THE US just witnessed the startling spectacle of hardcore conservative Republican politician Liz Cheney getting punished by her own party for refusing to echo the so-called conspiracy theory that Donald Trump lost the presidency because the 2020 election was rigged. We say this conspiracy theory is ‘so-called’ because the fraud allegation was concocted in the open and peddled by Trump himself. Conspiracies are supposed to be secret affairs but times have changed. Things are getting out of hand when conspiracies are conducted casually in public.

The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary defines a conspiracy as “a secret plan by a group of people to do something harmful or illegal”. What is harmful is not necessarily illegal. Indeed, a conspiracy, as some droll wit observed, may simply be any scheme that you are not part of. Conspiracies, according to crabby political cynics, are insider operations against the public good that somehow haven’t been legalised yet. So the mark of a really mature democracy is that most conspiracies take place in public view where there is nothing much anyone lacking riches or high status can do about them.

Conspiracies are no longer secret affairs.

Think of all those US politicians doing the bidding of their hefty campaign donors. Financiers and merchants? It was Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations (1776) and sainted hero of free market fans who never read him, who observed that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Free markets must arise, if they do, in spite of big business, not because of it. Conspiracy theory is supposed to mark the outermost fringe areas of any nation’s political life but evidently not any longer. It can be trying these days to figure out which conspiracy accusations are loony and which are accurate.

What about the five conservative supreme court judges who hand-delivered the 2000 election to George W. Bush, unable to provide any sensible legal justification for it? How did the massive tome comprising the Patriot Act, exquisitely designed to infringe on individual civil liberties while protecting the government from scrutiny, get rolled out so swiftly in the US after 9/11 except by careful backroom preparation in anticipation of the right panic button-pushing moment?

Richard Nixon launched the conspiratorial Watergate events that sabotaged him in 1974 because he believed he was being conspired against. The Pentagon Papers showed that the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident was contrived in a conspiratorial way to justify full-scale military intervention in Vietnam. Does the unseemly and unjustifiable rush into the 2003 Iraq invasion qualify as a conspiracy? Can anyone really prove who killed John F. Kennedy? Then there are revelations of the behind-the-scenes mischief of Blairites inside the British Labour Party to eject leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose egalitarian ways were not to their liking, and so actually strived to lose elections. Do the Panama Papers, detailing intricate rings of tax avoidance by the super-wealthy, not attest to a plush conspiracy?

Too often it appears a ‘conspiracy theory’ is what genuine conspirators label anything that might blow the cover on their own shoddy plots. One irony is that the same folks who revile Trump supporters for believing the last election was rigged simultaneously peddle unsupportable charges that the Russians are stealing US elections and, what’s more, persist in doing it so conspicuously that no one can possibly miss it. Given that everything that goes awry is blamed by centrist Democrats on Russians, Putin likely is having a hard time living up to his diabolical image. In fact, no one meddles in US elections (and elections elsewhere) better than Americans themselves do.

There of course are many conspiracy theories that are paranoiac idiocies, such as QAnon with its bigoted patchwork creed. It remains worth trying to distinguish as best as one can between the two kinds because not all conspiracies are fictions. A 2020 Pew Research survey reports that only about 20 per cent of Americans trusted their government “to do the right thing”. A recent study entitled Democracy in America? (note the question mark) found that what many Americans suspect is true, that scarcely any legislation passes that opposes upper-class interests.

You don’t double the income of the top 1pc over several decades without deliberate policy pressure. That doubling, economist Dean Baker notes, otherwise could boost the income of every earner in the lower 90pc by 20pc. Conspiracy theories abound where citizens experience themselves as disconnected and disenfranchised. So it’s surprising that conspiracy theories aren’t even more widespread. The upside is that four of five Americans still believe the system can be repaired, and want to do it.

The writers are authors of No Clean Hands, Parables of Permanent War and other books.

Published in Dawn, May 20th, 2021