There may be no such thing as national character. Indulging in the caprice that it does exist, then America’s entails an obsession with possibility and a disdain for limitations. The foundational American myths are ones of potential, space, resources – the raw grist of the frontier, the imagined endless future of Richard Slotkin’s trilogy on American culture. The 19th century nationalist George Lippard wrote that America was forging a new race, one to transcend all previous categories and limitations, that would be called the iron race. Even in a time marked by chattel slavery and border conflict, he imagined the constraints of ethnicity and parochialism would be supplanted by industry and progress.
Some hundred and eighty years after Lippard, my wife and I were Americans living abroad with two pet rabbits (both foreigners). The rabbits, sisters, were not fully bonded. In rabbits this manifests as nipping that can escalate to fighting and a full-fur tornado (sounds cute; is not). We asked a local rabbit expert for help. She stated in no uncertain terms the bonding could not be done. Rabbits tend to bond in male-female pairs, and we had two females. We responded, with unearned confidence, that we would do it nonetheless. The result was a terrible string of sleepless nights on the floor next to the pen. Colleagues told me they could not imagine doing such a thing. Yet we did it. It was a mundane moment of pure Americanism, a commitment to make something work through work, overwhelming function with effort.
This tendency characterizes a great deal of our country: our faith in individualism and meritocracy, our yeoman farmer concepts of the past, the basic anti-social constitutional structure of our polity. There is no doubt that this optimistic individualism has a certain utility. It is a good thing to strive in your life and to try to do things. We are very happy, for example, that we bonded the rabbits (as best we can tell, they feel the same). Kennedy’s fulfilled prophecy that we “choose to go to the moon” was a landmark in human exploration of our cosmos.
The consequences of the worldview Americanism entails, though, are dysfunctional. In particular I have come to suspect that our character condemns us to a national obsession with conspiratorial thinking. The fertile ground that QAnon and climate denialism and Alex-Jonesism, the persecution complexes against shadowy over-forces that Richard Hofstader termed the paranoid style of American politics, all take root precisely because of this faith.
The connection between possibility and conspiracy requires some disentangling, but it is there. To begin with, conspiracism is not idea involving a conspiracy, because some conspiracies are real (just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you!). Epstein really form a cohort of powerful sex-criminals sworn to silence.
Karl Popper says that conspiracism is the belief that history is shaped by a series of conspiracies, or in other words, that conspiracy theorists believe conspiracies are the true engine of events. This is plausible but not that illuminating: it provides no independent way to assess the facticity or falsity of any conspiratorial narrative. Hofstadter is more helpful in drawing attention to the way that conspiratorial thinking has analogues to paranoid thinking in constructing absent enemies and finding confirmation of their intentions in the precise lack of evidence for their existence. The conspiracy theorist isn’t a simple paranoiac, but they share tendencies of reasoning. This view helps explain how conspiracism departs from truth by identifying specific errors of reasoning the conspiracist commits.
The most helpful description, I think, is Cory Doctorow’s view that conspiracism is what happens when someone is determined to find an individual explanation for a structural phenomenon. For example, wealth inequality in the United States is a real and structural phenomenon. Legal and technical changes since the 1980s have allowed large firms to transfer ever more of the benefits of productive activity to shareholders instead of workers. It is possible but daunting to understand this shift in terms of the structures that have enabled it.
However, if one is committed to the perspective that individual hard work can overcome any obstacle, then one may need an individualized explanation for wealth inequality. What would it take to understand the diminished circumstances of contemporary workers without structure?
To begin with, there must be an antagonist. If it is a matter of individual will and effort, then some individual or individuals has done this to workers on purpose. Any individual who could plan and execute such a shift would need to be evil, callous, and self-interested as the shift involves intentionally harming many for the sake of few. Because there are several different banks and firms involved, they would also need to work in cahoots with at least a few other like-minded individuals. To avoid the justifiable anger of the everyman, they would need to keep their intentions secret by lying and concealing their actions and possibly propagandizing the world about the order of things.
At this point we are not so far away from inventing several actual conspiracy theories. Add in a dash of bigotry or social context to explain why some individuals are evil, callous, and self-interested where others are not, and we have the view that a cabal of Jewish elites collude to control the global finance system to impoverish everyone else. For conspiracists who prefer a less overtly-bigoted tone, a label like ‘Globalists’ might do. If you look for this trend, you will find it everywhere in conspiracism. QAnon took structural problems such as sexual violence against children and political disempowerment and converted them into the individualistic sins of a few high-profile cannibals. (And this is what makes much American discussion about Epstein not conspiracism – it is concerned with individual explanations for a particularly heinous individual).
