We Can Try To Explain America’s Dysfunction Without Sliding Into Conspiracy Theories. BY Jesse Singal

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We Can Try To Explain America’s Dysfunction Without Sliding Into Conspiracy Theories

A response to an article in ‘UnHerd’ that takes the wrong approach

I generally like UnHerd. I write for UnHerd. I hope to write more for UnHerd in the future. I like many of the other people who write for UnHerd.

But last week, UnHerd ran a really conspiratorial article that I didn’t like, and I want to explain why.

It’s by David Samuels, a seasoned journalist who has written cover stories for some of the most important outlets in the world. The article’s task ostensibly is to explain America’s “crack-up,” by which Samuels means the strange situation we find ourselves in: the country is, by many metrics, as strong as ever, “a global hyper-power that continues to lead the world in innovation, with flagship companies such as Google, Apple and Meta continuing their reign as the most valuable human creations on Earth.” And yet there are many signs of unrest and other forms of strife — a lot of people appear to be freaking out.

Early on, Samuels writes:

Imagine a time-traveller from any decade in recent memory arriving in America in January 2024: they would encounter a country that would appear to have gone nuts. Millions of migrants stream illegally into the US at the highest rates in history, while the government in Washington prohibits border states from enforcing Federal law. Meanwhile, major cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are routinely paralysed by angry demonstrators whose causes change from month to month (this month’s cause is “intifada”). Questions like “should doctors perform surgery on children to change their gender?” and “is it ok for the President of Harvard to routinely plagiarise the work of other authors?” are now seriously debated by reputable media outlets.

Samuels’ explanation for all this chaos? A shadowy cabal that controls every aspect of our daily lives.

It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but if I am it’s not by much: 

Americans now find themselves living in an oligarchy administered day-to-day by institutional bureaucracies that move in lock-step with each other, enforcing a set of ideologically-driven top-down imperatives that seemingly change from week-to-week and cover nearly every subject under the sun.

The new American system has little in common with the process of balancing regional interests through the two-party system, as described by 20th-century American political scientists. Today, power flows from the top down, from a set of fantastically wealthy billionaires, to a national administrative class, and to a new layer of non-profit administrators, foundation executives and NGOs, which in turn employ a floating class of hundreds of thousands of grant-makers, organisers, case-workers and protesters who serve as the shock troops of the Democratic Party. In this role, they regiment the party’s identity-driven interest groups while receiving large amounts of funding from the billionaire class and the Federal government — thereby enabling the Party to serve as the broker between the oligarchs and the “disenfranchised” poor.

There’s a useful heuristic to help determine how credible a given theory involving humans is: is it actually about humans? Like, does it invoke human nature? The political orientation of the theory in question doesn’t matter. For example, when fringe lefties claim that indigenous societies were peaceful utopias that lived in prolonged harmony with both other human groups and the natural world, does that. . . make any sense, given human nature? It doesn’t. I’m not saying this heuristic is dispositive, but it’s a good starting point.

Samuels’ article is almost entirely devoid of human nature. I know he will get more clicks, particularly from paranoiacs, by portraying “protesters” as “shock troops of the Democratic Party,” and pretending everything else he doesn’t like that has happened in the United States in the last few years is also the doing of shadowy elites, but this storyline is very obviously faulty. I’m not going to go through and fisk this article piece by piece [update: eh, I sorta did, as it turned out], but the question of protest is an easy one: protesters’ motivations vary, and there have definitely been astroturfed protest efforts in the past (remember the Brooks Brothers riot?), but a lot of the time people go to protests because everyone in their social circle is upset about something, and one of their friends is like, “Hey, want to go to this protest?”

This whole article is just exceptionally conspiratorial. Which billionaires is Samuels referring to? They’re calling the shots unopposed, issuing orders that then ooze down some hidden chain of command to. . . protesters? Could you clarify a little?

Except a bit later in the piece, he backtracks. Some billionaires are part of this conspiracy, but others aren’t: “Lately, even leading oligarchs such as Elon Musk and Bill Ackman, cocooned by their enormous wealth, find the system they live in to be insane enough to be worth putting their fortunes at risk to publicly oppose it.” This is a remarkable re-perspectiving, if I can make up a term, and again he simply ignores human nature to get there. No one can look inside these men’s heads, but to the extent anyone can explain their strange and increasingly erratic recent online behavior, it seems to have a lot more to do with personal flaws and the psychologically corrosive effects of receiving too much Twitter attention (particularly audience capture) than with some sort of principled stand against The Cabal. Why not treat them as the imperfect adults they are rather than noble fighters for justice? 

I already mentioned paranoiacs once, but much of this article really does seem written as though the goal is to bait them and to get them even more addled and agitated. For instance, Samuels writes, “In 2019, the last year for which statistics were available before the George Floyd riots, a total of 13 unarmed black men were killed by police throughout all of America, according to statistics compiled by the CIA-linked, oligarch-owned Washington Post.”

