Whether he is out of power or in office, Donald Trump deploys conspiracy theory as a political mobilizing tool designed to capture anger at the liberal establishment, to legitimize racial resentment and to unite voters who feel oppressed by what they see as a dominant socially progressive culture.
The success of this strategy is demonstrated by the astonishing number of Republicans — a decisive majority, according to a recent Economist/YouGov survey — who say that they believe that the Democratic Party and its elected officials conspired to steal the 2020 election. This is a certifiable conspiracy theory, defined as a belief in “a secret arrangement by a group of powerful people to usurp political or economic power, violate established rights, hoard vital secrets, or unlawfully alter government institutions.”
Not only do something like 71 percent of Republicans — roughly 52 million voters, according to a University of Massachusetts Amherst poll released on Jan. 6, 2022 — claim to believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election despite indisputable evidence to the contrary, but the Republican Party has committed itself unequivocally and relentlessly to promoting this false claim.
The delusion is evident in the Republican candidates who won primaries for governor, U.S. Senate, U.S. House and other statewide posts in elections conducted in 18 states during the first five months of this year.
“District by district voters in places that cast ballots through the end of May have chosen at least 108 candidates for statewide office or for Congress — Republican candidates who have repeated Trump’s lies,” Amy Gardner and Isaac Arnsdorf reported last week in The Washington Post.
Consider Texas. On the campaign trail this year, the Republican nominees for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general and 24 of the state’s congressional districts endorsed Trump’s claim that “the 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen.”
On June 18, the 5,000 delegates to the Texas Republican Party convention adopted a platform declaring, “We reject the certified results of the 2020 presidential election, and we hold that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States.”
The stolen election conspiracy theory has, in effect, become the adhesive holding the dominant Trump wing of the party in lock-step. This particular conspiracy theory joins the network of sub-theories that unite Trump loyalists, who allege that an alliance of Democratic elites and urban political machines have secretly joined forces to deny the will of the people, corralling the votes of illegal immigrants and the dead, while votes cast by Trump supporters are tossed into the trash.
In a 2017 essay, “How conspiracy theories helped power Trump’s disruptive politics,” Joseph Uscinski, of the University of Miami, Matthew D. Atkinson of Miami University and Darin DeWitt of California State University, Long Beach, recognized the central role of conspiracy theories in Trump’s rise to the presidency.
In the 2016 primaries, “Trump, as a disruptive candidate, could not compete on the party establishment’s playing field,” they write. “Trump’s solution is what we call ‘conspiracy theory politics.’”
Trump’s conspiratorial rhetoric, they continue,
boiled down to a single unifying claim: Political elites have abandoned the interests of regular Americans in favor of foreign interests. For Trump, the political system was corrupt and the establishment could not be trusted. It followed, then, that only a disrupter could stop the corruption.
A recent paper, “Authoritarian Leaders Share Conspiracy Theories to Attack Opponents, Galvanize Followers, Shift Blame, and Undermine Democratic Institutions” by Zhiying (Bella) Ren, Andrew Carton, Eugen Dimant and Maurice Schweitzer of the University of Pennsylvania, describes the methods political leaders use to gain power by capitalizing on conspiracy theories: “Leaders share conspiracy theories in service of four primary, self-serving goals: to attack opponents, galvanize followers, shift blame and responsibility, and undermine institutions that threaten their power.”
Such leaders, the four authors write,
often spread conspiracy theories to direct the attention, emotion, and energy of followers toward a common enemy who threatens their interests, thereby galvanizing followers. Toward this end, many conspiracy theories depict a nefarious perpetrator engaging in covert activities to harm the welfare of followers.
They continue:
Systems such as open elections and the free press can safeguard democracy by illuminating corrupt behavior and ensuring the peaceful transition of power. Leaders may use conspiracy theories to undermine the credibility, legitimacy, and authority of these institutions, however, if they threaten their power.
Politicians who adopt conspiratorial strategies, Ren and colleagues write,
find this to be an especially effective tactic if their own claim to power is illegitimate or controversial. Moreover, since the exposure to conspiracy theories reduces followers’ confidence in democratic institutions, leaders may even mobilize followers to engage in violent actions that further undermine these institutions (e.g., disputing an election defeat by initiating riots or mobilizing military forces).
In a September 2021 paper, “Social Motives for Sharing Conspiracy Theories,” Ren, Dimant and Schweitzer argue that in promulgating conspiracy theories on social media, many people “knowingly share misinformation to advance social motives.”
When deliberately disseminating misinformation, the authors write,
people make calculated trade-offs between sharing accurate information and sharing information that generates more social engagement. Even though people know that factual news is more accurate than conspiracy theories, they expect sharing conspiracy theories to generate more social feedback (i.e. comments and “likes”) than sharing factual news.
Ren, Dimant and Schweitzer add that “more positive social feedback for sharing conspiracy theories significantly increases people’s tendency to share these conspiracy theories that they do not believe in.”
