"Save democracy" sounds like "save the status quo": How everything became a conspiracy theory

A wave of authoritarian populism has flooded many parts of the world. It has common attributes while simultaneously being specific to a given country’s political culture, society and vulnerabilities.

In the United States, the great flooding wave of authoritarian populism manifests in the form of Trumpism, MAGA and the larger neofascist anti-democracy movement. Its origins include but are not limited to (much earned) rage at the elites and the ruling class, extreme wealth and income inequality. There is also sclerotic social mobility, a society that is undergoing rapid demographic and other changes, globalization and the neoliberal gangster capitalist order, a sense that the American Dream for most is dying if not dead, future shock and the rise of social media, AI, and other digital culture(s), technofeudalism, loneliness and social atomization, a decline in happiness, a larger crisis of personal meaning and aggrieved entitlement.

And of course, the central role played by conspiracism and conspiracy theories in the Age of Trump and the country’s democracy crisis cannot be minimized. The feeling that there are sinister forces who are manipulating the country’s politics and society in secret and that the everyday American has little to no defense against them except to embrace demagogues who promise “I alone can fit it!” is both a cause and effect of America’s democracy crisis and rising authoritarianism (and increasingly naked fascism).

The forces that summoned up the Age of Trump are not new; they have much deeper, decades- and centuries-old origins in some of the worst aspects of American political life, society, and national character.

As historian Richard Hofstadter warned in his seminal 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”:

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind....The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon….

This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture—it is no more than that—that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties.

In an effort to better understand the relationship between conspiracy culture and America’s democracy crisis, why such beliefs are so compelling (and radicalizing) to so many people, and how the rise of Trumpism and MAGA can be tracked back to the Oklahoma City Bombing 30 years ago and the conspiracist culture of the 1990s (and before) I recently spoke with Phil Tinline.

The author of "The Death of Consensus," which was chosen as The Times (London)’s Politics Book of the Year, Tinline spent 20 years working for the BBC, where he made and presented many acclaimed documentaries about how political history shapes our lives. Tinline's new book is "Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today."

How are you feeling right now in this time of global democracy crisis and authoritarian populism, specifically the rise of Trumpism? How are you making sense of this?

Trying to keep up with the new Trump administration and the implications of its actions is disorientating and exhausting. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 20 years researching the history of the fear that democracy is about to die, mainly in the UK but also in the U.S. Historically, we have worried about this many times without our nightmares coming to life. This led me to be very wary of people airily predicting that democracy was finished, and made me alive to the way that, paradoxically, such nightmares can actually damage democracy.

But since Trump’s speech at the airport in Waco, Texas, two years ago, and especially since January this year, I’ve been forced to the conclusion — as many others have — that constitutional democracy in America really is now under severe threat. I hope that, as has happened before, this crisis will force politicians to break free from old taboos and find more effective ways to restore ordinary Americans’ trust that democracy can make their lives better — and then to actually deliver on that.

[Last] month [was] the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. I remember watching the news on that horrible afternoon when the Oklahoma City bombing took place. It was beautiful outside, and the “breaking news” alert flashed. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing. 9/11 evoked similar feelings. The reporters and commentators immediately concluded it was a foreign attack. I told one of my friends, “No way. This is American-made. These are domestic terrorists."

I grew up listening to late-night AM Talk Radio and shows such as Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM, reading ‘zines and the alternative and underground media, and chasing down other such sources of information. In some key ways, the Oklahoma City bombing and the right-wing conspiracy culture that birthed it connect directly to the Age of Trump.

I remember that day too. I also remember reading a long article about the Branch Davidians and Waco two years earlier — at the time, it was one of the creepiest things I’d ever read. It was striking that the Oklahoma City bombing happened on the second anniversary, which was April 19 and the anniversary of the start of the American Revolution with the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

Because of your knowledge of conspiracist texts, you immediately thought that it was a homegrown attack. That was also the first thought of both an FBI profiler and Milton William Cooper, the author/compiler of the conspiracy theory compendium, "Behold a Pale Horse." Or rather, Cooper thought that it was a "false flag" attack staged on the anniversary of Waco to smear the militia movement.

I’m struck by how the conspiracy theories which contended that the federal government played some sort of role in the Oklahoma City attack — which of course killed some of its own employees — do not seem to have stuck as hard as the equivalent theories about the assassination of JFK.

Looking back, it’s not difficult to see some of the roots of today’s politics in the 1990s, and it’s a worthwhile exercise, but the roots go much deeper than that.

How does your expertise in politics and conspiracy theories inform your understanding of America’s current democracy crisis and the Age of Trump and MAGA?

