, 2025

Lasch Words

 

Christopher Lasch

John Jankowski
2 min read

“[Today,] people find it difficult to acknowledge the justice and goodness of…[a] higher power when the world is so obviously full of evil. They find it difficult to reconcile their expectations of worldly success and happiness, so often undone by events, with the idea of a just, loving, and all-powerful creator. Unable to conceive of a God who does not regard human happiness as the be-all and end-all of creation, they cannot accept the central paradox of religious faith: that the secret of happiness lies in renouncing the right to be happy.” — ChristopherLasch, “The Soul of Man Under Secularism”



“What democracy requires is rigorous debate, not information. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of information it needs can be generated by debate. We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy. information, usually seen as the preconditions of debate, is better understood as its byproduct. When we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention, we become avid seekers of relevant information. Otherwise we take in information passively — if we take it in at all.” — Christopher Lasch, “The Lost Art of Argument”









Thursday, January 30, 2025

The Monster Discloses Himself: On the allurements of conspiracy theory. Phil Christman for HEDGEHOG REVIEW

 


The Monster Discloses Himself

John Jankowski
26 min read

On the allurements of conspiracy theory.

Phil Christman teaches first-year writing at the University of Michigan and is the editor of the Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing. His work has appeared in The Christian Century, Paste, Books & Culture, and other publications. His most recent books are How to Be Normal and Midwest Futures.

It’s all wrong. The wrongness is pervasive; you could not, if asked, identify the it or the its that went wrong. Wrongness leaches into everything, like the microplastics you read about, which may or may not be reducing sperm count in men, which may or may not be good, in the long run — it’s something to do with the environment. Someone wanted you to feel one way or the other about it, but you can’t remember who or why or whether you agreed with him. Everyone speaks so authoritatively, whether it’s on the evening news or a podcast, in an Internet video or a book, or even in one of those Twitter threads that begins (irksomely, you once felt, but now you don’t notice) with the little picture of a spool. Authority makes them all sound the same; it crosses all their faces and leaves many of the same furrows. Only afterward, trying to add it all up, do you half-remember that none of them agreed with each other. But the wrongness you can be sure of. It is like God, undergirding all things.

One day, you stumble across something — a long video, an article, a conversation (How rare those are! You must make more time for them…) with a learned friend. The same self-righteousness of authority crosses his face, the tinniness of certainty issued from his mouth too, but this time what he says sticks. It seems to explain the wrongness. Or not even explain it, really — just make it stand still. It was this thing that was wrong. The monster disclosed himself. He was something small and definable — a vaccine, a chemical — that spreads until it can’t be isolated, or he was something large and indefinable — “wokeness,” “CRT” — that terminates in many small, sharp wrongnesses. Or maybe it was the second sort of thing, but epitomized in a single image, so that it sounds like the first: The Cathedral. The cabal. But for a second, you could see the wrongness. How clarifying, simply to see it. You felt something like desire.

As you read on, as you watch more videos, as you continue to talk with your learned friend, you experience, for perhaps the first time in your life, the joy of scholarship. What was school, anyway? A punishment for being awake, a reminder that for every minute of playground, life will exact an hour of sitting still in a hot room that stinks of others’ lunches digesting. How can one doubt the existence of malign conspiracies in a world that answers the miraculous sharpening of adolescent senses with the sense-insulting colors, shapes, smells, of school? School never gave you this feeling, the feeling that “there is a world inside the world,” as Don DeLillo writes in Libra (1988), his great novel of the John F. Kennedy assassination. You start to become, as DeLillo depicts Oswald becoming, a sort of secular monk:

He spent serious time at the library. First he used the branch across the street from Warren Easton High School. It was a two-story building with a library for the blind downstairs, the regular room above. He sat cross-legged on the floor scanning titles for hours. He wanted books more advanced than the school texts, books that put him at a distance from his classmates, closed the world around him. They had their civics and home economics. He wanted subjects and ideas of historic scope, ideas that touched his life, his true life, the whirl of time inside him. He’d read pamphlets, he’d seen photographs in Life. Men in caps and worn jackets. Thick-bodied women with scarves on their heads. People of Russia, the other world, the secret that covers one-sixth of the land surface of the earth.1

You read like Oswald, obsessively. You marshal for yourself the rough narrative of history that education should already have given you. You become that precious and imperiled thing, an autodidact.

