Looking for Explanations in a World of Covid-19 and Declining Neoliberal Legitimacy:
Conspiratorial Thinking vs Social Scientific Thinking
I want to expound a little on the difference between conspiratorial thinking vs social scientific thinking, and how the current political and social climate is driving a mode of thinking - conspiratorial thinking- that is fueling the rise of the far right.
Right now is a confusing time, people are looking for clear explanations communicated to them in a direct and confident manner. The overall ecological structure of knowledge and communication institutions in the United States hasn’t helped. Science has largely insulated itself from the public in its ivory tower, and when science is communicated to the public its usually through the press releases of a university with a corporate structure to a media that is looking for soundbites and clickbait. That media is largely owned by a few corporations funded by advertising revenue from other large corporations isn’t helping either. Narrowcasting and sensationalism has historically been proven to be the best way to adapt to this environment. Smaller media outlets try to fill the holes, but to survive and grow - and growth is the name of the game under capitalism - they must too adopt. None of this means that “the news media is all fake” as Trump would argue, but rather that there are many forces and filters that act upon the discourse twisting it to better fit the needs of capital. It's not that facts aren’t present, but how they are interpreted and their implications are skewed to respond to the positionality of the powerful. This isn’t totalitarian state media which just removes all unacceptable information, but again, it is acted upon by forces and filters which skew it to be presented from and respond to the positionality of the powerful. We can see this in that we got plenty of reports about kids in cages under Trump from the liberal leaning media that conveniently left out the debate about the kids in cages under Obama - both in immigration detention and the youth locked up in prison tried as adults under mass incarceration. We can see this in the debate about the best way to fight Islamic terrorism and should we go to war in Iraq or not but never a debate about whether or not to scrap capitalism. The capitalist class isn’t a unified homogenous force, there are philosophical and political differences between individuals within it, but also different industries have different interests, sometimes conflicting with each other. Just look at the Net Neutrality debate. Different sections of capital have different interests and therefore there was a much broader debate around that than for example the debate about turning the internet into a public utility. Of course the scope of debate isn’t just driven by the interests of sections of capital, but social movements are a major driving force. We have seen how Occupy totally reshaped discussion around income inequality and corporate money in politics for example, how Black Lives Matter changed the discussion around many of the issues around race in the US including policing, mass incarceration, and history (confederate flags and statues for example). All of this makes for a messy chaotic process of a many-sided tug of war between discussing the possible, the permissible, and even the desired directions of social policy and society as a whole.
I think neoliberalism - the employer offensive - and the incapacity for the bureaucratized labor “movement” to not just successfully resist but even to be able to organize anything that really resembled a resistance combined with the legacy of McCarthyism means that we have seen decades of the development of a culture in the US in which there is no large organized force to provide alternative visions or explanations, so instead we have seen the depoliticization of much of the public. With the sudden delegitimization of the neoliberal project and the rebirth of social movements in the US people are hungry for a perspective - an analysis and explanation of what is wrong or what is going on in the world. But the gap between on the one hand the lack of institutional memory and organized radical left mass publications means and on the other hand the millions of people questioning things is still very large. This has allowed for both the rise of opportunists and outlets with a terrible analysis but even more so it has created a huge opportunity for the vultures with an insatiable appetite - the grifters who peddle conspiracy theories, pseudo science, and more. Alex Jones was probably the most successful in taking advantage of this opportunity since its opening after 9/11 - which for many was a really confusing time, Americans are not used to anything that looks like a foreign attack happening within their borders (the 90’s WTC attack being one of the only other examples most people can even think of in recent history), and the sudden drum beat of war and the obvious lies used to sell it, plus the rise of the largest movement since the anti-Vietnam war protests of the 1970’s were very sudden and dramatic changes that people wanted - needed -answers for. The Bush admin was obviously lying and the liberal press like the NYT helped them sell the lies. But the radical left at that time didn’t have a large reach. Socialist newspapers, anarchist zines, and Indymedia, etc. did what they could to both organize people and increase the reach of radical perspectives, but liberal forces were able to easily capture the movement and direct its framing and goals. They drove the movement into the Democratic Party and out of the streets.
