Introduction to American Studies- Are Conspiracy theories a product of American execeptionalism?
Are conspiracy theories a product of American exceptionalism? In short, yes they are, in large part. They often reflect a lack of willingness on the part of Americans to believe that their systems of government and society may be inherently flawed, and that any breakdowns or malfunctions in these systems must, accordingly, be a result of sinister, external forces operating within these or externally to these systems to corrupt their purity and interfere with their noble workings. To elaborate further, however, we must first explore and understand both conspiracy theories and American exceptionalism – particularly the latter — and how they are a unique byproduct of American culture predating even the era in which the Unites States won its independence from England.
American exceptionalism is a peculiar cultural constant throughout the history of the United States that eerily echoes some of the worst snobberies of the monarchies against which Americans rebelled, and from which they fled Europe and sought refuge across the Atlantic Ocean. It is the collective belief of American society, held on a deeply spiritual and/or psychological level, and manifested in patriotism and politics, that the United States is a nation which carries a special divine blessing by a Judeo-Christian God, which entitles it to certain privileges over other nations and peoples – which, presumably, are or were out of favour with The Lord or have not done quite enough to earn the level of blessings He has bestowed upon the United States. Instead of the European Divine Right of Kings to do as they cared to with their subjects, America concocted a Divine Right of Democrats to do as they wished with their country, then North America, and later — as the United States’ power burgeoned exponentially — the entire planet.
The root of this exceptionalism can probably viewed as a noble one, inasmuch as the principles that inspired America’s Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights were no less than a fundamentally populist reorientation of the way in which Western societies viewed the dignity of human life and the inherent worth of the individual. As importantly, the Declaration of Independence, in particular, attached a spiritual impetus / foundation to these principles. The document’s original author, Thomas Jefferson (who went on to become the third president of the United States), famously stated in its second paragraph:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
In fact, reinforcing the spiritual influence on the text, the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident” was originally “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” until Benjamin Franklin suggested the revision that was included in the final document. This clearly shows that “Jefferson had asserted, intentionally or not, that the principle in question—the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights—was an assertion of religion.” (Seddon, 2005) That the United States founded itself on such ostensibly divinely inspired principles, and was able to overcome considerable odds and defeat the military might of England on two occasions (both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812), lent credence to those leaders or influential thinkers who — whatever their actual agendas may have been – advocated the belief that the United States was blessed with supernatural (or at least preternatural) powers and responsibilities as a people and a nation. This was where things started to go awry.
One such power, or responsibility, depending on one’s perspective, came to be known as Manifest Destiny, a term first coined in the 1850s, though the particulars of its methodology and philosophy had been in circulation and in practice for decades. Simply put, Manifest Destiny was the belief in a divinely endowed right of the United States to expand its national territory as far Westward as the Pacific Ocean. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803, in which the United States doubled its size for a paltry $15 million payment to France, at least had a semblance of a fair transaction, though the Native Americans who resided in the Louisiana Purchase territories likely found the transaction unfair at the least, and barbaric and spiritually illegitimate at worst. Later, the United States expressed a willingness to take by force what it wanted in land. In 1846, the U.S. entered into a war with Mexico which seemed to have little purpose behind it other than to seize a great deal of Mexican territory, which the victorious United States did in 1848 after capturing the Mexican capital. In a ‘magnanimous’ gesture, the victorious Americans did not deprive the Mexicans of their own sovereignty; they settled instead for assuming ownership of the Mexican territories that would later become the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Washington, Oregon, and California.
Manifest Destiny apparently also failed to recognize any potential claim the Native Americans may have rightfully had to the land on which they had lived for thousands of years before North America was colonized. Native Americans in general found the philosophical notion of owning land to be a ludicrous and baffling one, and thus were at first happy to accommodate their new neighbors, until such time as the neighbors began to enforce their European notions of property and land ownership on the entirety of the continent. When the Native Americans resisted, they were either slaughtered or forcefully relocated; the inherent dignity of their spiritual beliefs and their squatters’ rights, at the very least, over their lands, was dismissed out of hand because of their “heathen” beliefs and way of life. Apparently, in the views of advocates of Manifest Destiny, the Creator had not endowed the Native Americans with the same self-evidently inalienable rights as those who believed in the Judeo-Christian God of the Americans.
