United States from the Salem Witch Hunt to Conspirator-in-Chief Donald Trump
By Steve Fraser
October 15,
2020.
President
of America Mr Donal Trump
----
News is
“faked”; elections are “rigged”; a “deep state” plots a “coup”; Supreme Court
Justice Antonin Scalia died suspiciously in bed with a pillow over his face;
aides of ex-president Barack Obama conspire to undermine foreign policy from a
“war room”; Obama himself was a Muslim mole; the National Park Service lied
about the size of the crowd at the president’s inauguration; conspiracies are
afoot in nearly every department and agency of the executive branch, including
the State Department, the CIA, the Justice Department, the Federal Drug
Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI (“What are
they hiding?”). Thus saith, and maybe even believeth, the president of the
United States.
Donald
Trump is not the first commander-in-chief to believe in conspiracies. And some
of those conspiracies were real enough, but he is our first conspiracist
president. “Conspire” in Latin means to “breathe together.” Conspiracy thinking
is the oxygen that sustains the political respiration of Trumpism. Oval Office
paranoid fantasies metastasize outside the Beltway and ignite passions -- fear
and anger especially -- that leave armies of Trump partisans vigilant and at
the ready.
Members of
the administration’s inner circle keep the heat on. Michael Flynn, whose career
as national security adviser lasted but a nano-second, tweets “New York Police
Department blows whistle on new Hillary emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes
with Children, etc... MUST Read.” Michael Caputo, now on leave from his post at
the Department of Health and Human Services, uncovered a supposed “resistance
unit” at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention committed to
undermining the president, even if it meant raising the Covid-19 death toll.
On a planet
far, far away -- but not so far as to prevent the president from visiting when
he’s in the mood or the moment seems propitious -- is QAnon, where the
conspiratorial imagination really exhales and goes galactic.
The
earliest moments of QAnon, the conspiracy theory, centered around “Pizzagate,”
which alleged that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex-trafficking ring out
of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria where children were supposedly stockpiled in
tunnels below the store. (There were no tunnels -- the restaurant didn’t even
have a basement -- but that didn’t stop it from nearly becoming a murder scene
when a believer in Pizzagate walked into the shop armed with an assault rifle
and began shooting wildly.)
But QAnon
was playing for bigger stakes than just child sex-trafficking. Q (him or
herself a purported ex-government agent) supposedly relayed inside information
on Trump’s heroic but hidden plans to stage a countercoup against the “deep
state” -- a conspiracy to stop a conspiracy, in which the president was being
assisted by the Mueller investigation flying under a false flag.
QAnon
supporters are only the best known among conspiracy-oriented grouplets issuing
alerts about a covert CIA operation to spread lesbianism or alt-right warnings
that FEMA storm shelters are really “death domes” and/or places where “Sharia
law will be enforced”; or dark revelations that the “mark of the beast” is
affixed to the universal price code, smart cards, and ATMs; or, even grislier,
radio talk show performer Alex Jones’s rants about “false flag” events like the
slaughter of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut,
where (he claimed) “crisis actors” were employed, paid by George Soros, to
simulate a massacre that never happened.
The point
of it all is to make clear how close we are to The End; that is, to the
overthrow or destruction of the Constitution and the Christian Republic for
which it stands.
President
Trump flirts with such a world of conspiracy thinking. He coyly acknowledges an
affinity with it, then draws back from complete consummation, still sensing
that it’s good medicine for what otherwise threatens to shorten his political
life expectancy. QAnon “members” show up in the thousands at Trump rallies with
signs and shirts reading “We Are QAnon.” (And 26 QAnon-linked candidates are
running for Congress this November.)
Conspiracy
thinking has always been an American pastime, incubating what the novelist Phillip
Roth once called “the indigenous American berserk.” Most of the time, it’s
cropped up on the margins of American life and stayed there. Under certain
circumstances, however, it’s gone mainstream. We’re obviously now living in
just such a moment. What might ordinarily seem utterly bizarre and nutty gains
traction and is ever more widely embraced.
It’s
customary and perhaps provides cold comfort for some to think of this warped
way of looking at the world as the peculiar mental aberration of the sadly deluded,
the uneducated, the left-behind, those losing their tenuous hold on social
position and esteem, in a word (Hillary Clinton’s, to be exact), the
“deplorables.” Actually, however, conspiracy mongering, as in the case of
Trump, has often originated and been propagated by elites with fatal effect.
Sometimes,
this has been the work of true believers, however well educated and invested
with social authority. At other times, those at the top have cynically retailed
what they knew to be nonsense. At yet other moments, elites have themselves
authored conspiracies that were all too real. But one thing is certain:
whenever such a conspiratorial confection has been absorbed by multitudes, it’s
arisen as a by-product of some deeper misalignment and fracturing of the social
and spiritual order. More often than not, those threatened by such upheavals
have resorted to conspiracy mongering as a form of self-defense.