The rise of the modern far right, first under the astroturfed turned grassroots Tea Party movement, and now under the “alt-right” and “alt-light” has been symbiotic with the rise of the grifters - Jones of course becoming their most visible talking head. The web of conspiracy sites and accounts have created a fertile recruiting ground for the far right, as their way of thinking is very compatible. The conspiratorial worldview historically *is* the worldview of the far right - the earliest fascists peddled conspiracies about Jews secretly controlling governments and media and trying to create a global government. The underlying themes are the same today, just dressed up differently. For the hard right its about wealthy Jews like Soros funding policies and movements that will lead to “white genocide - this of course is the narrative that is needed to justify their ideological goal of a white ethnostate. Its a cut and paste algorithm, I remember back in the 2000’s coming home from a massive protest in Washington DC that was part of a massive global protest against the Iraq War as the US was trying to sell the public and the globe on its justifications and my father who had been watching Glenn Beck telling me that the whole thing was being funded by George Soros. Soros had been putting money into the ANSWER Coalition (a group I was very aware of and had a lot of disdain for given their connection to the Stalinist Workers World Party at the time, now the org is a front for the PSL), but anyone with any understanding of the movement and movements in general know that movements like that one arise from legitimate grievances and grassroots organizing. Of course, astroturfing exists, and it can be successful in sparking a real grassroots movement, but this story - of the outside agitator causing problems echos back to pro-Segregation whites blaming the Civil Rights Movement on Communists (aka Russia) or the 1920’s Red Scare that blamed Russia sending immigrants here to fuel labor radicalism - despite there already been a long history of American labor radicalism going back to the early days of industrialization. (Stalinists do this by claiming all internal opposition by working class people within a so called “socialist” state is just a CIA front coup.)
Conspiratorial thinking then has two sides to it, the first of which is.blaming bottom-up resistance of oppressed and exploited groups on insidious outside actors. This serves the purpose of denying the oppressive nature of our society and that different groups have different interests. It is dehumanizing of course because it denies agency and consciousness to these groups. It also tells a larger story about society - denying what sociologists would call the conflict model- that it is functional and just, and if left to its own it would be peaceful and productive and everyone would be happy - however there’s this one nefarious group that is trying to gum up the works - they want it all to come crashing down to delegitimize it so that they can take power. This is the second side - that all the world's problems can be traced to the nefarious decisions of a small group plotting to destroy things as they are so they can take power. This is the old Nazi tale of Jewish bankers, of US White Supremacists blaming Communist Jews on Black liberation movements, it is the story of the UN trying to destroy US sovereignty to create a world govenment, it is the story of Jews pushing muliticulturalsim to destory borders and enact white genocide, etc etc.
This is conspiratorial thinking and it is the opposite of social scientific thinking. As someone who teaches introduction to sociology and social problems it is jarringly obvious to me, but since not everyone has to take sociology classes, and not everyone who takes them really comes to understand this mode of thinking, I want to explain what I see the social scientific way of thinking as and how it differs from conspiratorial thinking. The Sociological Imagination, a term coined by C. Wright Mills, is the ability to understand how the things we experience as individuals are the result of the way in which our society is organized - or what we call social structure, and of course how that is impacted by history. When I first took a sociology class with Professor Vincent Serravallo he used a scene from a play version of the Grapes of Wrath. During the Dust Bowl a farmer is about to be evicted from his land, and a man driving a tractor is there to raze the house. The farmer is threatening to shoot the driver, but the driver says he’s just following orders of his boss who got the job from the bank. The farmer then proposes to shoot the bank CEO and Board of Directors. The ever so sociological driver then says that he heard that the bank got orders from “back East”. We are left to interpret if that means Wall Street or Washington, but the conversation doesn’t end there. He then says, maybe it's not really about any one individual’s decision, maybe it's money, maybe property is responsible. The farmer then says that but it was a problem created by humans, it should be solvable by humans. The idea here is that you have this moment between these two people - both just trying to live their lives and get by in a difficult economic time, and that their chance meeting is the result not of some villain’s plot but rather the product of various social structures and social forces. It is the system of property, it should be added white settler colonial property because this is a conversation between two white men on land formerly inhabited by indigenous people who were killed and driven off, that is both how this farmer came to “own” this property and live in this home and also the same system of property - capitalism and market forces that are driving the bankruptcies during the economic downturn for farmers caused by the Dust Bowl. But the conversation first starts between two individuals and traces itself to an organization - a bank- then to something more abstract and symbolic - the East which I already noted could mean Wall Street or Washington which can both be seen as representative of capitalism and settler colonialism, which is what is meant when the conversation ends on the idea that maybe it is money maybe it is property that is responsible. However, the final lines are there to both show that this is about something bigger than individual choices - social structure- but that it is something that can consciously be changed by human choices and action - I would argue collective action and revolution.