What does it mean to say the Post is “CIA-linked”? There’s no link and no clarification. When I asked my Twitter followers, I was pointed to this 2014 guest article on HuffPost that notes the problems inherent to Jeff Bezos owning The Washington Post, which in theory should be covering the Central Intelligence Agency as tightly and critically as any outlet, and also owning Amazon, which had a then-new $600 million cloud-computing contract with the CIA that could in theory be threatened by negative coverage of the agency. This is a genuine conflict, and a cursory read of the article didn’t give me the sense that the Post responded to it in an adequate manner, but it’s a bit more of a bankshot concern than what is implied by simply calling the paper “CIA-linked” with no link or further explanation.

The weirdest stuff in here concerns everyone’s favorite Marxist Muslim who was born in Kenya — I kid, I kid — Barack Obama:

A sane, constructive political class would have recognised the dangers posed by the emerging oligarchy, and increasingly insane public discourse, and worked to build bridges between the two Americas and help create the basis for a healthier society. Instead, Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, saw an opportunity to rubbish Republicans by making Democrats the party of the rich in the name of the poor. The policy of aligning the Democrats with the wealthiest Americans, while taking from the middle class and rewarding the poor with symbolic identity politics victories, was Obama’s creation — hardly a surprising coinage from a BLM-promoting Harvard Law School graduate who once told an intimate that the two things he wanted, as he left the White House, were a private jet and a valet. Obama’s continuing influence as a tone-setter for the Democratic Party, and within the Biden administration itself, should not be underestimated; there’s a reason why he became the first (healthy) former US President since George Washington who refused to retire to his farm (or the equivalent), instead keeping a large mansion in the heart of Washington.

Obama’s central position in the Democratic Party is both practical and symbolic: in his person, he represents both the elite institutions such as Harvard Law School and the large American foundations and billionaire funders who backed his political rise in Chicago. Obama represents the new American elite, which is composed of the people who populate the types of institutions that produced and backed him, and which is the main instrument of oligarchical rule.

To posit a conspiracy theory effectively, you need to sand off the rough and inconvenient edges of reality. Citing Barack Obama as particularly elitist and particularly dedicated to oligarchic interests is, as far as presidents go, just completely bonkers. His signature policy initiative and achievement was reforming the American healthcare system. He failed to get the public option he wanted, but the bill that passed, imperfect as it was, represented a transfer of wealth from richer people to poorer people (though the size of the transfer is apparently disputed). 

I’m far from informed enough to give a blow-by-blow assessment of Obamacare, and I’ve had my own very frustrating experiences interfacing with it. But 1) part of its weaknesses surely stem from Republican resistance to the public option and the lobbying might of the health insurance industry, and 2) pursuing major reform at all is one of the last things a president would do if they were seeking to protect the interests of the rich and offer only symbolic crumbs to the poor. On top of all this, Obama consistently spoke in the unifying language of old-school liberalism, often seeking to downplay the salience of his race. He’s just nobody’s idea of an elitist wokescold or a radical, even if some conservatives tried to portray him as such.

There’s also the matter of who David Samuels mentions in this article and who he doesn’t. Drawing upon my extensive knowledge of U.S. history, I can tell you, with perhaps 60% confidence, that our presidents since 1992 have been Bill Clinton, then George W. Bush, then Barack Obama, then Donald Trump, then Joe Biden. Imagine looking at that list and plucking out Clinton and Obama as the ones exemplifying elite oligarchical rule! It’s farcical. I’m of course not saying Clinton and Obama aren’t elites, because they certainly are, but both Bush and Trump are the scions of super-wealthy and super-powerful families. To exclude them from complaints about elitism in U.S. governance suggests the author has a very pointed agenda (especially in the case of Bush, much of whose domestic agenda was premised on cutting taxes for the rich).

More on Obama from Samuels:

What members of the new American elite share is a sense of placelessness, which is also embodied by Obama, a fatherless child who grew up in Indonesia and then in Hawaii, after being sent to live with his grandparents by his mother. Where former US elites represented the upper tip of multiple local pyramids of influence and wealth (see Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was born and died on the same patch of land in the Texas Hill Country), the new American elite is the product a small set of homogenous institutions which are all sponsored or owned by billionaires. 

Yes, back in the day elites had a sense of place. If you were a Kennedy, you were strongly rooted to the compound on the Cape. As a Bush, your family preferred Maine, where for generations they had a compound that came to be known as the “Summer White House” during H.W.’s reign. Then his son, George W. Bush, purchased a Texas ranch in 1999 that, after his ascendance to the presidency, came to be known as the “Western White House.” As for the Trumps, I wouldn’t know where to begin with their various real estate holdings and seasonal getaways, but again, lotsa rootedness. I’m not sure why Barack Obama didn’t simply decide to grow up in a family with multiple properties in multiple states, but it sure tells us something about those billionaires who run everything and their rootless nature. 

Sorry, who’s the elitist here? I’ll repeat myself: farcical. Yes, Samuels notes that these prior presidents were themselves wealthy, but he completely ignores the effects growing up ensconced in social networks of wealthy people might have on a president. You’re telling me George W. Bush wasn’t ideologically influenced, and in some cases didn’t view himself as owing a debt to, his fellow rich people who wanted lower taxes and who helped him become president? In Samuels’ view, ideological influence only happens to the new breed of rootless cosmopolitans responsible for most of the country’s ills. This is unrealistic in light of human nature.