Where the Lizard People Meet

The American autodidact illustrates on the educational level a more general point about American political economy. He (it is so often he) thinks himself free from the formal, recognized strictures of School, and he is. Unfortunately, this does not mean that he is free in general — rather, without extraordinary luck and discernment, he is completely at the mercy of whichever informants an unregulated marketplace has put in his path. Just as deregulation and the stripping away of publicly funded alternatives represent “freedom” for those with a junk product to peddle, and the slashing of the Environmental Protectional Agency’s enforcement budget means an oilman’s freedom to jack up the global temperature, the autodidact is free to be mobbed by infotainers.

I once asked a sociologist why a particular pop social theory, one refuted many times in detail by scholars, continued to survive. She answered, “It’s hard to see social structure.” She was right — even the term “social structure” is already a metaphor. (Society is not a building with a blueprint.) But if structure is hard to see, we will tend, in its absence, to blame the misshapen quality of our own lives on whatever and whomever we do see, particularly to the degree that those people are not like us — which is to say, like us in exactly those traits we most long to overcome, suppress, or repress. And the poorer someone is, the more visible that person becomes. The richest people in your city live in places you can’t even drive to, because you don’t know the gate code. The poorest live in tents and ask you for money.

Though he figures in a million conspiracy theories, and though he is a conspirator, DeLillo’s Oswald is himself — unlike you — no conspiracist. He is a Marxist. (I say “DeLillo’s Oswald” in part because he is a fiction, and in part because the Kennedy research community has disclosed a passel of other Oswalds.2) Marxism is a theory of social structure. The secrets it reveals are more like gravity or evolution: patterns of which we form a part, that produce us, and that therefore we couldn’t observe before. Obviously, those who own the means of production would want to continue to do so; it’s a good life. Their behavior is predictable and, if ethics are bracketed out, rational, at least in the short term, and if you grant Marx’s argument that the rate of profit tends to fall. Marx gives us a theory of social structure, though Marxists, in practice, imitate conspiracy theorists (not to mention Baptists and health food nuts) in one way: their attachment to schism. The closer they get to fully possessing History with their models, the more they must mount grandiose defenses over every last detail, because there are no longer any minor ones.

The most successful mass-entertainment conspiracy theories, in turn, imitate Marx, much as Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, imitated the Catholic Mass. They run the story backward, scramble it, play it against itself. They, too, posit rich people — capitalists — as the source of many evils, but in a way that still allows them the sour satisfaction of scapegoating the poor and the powerless as well. “Elites” — now redefined to mean many people who may lack wealth, and whose position in society is precarious, such as educators, librarians, and arty-looking baristas — are forcing on hard-working everyday Americans, some of them “elite” by any definition that involves actual power, various unpalatable propositions: that racism exists; that gender is a powerful idea, not a hard fact; that Native American genocide was bad; that the man who owns your workplace may not have your best interests at heart. Simultaneously, “elites” manipulate the powerless, inviting mass immigration and stirring up discontent, because by doing so, they initiate a process of social breakdown they think will leave them the only powerful agents left standing. (Over what?) This is a slight reskinning of the narrative various anti-Semites have long promulgated about Jews, who promoted Marxism, so the legend went, because it would make nations weaker and leave the Jewish people in a position of power. (One must again ask: Over what?) It is easier to posit a group of quasi-inhuman bad actors, engaging consciously in a pointlessly indirect but destructive scheme, than to accept that this world is the rational outcome of uncoordinated profit-seeking by people who want what almost any of us want, and that, up to a point, a person can’t help wanting: total insurance against ruin, for ourselves and for those close to us. But once a person has posited the existence of such cold-eyed, unsleeping enemies, has imagined himself shivering under their reptilian gaze, it feels dangerous, in turn, to entertain doubts about their existence: to return to earth. There is a world within the world, and that world is not, as it is for the Marxist, a metaphor. It’s where the lizard people meet.

