Left-Wing Ideologies Are Not Conspiracy Theories
Against a common false equivalency
Every time I point out that conspiracy theories have become central to right-wing discourse, I get responses saying that leftists believe in conspiracy theories too, like structural racism, Critical Race Theory, patriarchy, etc. A commenter to my post on Gribblism explained why this is wrong, and I hear it often enough that it seems worth addressing at length. The idea that conservatives are overwhelmingly more conspiratorial strikes me as so obvious from observing American politics that it shouldn’t need to be explained, but tribal thinking does remarkable things to people’s brains, so here we are.
When I googled the definition of “conspiracy theory,” the first result that came up was a “belief that some secret but influential organization is responsible for an event or phenomenon.”
That strikes me as a sensible definition, but it needs a few alternations. The organization doesn’t have to be secret, or even an organization but rather just a group of people, and I would add that in common parlance, to suggest something is a conspiracy theory is to imply that it isn’t true. For example, it is clearly a conspiracy theory when Bret Weinstein, in talking about the Democrats, says “the true explanations for the party’s objectives are never shared in public.” He doesn’t explain what his theory is, but assures us that there is a shadowy group using the Democrats for its own purposes.
If Weinstein had evidence for this, he could defend himself of the charge, but he characteristically doesn’t, so he is a conspiracy theorist.
Richard Hofstadter similarly discussed paranoid thinking in terms of a belief in deliberate plots to influence the course of history. As a mid-twentieth century liberal, he didn’t label all of his enemies conspiracy theorists. When Joe McCarthy said that George Marshall was a communist agent secretly working to advance the aims of the Kremlin, that was part of the paranoid tradition in American politics. But Hofstadter did not use the phrase to describe opponents of the welfare state who simply thought that the New Deal had gone too far, even if he didn’t share their economic views.
Clear examples of contemporary conspiracy theories include ideas like Bill Gates is using covid vaccines to microchip the population; Satanic pedophiles are secretly running the country; Democrats cheated to win the 2020 election; Trump is a Russian spy who was sent to do Putin’s bidding; and Covid was engineered in order to take away people’s individual liberties.
Many conspiracy theories tend to have their own non-conspiratorial versions of the same idea. The Great Replacement says that left-wing parties are importing voters to help win elections. If you believe that some leftists favor immigration in part for that reason, I would say that’s supported by evidence and not a conspiracy theory. If you think this is the main cause of migration or that leftists are thinking primarily about demographic replacement when formulating their views on how many people should be let into the country, I’d say this is a conspiracy theory because it presents an inaccurate representation of the world.
With this in mind, we can see why prominent left-wing ideologies do not count as conspiratorial beliefs. Critical Race Theory does not say that elite whites get together each Sunday night and plan how to hold black people down. According to an explainer from the Brookings Institution,
CRT does not attribute racism to white people as individuals or even to entire groups of people. Simply put, critical race theory states that U.S. social institutions (e.g., the criminal justice system, education system, labor market, housing market, and healthcare system) are laced with racism embedded in laws, regulations, rules, and procedures that lead to differential outcomes by race. Sociologists and other scholars have long noted that racism can exist without racists.
One doesn’t have to agree with Critical Race Theory to realize it is if anything explicitly anti-conspiratorial. It says that racism can exist even if no individual white is racist. The oft-repeated phrase “racism without racists” is key here. CRT would say that, for example, a long time ago, there was redlining, so blacks got stuck in worse neighborhoods, and that’s why they’re poor today. Or maybe that individuals working in the criminal justice system subconsciously think of blacks as criminals, so they are more likely to subject them to unjustified searches and give them long prison sentences. You can point out flaws in such beliefs without calling them conspiracy theories. They’re more similar to conservatives arguing that the media has a liberal bias. That obviously isn’t a conspiracy theory either, but rather a belief that explains outcomes in terms of the ideas and motivations of individuals.
Feminism is similar. The patriarchy isn’t a literal ol’ boys club that coordinates in order to hold women down. Feminists generally stress the power of stereotypes, societal expectations, and institutions that were originally designed with men in mind. Establishment liberalism also tends to shy away from conspiratorial thinking in its economic analysis. Neoliberals like Obama may occasionally demagogue certain issues, but mostly believe in economic forces like supply and demand. Warren and Sanders types are more likely to blame corporate greed for undesirable outcomes, which is further along on the paranoia spectrum.
Perhaps the most prominent leftist in the country who is a full-blown conspiracy theorist on economic issues is RFK. He believes things like demand for Ozempic is a result of the machinations of Big Pharma, when all you need to do is buy Americans three organic meals a day. This of course is the exception that proves the rule that rightists are the conspiracy theorists, as RFK was rejected by the left and has found a home in the MAGA movement.