American exceptionalism continued to grow malignant and show grotesque moments of hypocrisy; the United States consistently lagged behind other Western nations in the application of civil rights to minorities, particularly blacks, while sanctimoniously lecturing the world about the superiority of its values. The great land grab that was the Spanish-American War of 1896 was a mercifully brief venture in expanding the doctrine of Manifest Destiny beyond North America. While American troops fought and died to defeat the tyrannical forces of the Nazis, Japanese, and later Communists, at home, American’s own black citizens could not eat in the same restaurants or ride the same public transportation as their white brethren. In the late 20th Century, the United States would regularly overlook grotesque human rights violations of other nations if their political interests happened to be aligned in an expedient fashion; then, the Americans would invoke human rights as justification for military action (part of the stated rationale of the Bush Administration for invading Iraq, for example, though the U.S. had given economic and military assistance to Iraq in decades past). The stubborn “widespread conviction that [America] has been exempted by Providence (or some other force) from such chronic Old World problems as inequality, scarcity, revolution, or, indeed, of any deep, inherent, or irreconcilable sociopolitical divisions” (Pasley, 2000) has all too often prompted American leaders to look for the proverbial monsters under the American bed, not for the monsters within America itself, and in turn the United States often arbitrarily locates those monsters in foreign interests when politically convenient.
Ironically, conspiracy theories arose from the same intellectual evolution in Western societies as did American exceptionalism: The Age of Enlightenment. Science, empiricism, and rational thought helped propel Western Europe out of the Dark Ages and transform societies into institutions governed by reason, not superstition. These instincts guided the intellectual progenitors of Western democracy, and also conspiracy theorists. Conspiracy theorists have, as a rule, always been uncomfortable with the notion of randomness in the universe, or the difficulty in explaining events where causality is difficult to directly determine. They have historically sought to identify patterns and provide explanations for social and political events that fail to fit into the established schema of understanding, whatever the era. Conspiracy theories
… grew out of the contradiction between an increasingly complex and unpredictable political, social, and economic world and a new conviction that everything that happened in the world could and should be rationally and naturally explained. “The belief in plots was not a symptom of disturbed minds,” [Gordon] Wood wrote in 1982, “but a rational attempt to explain human phenomena in terms of human intentions and to maintain moral coherence in the affairs of men. (Pasley, 2000)
The unseen hand of God — real or imagined — always shadowed Enlightenment rationalism, however. The phrase “moral coherence” above suggests that since morality is commonly derived from religious influence, it is therefore not difficult to conclude that the metaphysical conflict between good and evil is always played out in any conspiracy theory worth its proverbial salt. American conspiracy theories, then, on one hand reflect the demand for rational explanations, but allow for the possibility that at the root of the rational explanation may very well be a metaphysical force or abstract manifestation of evil. These theories, then, are simultaneously subversive and superstitious; yet reinforce the political-social status quo by ruling out any inherent flaws in American political and social systems: “Thus the basic soundness of American institutions and American society, and the existence of a consensual set of American values, could be validated by compartmentalizing the blame for any indicators to the contrary.” (Pasley, 2000)
Put another way, God Himself ordained the basic soundness of American institutions, and when these institutions falter, it is a result of evildoers whose mission is to challenge God. If this sounds alarmingly similar to the philosophy of Al Qaida, it is because it is, in fact, alarmingly similar. Replace “God” with “Allah” and “American” with “Islamic,” and there you have a fundamentalist Islamic philosophy with enough potency to incite a thousand jihads. Osama Bin Laden’s conspiracy theories blame America for the woes of the Islamic peoples; George W. Bush and the conservative Republicans who control the United States blame terrorists and “evildoers” – this is a favorite word of Bush – for all the current ills of the United States. The grotesque American budget deficits and decline in domestic social services due to war expenditures in Iraq could not possibly be a result of foolish fiscal and foreign policy – they must certainly be the byproduct of the work of evildoers. It is not unreasonable, then, to assert that George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden are themselves reflections of one another, and serve as leaders of ideological movements that are far more alike than they are different.
