For a very long time – longer than I’ve been alive – the standard way for someone on the Right to begin a book or a speech, draw attention to a website, or launch a political campaign has been to say that something is deeply wrong with America’s present form of government.
It’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché that carries a lot of weight. Entering right-wing politics without declaring that America has gone astray from its founding principles, and that the government is trampling on our liberties, would be somewhat like joining a Pentecostal church but refusing to say that Jesus is Lord.
It isn’t that you couldn’t do it – just ask Jeb Bush. It’s just that you won’t get very far in either a religious or a political community if you don’t repeat and expound upon the core tenets of that community’s faith.
Now, among the people who are saying that something is deeply wrong with America’s present form of government, there are a lot of variations of belief about just what that something is. To people who aren’t on the right, this is often taken as evidence that right-wingers are blowing smoke.
I don’t see it that way. Rather, I think that the situation is more like the old story of the Blind Men and the Elephant. If different people can spend years pondering the decline of the American empire and come to different conclusions about what is happening and why, it’s simply because the decline is so big and multifaceted that a single person’s insights are never enough to understand it.
For example, watching a pair of right-wingers arguing over whether central banking or leftist jurisprudence is the true cause of their country’s loss of freedom over the last century is somewhat like watching the blind man with his hand on the elephant’s tusk saying to the blind man with his hand on the tail, "There’s no truth to your theory that the elephant is like a rope; clearly the object that it resembles the most is a spear."
That being said, there is one strain of belief, common among the Right, which I wholly and unabashedly reject. I have no point of agreement with the people who think that the biggest threat to our liberties and our country’s well-being is a single, well-organized conspiracy working behind the scenes to subvert the US constitution, and that, one day, this conspiracy will emerge from the shadows and subject us all to a new and radically different form of government.
This is a theme that is played with many variations. Conspiracy theorists disagree about what the shadow group is, what sort of government it is trying to set up, which publicly-known organizations are front groups for it (Skull and Bones, Council on Foreign Relations, etc.) and why the shadow-rulers felt the need to pull off the Kennedy Assassination, the 9/11 attacks, and so forth.
My plan here is to discuss why I don’t believe these theories, and also to try to answer the question of just what it is about the conspiratorial worldview that makes it so appealing – and so wrong.
Consider, to begin with one of the (relatively) less insane conspiracy theories: the one that claims that the United Nations is on the brink of taking over the United States, suspending the constitution of 1787, and imposing martial law.
If the UN is on the brink of doing something like that, then they’ve been on the brink for a very long time. Controversy over whether it was a good idea for the US to create and join the UN has been an off-and-on theme in American politics since 1945. Before that, there was a similar controversy over the League of Nations at the end of World War I.
In both cases, the controversy started the same way: Americans were afraid of the establishment of a supranational governing body which might compel the United States to go to war without the consent of the US Congress....
Read more at Twilight Patriot: The United Nations and the Conspiratorial Worldview