Paranoia on the Page

What most confirms you in your new direction is this: People keep trying to stop you. Your friends roll their eyes; your relations avoid you. One or two of them do something worse: They patiently correct you. What feels worse than patient correction?

In less intimate settings, you get attacked, you get wearily sighed at, for merely asking questions. People start to fight you — over politics — in a way that nobody has fought with you over politics before. Because you are not a political person. (You say so, incessantly.) This isn’t politics, that impenetrable form of sports fandom for people whose parents paid their tuition. This is reality. It’s as simple as that.

The mainstream media has little to say about your new line of inquiry. Every Google search yields multiple “Explainers,” which always, after considerable double talk, explain only that you are wrong, about some heap of details. The great wrongness, the thing you initially set out to understand, they never say a thing about. It starts to feel coordinated.

Social media takes you further than Google, but it’s all so inconclusive, and meanwhile, everyone makes fun of you. It turns out there is a name for your position, usually a derogatory one. You don’t like being named. You don’t like being a this. Again: You’re not a political person, one of those people who give names to themselves, then fight over the names. But eventually you embrace the name, because it helps you find more of what you’re looking for.

In Gloria Naylor’s 1996 (2005) — in some ways an extraordinary book, in more ways a regrettable one — the belaureled author of The Women of Brewster Place (1982) and Mama Day (1988), a National Book Award winner and Guggenheim Fellow, a canonical American novelist, describes her experiences as a victim of gangstalking and of government-sponsored mind-control attacks. “Gangstalking” is a (mostly hypothesized) practice in which a large, frequently changing group of people surveils and harasses a particular person over a period of time. (Determining how the subject of a gangstalk might distinguish such a group from the ordinary set of people and annoyances one encounters as one goes about one’s day is an exercise left to the reader.) Government-sponsored mind-control attacks are pretty much exactly what the phrase implies. Naylor called the book a “fictionalized memoir”; to my knowledge, she never made any statement separating the fictionalized elements of the book from the nonfictional. So I have only 1996 to go on, and in that book her experiences begin when she notices that, well, Jews — not the same people, but all Jews — are casing her South Carolina writing retreat. She somehow knows they are Jews, even when they drive by quickly, at a distance.3

She also knows how this sounds. She even depicts two of her persecutors having the following exchange: “The woman is seeing Jews everywhere. You’re telling me that doesn’t show that she’s an anti-Semite?” says one spy. His colleague responds, “Yuri, she’s being followed by Jews. Everywhere.”4 If 1996 more often featured this level of self-awareness, I would wonder whether it is truly, as it seems, a document in which a great sensibility disintegrates, or whether it is a wickedly clever literary game. Perhaps Naylor-the-author is playing with an American audience’s excessive readiness to attribute daffiness, paranoia, and anti-Semitism to black people. (Doesn’t a black woman have excellent reasons for paranoia?) I really tried to entertain this possibility as I read, but if it was Naylor’s intention, she camouflaged it awfully well.

Eventually, Naylor-the-character returns to New York City. There the harassment continues: for example, a plague of people slamming their car doors all day, distracting her from writing. The reader sees easily enough what is going on. If you decide to notice every instance of some trivial and random phenomenon — if you underline, mentally, every slammed car door, every vehicle driving past your house, every street encounter with a local person you sort of know and sort of don’t — you will find, first of all, that that phenomenon becomes irritating past endurance, and then that the mere persistence of this random thing feels like a personal attack. (One wonders whether such afflictions as “wind turbine syndrome” operate the same way.)

Naylor-the-character then finds that she is experiencing strange, unwanted thoughts that seem to appear in her head from nowhere. To an experienced sufferer of mental illness — the author of this essay, for example — these passages provoke deep sympathy. Unwanted and intrusive thoughts are a common symptom. Lots of people have them, but they are humiliating to talk about with those who don’t. The thoughts thus increase the isolation that causes them to fester; in the worst cases, they turn into obsessions with which the victims come to identify, and thus, they fulfill themselves.5 (Naylor, with more of the strange honesty that compels her to keep stacking the deck against herself, reports that one of her unwanted thoughts is I hate Jews.) She sounds like someone who has never experienced unwanted thoughts before, and then, late in life, is mobbed by them. She is totally unprepared.