This is only a recent example of American exceptionalism making a strange bridegroom with conspiracy theories; it is only the latest, however, in a series of events where the former fueled the latter. The very first example, in fact, predates the American Revolution by a century – the Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts. Disease, mental illness, poor physical health, etc., were all a sad reality of life in many of the early American colonies. The colonists themselves believed, though, that the new life upon which they had embarked in the New World was a divinely ordained and blessed exodus from oppressive Europe, akin to the exodus of the Jews from Egypt. Thus, when they fell upon hard times that were either inexplicably too challenging, or simply too difficult to process emotionally or spiritually, the colonists often looked to blame abstract forces of evil, as they did when attempting to ferret out a supposed epidemic of witches in Salem, Massachusetts:
Conspiracy theories tend to retain strong mystical elements even at their most rationalistic … there were some religious roots to even American revolutionary conspiracy theories: Christians had long cast Satan or the Antichrist as dark and implacable plotters against humanity’s hopes, and diabolical imagery easily crept into Revolutionary sermons, newspaper essays… (Pasley, 2000)
Thus, given the collective early American assumption of God’s blessing on their colonial endeavours, it was likely a quasi-logical process to arrive at the conclusion that the minions of the Devil were actively working to prevent the success of the colonists, in this case demons that had been sent to turn hapless Salem residents into witches. Unfortunately for the citizens so accused under shoddy evidence, Satan was not accorded the resulting punishment; rather, these poor souls were largely executed instead of even being offered the option of a rehabilitative exorcism.
Later generations of colonists rightly elected to rise up against the arbitrary, unjust, and indifferent British colonial and homeland government, but in the process of doing so, engaged in a good deal of conspiracy-theorist exceptionalism themselves. The Declaration of Independence, though containing so many bold, emancipating, and noble thoughts, is also clearly a narrative of paranoid and hypocritical invective against King George III, seeking to expose “the king’s secret ‘design’ to ‘reduce [the Americans] under an absolute despotism’ … [a] rather stunning [effort] to blame the British for internal American social problems, particularly its racial problems.” (Pasley, 2000). For example, the Americans rather incredulously blame the British for forcing the colonies to engage in slave trade; the King is admonished for “limiting the acquisition of new lands,” i.e. westward expansion into Native American territory; and the British are blamed for inciting the Native Americans to attack colonists.
American history from that point is replete with conspiracy theories including a Slave Power conspiracy in the mid 19th-century, which held that slaves were conspiring to take over the United States and murder their former masters, which was easier to stomach and react against for many than to accept the fact that the United States was an inherently racist society and take principled action accordingly; the Red Scare of the 1950s, an anti-Communist conspiracy theory embodied by Senator Joseph McCarthy, which blamed any number of social, cultural, and economic ills on Communist presumed to be lurking around every corner of the United States; the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which was theorized to be a complex plot involving, at various junctures, anti-Communist hardliners, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and even Vice President Lyndon Johnson, all of whom were assumed to have an agenda to foil the ostensibly dovish and progressive tendencies of the president. The possibility that the United States may simply have been a dysfunctional society that produced a mentally disturbed lone assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was and is dismissed by a large number of Americans, even to the present day. Even First Lady Hillary Clinton accused a “vast right-wing conspiracy” of plotting to destroy her husband, President Bill Clinton, in 1999; while the basic gist of her accusation may have been true, that conservative political forces were working closely together against the Clinton Administration’s policies, it was a fundamental denial of the inherent stupidity and immorality of having her husband’s choice to have an affair with an intern and then lie about it.
In each of these examples, the fundamental goodness and divine blessing of American institutions is never questioned, no matter how obvious the inherent flaws may be at the time; rather, external forces are blamed for the sin or dysfunction. Sadly, as in the case of Hillary Clinton, a legitimate analysis of the root of a political or social problem in America can be obscured by the paranoid, hypocritical mindset of conspiracy theories rooted in exceptionalism. Far more destructive, however, is the case of George W. Bush vs. Osama Bin Laden, which if American history is any indicator, will likely not be the last in this sad litany of examples.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jefferson, Thomas. Declaration of Independence of the United States from Great Britain, July 4, 1776.
Seddon, Fred. “Hume, the Analytic and the Declaration of Independence,” Sense of Life Objectivists Magazine, April 22, 2005.
Pasley, Jeffrey. “Conspiracy Theory and American Exceptionalism from the Revolution to Roswell,” a paper presented at “Sometimes an Art”: A Symposium in Celebration of Bernard Bailyn’s Fifty Years of Teaching and Beyond, Harvard University, May 13, 2000
