Conspiracy Theory after Trump

the title of my article may seem premature, as american politics is not done with Donald Trump, and Trump definitely is not done with American politics. He may or may not manage to return to the White House, but it is highly likely that he will try. Still, for the time being the Trump presidency is history, and it is time to assess its effects on American politics in general and conspiracy theory in particular. Accordingly, the "after" in my title does not only indicate a temporal relationship but is also meant to articulate another meaning—admittedly, long obsolete in English—which the Oxford English Dictionary describes as "on the authority of, as stated by, according to (an author or text)" (OED n.d.). In other words, what I am tracing is the impact that Donald Trump has had (and of course continues to exert) on the forms and functions of conspiracy theory in American political culture. Specifically, I am interested in tracing a shift in the status of conspiracist knowledge within the Republican Party and parts of its electorate. But to assess the impact of Trump we also need to understand what was going on before he entered the scene. This is why this article begins even before his ancestors immigrated to the United States. It ends with a consideration of what might lie in store in the future.

CONSPIRACY THEORY BEFORE TRUMP

For a long time, it was completely ordinary to believe in conspiracy theories (Butter 2020, 97–99). Most scholars now agree that conspiracy theories emerged during the early modern period (Zwierlein 2020). From then until the 1950s, they constituted what the sociology of knowledge calls orthodox knowledge (Anton 2011, 25–31). They were both a mainstream and an elite phenomenon, and were produced, repeated, circulated, and believed by ordinary people as well as by epistemic authorities in both North America and Europe. As an integral part of public discourse, they were articulated in political speeches and pamphlets, sermons and religious treatises, newspaper articles, plays, novels, and many other forms of popular writing. Whereas today we tend to think of conspiracy theories as counternarratives, as challenges to official, non-conspiracist versions of events, they usually were the official versions in the past. Accordingly, they often had significant impact on events and developments.

Here are just two examples. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 on the basis of a conspiracy theory, galvanizing activism against slavery on moral grounds with resistance against what its members and supporters called the "Slave Power," that is, the influence of the most powerful slaveholders over national politics. As Eric Foner puts it, the Slave Power conspiracy theory functioned as "a symbol for all the fears and hostilities harbored by northerners toward slavery and the South" (1995, 91) and united diverse groups such as abolitionists, conscience Whigs, and renegade Democrats. Its most famous indictment occurred in Abraham Lincoln's 1858 "House Divided" speech in which he suggested that Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, and Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan had orchestrated all major events of the recent past—in particular the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision—to further the goals of the Slave Power (Butter 2014, 187–201). As the founding ideology of the Republican Party, the Slave Power conspiracy theory was an important cause of the Civil War. It enabled Lincoln to win the 1860 presidential election, which led to the secession of the slave states, which, in turn, resulted in the outbreak of hostilities.

A century later, the fear of a communist conspiracy masterminded in Moscow pervaded American society. In popular memory the Red Scare is nowadays often reduced to the rants of Joseph McCarthy, but "there was far more to the 'McCarthy era' than Senator Joseph R. McCarthy." Anti-communism was not a minority phenomenon, and "there existed in Cold War America a broad anti-Communist consensus shared and seldom questioned by most liberals as well as conservatives, by intellectuals as well as plain folks" (Fried 1990, vii, 34). Throughout most of the...