- THE SPECTATOR - JULY 23, 2021 - Peter Wood -
What makes America America? An answer available to most of us is our shared dedication to the principles of liberty and equality. We are ‘the land of the free’. Or at least we were until five minutes ago. Our freedom these days seems a little shaky. And in the world of higher education, those simple declarations are especially faint. By the time they arrive as freshmen (or ‘first years’ in today’s man-phobic argot) students are generally well-versed in all the ways we aren’t ‘free’ and most of the reasons why ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ are doubtful propositions. ‘America’ is increasingly defined for this generation as a place where some really bad things happened and continue to happen.
To follow that thread would to lead us into critical race theory, the 1619 Project, DEI and a host of other attempts to unsettle the American founding, uproot American capitalism, redefine relations between the sexes, de-carbonize the economy and embrace a new vision of a utopian future. I have been spending a lot of time for the last several years following those important controversies, which are sometimes bundled together as ‘successor ideology’.
Successor ideology, however, isn’t the only form of antipathy to the American founding on the shelves today of intellectual supermarket. If you ask, ‘What makes America America?’ you can find ardent supporters of many views: our geographic expanse, our multi-cultural origins, our Scots-Irish heritage, our English law heritage, our prevailing Christianity, our Enlightenment heritage, our inventiveness and more. The debates on these matters sometimes get heated but in the Walt Whitman spirit of ‘I contain multitudes,’ we should welcome both the variety of views and the contentions among them. They bring forward aspects of our exceptional country worth considering.
One of these areas of contention, however, has recently jumped what I think of as the guardrails. It does so by depicting its chosen opponents as mad or evil, or both. The primary voice of this view is a scholar named Laura K. Field, who is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, ‘a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) think tank that works to promote an open society’. How closely the Niskanen Center matches her views, I do not know. The center is best known for its support of the liberal-left power structure in DC and its advocacy of anti-global warming environmentalist measures.Conspiracism
Field has emerged into public visibility through a series of articles — eight so far — posted to the NeverTrumper website the Bulwark, and one very notable article posted by the Niskanen Center, titled ‘The Highbrow Conspiracism of the New Intellectual Right: A Sampling from the Trump Years’. All nine articles are, in various forms, denunciations of Trump and his supporters. Not long after Field published ‘Highbrow Conspiracism’, Peggy Noonan published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, ‘What Drives Conspiracism’. Noonan didn’t cite Field and it is possible they were both drawing from the same well, but the word is sufficiently unusual that a debt seems likely.
A few words of explanation. Field says in her essay that she took the concept from Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum’s 2019 book, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. ‘Conspiracism’ appears to have been coined around 1981, according to Googles’s Ngram generator, but didn’t gain any broader usage until the late 1990s, and spikes during the Trump years. Its meaning shifts a bit over that 40-year career, starting our as way of talking about the willingness of people to believe conspiracy theories, evolving into the notion that all of history is an unfolding conspiracy, before arriving at Muirhead and Rosenblum’s idea that ‘conspiracism’ is ‘conspiracy without the theory’, made up of a tissue of — Field’s words — ‘assertion and fabrication’. Old fashioned conspiracy theories involved ‘sleuthing and a scrupulous attention to logic and detail’. Conspiracism goes straight to the construction of a fantasy world of ‘pure contrivance and fabulism’. To this category, Field adds ‘intellectual conspiracism’, in which the ‘New Right’ fills in the gaps with ‘hyper-abstraction’, as ‘bad arguments and scant evidence’.
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