Do Conspiracy Theories Have a Conservative Bias?

There is a not-so-old saw that facts have a liberal bias.  Here I am flipping this political aphorism to ask the related question:  whether conservative thought is especially attracted to outlandish conspiracy theories.

First, let’s clear out some ideological underbrush.  Neither left nor right in American politics has a monopoly on the truth.  Nor is either immune to the attraction of far-fetched theories that appear to explain noxious or threatening political developments.  

Furthermore, not all conspiracy theories are false.  Sometimes there are malicious plotters pulling unseen levers to control or harm others.  We need look no further than to the CIA in Central and South America in the mid-20th century, or to Russian conspirators in the 2016 US election, or to Cambridge Analytica’s recently disclosed efforts to manipulate voters and candidates in various countries through personal data harvesting and dirty tricks, all efforts to control the politics and stability of societies.

But certainly in the present climate elements of the American right seem to be particularly susceptible to implausible, even fantastical, theories of political evils.  And there is a sensible explanation for this affinity.

Examples at the fringe of such beliefs are stories pushed  by right wing media outlets over the years to demonize Hillary and Bill Clinton.  These include the wild tales during the 2016 presidential campaign that Hillary was sexually abusing children in the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant, and that the Clintons had been involved in the murders of several political operatives.  However far-fetched, such stories often gain traction within the right.   Polling in late 2016 found that 14 percent of Trump voters believed the sexual abuse story, while another 32 percent were unsure about it.

Some conspiracy theories have especially long legs.  The ‘birtherism’ fraud that Donald Trump embraced as early as 2011, and that he used to help launch his campaign for the White House–that Barack Obama was born in Kenya rather than in Hawaii, and hence was an illegitimate president–continues to resonate on the right.  Long after this fantasy had been debunked, a poll at the end of 2017 found that 57 percent of Trump voters still said that it was ‘definitely’ or ‘probably’ true.  (And this despite some evidence that Trump himself does not believe the lie.)

Recent polling by Monmouth University shows that majorities of members of both major political parties believe in a ‘deep state’ of unelected officials in the government and military who secretly shape national policies.  In fact, the ‘deep state’ simply comprises the cadres of government civil servants in federal agencies and military personnel that have always overlapped political administrations, and that generally moderate changes in national policies, limiting abrupt, radical shifts.  In any event the Trump Administration has been unique in charging that  the ‘deep state’ works to undermine it, and more recently it and its allies in Congress have argued that the Russia investigation proves that elements in the FBI and the Justice Department are seeking to destabilize the Administration for partisan reasons.  The claim is especially ironic given that the leadership of the Justice Department and the FBI, as well as special counsel Robert Mueller, are Republicans.

That conspiracy theories appear to have a particular grip on conservatives should not be surprising in the current political climate of fake news (largely perpetrated by politicians and media on the right), pathological presidential lying, and ‘alternative facts.’  It is uncomfortably reminiscent of the right-wing fanaticism of McCarthyism in the 1950s, which imagined wide-spread communist subversion in the U.S.  (Which is also ironic.  Then the Soviets presented as America’s arch-enemy.  Currently the Trump Administration appears to curry favor with the Russian government despite the latter’s cyber-warfare against our country’s elections and energy infrastructure, its siding with the autocratic leadership of Syria in that nation’s civil war, and its aggression against Ukraine.)

It also recalls the hysteria of the witch trials in 17th century Salem, Massachusetts.  And here the sheer irrationality of the trials and executions of ‘witches’ offers clues to the appeal of conspiracy theories.  Social theories of collective human behavior dating back to the 19th century French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, argue that such group hysteria is occasioned by threats to the existing social order.  Such threats can lead to ‘moral panics,’ during which the threatened group identifies scapegoats as the source of the threat.  As for the leadership in colonial Salem, who did not understand the real causes of disruption and change in their community, scapegoating identifies typically vulnerable parties to blame for the group’s disquiet.

In this explanation we find the source of the appeal of conspiracy theories for conservatives, and especially for the president’s most fervent supporters.  Notice that the argument is about conservatism:  groups generate ‘moral panics’–and subscribe to conspiracy theories–precisely when they feel that they are losing control of their customary social environments.  And such a sensibility surely characterizes the core elements of the Trump coalition.  These are the white working-class males whose livelihoods have been undermined by global economic change and technological advancements, and who experience further existential threat from the demographic wave that is turning the country into a minority-majority nation.

They are also the white evangelical Christians whom the conservative (and evangelical) writer, Michael Gerson, described in the current issue of The Atlantic as seeing themselves ‘as a besieged and disrespected minority’ amidst the nation’s secular culture.  It is another signal irony of the Trump era that these Christians have been so quick to abandon their characteristic moral standards in excusing the President’s licentious ways, arguably another form of moral panic.

Perhaps, given the last presidential election and the first 15 months of the Trump Administration, it is liberals who should now be susceptible to conspiracy theories and moral panics.

Or perhaps facts do have a liberal bias.