Mills tells us to use the sociological imagination we need to ask 3 questions 1. What is the structure of society? 2. What kinds of people are there? 3. Where is this society in human history? Mills is asking us to look at how our society is organized - what kind of economic system do we have, what institutions have we built, how can our government be characterized, etc. what types of difference is silent in our society - in our racialized system due to the history of slavery and the system of whiteness and property and then its trandformation through Segregation and Jim Crow to neoliberal colorblind racism and mass incarceration we have created a category called race that is a social construct and is very salient for how people expereince life (and death) in our society. However even something with a physical biological basis such as whether or not you have an “innie” or “outie” belly button may not be a salient category for our society - so whether or not something is completely socially constructed or has a physical biological basis (or is a mix of the two) isn’t the issue, the issue is what categories of difference and identity have socially/culturally been determined to be important for this society. This helps us understand power and inequality (how society is organized) and how it impacts our daily lives as members of these salient groups. History of course is important because of something called path dependency - the past impacts and shaped the present and our possible future. We are all born into a world we didn’t choose, but then what we do with our life determines what this society turns into (or not) and what world the next generations are born into.
Another example I use to explain this concept of the sociological imagination to my students is looking at Breaking Bad. It's a story that while far fetched (a high school science teacher becomes a drug kingpin) is a story that resonated with many people in this country and “felt” realistic and possible. Yet it's a story that only makes sense to Americans. While not everyone in Walter White’s (the science teacher) position would make that choice, it is the circumstances that felt real and gave the show its realism. The US healthcare system is a for-profit system with some non-profit sections trying to fill in some of the cracks. Treatments that would be totally covered at practically no cost in countries with socialized medicine are exorbitantly expensive here, putting many many Americans into medical debt every year. Walter’s choice to start making crystal meth to pay for his medical treatments isn’t one most people would choose, but the circumstances they knew or had been through or they understood clearly as a common situation. This is what Mills means when we say we need to understand our own personal problems as social issues. Walter isn’t a unique case, he’s part of a pattern or a group of people that are experiencing something as a result of the larger organization of our society. We can go deeper into Breaking Bad and look at how gender norms shaped Walt’s decision to be a provider for his family after his death and how he responds through violence and competition, but I think I’ve made my point here. A story of a woman science teacher in Sweden who gets cancer and becomes a drug lord to pay her medical bills and provide for her family would not be a story that would even be thought up let alone one that would make sense or feel realistic to its audience - and that’s because of the factors stated .
So sociology and social science teach us that we need to understand how society is organized and how that produces social forces - profit motives, colonial competition, gendered dominance, drives for legitimacy, etc. - that act upon us as individuals and organizations. So to use the examples from earlier - a sociological understanding of the Civil Rights Movement wouldn’t explain it as the product of foreign interference but would instead look to how the racialized nature of the South (and the North which got its challenge the next decade by the Black Power Movement) led to less rights and more suffering for the Black community and that lacking institutional power the only way for them to express their grievances and to try to change their situation was through protest action. Similarly labor radicalism in the early industrial period stemmed from worker exploitation and unsafe working conditions and even from abuse by bosses, and this lack of rights and a “fair share” of what workers produced led to an expression of grievances through strikes, slowdowns, and more. In these examples we look to the organization of society and how it impacted certain groups to understand this as a relational problem - a problem of group relations. This explanation doesn’t rely on convenient outside actors who are ill defined and caricatured as ever present and all powerful yet also unable to succeed as the myths and conspiracy theories also portray their evil group behind everything whether its Jews or Communists (usually both combined).
