Abstract
Some things you can’t make up. In a co-authored 2009 Journal of Political Affairs article, Cass Sunstein (appointed that year to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs) argued that conspiracy theories can lead to violence and advocated “cognitive infiltration of conspiracy theorists . . . [that] government agents . . . might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action” (Sunstein and Vermuele 2009:24–25). They may be paranoid, but Sunstein makes clear that the government is also out to get them. Lance deHaven-Smith starts his book, Conspiracy Theory in America, with this nugget, among others.
DeHaven-Smith’s book is a hybridized popular social history of the shift from a U.S. civic culture grounded in skepticism about elites to one that fails to question elite abuses of power. He claims U.S. culture has lost its foundational suspicion of political power; after the end of World War II, Americans became immune to challenging what he calls SCADs, “State Crimes Against Democracy.”
Many sociologists will find it an entertaining, and sometimes surprising, read. Its strengths include a genealogy of mid-twentieth century conservative social science and philosophy, an outline of the rise of the label “conspiracy theory,” and arguments in favor of evidence rather than preemptively dismissive “conspiracy panic discourse” (in Jack Bratich’s terms). Although sociology rarely enters directly, this intellectual history traces the conflict between historian Charles Beard, Karl Popper, and Leo Strauss on citizen distrust and the last two scholars’ legacy on social science theory and method more broadly. The reader will see how these currents shaped post-war sociology as well, and how such influences linger.
DeHaven-Smith starts by unpacking the discursive work done by the phrase “conspiracy theory.” The phrase denigrates that which is so labeled, effectively masking forms of governmental wrongdoing in an age of increasingly concentrated global power. The determination of a conspiracy theory in popular and scientific culture seems to depend on its relation to conventional beliefs and assumptions about integrity of political elites—deHaven-Smith notes that claims about politicians in Russia are considered legitimate, while similar charges leveled at U.S. politicians are considered loony.
Key to his arguments is the centrality of distrust about elite power in U.S. history. He traces conspiracy thinking to the Declaration of Independence, arguing that distrust of authority was itself central to the nation-state and its founders. He challenges the “widely shared view” that democracy depends on public trust and civility, offering an insightful study of the role of distrust in framing the United States’ law and practice until the twentieth century. He challenges the idea that politeness and civility are central to democracy, arguing that public challenges to governmental power are healthy for democratic deliberation. DeHaven-Smith’s term “SCAD” is meant to displace the term “conspiracy theory” and undo some of its rhetorical damage in public life.
The next two chapters outline the shift from the “suspicious political science of the founders” to what he believes is a largely unquestioning popular culture in the United States. He lays blame squarely on (1) postwar currents in U.S. philosophy and social science and (2) CIA intervention after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He traces such uncritical intellectual currents to Karl Popper (an interesting read for sociologists, whose knowledge of Popper often comes primarily from introductory chapters in elementary statistics texts) and Leo Strauss, who is hailed as the father of neo-conservatism among U.S. politicians and researchers. DeHaven-Smith points out that Popper and Strauss, who disagreed with each other vehemently, both feared unbridled skepticism on the part of the “masses”—each for different reasons, but with the effect of crafting a cold war social science that forsook “grand theorizing” for meso-range empiricism. This new American social science warned against disrespect for governmental authority. This led to a social science that still routinely dismisses claims of collusion by governmental elites. Details of this genealogy are interesting; for example, it was Popper who coined the term “conspiracy theory society” as a pejorative, reacting against Nazism’s destabilization of traditional belief and European intellectuals’ “grand theorizing.” In both cases, he may have erred. Ultimately, too, the notion that “true conspiracy will always out” is due to Popper; and deHaven-Smith carefully critiques this rationalization.
Chapter Four focuses on the second key agent in the transformation of American political culture: the CIA. The phrase was used as a pejorative by a CIA propaganda program after Kennedy’s death. This chapter, of less interest to sociologists, perhaps, performs a detailed content analysis of a dispatch from the CIA to local offices, encouraging agents to feed journalists and politicians ways to discount challenges to the Warren Commission. A problem that has lurked in the margins of deHaven-Smith’s analysis becomes prominent here; exactly how much conspiracy denial exists in the United States in relation to conspiracy belief? DeHaven-Smith does not address the question, despite massive poll data on the nature, frequency, and depth of conspiracy belief. Instead, he asserts U.S. culture is entirely or primarily conspiracy-denying, and this is one of the book’s flaws for scholars of culture; specifying who denies, how, and how much is vital to the book’s core arguments.
Chapter Five presents another set of problems for the methodologically inclined. The chapter, which nicely characterizes skepticism bounded by empirical claims as a valuable “way of seeing” the world, is, at its core, an analysis of 27 historical conspiracies in the United States from 1796 to the present, grouped by era. But it never specifies the method by which these particular events (rather than others) were chosen. Each era’s “vehicle,” “cause,” and “type” of corruption is specified and analyzed, but the reader cannot evaluate these claims without more data and an understanding of method and each case. DeHaven-Smith’s conclusion, that SCADs occur in clusters or pairs, is worthy of systematic documentation, but his chapter has not yet done so.
The final chapter addresses what should change in U.S. political culture to end government’s systematic failure to stop, document, or punish illegal behavior. The author suggests protocol reform, independent investigation, and punishment of documented illegality (and he duly highlights a large amount of just such documented, unsanctioned illegality). Ultimately he calls for U.S. citizens to demand proper investigation in “fishy” cases—fishiness being something that is worthy of reasoned argument rather than emotional dismissal as the ravings of paranoids.
The book is worth a read, despite its unevenness. Intermittent fact-checks led to discovery of low-level inaccuracies, and ironically, some weaknesses in sources (both number and kind). Some key scholarship is missing, including that of Jack Bratich, Clare Birchall, and even Noam Chomsky. Still, the book’s usefulness lies in how to (and not to, at times) make claims about conspiracy. Ultimately, the book highlights the fragility of knowledge claims in an era of massive political/economic power, despite the fact that SCAD’s emphasis on the state largely neglects corporate conspiracy. What we know, how we know it, and when we think we knew it are increasingly polarizing questions in the United States.