Many scholars have drawn on this argument and have suggested that, ironically, exactly at the time when [in his essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, Richard] Hofstadter was making this claim, conspiracy theories were beginning to move from the margins to the mainstream of American culture. Focusing on the contemporary period, these studies argue that conspiracy theories have become more widely spread and influential than ever […]. This argument sounds very convincing at first, considering the attention that has been paid to conspiracy theories in recent years. With a president prone to use conspiracist rhetoric currently in the White House, it is not surprising that some very recent studies suggest that, due to political polarisation and the echo chambers of the Internet, conspiracy theories are now more popular than ever […].
However, drawing on an approach from the sociology of knowledge (Anton et al. 2014), I will argue that the opposite is the case. Conspiracy theories have not increased, but decreased, in popularity and importance over time in American culture. They have moved from the mainstream to the margins, not the other way around. They were once orthodox, that is, officially accepted and legitimate knowledge, and became heterodox, that is, stigmatised and illegitimate knowledge after the Second World War. It is true that conspiracy theories have become more important again in recent years and are now more visible and influential than 30 years ago, but they are still far less widely spread and influential than 100 or 200 years ago.
– ‘Conspiracy theories in American history’, in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (2020), p. 648
The shift from orthodox to heterodox knowledge constitutes the most important caesura in the history of American conspiracy theories. It is far more important than the Kennedy assassination, whose impact other scholars have highlighted. Peter Knight, for example, has argued that ‘Following the assassination …, conspiracy theories have become a regular feature of everyday political and cultural life’ (2000: 2), when, in fact, the opposite is true. The Kennedy assassination was the first event in American history that triggered large-scale conspiracy theories that were problematised immediately and on a completely new level. Whereas discussions in earlier decades and centuries had revolved around the question of whether a particular conspiracy theory was true, political elites and the media now began to question the foundations of this mode of thinking and they expressed concerns about its possible effects. Put briefly, where earlier ages had once worried about the effects of conspiracies, the public was now becoming concerned with the effects of conspiracy theories. Thus, conspiracy theories were much talked about but no longer believed.
The reasons for this shift have been thoroughly investigated by Katharina Thalmann (2019). The problematisation of conspiracy theories began within the social sciences and spread from there through the whole culture. More specifically, Thalmann argues that the stigmatisation of conspiracy theories occurred in three waves (2019: 29). During the first wave, which peaked in the years after the Second World War, social scientists began to challenge conspiracist knowledge in two different ways. On the one hand, writing under the impression of the war in Europe and the Holocaust, émigrés from the Frankfurt School – Adorno et al. in The Authoritarian Personality (1950) and Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman in Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949) – stressed the potential dangers of conspiracy theories for peace and democracy. On the other hand, scholars like Karl Popper – in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1956) – criticised the epistemology of conspiracy theories, arguing that they overestimated intentional action and underestimated systemic conditions and structural effects.
These studies did initially not have much impact outside of the ivory tower, but their ideas were picked up a few years later by a younger generation of scholars. No longer concerned with Europe, but with the effects of the Red Scare in the U.S.A., scholars like Seymour Martin Lipset – in ‘The Sources of the Radical Right’ (1955) – or Edward Shils – in The Torment of Secrecy (1956) – sought to counter the widespread allegations that liberal scientists and intellectuals were puppets in a Soviet plot. They labelled such accusations either ‘pseudoconservatism’, following the path of the Frankfurt School, or ‘pseudoscience’, following the path of Popper. Unlike the earlier scholarship, the studies by Lipset and Shils received a much broader reception because they made efforts to write in ways accessible to larger audiences. Moreover, many liberal journalists, who also worried about the effects of the Red Scare, picked up on their ideas and popularised them. This popularisation was accelerated by an ‘unprecedented growth in audiences who were receptive to and interested in scientific ideas’ due to the ‘G.I. Bill’ (Thalmann 2019: 30), which paved the way to tertiary education for 2.8 million veterans […].
– Ibid., p. 654
However, as Stone and many other conspiracy theorists experienced, their convictions could no longer be articulated with impunity in public, and they were rejected and sanctioned by the media, academics and other gatekeepers. Thus, explicit conspiracy theorising – not to be confused with an often alarmist discourse on conspiracy theories – largely disappeared from the public sphere and moved into subcultures. As they were now predominantly articulated by figures on the margins of society trying to come to terms with their own marginalisation, the nature of conspiracist accusations changed. Whereas earlier conspiracy theories had almost always focused on external enemies or plots from ‘below’, ‘The 1960s … witnessed a broad shift … to conspiracy theories proposed by the people about abuses of power by those in authority’ (Knight 2000: 58). In other words, ever since the 1960s, most American conspiracy theories have revolved, not around alleged plots against the state, but by the state.
– Ibid., p. 655
Another characteristic of explicit conspiracy theorising since the late 1960s is the tendency to develop what Michael Barkun has called ‘superconspiracy [theories]’, conspiracy theories, that is, that do not merely revolve around one specific event – the Kennedy assassination or 9/11 – or a specific group of alleged conspirators – the Slave Power, the communists or the government – but merge several of these scenarios.
– Ibid., p. 656
As any casual glance at the alarmism shows with which the conspiracist allegations of Donald Trump have been discussed in most American media […], conspiracy theories have not (yet) returned to the position at the heart of mainstream and elite discourses that they occupied from the seventeenth century to the 1950s in American culture. The Internet has not simply removed their stigma and turned them into orthodox knowledge once more.
– Ibid., p. 656
Anton, A., Schetsche, M. and Walter, M.K. (eds.) (2014) Konspiration: Soziologie des Verschwörungsdenkens, Springer VS.
Knight, P. (2000) Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to The X-Files, London: Routledge.
Thalmann, K. (2019) The Stigmatization of Conspiracy Theories since the 1950s: ‘A Plot to Make Us Look Foolish’, Routledge.