There at the Creation
Witch-hunting,
of which the president tediously reminds us he is the victim, began long, long
ago, before the country was even a country. Cotton Mather, a leading Puritan
theologian in a society where the church exercised enormous power and
influence, detected a “Diabolical Compact” in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692.
There, Satan’s servants were supposedly conspiring to destroy the righteous
(sicken and kill them) and overthrow the moral order. By the time the witch
frenzy had run its course, it had infected 24 surrounding towns, incarcerated
150 people, coerced 44 into confessing diabolical designs, executed 20 of the
irredeemable, left four to languish and die in prison, and killed the husband
of an alleged witch by pressing him to death under a pile of heavy rocks.
Salem is
infamous today, mainly as a cautionary tale of mass hysteria, but from its
outset it was sanctioned and encouraged by New England’s best and brightest.
Cotton Mather was joined by local ministers and magistrates eager to allow
“spectral evidence” to convict the accused.
Social fissures fueled anxiety.
Worries
about uppity women (widows in particular), especially with their own sources of
income and so free of patriarchal supervision, added to the sense of
disorientation. Slavery and the undercurrent of fear and foreboding it
generated among the enslavers may also have raised temperatures. Can it be a
mere coincidence that the first to “confess” her knowledge of satanic
gatherings was Tituba, a slave whose fortune-telling to a group of four young
girls set the witch-hunt process in motion? Fear of slave conspiracies, real or
imagined, was part of the psychic underbelly of the colonial enterprise and
continued to be so for many years after independence was won.
Elites,
whether theocratic or secular, may be inclined, like Mather, to resort to
conspiracy mongering and even engage in their own conspiracies when the social
order they preside over seems seriously out of joint. Take the founding
fathers.
Revolution and Counter-Revolution
Soon after
independence was won, the founding fathers began conspiring against their
fellow revolutionists among the hoi polloi. The Constitution is a revered
document. Nonetheless, it was born in the shadows, midwifed by people who
feared for their social position and economic well-being.
Most, if
not all, of the revolution’s leaders were men of affairs, embedded in
trans-Atlantic commerce as planters, ship owners, merchants, bankers, slave
brokers, lawyers, or large-scale landowners. But the revolution had given voice
to another world of largely self-sufficient small farmers in towns and villages,
as well as frontier settlers, many of them at odds with the commercial and
fiscal mechanisms -- loans, debts, taxes, stocks and bonds -- of their
seaboard-bound countrymen.
Tax revolts
erupted. State legislatures commanded by what was derisively referred to as the
“democratical element” declared moratoria on, or cancelled, debts or issued
paper currencies effectively devaluing the assets of creditors. Civil authority
was at a discount. Farmers took up arms.
Men of
property responded. They drafted a constitution designed to restore the
authority of the prevailing elites. The new federal government was to be
endowed with powers to tax, to borrow, to make private property inviolate, and
to put down local insurrections. That was the plan.
Gaining
consent for this, however, wasn’t easy in the face of so much turmoil. For that
reason, the founding fathers met secretly in Philadelphia -- all the windows
and doors of Independence Hall were deliberately closed despite stifling heat
-- so no word of their deliberations could leak out. And for good reason. The
gathering was authorized only to offer possible amendments to the existing
Articles of Confederation, not to do what it did, which was to concoct a wholly
new government. When the Philadelphia “conspirators” eventually presented their
handiwork to the public, there was a ferocious reaction and the Constitution
was nearly stillborn. Its authors were frequently labeled counter-revolutionary
traitors.
Less than
10 years later the Constitution’s godfathers would themselves dissolve in
fraternal enmity. Once again, charges of revolutionary and
counter-revolutionary cabals would superheat the political climate.
John Adams
and Alexander Hamilton would denounce Thomas Jefferson and James Madison as agents
of godless Jacobinism, conniving in secret with revolutionary French comrades
to level the social landscape and let loose a mobocracy of “boys, blockheads,
and ruffians.” Jefferson and Madison returned the favor by accusing their
erstwhile brothers of conspiring to restore the monarchy (some had indeed tried
to persuade George Washington to accept a kingship), of being “tory
aristocrats” seeking to reestablish a hierarchical society of ranks and orders.
(Again, it was true that Hamilton had advocated a lifetime presidency and
something along the lines of the House of Lords.) Everything seemed to hang in
the balance back then, so much so that the feverish conspiratorial imaginings
of the high and mighty became the emotional basis for the first mass political
parties in America: Jefferson’s Republican-Democrats and Adams’s Federalists.