I try not to get too stuck on party labels. I try to focus on the broad ideological traditions and the abiding fears that shape them. With that in mind, I think it’s sometimes useful to read U.S. politics as not simply left versus right, or Democrats vs. Republicans, so much as a three-way split between alienated elements on the left and the right who dislike each other, but also have a shared antipathy to the center.

I’d argue that political conspiracy theories are generally stories about power. People invest in them as a way to process and explain why they feel disempowered or defeated, especially when that defeat is a shock. I think this helps make sense of why left-wing conspiracy theories about the state in the 1960s and 1970s have something in common with right-wing conspiracy theories about the state in the 1990s and ever since.

However, I wouldn’t want to overdo this. There are huge differences as well between the fears of the left and right, and it’s demonstrably clear that right-wing extremists have killed far more of their fellow citizens. It’s also striking that the phenomenon of conspiracy theory beliefs being triggered by shocking defeats is not something from which the political center is immune, as we were reminded after both Trump’s first election and Brexit in the UK.

I have copies of many of the “classic” conspiracy theory texts. Your new book examines one of those classics from the 1960s, "Report from Iron Mountain." What compelled you to write a book on the origins and cultural and political impact of that conspiracy theory? Why now?

"Report from Iron Mountain" is a 1967 anti-war satire that claimed to be a leaked top-secret Pentagon-commissioned report — the subject of my new book, "Ghosts of Iron Mountain." The Report warned that if permanent global peace broke out, it would wreck the U.S. economy, and that the social effects of war would have to be replaced with eugenics, slavery, fake UFO scares, polluting the environment and “blood games.” When this was published, many people thought it was real. The satirists eventually confessed, but the hoax fitted so convincingly with how many people felt American power really worked that they refused to believe it wasn’t real.

Ever since the 1990s, "Iron Mountain" has been embraced by some on the far-right and in the militia movement as “proof” of the evil of what we now call the “deep state;” videos from the 1990s insisting that the Iron Mountain report was real still circulate online today. And as I argue in my new book, this case reveals how falling for stories that confirm your prior beliefs doesn’t just make you look like a fool. It can do serious political damage too. The Iron Mountain story revealed a shared left-right anger at the way the powerful treat ordinary Americans because it made sense of their feelings of disempowerment.

The story of "Report from Iron Mountain" and its strange afterlife caught my imagination for two reasons. First, because we know for certain that it is fiction. I have a copy of the contract, which refers to it as the ‘"EACE HOAX BOOK." And second, because it slipped from being a 1960s left-wing satirical hoax to being the basis of 1990s right-wing conspiracy theories.

This was an enticing way to explore three things at once, all through telling what I hope is a compelling story. There were similarities and differences between left- and right-wing fears of centralized power. Then the slippery borderland between fact and fiction, and the perils of ignoring just how slippery it is. Finally, it also brought back my memories of the way that the 1990s were absolutely haunted by the 1960s, as the boomers took power, the end of the Cold War left some Americans politically disoriented, and the memory of Vietnam still refused to fade.

And the fact that some people still believe it’s real, even now, just clinched it.

What makes for a "good" i.e. enduring and believable conspiracy theory?

Enduring and believable conspiracies are the ones that play on our fears, the stories we tell ourselves, and how far we are willing to go to accept what “feels as if” versus what actually “is.”

As I write in "Ghosts of Iron Mountain," “the tale of 'Report from Iron Mountain' offers a warning about the consequences that await if you don’t keep an eye on the line between your deep story about how power works, and what the facts support.” And conspiratorial thinking that’s appropriated "the Report" drew on what was already a longstanding nightmare on the American Right: the fear of one-world government, and how it might take over the US. Their fears were incredibly detailed and specific, and they power a deep undercurrent of paranoia that has resurfaced today.

"Report from Iron Mountain" is an example of a co-opting of a satire as “evidence” of government evil, which offers unusually clear evidence of just how powerful narrative can be. Of how it facilitates the triumph of what “feels real” over what we know to be factually true. And of how hard it can be to overcome this — even long before the advent of social media. It’s an inarguable case of a clear, proven hoax being taken as truth, meaning it allows us to trace the exact logical leaps its promoters made and offers a template for how conspiracy theorists think about the power of federal government. And that’s why it’s remained such an important and telling example of American conspiratorial thinking today.

What is the difference between conspiracy theories and conspiracism? Too often, the news media and other political commentators and public voices (and the general public) talk about conspiracies when what they really mean is conspiracism. The distinction matters. How does this relate to the Age of Trump and authoritarian populism?