After he lost the 2020 election, Trump made the idea that it had been stolen from him central to the messaging of the Republican Party. The man says that he would win California if only the votes were counted fairly. People make false comparisons with some Democrats arguing that 2004 and 2016 were stolen, but it was only on the Republican side that a stolen election narrative came to dominate politics and decide the outcomes of future state party elections and primary races.
This isn’t just a Trump issue, as right-wing influencers and politicians tend to go straight to conspiracy thinking regardless of what is happening in the news. Individuals as prominent as Ted Cruz and Vivek Ramaswamy have argued that Democrats were planning to replace Joe Biden with Michelle Obama. This got coverage in the conservative press as if it were a real possibility. Many of these people claimed vindication when Biden dropped out, but absolutely no evidence has emerged that there was a long-running plan to get him out of the race that existed before his disastrous performance in the presidential debate. There isn’t any equivalent to this on the Democratic side. No one ever said that there was a plot within the Republican Party to replace Trump with Laura Bush.
To take another example, when Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked at his home by a man wielding a hammer in 2022, The New York Times put together a nice graphic of prominent figures in Republican politics and the conservative movement who started spreading conspiracy theories about the story, including the idea that he was attacked in the midst of having a gay affair.
Look, Democrats may have flaws. But if tomorrow Ivanka Trump got into a car accident, I promise you that you would not have rampant speculation by Chuck Schumer, Rachel Maddow, and Barack Obama that she was actually buying crack or driving to get an abortion at the time. Some left-wing influencers might suggest things like this, but they wouldn’t have the status of Trump, Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson, and members of Congress.
Republican conspiracy theories are at the center of conservative discourse and messaging. Conspiracy theorists on the left, in contrast, are usually marginalized. After the attempt on Trump’s life, one aide to a Democratic donor suggested it was a false flag. He was widely ridiculed in the press, and soon apologized. This type of thing of course doesn’t happen on the right, where conspiracy theorists instead build large followings and are never pressured to admit they were wrong about anything.
Note that the NYT graphic includes those who raised doubts about all the facts of the story having been disclosed. In isolation, this might not seem like a big deal. But when prominent figures are saying “Paul Pelosi was hanging out with a gay prostitute,” the ones going “I’m just asking questions” know what they’re doing. Rightists who are not pushing conspiracy theories themselves run cover for those who do instead of trying to address the epistemological wasteland on their own side. Something similar has happened with vaccines, with some conservatives saying that they kill people, and others not only failing to refute them but subtly suggesting that the cranks may have a point in order to win votes or cultivate larger audiences.
The Paul Pelosi story is notable because there’s nothing about it that suggested it needed to become subject to conspiracy theories. It didn’t involve the results of an election or some policy outcome. It’s just that when the most prominent rightists in the country see an old man getting beaten with a hammer, if he’s married to a political opponent, they assume he must be a homo. Sick stuff. Sort of funny, but really sick.
Besides Critical Race Theory and other woke ideas, the other thing that Republicans point to in order to call Democrats conspiracy theorists is Russiagate. As with the Great Replacement, the term can encompass a lot of different beliefs. It is a conspiracy theory to think Trump was a Russian spy. But the evidence suggests that the idea that Russia hacked the DNC in order to help Trump win the 2016 election is likely true. Conservatives often use “Russiagate” as a shorthand for the craziest views held by anyone on the left, but it was in actuality a combination of reasonable and unreasonable beliefs about the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Regardless, Democrats stopped talking about Russiagate after the Mueller Report in 2019. Meanwhile, Trump said that he should win California a few days ago. And Republicans in Minnesota just nominated this guy for Senate.
It tells you something that conservatives need to go back to something that ended five years ago to claim Democrats are conspiracy theorists. Meanwhile, the most powerful and influential conservative figures in the country, especially their presidential nominee, are coming up with new conspiracy theories on a weekly or monthly basis as a regular part of the news cycle.
Why does this distinction matter? The conspiracy theorists versus ideologues divide is something that fundamentally splits high and low human capital. If you don’t see how conspiracy theories are different from false ideological beliefs, you fundamentally can’t understand the world. I’m interested in analysis, not taking the side of one tribe and then justifying everything it does by saying its opponents do the exact same thing or worse. Conservatives and liberals have different strengths and weaknesses in their ways of analyzing the world, but there’s no reason to believe that the thinking habits and norms of each tribe are equally conducive to discovering truth.
Smart people can convince themselves of false beliefs, but the stories they believe usually need a degree of internal coherence. Moreover, ideologues tend to have blinkered vision on a limited set of issues, but otherwise can be trusted to run institutions. I think this is an underrated reason why most scientists and journalists are leftists today. The media and the scientific establishments in the modern West have flaws, but they’re vastly superior to anything conservatives have been able to create. Especially among the MAGA wing of the right, there isn’t enough of a cultural orientation towards truth for them to be trusted with power. They prove this every day.
