A Quick Note on Conspiracies

A common refrain among liberal punditry is that believing in conspiracies is not only bad but is destroying our country.  This line of thinking is not new, but it has reached a new fever pitch with the coming of the Trump era of politics.  And while I certainly agree that the common perception of "conspiracies" as right-wing fever dreams does describe a pernicious and malign influence on our polity, it is also the established position of this blog that conspiracies are not only real but must be accounted for in any real analysis of power.

As such, I think it is useful to briefly consider what we're really arguing about when we argue about the very idea of conspiracies.  Certainly, it must be true that very few if any liberals think that conspiracies literally do not exist.  Otherwise it's unlikely that they would ever mention things that fit the literal definition of conspiracy, whether it be things that are sorta real or things that are completely made up:

As we can assume that blanket dismissals of "conspiracies" are not literally that, we can instead attempt to understand the real topic of discussion.  Silly as they are, the tweets above actually illuminate the political function that conspiracy theories serve.  Whether it be a leftist critiquing the forces of capital, a right-winger decrying the scourge of "wokeism," or a Democratic Party loyalist speculating that a whistleblower killed himself for funsies, the intended affect is the same.  In each case, the theorist identifies a group or an entity as both powerful and dastardly, and uses the lens of conspiracism to paint them as the enemy.  As such, the true object of these theories is not so much the conspiracy itself but rather who holds power and to what end.  In turn, conspiracies theories inherently posit that those who are powerful wield that power specifically to diminish those who should have power.  This means that conspiracy theories are "bad" in that they mask what is fundamentally a normative statement about political beliefs behind a web of intrigue.  But they're also "good" because the underlying assertion that a group or entity holds power is a testable, falsifiable statement.  So even thought we (hopefully) have the epistemic humility to know that we'll never know the real truth behind many things, conspiracy theories serve a useful political function of not only identifying one's enemy, but also giving a specific reason for such a designation, within an admittedly crude structure of an analysis of power.