Conspiracy theories are the Great American Fantasy

A few weeks ago, one of the professional bloviators at the New York Times argued that “we need a great American fantasy.” I don’t know who we is, exactly, but I do know that the columnist in question was Ross Douthat—and that his beef was that America hasn’t broken away from Lord of the Rings-style medievalist Euro-fantasy and created its own big-hitting franchise full of magic and mythos.

“If I were giving out assignments for would-be invigorators of our stuck culture,” he posited, “I would suggest new experiments in the national fantastic and a quest for the Great American Fantasy story.”

Now I dislike Douthat at the best of times, and the question seemed like part holiday period barrel-scraping and part Bad Faith Culture War Stuff (I find he rarely writes anything in good faith.) Evidence? He stepped around the two most obvious candidates for Great American Fantasy with a high-handed swoop, failing to give any real explanation other than they didn’t fit the pattern he was trying to lay down.

“Space opera, from Flash Gordon to Star Wars,” he said, don’t count but it “would take a separate essay to unpack.” And if you argued that the entire universe of superhero stories that dominate our culture was the American ur-fantasy… “you’d be wrong.” 

Thanks for the explanation.

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Still, weak as the argument was, something about it kept picking away at me. What else could fit the bill? And then I thought about January’s book of the month, Stories are Weapons. Does it suggests that rather than the ballad of Clark Kent or the mythos of Luke Skywalker, there might be a less-expected answer? 

What if America’s greatest fantasy is the conspiracy theory?

Conspiracies, cults and cover-ups exist in other countries, of course, but there’s something uniquely American about the ability for an idea to go from “out there” into the mainstream, rapidly blurring fantasy and reality.

There are the more cuddly kinds of conspiracy thinking, the Big Foots and the Jersey Devils and the Squonks. Then there are the slightly disturbing ones, like JFK or the moon landings. And then there are the more recent, and perhaps more frightening, kind: government-sponsored vaccine injuries, the “deep state” and birtherism, Pizzagate and everything that span out of it.

Disinformation researcher Abbie Richards even laid it out in helpful escalating ladder form.

Newitz talks about this in Stories Are Weapons in various ways. One of their observations: that America got so deep in this stuff that it’s created a legitimation crisis. 

“In such a crisis, social consensus and even simple communication become impossible because people disagree about the legitimacy of basic scientific and historical truths. When the US military engages in a PSYOP, a legitimation crisis is the last thing they want. They’re hoping to persuade people to take America’s side in a conflict.”

Attempts from the top to convince people about a common enemy have been let loose on the imagination, and have become a kind of everyday daydream that has crossed into our culture. They are fantasies that are increasingly indulged—to the point where today, the incoming president is a man buoyed by conspiracies of almost every kind.

And while America’s conspiracies don’t necessarily knit together into anything coherent, I don’t think that necessarily matters: Greek myths and Arthurian fables were never exactly entirely internally consistent. Contradiction doesn’t seem to matter for the Great American Fantasy.

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Why are conspiracy theories so successful in America? Well, religion has long been a central concern of the genre, from the anti-semitic to the anti-Catholic to the anti-Muslim—the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Satanic Panic have the same DNA. So perhaps the origins of the United States as a home for religious tolerance (or, maybe more accurately, its tolerance for a multitude of religious dogma) makes it particularly susceptible?

Newitz’s book suggests that the American psyche is touchpaper, fertile ground waiting for conspiracies to drop. Russia’s Internet Research Agency “didn’t directly create QAnon,” they say in Chapter 3. “They simply inspired people to ‘do their own research’ and uncover more conspiracies. Ordinary people using social media did the rest.”

Has it always been that way? I don’t know. But I do know that even the term “conspiracy theory” is extremely American. According to the dictionary, the earliest published use of the phrase was in a letter run in an American newspaper in 1863, arguing about Britain’s role in the Civil War. 

Perhaps Ross Douthat would be interested to know which newspaper. It was, of course,  the New York Times itself.

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A few quick updates:

I’ll be interviewing Annalee later this month to dig deeper into this fascinating book: if you have questions you’d like to ask, please email them over to [email protected].

While the whole TikTok thing hasn’t happened yet, Curious Reading Club is on BlueSky as @readcurious.xyz, with occasional posts about books, authors, and what’s tickling me right now. 

Finally, the author of CUR001, A Map of Future Ruins, Lauren Markham has a new book coming out (Immemorial, “a speculative essay on language in the face of climate catastrophe”) and is doing a couple of talks in the SF Bay Area to support it. You can find her on February 4 in Berkeley with Jenny Odell, and then in Point Reyes on February 8 with Rebecca Solnit. I’ll be at the Berkeley event, and you can get tickets here.

Onwards!

Bobbie