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, noted that spreading a lie can serve as a shibboleth — something like a password used by one set of people to identify other people as members of a particular group — providing an effective means of signaling the strength of one’s commitment to fellow ideologues:
Many who study religion have noted that it’s the very impossibility of a claim that makes it a good signal of one’s commitment to the faith. You don’t need faith to believe obvious things. Proclaiming that the election was stolen surely does play an identity-advertising role in today’s America.
Joanne Miller, a political scientist at the University of Delaware, wrote by email that she and two colleagues, Christina Farhart and Kyle Saunders, are about to publish a research paper, “Losers’ Conspiracy: Elections and Conspiratorial Thinking.” They found that “Democrats scored higher in conspiratorial thinking than Republicans after the 2016 election, and Republicans scored higher in conspiratorial thinking after the 2020 election.”
One factor contributing to the persistent Republican embrace of conspiracy thinking, Miller continued, is that Trump loyalists in 2020 — who had suddenly become political losers — abruptly understood themselves to be on “a downward trajectory.” Miller writes that “perceiving oneself to be ‘losing’ (culturally, politically, economically, etc.) is likely one of the reasons people are susceptible to belief in conspiracy theories.”
Haidt added another dimension to Miller’s argument:
I don’t think there’s anything about the conservative mind that makes it more prone to conspiracies. But in the world we live in, the elites who run our cultural, medical and epistemic institutions — and particularly journalism and the universities — are overwhelmingly on the left, so of course Democrats are going to be more trusting of elite pronouncements, while Republicans are more likely to begin from a position of distrust.
Are there partisan differences in connection with conspiracy thinking?
Uscinski argues that in his view there is little difference in the susceptibility of Democrats and Republicans to conspiracy thinking, but:
The issue here isn’t about conspiracy theories so much. These ideas are always out there. The issue is about Donald Trump. The numbers are so high because Trump and his allies inside and outside of government endorsed these election fraud conspiracy theories. Trump, his many advisers and staff, Republican members of Congress, Republican governors and state legislators, conservative media outlets, and right-wing opinion leaders asserted repeatedly that the 2020 election would be and then had been stolen.
This has a lot more to do, Uscinski contended, “with the power of political and media elites to affect their followers’ beliefs than anything else.”
John Jost, a professor of psychology, politics and data science at N.Y.U., strongly disagrees with Uscinski, arguing that there are major differences between Democrats and Republicans on measures of conspiratorial thinking.
Jost wrote by email:
My colleagues and I found, in a nationally representative sample of Americans, that there was a .27 correlation (which is quite sizable by the standards of social science) between conservative identification and scores on a scale of generalized conspiratorial mentality.
In a separate study, Jost continued:
We observed a smaller but clearly significant correlation of .11 between conservative identification and a clinical measure of paranoid ideation, which includes items such as “I often feel that strangers are looking at me critically.” Furthermore, we found that paranoid ideation was a significant mediator of the association between conservative identification and general conspiratorial mind-sets.
Jost pointed to a January 2022 article — “Conspiracy mentality and political orientation across 26 countries,” by Roland Imhoff, a professor of psychology at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, and 39 co-authors — that examined the strength of the “conspiracy mentality” at the extremes of left and right based on a sample of 104,253 people in 26 countries, not including the United States.
Among their findings:
While there was a clear positive relation suggestive of greater conspiracy mentality at the political right in countries spanning the center — north of Europe such as Austria, Belgium (particularly Flanders), France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden, the conspiracy mentality was more pronounced on the left in countries spanning the center-south of Europe such as Hungary, Romania and Spain.
But it’s not only that:
Taken together, supporters of political parties that are judged as extreme on either end of the political spectrum in general terms have increased conspiracy mentality. Focusing on the position of parties on the dimension of democratic values and freedom, the link with conspiracy mentality is linear, with higher conspiracy mentality among supporters of authoritarian right-wing parties. Thus, supporters of extreme right-wing parties seem to have a consistently higher conspiracy mentality, whereas the same only counts for extreme left-wing parties of a more authoritarian makeup and with less focus on ecological and liberal values.
In a March 2019 paper, “Understanding Conspiracy Theories,” Karen M. Douglas, a psychologist at the University of Kent, writing with Uscinski and six other scholars, conducted a wide-ranging study of conspiratorial thinking. They found that “conspiracy beliefs are correlated with alienation from the political system and anomie — a feeling of personal unrest and lack of understanding of the social world. Belief in conspiracy theories is also associated with a belief that the economy is getting worse.”
In addition, Douglas and her colleagues contend that “a conviction that others conspire against one’s group is more likely to emerge when the group thinks of itself as undervalued, underprivileged, or under threat.”
Studies in the United States of “the social characteristics of those prone to conspiracy theories,” the authors note, show that “higher levels of conspiracy thinking correlate with lower levels of education and lower levels of income.” Another study they cite found that “conspiracy believers were more likely to be male, unmarried, less educated, have lower income, be unemployed, be a member of an ethnic minority group, and have weaker social networks.”