Rather than attributing these thoughts to stress, overwork, or oncoming mental illness, Naylor-the-character theorizes that the government is beaming sentences fully-formed into her brain. She learns that there are public patents for technologies that could form, hypothetically, the very earliest stages of such a weapon; that one former CIA agent has attested to their existence. (Old spies say a lot of things, and are surely as likely to go crazy as anyone else.) She learns that the future possibility of such weapons is mentioned in certain weapons treaties — which just sounds like covering all one’s bases. If such technologies existed, they would certainly already have been sold back to us — like LSD, the Internet, and drones — as a lucrative if risky consumer good.

There are further developments in 1996, but not many. Naylor seeks out a psychologist; he finds that someone has bugged his office. (Given the actual history of FBI surveillance of black writers, it wouldn’t shock me if this bit were true.) She goes down various research rabbit holes. Most importantly for Naylor, she discovers that, even in her isolation, she isn’t alone. Cut off from her old social life by her experiences, she finds an invisible college of companions on the Internet. The book ends with Naylor writing the opening sentences: Her life is now a closed loop. Ignoring every other explanation, she embraces being a this.

Worlds Within Worlds

Like Naylor, you do have your doubts. You’re not a fanatic, whatever your former friends say. In the spare time that has opened up to you, now that those friends ignore your invitations, you zealously continue your research.

Gradually you find, in your inquiries, that your initial ideas were oversimple. You had glimpsed the monster, but seen him from the wrong angle. There was a world within the world, but still further worlds within that one. Perhaps there is only one world after all, but one infinitely muddled, a network of networks nested in one place.

In Thomas Pynchon’s novels — you have tried to read one by now; that guy did too many drugs — the eeriest moments often come when the conspiracy suddenly bifurcates. There are two conspiracies, or more, some of them involving the same people. Sometimes Pynchon’s characters play this double game out of mere cynicism; they are hedging. That’s one of the things people unhindered by principles do. They attach themselves to every possibility. Nor is it an accident that one finds so many people thus unhindered near the center of power. They are the only people morally flexible enough to stay there.

In Joseph Ellroy’s American Tabloid (1995) — you liked that one a little better than the Pynchon, though you could have done with less swearing — the Kennedy assassination emerges not from a single agency within the bowels of the American deep state but from a chaos of various overlapping plots. The spies and operatives who set the conspiracy in motion are so good at “compartmentalizing” (a word that repeats throughout the novel) that they lose the ability to fully see what they’re doing; their freedom to manage events comes at the cost of any stability in their goals. To stay close to the center of events, they sacrifice control over outcomes. A similar dynamic arises in one of the earliest modern works of conspiracy fiction, Honoré de Balzac’s History of the Thirteen (1839). After a bravura opening section, describing the devilish wit and cunning of the thirteen men from every sector of Paris society who have drawn together to advance each other’s interests at no matter what cost to themselves, Balzac depicts them doing…not all that much. (They poison one guy and help another sneak into a convent.) In Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 (1971), two clandestine political sects, influenced by Balzac’s novel, traipse about Paris exchanging messages and playing theater games. By the end of the nearly thirteen-hour film, their activities have led to violence and even death, but their goals and political beliefs remain unclear to the viewer and perhaps to the characters themselves.

The most successful conspiracy, the one easiest to maintain over the long term, might be one with few or no goals beyond its own perpetuation. It would be a live-action role-play, an alternative reality game, perhaps an art project. Perhaps it would even present itself as a series of cryptic messages around which a loose-knit interpretive community gathers, one dedicated to the uncovering of another conspiracy, and which exists only in-game.

The Lies That Got Away

As you watch your single conspiracy shiver into a mass of details, possibilities, smaller overlapping plots, you feel that you have reached a perilous moment. Do you search for one truth or for many? Are you pursuing facts, or meaning? A world within the world, or just…a world?