It is vital not to use "conspiracies" as a synonym for "conspiracy theories," or for "conspiracism." Real conspiracies often occur, but they tend to be structurally quite different from what the theories claim. As the scholar of folklore Timothy Tangherlini and his colleagues at UCLA showed in a research paper in 2020, actual conspiracies tend to involve strong bonds between a relatively few players, whereas conspiracy theories tend to be much more loose and sweeping. This makes real conspiracies hard to investigate, which means they often emerge gradually through painstaking reporting, whereas conspiracy theories are often constructed very swiftly in reaction to a shocking event.

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Conspiracism is the way of thinking that underpins belief in conspiracy theories, centered on the belief that there is a malignant, all-powerful, invisible force controlling crucial aspects of our lives.

Trump has long drawn on this to play on Americans’ sense of disempowerment and direct it against the supposedly tyrannical “deep state.” Trump won by claiming to be the populist champion of the rage that many ordinary Americans feel against the uncaring, distant elites who have humiliated them for years. This feeds into the fear of dark forces at the core of the state that have spread since the 1960s. The great ironic twist is that having drawn on conspiracist narratives about the centralization and misuse of power, he is now moving aggressively to centralize and misuse power himself.

Contrary to what those outside of that community, the normal politics types, would like to believe, people who have a serious belief in conspiracy theories/conspiracism are not necessarily dumb or stupid. Moreover, there is social psychology and other research that shows that they tend to be of above-average intelligence and have some college training because internalizing and making sense of conspiracy theories is cognitively demanding. Mockery is not an effective way of intervening against conspiracy theories/conspiracism and those who are seriously committed to them.

I agree that conspiracy theorists may well be highly intelligent, committed and hard-working — though that’s clearly not always so. I also agree that mockery is unlikely to help coax a person out of this kind of belief, though it’s legitimate, and I do think it can be useful in putting people off early on.I think that the reason that mockery is often ineffective is that it reinforces the conspiracist’s sense of exclusion, disempowerment and humiliation, particularly if that is then countered with warmth and affirmation from fellow believers.

I suspect it’s more effective to focus on the underlying structural logic of conspiracy theory, summarized by one of the leading experts on conspiracism, Michael Barkun, as “everything is connected,” “nothing is accidental,” and “nothing is as it seems.” Most people would accept that in their own lives, accidents and coincidences happen, and some things really are just as they seem. That strikes me as a more useful place to start, though I have never had to try to rescue someone from a rabbit hole.

Did you see the recent film The Order? Justin Kurzel’s film (which is based on Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s 1989 book "The Silent Brotherhood") is critically important given where America is right now. The film did not do well commercially. In my opinion, it told too much uncomfortable truth in an era when most people are trying to avoid the horrible reality. Denial will not save them. The screening I went to was basically empty. I saw "The Order" three times, and only in one screening were there more than 10 people in it.

I went to see the film by myself during its opening week in London, on a freezing night between Christmas and New Year. The cinema I saw it in was almost empty too. I thought The Order was a solid piece of work, and I was glad that it didn’t flinch from having the characters articulate their horrible racist ideology that drove them to kill. My main doubt was whether the film did enough to dramatize the broader sense of economic disempowerment that it implied was part of their motivation, because the more we understand what drives people toward the violent extremes of the right, the more likely we are to be able to divert them.

The Order is based on the murder in 1984 of the radio personality Alan Berg. Watching Kurzel’s film sent me back to Oliver Stone’s 1988 movie "Talk Radio," which was also inspired, in part, by that story. Much as I’m critical of Stone’s later movie JFK, he deserves a lot of credit being so swift to tackle the story of Berg’s murder and the vicious ideology that drove the killers. Stone’s "Talk Radio" was warning about The Turner Diaries seven years before it helped to inspire Timothy McVeigh to murder 168 people with his truck bomb in Oklahoma City.

Where do we go from here?

Towards the end of last year, I went to a presentation of the results of some polling conducted in the wake of the presidential election. It pointed to a troubling finding: when disaffected voters heard Democratic politicians ask for their votes to “save democracy,” what many of those voters heard was “please vote for me to save my job, and the status quo.” This chimed with my experience talking to people in the week before the election, which I spent travelling westward through Pennsylvania.

What I think this points to is conspiracy theories are one of the warning lights on the dashboard of democracy. They express how people feel about power. More people who care about democracy should have seen those lights flashing red and acted accordingly much earlier. But now here we are. The only way that I can see America recovering from this situation is for democratically elected politicians to show that they can and do make ordinary people’s lives better. The problem is that, meanwhile, conspiracy theories are a very useful way for other politicians to stoke distrust and division in pursuit of power.