On Wednesday, Chris wrote a diary, "Conspiracy Theories", picking up on a PPP poll:
According to PPP, 35% of the country thinks either that President Obama was not born in America (23%), and / or that George W. Bush had something to do with the 9/11 attacks (14%). My favorite line in their press release is "a very troubled 2% of the population buys into both of those conspiracy theories." Ha!
On the bipartisan front, 25% of Democrats think that Bush was involved in the 9/11 attacks, while 42% of Republicans think that Obama was not born in the United States.
This is the first of two diaries spinning off of that poll, and issues it's raising about the nature of political narratives and worldviews. In this diary, I want to stress some important differences between the two types of "fringe" thinking that are being conflated here. First off, Chris makes a good point that a better comparison might well be the belief that the 2004 election was stolen. Still, the pollsters are correct to note that both beliefs represent profound distrust of political leadership, and thus there's a legitimate basis for comparison, even though the comparison is not as exact as the alternative Chris proposes. My intention in this diary is to underscore deeper ways in which the two beliefs differ from one another, and should not be facily equated with one another.
But before doing so, I want to make it quite clear that I am not offering an apologia for the 9/11 Truthers, or any other form of leftwing conspiracy theories. I'm an implacable foe of conspiracism--the mindset behind conspiracy theories--for the simply reason that it gets things fundamentally wrong, and stands in the way clear understanding and effective action. Conspiracism originates from the political right, and when taken up by the political left it inevitably distorts thinking in ways that are both subtle and gross.
That doesn't mean that think conspiracies don't exist--there are conspiracies all over the place. But conspiracism as a mindset is something quite different from the simple recognition that conspiracies exist. Rather, it is an orientation that assumes a basically benign social order, facing destruction at the hands of a powerful outside force that deceptively seeks to insinuate itself into a position of total control. This is its rightwing core. This view fundamentally misunderstands the roles that conspiracies play in history and politics, obscuring the larger social and cultural contexts in which they occur. As a result, even when conspiracists are talking about real conspiracies, the result is reminiscent of racist LA cop Mark Furman investigating OJ Simpson--they're framing a guilty man, and making the truth more difficult to make out, not less so.
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| A recent study from Political Research Associates, "Toxic to Democracy: Conspiracy Theories, Demonization, & Scapegoating" goes into considerable detail about the historical role and function of conspiracism in American history, including the relatively recent migration of conspiracist thinking from right to left. The light it shines on how leftwing conspiracism distorts our understanding and political outlook is invaluable, and nothing in this diary is meant to argue otherwise. Nonetheless, there are considerable differences between leftwing and rightwing conspiracism--especially in the way they appeal to wider audiences beyond the hard core of "true believers". And it precisely these wider audiences who are registered by polls, such as the one that Chris pointed out.
First, I want to echo Chris in noting that the rightwing beliefs are far more widespread. Not only is it the case that 42% of Republicans think that Obama wasn't born in the US, compared to 25% of Democrats think that Bush was involved in the 9/11 attacks, but if one adds in those who aren't sure, a majority of Republicans doubt that Obama is legally qualified to be President. Second, the Birther belief is easily refuted, and has been openly refuted on the internet for well over a year now.
In contrast, the idea that Bush was somehow involved planning or allowing 9/11 to occur has never been seriously investigated, much less refuted, much less could it be simply refuted by a few documents posted on the internet. This does nothing to prove that the claim is true--it merely indicates that similarly unambiguous evidence does not exist.
As a consequence, one cannot claim that the two belief systems are equivalent, especially for broader low-information audiences. A casual Republican can readily find Obama's birth certificate online, and almost as easily find his birth announcements from two Hawaiian newspapers. But a casual Democrat inquiring about 9/11 can find nothing similarly clear-cut. Indeed, they may well find something like this:
Here are some of the unbelievable, yet widely reported, examples of dishonesty from members of the Bush Administration with regard to the warnings that they say NEVER came. Check these claims versus the warnings posted on this web site!- September 14, 2001 - FBI Director Robert Mueller claims: "If we had understood [that hijackers trained in the United States to be pilots] we would have - perhaps we could have averted this." Yet, the FBI did, on many occasions, learn just this!
- September 16, 2001 - President Bush claims: "Never in anybody's thought processes ... about how to protect America did we ever think that the evil doers would fly not one but four commercial aircraft into precious US targets ... never." Yet, NORAD, the Pentagon, and the FAA did learn about this and even made preparations for it!
- September 17, 2001 - FBI Director Robert Mueller claims: "There were no warning signs that I'm aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country." This is simply false!
- September 17, 2001 - NORAD gave briefing to White House regarding fighter response times on 9/11. Its time line is released the next day and contains numerous errors regarding what it did on 9/11 to protect the country.
- February 6, 2002 - CIA Director George Tenet says "We are proud of [our record on 9/11]" and claims that the 9/11 plot was only "in the heads of three or four people." Yet, the evidence shows many, many people knew of the plot!
- February 6, 2002 - FBI Director Robert Mueller claims: "There was nothing the agency could have done to anticipate and prevent the [9/11] attacks." Yet, the evidence suggests the FBI could have prevented the attacks simply by sharing the news of the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui with other agencies and the American people!
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- May 16, 2002 - National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice claims: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile." She also said that "even in retrospect there was nothing to suggest that." Yet, a look at the evidence paints such a clear picture of what was coming that it is embarrassing we missed it!
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- April 13, 2004 - President Bush says: "We knew he [UBL] had designs on us. We knew he hated us. But there was nobody in our government, and I don't think the previous government, that could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale." If President Bush doesn't know that this had been envisioned and even planned for, isn't this proof he was out of touch with the members of his intelligence agencies who had the information?