In Tom O’Neill’s Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (2019), an editor at a film magazine commissions O’Neill, an entertainment reporter, to write a commemorative story on the thirtieth anniversary of the Manson cult murders. As the book opens, it is 1999; Manson is ancient news. Yet an impressive number of famous actors who may once have known Manson refuse to speak to O’Neill, as do many of the cops and lawyers associated with the initial investigations and prosecutions. Those who do grant interviews speak cryptically, referring to various buried secrets, undisclosed links between Charles Manson and the demimondes of Hollywood and Laurel Canyon. For the first hundred-odd pages of the book, the reader can dismiss many of O’Neill’s findings in this way: The only people who love gossip more than actors are cops and lawyers. To be able to say, well into one’s retirement (and perhaps one’s cups), that one always knew there was more to the story, that more people should have gone to prison, that one just had a bad feeling about this or that unindicted person: This is some comfort after a perhaps violent and morally compromising career. A person can dine out forever on such talk.

Then O’Neill catches Vincent Bugliosi in a lie, and the reader shivers.6 (The details are hard to remove from their context, but briefly: Bugliosi, the lead prosecutor in the Manson trial, and — mainly because of Helter Skelter (1976), his book about the case — the best-selling true-crime author of all time, suborned testimony from a witness, Terry Melcher, that he knew was false.) One remembers, perhaps, that this same Bugliosi wrote Reclaiming History (2007), the most exhaustive defense of the Warren Commission’s Oswald-as-lone-assassin theory of the murder of JFK. Reclaiming History is a long book: how much of it is true? The mind tingles. But the reader of Chaos only knows that Bugliosi lied about Manson.7

From this point, O’Neill finds mystery after mystery, anomaly after anomaly. Eventually the hand of the CIA shows itself, as it does in so many American stories. (One occasionally feels that the real job of the Cold War CIA was simply to show up at the edges of stories so often that the vigilant citizen would be driven to paranoia.) O’Neill encounters not just A Conspiracy, but conspiracies, so many that they become a problem for each other:

I could poke a thousand holes in the story, but I couldn’t say what really happened. In fact, the major arms of my research were often in contradiction with one another. It couldn’t be the case that the truth involved a drug burn gone wrong, orgies with Hollywood elites, a counterinsurgency-trained CIA infiltrator in the Family, a series of unusually lax sheriff’s deputies and district attorneys and judges and parole officers, an FBI plot to smear leftists and Black Panthers, an effort to see if research on drugged mice applied to hippies, and LSD mind-control experiments tested in the field…could it?8

Clearly, O’Neill would like to be telling the last of these stories. But he is finally too honest a writer to pretend that he has more than eerie but circumstantial evidence — or evidence, simply, of the same thought, What could I get away with if I made a bunch of people take drugs? occurring independently to two different bad men. The reader admires O’Neill’s honesty, and shares in his disappointment.

Enter the Mono-Conspiracist

You, like O’Neill, lose a bit of the clarity you enjoyed in those first sparkling months. You thought you saw the monster, but you saw him wrong. Perhaps he is, after all, something mundane, a coatrack casting a shadow. Perhaps there is only one bewildering world.

If you choose this option, you return by degrees to a shared world, with friends and colleagues. You have a few strange opinions on the side, as does nearly everyone. Occasionally you remember the eeriness of those months, the sense that a heap of facts had come to life, had opened its eyes and glared at you with intention. But you move on. You get new hobbies.

Or you don’t. By now, you know the term “limited hangout.” Richard Nixon uses it on the White House tapes to describe a planned leak of seemingly secret information, from which further secrets have been redacted.9 To the necessary limitations of all human knowledge, the concept adds a sinister twist: Now you feel you can’t be sure whether every theory similar to your own isn’t a ringer, a plant. Hasn’t everything in your life, up to now, been a limited hangout? Even your questions, your voiced and unvoiced doubts: Do they come from within? Or did they seep in, like the plastics?

So you continue to look for the single conspiracy, the plan under all plans. You decide that the UFO people are here, and that they have changed everything, most of all in the effort they have provoked from all the world’s crowned heads to prevent us from realizing that they are here and that they have changed everything. That a presidential candidate most notable for an almost creepy personal discipline is secretly ordering hits and supping on children. That the CIA’s various experiments with brainwashing and mind control were successful — that’s where serial killers come from.10 That the Satanic ritual abuse cases of the 1980s were mostly or partly real.11 That the Knights Templar evolved into the Masons and continue to manipulate important events to their benefit. Any number of things. Even in your moment of clarity, the details blur once again. Bin Laden was already dead when the Navy SEALs found him, and also, he’s still alive.12 Your story changes constantly, but your identity is stable: You have become one of the several things popularly referred to by the imprecise term “conspiracy theorist.” It’s not that you believe in the existence of malign, as yet undisclosed conspiracies — a person who merely confesses a belief in the existence of the NSA, or the Mafia, admits that much. No, your political theology — for that is what it has become — is that of the mono-conspiracist.

