Originally Published: June 21, 2024 7:50 a.m.

This article was adapted from The Politics of Fear: The Peculiar Persistence of American Paranoia. It appears at TPM by arrangement with Vintage Books, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

If America's paranoid style is homegrown and unique, conspiracy theory is universal. By the early 1920s, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — the Beethoven's Ninth of conspiracy theory — had been translated into German, Polish, French, Italian, and English. Its first Arab translation appeared in 1925, and it was published in Portuguese and Spanish in 1930. Even after some of its German readers acted on its lessons and exterminated millions of Jewish men, women, and children, it continues to be read and studied around the world. It is explicitly cited in Hamas's charter and was the basis of TV miniseries in Egypt and Syria and several documentaries in Iran. But, as deplorable as it is that the Protocols would have the propagandistic currency that it does in the Middle East, it's not surprising, as the Arab-Israeli conflict has been inescapable for the past three-quarters of a century and more. It's also understandable that conspiracy theories would be as rife as they are in countries that really are groaning under nonmetaphorical tyrannies, or that did in the not-so-distant past. 

But the gap between reality and the stresses that give rise to paranoid fantasies is much larger in the United States than in much of the Muslim world today. For all of America's longstanding racial, ethnic, and religious enmities, most of its citizens — including many who claim to have been dispossessed — enjoy a relatively high standard of living, and its laws still protect the press from censorship. Unless you are poor, undocumented, incarcerated, or Black, the hand of the government lies much lighter on U.S. citizens than it does on those of many other countries.

So why here? Exactly what are America's many conspiracy theorists so afraid of? 

I covered a conference of Richard Spencer's alt-right National Policy Institute in 2011. The last speaker I heard was the well-known white nationalist Sam Dickson, David Duke's lawyer and a former candidate for lieutenant governor of Georgia, who described his life's journey from youthful Goldwater activist to a true believer in the ethno-state. His words, spoken in a courtly southern drawl, left an indelible impression on me.

Movement conservatives, the Tea Party, all of them miss the point, he said. While they talk about "taking America back," they forget that the Constitution was poisoned at its inception by "the infection of the French Enlightenment." White people haven't controlled America's government for 150 years, he alleged. In fact, the constitutional republic is the white race's greatest enemy. "Our government hates us, degrades us, and seeks to destroy us," he said. "We cannot save America. We need to let go and think of something new. America is the God that failed."

Dickson's frankness, of course, is not the norm among conservatives, even if some of his sentiments are more widely shared than most care to acknowledge. Repressed desires, like the forbidden hope that America will end its experiment with democratic republicanism and replace it with an authoritarian Christian regime like Hungary's, give rise to the same kinds of painful dissonances that irrational beliefs do. One way to manage the discomfort is to project those beliefs onto your enemies: Obama despises America. Biden is a tyrant. Democrats want Republicans dead and they have already started the killings.

As wrong as they are about everything else, the conspiracy theorists seem to be right about one thing. A great many of America's problems share a hidden factor. The conspiracy theorists may not identify it correctly — it isn't Jewish chicanery, satanically inspired homosexuals, or space aliens. Nor is it critical race theory or drag queens. It is racism and bigotry, whether acknowledged or unacknowledged, de jure or de facto, an active principle or a lingering vestige of a willfully misunderstood past.

The conspiracy theorists are right about something else as well: things are not always what our parents and teachers and pastors taught us to believe they are. America has often failed to live up to its exceptionalist ideals. That's not to say that America is exceptionally wicked. As nation-states go, the United States is better than many, and its founders' ideals are mostly admirable, even if they and we have often failed to live up to them.

But like they do in most places, America's financial, political, and social elites really do keep a tight grip on the reins of power — that's why they're called elites — and they work hard to protect their interests. Despite what they tell us, what's good for them is not always what's good for everyone else. While it's true that capitalism has raised living standards across the board, from a child mill worker's perspective 150 years ago or a part-time minimum-wage worker's today, owners continue to enjoy all kinds of unfair advantages. Does the capitalist class routinely hold secret ceremonies in which they ritually rape and murder children? Of course not. Most of their energies go into union busting and political lobbying to keep their taxes low and regulations at a minimum. The owner class constantly tests the limits of what they can get away with, and they get away with a lot.