In an influential essay from the mid-sixties, Richard Hofstadter tries to capture the essence of conspiracy and the “paranoid style” as they have appeared in American politics. I want to stress two of the characteristics he attributes to this “paranoid style”: the element of distortion and the element of evidence. First, although Hofstadter doesn’t claim that the style in which a political idea is expressed determines the worth of that idea, he nonetheless finds it more likely that bad, false, and deeply right-wing views will be articulated with paranoid rhetoric. “A distorted style,” he reasons, “ is a possible signal that may alert us to a distorted judgment, just as in art an ugly style is a cue to fundamental defects of taste.” Second, Hofstadter notes that paranoid scholarship usually begins with defensible assumptions and a set of facts that are used to prove the truth of conspiracy. He writes: “It is nothing if not coherent – in fact, the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities.” For Hofstadter, then, “what distinguishes the paranoid style is not … the absence of verifiable facts … but rather the curious leap in imagination that is always made at some crucial point in the recital of events.
Hofstadter isn’t wrong. But because he has decided in advance what can be categorized as having a paranoid style, a decision he makes based on his assumptions that social conflict is “something to be mediated and compromised,” he doesn’t consider what makes conspiracy theories useful for those who deploy them. For him, they can only be signs of pathology, deviations from the right and reasonable procedures of consensus politics, For him, there are only two kinds of politics, normal and distorted, and the possibility that the normal is itself already a myth, illusion, or simplification deployed in ways that prevent it contestation never arises. Indeed, Hofstadter’s attack on the curious jumps and leaps, on the hyperrationality of conspiracy theory, may actually be an attack against theory in general. How vast is the leap from social conflict and differentiation to the social contracts, original positions, and ideal-speech situations of normative political theory? How curious is the effort to vacate from the site of politics the lives, languages, and bodies that conflict and reproduce there? Much, too much, social and political theory leaves little room for mistakes and ambiguities, making attributions of rational choice willy-nilly.
The so-called distortions and imaginative leaps of conspiracy theory may be helpful tools for coding politics in the virtual realities of the techno-global information age. Not least because we’ve lost the conditions under which we can tell the difference: the increase in information brought about by global telecommunications disrupts the production of a normalized, hegemonic field of the normal against which distortions can be measured. The accusation of distortion is thus revealed as a play of power, one often made on the part of a dominant group against those who may perceive themselves as threatened, marginalized, or oppressed, as harmed by the devices of associations so inaccessible they may as well be secret. Would criteria for normal versus distorted help us deal with fears of government complicity in the impact of AIDS on black bodies in the face of the histories of denial and violation in which the Tuskegee experiments are embedded?
– Aliens in America (1998), pp. 143-4