Most likely, as you further pursue this line of inquiry — a line of inquiry that can go on forever and include everything; it astonishes you that anyone can consider the conspiracy research community to be ignorant or unlettered — you find yourself turning more and more toward the occult to explain the persistence and power of the single conspiracy. There is an observable homology to evil. Those who seek to have more power over others than anyone ought to have, or want to have, land again and again on similar strategies — torture, systematic lying, drugs, the manipulation of their victim’s environment. (These are the features that united Charles Manson and Louis J. West.) They tend, as the podcaster Matt Christman (no relation) has emphasized in his observations on the Jeffrey Epstein case, to violate moral taboos together — both because this is one of the few forms of conspicuous consumption left to people who already have everything, and because this gives them useful dirt on each other, which enhances the coordination that keeps their class itself from fracturing. Sometimes their search for power leads them toward means that smack of the occult: Jeffrey Epstein’s weird temple; the famous statue of Mammon at Bohemian Grove, “where the rich and powerful go to misbehave”; the strange rituals of Yale’s Skull and Bones secret society.13 This tendency springs, I think, from the deep structures of the human mind, perhaps from the capacity for language itself. Language is like magic: It does and transforms things; it seems to turn nothings into somethings and lead into gold, but not predictably, and not with perfect success. It has powers both godlike and flimsy. Those who worship power above all other gods eventually find themselves literalizing that metaphor. For the mono-conspiracy theorist, on the other hand, these similarities, as they turn up, are simply proof of a common origin, frequently the Knights Templar or the Illuminati.

If, finally, there were one dark intelligence at the center of world history, that intelligence would have to be Satan, given the state of the world. And I do believe, like billions of the world’s Christians, in the existence of the Devil. But it is precisely those who have believed in such an entity the longest, as part of a disciplined tradition of theological reflection, who will tell you how fruitless it often is to invoke Satan as the direct cause of events. Before one turns to exorcism, one exhausts medicine and psychiatry. Satan is an accuser, a prosecutor; one of his oldest tricks is to make you see him in your neighbor.

The Facts Warrant Paranoia

Your story, in any case, is now over. It has entered a cul-de-sac. Whatever happens, whatever kaleidoscope of details follows from here, you can, in a sense, only reach one answer. You may exit your story, but you will progress no further in it.

So we turn now to the story of your estranged friend, who has watched your descent with alarm. What she knows: You have gone wrong. Your wrongness is universal and all-pervading. She can’t refute all of your arguments, especially since you keep changing your details. Some of it even sounds true. And when she does try to argue with you, she senses something horrible — the self-righteousness, the certainty, the tinniness of rant crossing her face, colonizing her vocal cords too.

Like you, she reads. And as she does so, the monster discloses himself. It is “conspiracy theory.” This is the name, simultaneously, for the habits of thought, the media ecosystem, and the affect that have ruined you. For her, as for you, the monster has stood still; it is, for the moment, one thing.

As your friend investigates further, however, she immediately runs into problems. How are “conspiracy theories” to be separated, isolated, contained? What distinguishes them from ordinary political thought, from the attempt to understand what is happening in the world?