Climate Change deniers think a more apt explanation of our situation is that all of science and the government is in on a plot -which is totally absurd is you realize how diffuse “science” is - from the R1 researchers to their graduate student and undergrad lab assistants to the publishers etc. the idea that these thousands and thousands of people are all “in on it” is absurd. It's not an analysis of the pressure of publishing or getting grants or the normative worldview of scientists and how those impact science. It's literally just a plot for world domination which will somehow magically come about by getting solar panels, or something. The denier's worldview isn’t necessarily coherent and logical, but it boldly and clearly proclaims the enemy and their agenda. This of course has to resonate on some level with the audience, and with small business owners in the shadow of large corporations and the power of the state they see their future as tied to their property (their small capital) and they just want to be left alone to be successful - which means no more government regulations around labor and the environment - and this narrative about elite academics and governments collude to interfere with the market speaks to their already existing struggles and interests. This is not to say all deniers are small capitalists, but rather I think the far right conspiracy narratives echo fascist projects so much because they tend to articulate the contradictory position of being squeezed by the system while being fanatically tied to it, its system of property, whiteness, masculinity, etc. Big capital often unleashes and fans the flames of these currents, as the Fossil Fuel industry hides behind them, even if they can’t control it and it takes a life of its own. The cry of the privileged but not on the top, in fear of being lowered to the position of those below them. The decoupling of cultural and economic capital (stemming from the successes of the 1970s to make education more accessible) seems to also play a part in this, as science and educational institutions are seen as part of the problem in collusion with a government out to get the market.
We can also find this narrative theme unlying the anti-vaxx movement. Distrust of scientific and education institutions, Big Pharma and the government, are all thrown together to argue that we are all being lied to about vaccines and depending on the strain (pun intended) of the anti vaxxer it could be just about their ableist Eugenic outlook and Autism, or it could be about fears of vaccines being used to something something control the world... I don’t know it never makes sense. I’ve read stuff about being implanted with tracking chips (because we don’t already carry phones and are constantly being spied on already by the NSA…) or that vaccines are actually being used to “depopulate” the global South. In practice the antivax crowd is pushing a Eugenic project that puts the dehumanization of Autistic people and/or their desire to deny needed healthcare to the global South under the white savior guise of saving them. This is still true even when they prop up token POC to peddle their trash.
Sites like naturalnews may not functionally play the same role as the Proud Boys, and they may have a different spin than Alex Jones, but they are grifters whose role in the far right ecosystem is to peddle the softer conspiracy stuff that appeals to even some who identify as progressive or leftist, by emphasizing their anti-corporate and anti-statist positions - of course as said already this is because fascism is the reactionary expression of the small capitalist who is in the shadow of the large corporations and the state. Their anti-corporate stance isn’t principled and itsn’t anti-capitalist or anti-white supremacy. Their role is ultimately to sell you on an epistemological position - that the world is so unknowable and power is so omnipresent and consolidated that some group of nefarious actors are against “us” and that this site is the only site with the truth (good thing you found them!) so you have to come to them for the truth. It isn’t teaching you to think on your own, it isn’t giving you tools for analyzing the problem, they aren’t tools involved that’s why. All they have is a narrative that has to keep twisting around to explain changing world events. But now you're locked into the epistemological authority, you only listen to them, you can’t figure it out yourself because there’s no forces to study to structure to analyze, just bad actors with certain goals which they define from episode to episode. How are you supposed to know what Bill Gates or George Soros is thinking? You can’t on your own, it's impossible, but you keep coming back to the site because they will tell you, they have insider knowledge. It's a model of information producer and consumer that is totalitarian and breeds 100% dependency. Just look at Alex Jones. He has such a rabid fan base not in spite of the fact that he's had to change stories and contradict himself over the years, but precisely *because* of that. Only Alex knows. He is the prophet.