There is a little bit more to this story, isn't there? We knew they wanted to attack us, how they wanted to attack us, and even that they were going to attack us at any minute. But, no one is admitting to that. I wonder why???
My claim is not that the author of this website is correct, but that the information he presents has never been satisfactorily accounted for. I believe it could have been accounted for, had the Democrats pushed for a credible, full-fledged investigation. (More on this at the end of this diary) But they did not. Their underlying rationale was that they did not want to be seen as partisan, as divisive, and as working to delegitimize the Republican Administration. In adopting this rationale, they were, essentially, accepting the conservative/GOP framework that forbids holding conservative elites responsible for their actions. But rather than putting questions to rest, it only serves to add further questions--not least the question of how much Democratic elties are also to blame.
Low information voters, and political observers more generally, are most likely to follow political activities only sporadically and fragmentarily. They will, necessarily, tend to view politics through the lens of much more familiar sorts of activities and narratives. So when they see secrets being hidden, there is a natural tendency to suspect hidden motives as well--which in turn means there may be other, more sinister things they are lying about. Lying about whereabouts could mean lying about committing a murder, unless there's a more plausible explanation for the more obvious lie.
Dozens of crime shows on tv constantly reinforce this heuristic assumption--if you don't know why someone is lying to you about their alibi, you are best off assuming that it's because they're guilty of the murder. It may not be true--and scores of episodes of Law and Order and its spin-offs hinge on it not being true--but it's a good working hypothesis, nonetheless. It is not crazy, even if its not always right.
This is hardly the only example, but it's typical of how more familiar experiences (firsthand or not) will tend to color lass familiar ones. And if one does not follow politics closely, then it's hardly surprising that these sorts of heuristics would color how people interpret the fragmented information they do get. Given that the fragments listed above are so damning, it's hard to argue that casual observers are crazy. They are just acting the way that casual observers always act. We might very will wish that they weren't casual observers (I certainly do), but since they are, we're being just as intellectually lazy as they are when we write them off as "crazy."
Indeed, we're being lazier, since understanding politics is supposedly a big part of our agenda, but not theirs. If they're spending more time and energy worrying about how their kids are doing in school, or how they're going to pay the mortgage, then calling them intellectually lazy is probably a bum rap. But our laziness in mis-representing them? Not so much.
In short, my argument is that hard-core "9-11 Truthers" may well be considered crazy in a manner similar to that of the hard-core Birthers. But the same cannot be said about the broader passive population picked up in general population polls. The appearance of mass craziness on the Democratic side is a function of normal cognitive processes on the one hand, interacting with the abandonment of responsible opposition by Democratic elites, and rush of hard-core "9/11 Truthers" to fill the resulting vacuum. Let me repeat--this is an explanation, not an excuse. But as an explanation, it says something about where the bulk of the blame should lie--and it's not with those who casually conclude that Bush was guilty of something that hasn't yet been revealed. In fact, they are 100% correct. They are only wrong in their intuition about what that something is.
And here we now return to the parenthetical promise made above to discuss how the questions raised by all the BuschCo lies could have been answered. My explanation for the BushCo lies is three-fold:
(1) Sheer incompetence. After 8 years of "heckuva job, Brownie" governance, it's impossible to overstate how utterly incompetent this crew is, for a wide variety of reasons.
(2) Clinton hatred. The degree to which Clinton Administration warnings were purposely ignored was staggering, and clearly played an enormous role in systematically ignoring warnings--meaning not just ignoring them on a retail level, but shutting out virtually all warnings from people such as Richard Clarke.
(3) Ideological blindness to the terrorist threat. This took the form of a deep-seated quasi-conspiracist mindset fully articulated by PNAC's neo-conservatives, but much more broadly shared, which simply refused to believe that a rag-tag group like Al Qaeda could pose any sort of significant threat. Indeed, going back to the early Reagan Administration, conservatives had loudly insisted that international terrorism was a Soviet creation, and thus that all terrorism was state-sponsored terrorism. This hearkens back to the roots of modern conspiracist thinking, which blamed the French Revolution on a small handful of elite deceivers, and links up with the BushCo insistence that Iraq had to be to blame for 9/11, even if there were absolutely no evidence to prove that it was.
Ironically and/or instructively, the source cited above listing Bush Administristration lies about 9/11 forewarding also advances the notion that a government sponsor must have been involved. In fact, there is good reason to investigate both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia for their roles in furthering the development of alQaeda--as, indeed, America's own role has remained largely under-examined. But that's a far cry from insisting that either of them must have been operationally involved in 9/11.
In the executive summary of Toxic to Democracy it states:
The conspiracist narrative is built upon four key elements, which Berlet calls "tools of fear": 1) Dualism; 2) Scapegoating; 3) Demonization; and 4) Apocalyptic Aggression.
Dualism is an overarching theme or "metaframe" in which people see the world as divided into forces of good and evil. Scapegoating is a process by which a person or group of people are wrongfully stereotyped as sharing negative traits and are singled out for blame for causing societal problems, while the primary source of the problems is overlooked or absolved of blame. Demonization, a process through which people target individuals or groups as the embodiment of evil, facilitates scapegoating. Even the most sincere and well-intentioned conspiracy theorists contribute to dangerous social dynamics of demonization and scapegoating. Apocalypticism, also a metaframe, involves the expectation that dramatic events are about to unfold during which a confrontation between good and evil will change the world forever and reveal hidden truths. Apocalyptic Aggression occurs when scapegoats are targeted as enemies of the "common good," and this can lead to discrimination and violent acts.
What's called for in understanding 9/11--including any possible roles of various government entitites--is precisely the oppose of all the above--a refined understanding of complex and contradictory motives, aims and actions and the social-political contexts that shape them, which simultaneously undermines dualism, scapegoating and demonization, without which apocalypticism is also impossible. |
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