The right’s human capital problem is bad, and the recent embrace of RFK and Gribblism indicates it is about to get much worse. If you still believe that the two sides are anywhere near parity in their susceptibility to conspiracy thinking, you have a very poor understanding of modern American politics and culture.
Matthew Yglesias recently articulated what I found a useful formulation: the Democrats have become the party of "credulous conformists" and the Republicans the party of anti-institutional conspiracy theorists.
Now, in a modern American context - where most institutions are mostly trustworthy most of the time - it's generally better to be a credulous conformist than a conspiracy theorist. But being a credulous conformist is still not good, and sometimes on specific issues or in particular moments the conspiracy theorist will have the right of it. I suppose the ideal epistemology would generally default to institutional trust but nonetheless maintain some amount of reasonable skepticism, to be applied on a case-by-case basis. This obviously requires a degree of critical thinking skills, which I guess is where our educational system *should* come in, but obviously doesn't these days.
Conspiracy Theories are marginalized on the Left? Surely you jest. No, they dominate the coverage of the NYT, WaPo, and other legacy press for months and years. You handwaved RussiaGate, but let's seriously consider that something like half the country has seriously believed, with essentially no evidence, that Trump is a White Supremacist, that Trump is a Russian stooge, that even the most lurid gossip of the Steele Dossier was proven true, that the Hunter Biden Laptop story was Russian Misinformation Op, that Trump planned to declare Martial Law and stage a military coup to avoid leaving office, that Trump planned and led an insurrection, that Trump is plotting "a bloodbath" in the streets if he loses, that Trump will end elections if he wins again, that the Republican Party are "literally Fascists" who are plotting to create a "Christofascist Tyranny", that if Trump wins then LGBTQ people will be rounded up in camps and women who get abortions will face the death penalty, need I really go on? Hell, I remember during early COVID when the Democrats were pushing the claim that Trump was going to kill people by releasing a placebo instead of a real vaccine because they INSISTED that there was no possible way to produce a vaccine in less than several years, or before even that, when they were accusing Trump of alarmism and anti-Asian bigotry while Nancy Pelosi was still out hugging people in the streets of Chinatown to show how unconcerned Democrats were about "the Chinese virus".
It's hardly a new thing either. Anti-vaxxers have traditionally been found mostly on the left wing, as are the numerous conspiracy theories about GMOs and Monsanto, about Big Oil secretly controlling our foreign military policy, etc. I shouldn't have to repeat this, but objective studies have repeatedly found no significant difference in the prevalence of conspiratorial thinking on either side. The only consistent difference they have found is that liberals tend to have a lower threshold of evidence for changing their minds, often being the majority of early adopters of new conspiracy theories, whereas conservatives tend to have higher evidence thresholds, and therefore are slower both to be talked into them and talked out of them.
As for "racism with racists", that's a nonsense logical contradiction in terms right up there with "implicit bias" (which is itself essentially just an updated "false consciousness"). If you really want them, I can easily provide quotes from DiAngelo, Coates, and others describing "Whiteness" in blatantly conspiratorial terms and advocating for explicit discrimination against Whites. More to the point, you mentioned Hofstadter, but you didn't represent him accurately. With credit to Britannica:
"American historian Richard Hofstadter explored the emergence of conspiracy theorizing by proposing a consensus view of democracy. Competing groups would represent the interests of individuals, but they would do so within a political system that everyone agreed would frame the bounds of conflict. For Hofstadter, those who felt unable to channel their political interests into representative groups would become alienated from this system. These individuals would not accept the statements of opposition parties as representing a fair disagreement; rather, differences in views would be regarded with deep suspicion. Such alienated people would develop a paranoid fear of conspiracy, thus making them vulnerable to charismatic rather than practical and rational leadership. This would undermine democracy and lead to totalitarian rule.
In The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965), Hofstadter proposed that this is not an individual pathology but instead originates in social conflict that raises fears and anxieties, which leads to status struggles between opposed groups. The resulting conspiracy theorizing derives from a collective sense of threat to one’s group, culture, way of life, and so on. Extremists at either end of the political spectrum could be expected to develop a paranoid style."
Left-Wing theories of CRT, "The Patriarchy", "Whiteness", etc clearly fit this definition: they originate with groups that feel alienated from the system, they regard another clearly identified group as inherently threatening to them, view the claims of the groups they accuse as inherently deceptive and concealing negative motivations toward them, they do not regard the accused groups or the system itself as legitimate, so they are not satisfied with attempting to resolve the matter with persuasion and democracy within the system, instead they respond by undermining the system itself and resorting to totalitarian measures (riots in the streets, public intimidation, lawfare, weaponizing government agencies, etc). Hofstadter does not require that any small cabal of leaders of the conspiracy actually exist, nor even be alleged to exist, only that the conspiratorial thinkers mischaracterize legitimate disagreements within the system as a collective hostility resulting in alleged illegitimate actions threatening the thinker.