Samuels continues by saying that the result of the dynamics he’s complaining about “is a class of shallowly educated people — of whatever race, gender or sexual preferences — with a set of uniform values imposed by self-infatuated academics and diversity gatekeepers which are of very little help in sensibly administering a continent-sized republic, which was not designed to be run by a national elite in the first place.” Again: to talk about presidents and elites being “shallowly educated” in homogeneous settings without mentioning George W. Bush and Donald Trump, both of whom received Ivy League educations in large part because their families were wealthy and powerful (it certainly wasn’t because of their academic potential), tells us all we need to know about where Samuels is coming from. Now that I think about it, and along those same lines — how can you write about America’s “crack-up” without mentioning the Tea Party movement, the deranged discourse about the White House that engulfed right-wing spaces after Obama was elected, or, you know, the tens of millions of people who continue to think Donald Trump was elected in 2020, a handful of whom were sufficiently exercised by this conspiracy theory to overrun police and temporarily occupy the Capitol? This is an exceptionally cherry-picked article.

A bit more:

As the fearful servants of a fearful oligarchy, America’s elites don’t trust the people they rule. It’s no surprise, then, that one thing that most of the social innovations of the past five years — from open borders to the new language of race to the attack on meritocracy — have in common is that no one voted for them. When major shifts in elite ideas contradict existing laws, American institutional leaders have learned that ignoring these contradictions is a smart move, lest one find one’s own elite status revoked, or cancelled.

Let’s unpack this a bit. Do we have “open borders”? We do not. We have a migration crisis because of various interlocking dysfunctions within our political system, none of which can be summed up easily by one group’s ideology. That crisis has caused a major rift in the Democratic Party, with many locally and regionally important Democrats specifically calling out the Biden White House for mishandling it. If there were, in fact, a top-down conspiracy to impose open borders on Americans, it sure as hell wouldn’t look like this. Again: human nature. Human institutions get gummed up, leading to crises. That is a much better explanation for what’s going on than the tiny cadre of radicals calling for full open borders. 

Even Samuels’ earlier mention of the “government in Washington prohibit[ing] border states from enforcing Federal law” is a laughable oversimplification of these fights. For one thing, the situation in Texas, the biggest migration flashpoint, partially involves state authorities defying federal ones. As the libertarian and therefore pro-immigration Cato Institute explained, Governor Abbott has been trying to use concertina wire to stanch the flow of immigrants. This annoyed the federal Border Patrol operated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection  — that famous far-left, open-borders advocacy group — because it “reduced [officers’] ability to move along the border, especially to move from the riverbank into the Rio Grande, where many migrants were crossing and some were drowning. The Texas National Guard and [Department of Public Safety] occasionally cut the wire to assist migrants in danger or process them for removal or release, but the Border Patrol and Texas disagreed about when to cut it, and Border Patrol sometimes did so without permission.”

The Cato article later explains that for a while, the conflict was relatively low-simmer, but “On January 10, the situation spun wildly out of control when the State of Texas seized Shelby Park, which is owned by the city of Eagle Pass and abuts the Rio Grande. The Texas National Guard then built fencing around the park and denied Border Patrol access to the park’s facilities, including the boat ramp.”

What better describes this situation: elites imposing open borders on a hapless citizenry opposed to that policy, or a complicated political clusterfuck that in part was caused by a rogue state government? You can understand what I’m saying without even taking a side on the underlying conflict — it’s just a matter of fair and comprehensive commentary versus, again, chumming the water for conspiracy theorists.

***

I could go on and on but I won’t. The most annoying thing about this article is that a small set of already troubled people will take it seriously and become only more addled. In a country that’s increasingly on edge, I don’t like that. The second most annoying thing is that there are perfectly reasonable, non-conspiratorial ways to talk about a lot of this. On some issues, the Democratic Party really did get out over its skis! And elite academic institutions, even more so! 

But again, human nature: you can describe all this using pretty thin, accepted theories of how humans and our social institutions work. For example, relatively small groups of radicals can exert undue power within institutions and social networks simply by being very loud and insistent with their preferences, and bullying anyone who opposes them, especially when they can successfully spark cycles of pluralistic ignorance — most people think most people in the group are on board with the radicals, which reduces resistance, which causes more people to think most people in the group are on board with the radicals, which further reduces vocal resistance, and on and on, down we go. This is just how things work sometimes in human networks, whatever political flag they are flying, and when it comes to the subset of Samuels’ complaints that are worth addressing, there has very obviously been pushback, and many signs the radicals aren’t winning. Yes, there have been many progressive meltdowns in recent years, but no, they are not the result of top-down conspiracies, and the radicals are no longer unopposed.

The lesson here is, again, to trust commentators and journalists who take human nature into account more than those who offer sweepingly conspiratorial theories to explain what’s going on.

Questions? Comments? Sweepingly conspiratorial theories? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal. Image: GPT-4’s interpretation of the prompt “an image that captures the mind of a conspiracy theorist, wide format, including his head and its imaginings.”