If you
think Donald Trump has introduced an unprecedented level of vitriol and
character assassination into public life, think again. Little was considered
out of bounds for those founding fathers, including sexual innuendo linked to
political deceit and scabrous insinuations about “aliens” infecting the
homeland with depraved ideologies. It was a cesspool only a conspiracy monger
could have completely enjoyed. Two centuries later those ventures into the dark
side, even if largely forgotten, should have a familiar ring.
God Killers
Conspiracy
mongering may not have been the happiest legacy of the revolutionary era, but
it was a lasting one. New England’s social and religious elites, for instance,
feared the atheism that seemed embedded in the revolution and its implicit
challenge to all hierarchies, not merely clerical ones. So, for example,
Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale College and a pastor, had nightmares
about “our daughters” becoming the “concubines of the Illuminati,” an alleged
secret society, atheist to the core, whose members, it was claimed, used
pseudonyms and arranged themselves in complex hierarchies for the purpose of
engineering the godless French revolution.
Those
“Illuminati” came and went, but the specter of atheism endured as a vital
element of the pre-Civil War conspiratorial political imagination. An
anti-Masonic movement, for instance, emerged in the 1830s to deal with the
Freemasons, a secret order alleged to harbor anti-republican and especially
unchristian intentions and to engage in pagan rituals, including drinking wine
out of human skulls.
Anti-Masonic
sentiments became a real force and even developed into a political party (the
Anti-Masonic Party), which exercised considerable leverage in New York,
Pennsylvania, Vermont, and elsewhere -- yet more evidence of how easily the
specter of conspiracies against God could inflame public life. We are reliving
that today.
Mongrel Firebugs
Along with
American culture more generally, the conspiratorial imagination of the upper
classes became increasingly secular as time passed. What most came to alarm
them was class rather than spiritual warfare. From the years after the Civil
War through the Great Depression of the 1930s, this country was the site of a
more or less uninterrupted battle, in the phrase of the time, between “the
masses and the classes”; between, that is, the exploited and their exploiters
or what we might now call the 99% and the 1%.
One way to
justify dealing harshly, even murderously, with the chronically restless lower
orders was to claim that scheming among them were the covert agents of social
revolution. If there were uprisings by anthracite coal miners in Pennsylvania,
blame and then hang the Molly Maguires, alleged Irish terrorists imported from
the old country. If there were hunger demonstrations demanding public relief
and work during five miserable years of economic depression in the 1870s, blame
it on refugee subversives from the Paris Commune, workers who had only recently
taken rebellious control of that city and now threatened the sanctity of
private property in the United States.
If there
were nationwide strikes for the eight-hour day in the 1880s, it must be the work
of secret anarchist cells inciting “mongrel firebugs” -- immigrants, also known
to respectable opinion as “Slavic wolves” -- to riot in the streets. It was
okay in 1913 for the Colorado National Guard and the Rockefeller company’s
private army of guards to machine gun a tent colony of striking Colorado
miners, including their wives and children, killing at least 21 of them,
because they were, after all, the pawns of syndicalist plotters from the
Industrial Workers of the World (colloquially known as “Wobblies”) who
advocated One Big Union for all working people.
Upper-class
hysteria, which consumed the captains of industry, leading financiers, the most
respectable newspapers like the New York Times, elders of all the mainstream
Protestant denominations, hierarchs of the Catholic Church, and politicians
from both parties, including presidents, ran amuck through World War I. It
culminated in the infamous Red Scare that straddled the war and post-war years.
Mass
arrests and deportations of radicals and immigrants; the closing down of
dissenting newspapers and magazines; the raiding and pillaging of left-wing
headquarters; the banning of mass meetings; the sending in of the Army, from
the Seattle waterfront to the steel country of Pennsylvania and Ohio, to suppress
strikes -- all were perpetrated by national and local political elites who
claimed the country was mortally threatened by a global Bolshevik conspiracy
headquartered in St. Petersburg, Russia. Attempts to overthrow the government
by force and violence were, so they also claimed, just around the corner.
So it was
that the conspiratorial mentality in those years became weaponized and the
night terrors it conjured up contagious, leaping from the halls of Congress and
the cabinet room in the White House into the heartland. A Connecticut clothing
salesman went to jail for six months for saying Russian revolutionary leader
Vladimir Lenin was smart. In Indiana, a jury took two minutes to acquit a man
for killing an “alien” who had shouted, “To hell with the United States.”
Evangelist Billy Sunday thought it might be a good idea to “stand radicals up
before a firing squad and save space on our ships.”
The Great Fear
Attorney
General A. Mitchell Palmer best expressed the imagined reach of “the Great
Fear,” an all-embracing dread of a fiendish conspiracy that supposedly sought
to strike at the very foundations of civilized life. Denouncing “the hysterical
neurasthenic women who abound in communism,” he warned of a hellish conspiracy
“licking at the altars of churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell,
crawling into the sacred corners of American homes to replace marriage vows
with libertine laws.”
