What, If Anything, Do Populism and Conspiracy Theories Have to Do with Each Other?

populism and conspiracy theories are often mentioned in one breath.¹ Populists, it is frequently claimed, are characterized as being "critical of elites" or "angry with the establishment." And "the elites," or so populists claim, are all conspiring against "the people" somehow: a simplistic and, above all, Manichean picture, with good and evil clearly allocated on different sides, something that is also often said to characterize conspiracy theories (Priester 2012; Castanho, Vegetti, and Littvay 2017; Bergmann 2018; Bergmann and Butter 2021). Populists' audiences are taken to be receptive to claims about elites conspiring (usually, it is asserted, "behind the scenes"); this observation in turn prompts what has also become conventional wisdom for many politicians, pundits, and even social scientists: those supporting populist leaders and parties are likely to be irrational, if not outright paranoid, for they fall for conspiracy theories that evidently lack a factual basis but are very effective at riling up supposedly "ordinary people" (see also Hofstadter 1964). Populist leaders, in turn, can safely be assumed to be lying—maybe not all the time, but much more frequently than other politicians (here the sum of former US president Donald Trump's lies immediately comes to mind: in total, a staggering 30,000 or so instances over a four-year period [Kessler, Rizzo, and Kelly 2021]).

If one broadly accepts this picture, what follows? For one thing, liberals (in the broadest sense of that term, not in the specific partisan American sense) have license to indulge what would seem a recycling of the arguments from late nineteenth-century mass psychology: "ordinary people" are ill informed and incapable of rational decisions; instead, they are easily swayed by mass sentiments and ready to be seduced by talented demagogues peddling falsehoods. It is perhaps telling that, in our era, political science—always plagued by feelings of insecurity when it comes to its own methods and status as a discipline—has increasingly been dominated by psychology, especially the kind of psychological inquiry that purports to demonstrate the limits of human rationality ("if I demonstrate to highly partisan citizens the falsehood of their beliefs, they will double down on them"—that kind of thing [Nyhan and Reifer 2010]). What used to be mainly economics envy among political scientists has, for plenty of practitioners, been displaced by psychology envy, or so it seems.

Second, it becomes very easy for liberals (again, in the broadest sense) to dismiss what populist leaders are saying as simply false. The question is no longer what precisely particular politicians are claiming, but why people would possibly believe them. This is not to suggest that liberals have necessarily been complacent about the success of populist politicians; on the contrary, we have witnessed a kind of moral panic among liberals in the past half decade or so about the success of populists (and, as Michael Butter [2022] has put it, we have seen panic because of conspiracies in one part of society and panic about conspiracy theories in another). Yet the success of populists at the polls has largely been treated as a symptom; for those taking this perspective, the challenge then is to identify the underlying cause (be it economic, cultural—often enough a euphemism for racism—or somehow a mixture of the two). Here liberals have sometimes gone from one extreme to the other: from assuming that populists are always simply lying and engaged in conspiracy theorizing, to becoming convinced that, in fact, populist leaders are ultimately, at least in an indirect way, telling us the truth about what is really happening in society. Populists, it is assumed, make visible problems long ignored by "liberal elites."

I want to question these familiar frames and move away from too easily and quickly associating populism and lying in politics, and the propounding of conspiracy theories in particular. But I don't want to suggest that there is no relationship at all. Rather, I argue that there exists what, with Max Weber, one might call an elective affinity between populism and conspiracy theories—but the link is weaker...