In her enlightening and empathetic study of flat-earthers, Off the Edge (2022), Kelly Weill cites the social psychologist Jan-Willem van Prooijen to define the “conspiracy theory.” Such a theory “explains correlations between events and actors; the perpetrators must have acted deliberately; multiple people must have been involved in the plot; the plot must be ominous in its deception…and the cover-up must be ongoing.” This is clear enough. What is not clear is why such a belief would automatically be bad or irrational. Weill herself concedes that “belief in conspiracy theories is highly common,” and that her own suspicion that Timothy McVeigh had yet-unnamed accomplices in his 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City “means [that she] can be classified as a conspiracy theorist.”14 But Weill is hardly alone in this reasonable belief. Van Prooijen’s definition doesn’t explain why such theories are inherently bad or unreasonable. Anna Merlan, in her excellent Republic of Lies (2019), takes this point further, citing the large number of secret actions by the US government, the covert harassment of American political dissidents (particularly black and Native American organizations), and, again, MK-ULTRA. Others cite as well the Tuskegee experiments, in which black patients were knowingly denied treatment for syphilis. “If you were paranoid,” Merlan writes, “you might think there is something at work in the use of the term ‘conspiracy theory.’ Something sinister, perhaps?” You might indeed.15

You might, and your friend might, and I might, and if any of us were to turn to some of the academic authorities Merlan and others cite, we might find that impression reinforced. The political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent, in American Conspiracy Theories (2014), offer the citizen-reader the following guidelines for when to believe, or reject, a conspiracy theory:

The bottom line is that citizens should believe accounts from properly constituted epistemic authorities rather than theories that either (1) directly conflict with the epistemic authorities or (2) assert knowledge that has yet to be deemed authoritative by the epistemic authorities. A conspiracy theory may be true, but people are not justified in believing it until the appropriate epistemological authorities deem it true. Therefore, well-evidenced conspiracy theories may — should they reach a certain evidentiary bar — provide the grounds for investigation, appeal, and reassessment, but they should not be believed outright.16

Already one can see problems. In a conflict between holding a justified belief and holding a true one, wouldn’t one prefer to hold the true one? Is there really a secure distinction between believing an idea “outright” and entertaining it, considering it, testing it? Who is allowed to decide when the evidence has met “a certain evidentiary bar”? And where are these “properly constituted epistemological authorities” to be found? Here is the definition Uscinski and Parent provide:

An appropriate epistemological authority, therefore, is one that is trained to assess knowledge claims in a relevant area and draw conclusions from valid data using recognized methods in an unbiased way. Physicists, for example, are the appropriate authority for making and evaluating claims pertaining to physics, whereas historians are more appropriate for making claims about history. Having expertise relevant to the subject area is key. Watergate, for example, is referred to as a conspiracy because it was deemed as such by Congress, courts, and many other investigative bodies whose hearings and evidence are open to inspection. Many of the conspirators — including Nixon — admitted to their crimes in open forums.17

Leave aside the question begging that nearly every term in this definition — “trained,” “relevant area,” “valid data,” “recognized methods,” “unbiased way” — commits. A certain humility before experts is a necessary part of social life, but what Uscinski and Parent advocate here sounds to me more like self-infantilization. Most people would say that the FBI constitutes an “appropriate epistemological authority” when it comes to crimes committed on US soil — it is, in fact, part of the apparatus that defines crime as such in the first place. This does not mean that a person who believed the FBI when it falsely accused Angela Davis of murder was practicing better mental hygiene than one who did not. Properly constituted epistemological authorities are made up of people, who possess interests and, yes, biases. The realization that one has biases, that one cannot escape them, is one of the first steps toward truth, and the admission of these biases a necessary act of charity toward one’s readers. An agency — or, for that matter, a work of political science — that affects an above-the-fray, view-from-nowhere style gives us, in that very affectation, a reason to believe it is hiding something, if only from itself. Uscinski and Parent remove all doubt on this latter point when they accuse Senator Bernie Sanders of conspiracy theorizing for his famous claim that the “one percent” has “rigged” America’s economy.18 This is not a conspiracy theory; it’s almost a tautology. What do Uscinski and Parent think lobbyists do all day?