This is of course the opposite of the social scientific worldview which not only teaches you how to analyze things for yourself but encourages data collection and debate. It is more diffuse epistemologically and if an idea is proven wrong it will be corrected, as opposed to long forgotten and no longer talked about because that was from a podcast he did 12 years ago and no one is listening to that. What the conspiracists sell isn’t entertainment - as infotainment is the term many use to describe some modern media practices- what they are developing is more like a cult - centralized authoritative knowledge that despite going against all the actual experts has to be true. The earth is flat, climate change is fake, vaccines are bad, etc. You of course don’t have to, and shouldn’t believe all of these, because that’s the nature of the ecosystem, each peddler has their own fiefdom of influence on their topic, and some may connect some topics like vaccines and climate change while others may laugh at climate deniers while pushing antivaxx. Each niche is an opportunity for a grifter to sell their unique brand to their audience and in each case they are the lone expert.
Are all the grifters fascists? Of course not. But that doesn’t mean that they aren't part of the fascist ecosystem helping bring people into the fascist worldview. But some are openly anti-fascist, so that proves that this one is ok, and that this one has actually discovered the truth and isn’t a nazi and wants to warn us all about the globalist agenda.. Blah blah blah. Lets not forget that the literal fascists at these rallies like Unite the Right and the Reopen America protests also call their targets fascists and nazis. For the self identified right it's because they say that nazism is the same as communism and is a left wing ideology. But for others its because they are peddling a different enough flavor that they can call the more obvious elements of the fascist movement fascism -remember the name of the game for these grifters is to build up their own empire where they are the sole arbiters of truth - so calling others nazis is ok, even if they are peddling some of the same shit.
Let’s finally, sorry this took so long, get to the pandemic. When it first hit there wasn’t clear warning and communication from Trump or others in power. If anything he denied it and called it a hoax for weeks. This left it up to governors to decide to act, which some did. Around this time scientists were already giving long term projections - that this could last 18 months without pharmacological interventions. However, the governors, already acting on their own, chose not to be seen as taking a huge step and communicated this to them clearly, instead they chose the strategy of a couple weeks at a time. This may also be because of pressures on them from capital to remain open. Again, the contradictory position of capitalism to be dependent upon labor and circulation for the system to operate healthily meant that the system was facing either a crisi of social reproduction or a crisis of profit (accumulation). Trump stepped in to give a massive handout to capital to assure them it wouldn’t be a crisis of profit, while giving a crumb to the rest of us to keep social reproduction going for a little bit. But the needs of accumulation began to overweigh the social reproduction needs and once it was realized that the effects of the pandemic were also racialized with Balck and Brown working class people facing the brunt of it, there became a quick backpedaling and a plan to reopen. Money was thrown to astroturf support - like the Tea Party- and the Reopen America protests popped up. However the obviously genocidal nature of this social policy and the political forces funding it led to the local rallies becoming populated and ran by local fascist groups like the Proud Boys and American Identity Movement and other alt-right orgs. Meanwhile people at home are still relatively in the dark about the expectations and they can see money running out (especially if things reopen and they are kicked off unemployment) and so they too are looking for an explanation. And this crisis runs deeper than anything else in recent history. Scientists are insulated from the public, and state officials aren’t communicating it all clearly, probably for the reasons I stated earlier, and despite the growth of the DSA, the left is still extremely small and so its power to step up and explain the crisis is limited. So of course it was inevitable for the conspiracists to try to take hold of the narrative.
If this pandemic was planned then why was no one in power able to step in and take advantage right away? This is the opposite of the Shock Doctrine. The Shock Doctrine says Disaster Capital will use a crisis to push through its agenda. But we saw a stumbling, we saw for a moment when Trump did acknowledge it finally a move that many on the left thought was meant to be a populist capture to pivot to the left of Biden (this was after Bernie dropped out) of the issue of the welfare state and UBI. But then shortly after Trump pivoted completely away from all that and toward open negligent mass murder. The neoConservatives who wanted to remake the Gulf didn’t hesitate to immediately make moves on Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, they didn’t hesitate to crush public schools and pushthrough charters in New Orleans, etc. But we saw no such coordinated response from any sector of Capital. But that won’t stop the grifters from arguing this was all a ploy by Gates or whoever for whatever reason. Again, it's not about providing a testable theory for how things function, it's about capturing an audience who will come to you for explanations during what feels like an unprecedented global event to those of us not around 100 years ago for the “Spanish flu”.