Importantly, the Douglas paper points to studies showing that “conspiracy belief has been linked to violent intentions.” One of those studies, by Uscinski, writing with Joseph M. Parent of Notre Dame,
showed that those who were more generally inclined toward conspiracy theories were more likely to agree that “violence is sometimes an acceptable way to express disagreement with the government.” Those inclined toward conspiracy belief are also in favor of lax gun ownership laws, show a willingness to conspire themselves and show greater intentions to engage in everyday crime.
Douglas, Daniel Jolley of the University of Nottingham, Tanya Schrader of Staffordshire University and Ana C. Leite of Durham University demonstrate a linkage between conspiracy thinking and everyday crime: “Such crimes can include running red lights, paying cash for items to avoid paying taxes, or failing to disclose faults in secondhand items for sale” — in their 2019 paper, “Belief in conspiracy theories and intentions to engage in everyday crime.”
In a series of experiments, Jolley and his colleagues found that “belief in conspiracy theories was significantly positively correlated with everyday crime behaviors. Criminal behaviors were also negatively associated with Honesty-Humility, Agreeableness-Anger, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience and Moral Identity.”
The authors suggested that “engaging in everyday crime may be empowering for people who perceive that the world is full of conspiring powerful elites who ought to be challenged.”
A related question facing the country going into the 2022 midterms and, more important, the 2024 presidential election is whether the contagion of conspiratorial thinking will increase the likelihood of violence before, during and after the election.
In another paper, “The complex relationship between conspiracy belief and the politics of social change,” Christopher M. Federico, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, makes a key point: “Conspiratorial ideation about secret plots among the powerful is associated with decreased intention to engage in normative political action (e.g., voting, legal demonstrations) and increased intention to engage in nonnormative political action (e.g., violence, spreading misinformation).”
Since conspiratorial thinking, Federico continued, “is associated with extremist intentions and willingness to engage in aggressive, nonnormative political action, it may allow individuals whose politics otherwise incline them to support the status quo to violently resist established authority in the name of imposing their own ideal social order.”
Along similar lines, Jan-Willem van Prooijen, a psychologist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, argues in his forthcoming essay, “Psychological benefits of believing conspiracy theories,” that “conspiracy theories help perceivers mentally reconstrue unhealthy behaviors as healthy, and anti-government violence as legitimate (e.g., justifying violent protests as legitimate resistance against oppressors).”
In October 2021, Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, published “The Rise of Political Violence in the United States.”
Kleinfeld argues:
Ideas that were once confined to fringe groups now appear in the mainstream media. White-supremacist ideas, militia fashion, and conspiracy theories spread via gaming websites, YouTube channels, and blogs, while a slippery language of memes, slang, and jokes blurs the line between posturing and provoking violence, normalizing radical ideologies and activities.
While violent incidents from the left are on the rise, Kleinfeld continued,
political violence still comes overwhelmingly from the right, whether one looks at the Global Terrorism Database, F.B.I. statistics, or other government or independent counts. Yet people committing far-right violence — particularly planned violence rather than spontaneous hate crimes — are older and more established than typical terrorists and violent criminals. They often hold jobs, are married, and have children. Those who attend church or belong to community groups are more likely to hold violent, conspiratorial beliefs. These are not isolated “lone wolves”; they are part of a broad community that echoes their ideas.
Perhaps the most telling aspect of Kleinfeld’s essay is a chart based on statistics collected in the Global Terrorism Database that shows a surge in far-right terrorist incidents in the United States, starting in 2015 — when Trump first entered the political arena — rising to great heights by 2019, outstripping terrorist incidents linked to the far left, to religious groups or to environmentalists.
What will come of all this?
Parent made a good point by email: “This is tricky: Trump has been a conspiracy theorist since forever and he was only briefly a successful politician.” As The Times put it in 2016, “Donald Trump Clung to ‘Birther’ Lie for Years.”
Parent continued:
What’s freakishly destabilizing about the present is that ideological glues have never been so designed to eviscerate democracy and promote violence. Previous leaders always had the option to go down that road, but chose not to. Now the inmates are running the asylum.
Matthew Baum, a professor of public policy at Harvard, put it another way in his email:
We had a sitting president declare that an election outcome was illegitimate. This is historically unprecedented. Trump’s assertion is extremely influential to voters who look to him as the leader of the Republican Party in general, and as the leader of the MAGA movement in particular. These factors have combined to allow this particular story to metastasize to a greater extent than most other political conspiracy stories in recent history.
Can the country return to the status quo ante?
“It is too soon to say,” Baum writes, “whether this delegitimization is permanent. There is certainly a risk that once the genie is out of the bottle — that is, election losers are no longer willing to accept losing as a legitimate outcome and ‘live to fight another day’ — it will be hard to put it back.”
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