A better account comes from the historian Kathryn S. Olmsted. In her book Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (2008), she emphasizes a point that too much scholarly writing on conspiracy theories concedes and then ignores: Some conspiracy theories are prima facie believable because they rest on considerable historical precedent. She points, for example, to Operation Northwoods, a scheme to destabilize Fidel Castro’s Cuban government. Agents of national security openly theorized about murdering both Cuban and American citizens as part of a “false-flag” attack that would then be blamed on Castro. Olmsted cites Operation Northwoods, which President Kennedy eventually vetoed, as a reason why some Americans might believe that 9/11 was an inside job.19 Indeed, during my own lifetime, a formidable number of seemingly outrageous claims about American history, once relegated to the alternative media, have turned out, as documents were declassified and guilty parties spoke, to be simply true. The CIA, at the very least, hid the involvement of the Nicaraguan Contras in cocaine dealing.20 Richard Nixon really did sabotage the 1968 Paris Peace Talks in order to give himself a fleeting electoral advantage.21 During the Cold War, the CIA actually covered Western Europe with stay-behind paramilitary networks and weapons caches, of which some of the latter were later linked to right-wing terrorist actions.22 The FBI and the Chicago police conspired to murder the Black Panther Party activist Fred Hampton.23 Jeffrey Epstein existed, and two presidents rode on his plane.24 If I am not yet certain that Allen Dulles had Kennedy killed, if I don’t believe at all that the CIA invented serial killers to sell more anomie, it is not because I think that these people or institutions are too fundamentally decent to do such things. The history of American covert politics convinces me otherwise. In fact, the history of American overt politics convinces me otherwise.

Indeed, when we turn our attention to other First World democracies, we routinely find the sorts of plots that we would reject as fantastic, even impossible, in a US context, widely accepted as real historical episodes. The Marc Dutroux case, in which Belgium’s justice system incompetently prosecuted a particularly vicious instance of pedophilia and murder, could be described, with only some exaggeration, as a Belgian Pizzagate that actually happened.25 When Americans read the works of the great Sicilian crime novelist and journalist Leonardo Sciascia — particularly his sinuous, elliptical study on the 1978 kidnapping and murder of Italian prime minister Aldo Moro — we read of a world in which all important political events are controlled, if somewhat messily, by a conglomeration of bad actors that includes the Christian Democratic Party, the Mafia, and the Roman Catholic Church.26 And we never doubt this picture. We instantly recognize it as the kind of thing that is likely to happen in this vale of tears. We praise Sciascia’s bravery and clearheadedness, and we wonder what silences even he must have kept to avoid catching a bullet during the Years of Lead. Is it not American exceptionalism, of a rather Pollyannaish kind, to assume that such things could never happen here?

The facts warrant paranoia. At least, some of the facts warrant some paranoia. We cannot reject “conspiracy theories” en bloc.

You, your friend, and I all find ourselves in a pretty pass. Your mono-conspiracism has made you impossible to talk to, and it may well have led you to disgrace yourself. In recent years, members of the conspiracy-theory fan community — there is nothing else to call it — have stalked bereaved parents and plotted to steal elections. Even the most benign conspiracists spend a lot of time gossiping about strangers who may well be harmless. You need to extricate yourself from this community.

If you have fallen victim to a grave cognitive distortion, your friend has committed a lesser one of a similar kind. Like so many in the liberal center (that dwindling but stubborn remnant), she has turned to the concept “conspiracy theory” as a single explanation for an apparent (but probably only apparent) rise in motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, demonization, and other logical errors that have always been with us.27 Nor are you entirely wrong in feeling that she throws around the term “conspiracy theory” to avoid reckoning with the many excellent reasons one may have for failing to register all one’s opinions with one’s local epistemological authorities.

I have, in my turn, found myself almost persuaded by both of you. I have read the words “Jeffrey Epstein suicide” and felt as though paranoia were a positive duty. I have read of Alex Jones’s persecution of the bereaved, and sworn off the entire world of “parapolitics.” You think I’m a patsy, or worse. Your friend thinks I’m as crazy as you are.

The hope of democracy is that we will, knowing all this, find a way to trust each other again, or at least, in the absence of trust, to halfheartedly will each other’s good. Perhaps we will stumble one day on some key, some insight, that will help us to do this again. But for now, real blood has been shed, and more blood is threatened, and each of us really does have enemies, and every day, another you unwittingly begins talking himself into being one of them. And so we all stand jabbering at each other, accusing like Satan, united only by the self-righteousness that crosses every face, which we don’t see because we are no longer looking at each other, or at anything. There is only the wrongness.

Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 25.1 (Spring 2023). This essay may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission. Please contact The Hedgehog Review for further details.

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