You can
hear something similar echoed in Donald Trump’s recent inveighing against
“socialism” and the way Joe Biden and the Democrats threaten God, family, and
country.
Arguably,
America never truly recovered from that first Red Scare.
A
generation later that same cosmological nightscape, brought to a fever pitch
during the early years of the Cold War by the claims of Wisconsin Senator
Joseph McCarthy that communists lurked in the highest reaches of the
government, would terrify legions of Americans. His notorious “conspiracy so
immense” reached everywhere, he claimed, from the State Department and the Army
to movie studios, the Boy Scouts, advertising agencies, and the Post Office. No
place in America, it seemed, was free of red subversion.
Still, it’s
instructive to remember that McCarthy’s Cold War conspiracy culture was, in
fact, set in motion soon after World War II not by him but by highly positioned
figures in the administration of President Harry Truman, as loyalty oaths
became commonplace and purges of the government bureaucracy began. And note the
irony here: it wasn’t communist conspirators but the national security state
itself, in particular the Central Intelligence Agency, which first conducted an
ever-expanding portfolio of mind control and behavioural modification
experiments, while launching disinformation campaigns, assassination plots,
coups, and every other variety of covert action globally. That, as it happened,
was America’s true new reality and it was indeed as conspiratorial as any on
offer from the lunatic zone.
All of this
nationalized the conspiratorial mind-set at the highest levels of our society
and helped make it into a permanent part of how millions of people came to
understand the way the world works.
The Conspirator-in-Chief Lost in Space
Donald
Trump might then be seen as but the latest in a long line of the empowered who
either believed in or, for reasons of state, class interest, or political
calculation, feigned a belief in grand conspiracies. Yet, as in so many other
ways, Trump is, in fact, different.
Past
conspirators offered a general worldview, which also came with meticulously
detailed descriptions of how all the parts of the conspiracy supposedly worked
together. Sometimes these proved to be dauntingly intricate jigsaw puzzles that
only the initiated could grasp. Such cosmologies were buttressed by “evidence,”
at least of a sort, that tried to trace links between otherwise randomly
occurring events, to prove how wily the conspiracy was in its diabolical
designs. And there was always some great purpose -- a Satanic takeover or world
domination -- for which the whole elaborate conspiracy was put in motion,
something, however loathsome, that nonetheless reached into the far beyond
where the fate of humankind would be settled.
None of
this characterizes the reign of the present conspirator-in-chief. Trump and his
crew simply load up the airwaves and Internet with a steady flow of
disconnected accusations, a “data set” of random fragments. No evidence of any
kind is thought necessary. Indeed, when evidence is actually presented to
disprove one of his conspiracies, it’s often reinterpreted as proof of a
cover-up to keep the plot humming. Nor is there any grand theory that explains
it all or points to a higher purpose... except one. Abroad in the land is, in
Senator McCarthy’s classic 1950s phrase, a “conspiracy so immense” to -- what else?
-- do in the Donald. The Donald is the one and only “elect” without whom
America is doomed.
We live in
conspiratorial times. The decline of the United States as an uncontestable
super-power and its descent into plutocratic indifference to the wellbeing of
the commonwealth is the seedbed of such conspiracy-mindedness. Soldiers are
sent off to fight interminable wars of vague purpose against elusive “enemies”
with no realistic prospect of resolution, much less American-style “victory”
whatever that might mean these days. “Dark money” undermines what’s left of
democratic protocols and ideals. Gross and still growing inequalities in the
distribution of wealth and income are accepted year after year as business as
usual.
All of this
breeds entirely justified resentment and suspicion.
To the
degree that political conspiracies take root among broader populations today,
it is in part as a kind of folk sociology that tries to make some sense,
however addled, of a world in which real conspiracies flourish. It’s a world
where the complexities of globalization threaten to overwhelm everybody and a
sense of loss of control, especially in pandemic America, is now a chronic
condition as mere existence grows ever more precarious.
Trump is
the chief accomplice in this to be sure. And his narcissism has produced a
distinctive, if degraded and far less coherent version of the grander
conspiracies of the past. Still, as in the past, when we try to come to terms
with what one historian of the CIA has called this conspiratorial “wilderness
of mirrors” we are all compelled to inhabit, we might better turn our attention
to America’s “best and brightest” than to the “deplorables” who are so easy to
scapegoat.
----
Steve Fraser, a TomDispatch regular, is the
author of Mongrel Firebugs and Men of Property: Capitalism and Class Conflict
in American History. His previous books include Class Matters, The Age of
Acquiescence, and The Limousine Liberal. He is a co-founder and co-editor of
the American Empire Project.
Copyright 2020 Steve Fraser
Original Headline: The United States of
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Source: The TomDispatch
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