We can connect individualism and conspiracism. The next step is to analyze this connection in context of the American belief in the individual’s unfettered potential. Oftentimes, the American notion that anything can be done with enough hard work operates to fuel conspiracism precisely because it implies that structural failures are the product of a lack of individual will or effort. To explain why individuals lack will or effort, conspiracism steps in.
Consider explanations for the present moment in American politics. Everyone is fairly unhappy and there is a bipartisan sense of a country coming apart, a lack of effective political representation, and increasing economic injustice. There are different stories available about how things became so dire. One concerns race resentment and the failure of America to adequately deal with the Confederates after the Civil War. The Reconstruction was allowed to fail and the moment of revolutionary promise heralded by the reconstruction amendments was stopped short. Now we continue to wage the same war around ethnonationalism and nativism between those who believe that a pluralistic liberal democracy is good and those who will accept only an apartheid ethnostate.
Another story concerns the collapse of unions and the Fordist economic model. Imperfect as it was – it relied heavily on the subsidizing of the middle-class through tied fixed-term migrant employment – it did create a world where workers took home relatively more of the fruits of their productive labor. This model was eaten alive, first by financial engineering that came to see the corporation and its tools of production as financial rather than productive assets during the inflation crisis – the book value of machinery and parts was often higher than the value of the products made with them – and then with regulatory changes that encouraged companies to self-cannibalize as often as possible for the sake of shareholders.
We can thread these stories together, as John Ganz’s history of this moment does. But Ganz’s view doesn’t reflect a popular understanding of history. In our mythologization of the past, our national character is revealed. For example, almost everyone in the United States treats racism as a problem of individual behavior. There are variants of this for both left and right political affiliations (those on the left tend to defer to a superficial framing of the matter as structural, but there is no substance behind it). For the left, a good example is the prevailing tendency to believe that racism emerges from patterns of poor interpersonal behavior (this is the entire corpus of Robin DiAngelo) and that it can be cured by an individual commitment to do the work. For the right, racism refers only to individual and overtly hateful expressions of racism, and perhaps not even those if the individual later recants. It is a property of pure individual will that can only be identified in cases where an individual declares they have rationally and knowingly embraced racism. Contrast these views with the perspective the Fields sisters advance in Racecraft, which explains racism as a social technology for producing and then naturalizing disparity. This is a properly structural analysis, and thus it is much less appealing to many Americans than individualized accounts.
It is a similar story with the history of economic dissatisfaction. The collapse of union membership has been driven primarily by government assaults on unionism, but both anti-union policies and union bureaucracies divorced from organizing are tolerated in part because of stories about unionism as a force opposed to individual merit. I know a worker who would do much better in a union but insists she does not want to join one because she wants to be rewarded for her own talent and achievement. Unions are a collective endeavor and therefore easily opposed to individualism. Without the ability to collectively bargain with employers, workers can easily be pitted against one another – all the more so in an age of big data and platform-driven information asymmetries. An extreme example of this is Uber’s practice of bidding the same jobs at different prices to different drivers, based on the driver’s past history of fare acceptance. Collective bargaining would make this practice impossible, but atomistic bargaining where only Uber knows the fare behavior for every driver makes it trivial. It has the undeniable effect of depressing driver wages, since Uber’s incentive is to extract the maximum possible profit from the ride. Uber drivers who are unaware of the machinations of the algorithm simply believe they need to work harder to achieve the same returns as their successful peers.
The work of history, at least in the popular consciousness, is mythmaking about present identity. If American culture revolves around a belief in individual agency and potential, then these are the natural agents of historical motion. Economic failures become failures of individual effort and will and social problems such as racism become the product of individually malign and unrepentant racists. If the individual is capable of anything with sufficient will, then even if individuals face structural or systemic barriers shaping their decisions, they could overcome these barriers with commitment and determination. It follows that the individual is at some level responsible.
All of this leaves us with little choice other than conspiracy theories to explain the state of the world. If social problems are the result of individual bad decisions, then it makes sense to try and identify the individuals responsible. If, as Doctorow says, conspiracism consists of individualizing systemic problems, then fitting reality into the American mindset is necessarily a conspiratorial endeavor.
This is why modern and even schizophrenic conspiracy theories such as QAnon found such fertile soil in the United States. The right-wing theory of presidential action and power underlying Trump’s first term, and to a great extent his second, was quintessentially American. Trump had no experience with government, no real interest or attention to it, and no concern for technocracy or bureaucracy. The way in which he was supposed to fix everything was more or less with the application of individual verve and tremendous will. Even Trump himself believes this; he governs with executive orders and grand pronouncements of his intentions delivered over Truth Social.
In reality, the American president is constrained. Less so today, no doubt, but there remains a vast federal apparatus which contains both legal-ideological barriers (lower officers receive commands from Congress and the courts which may contradict presidential orders) and bureaucratic-functional ones (the system may lack the physical and logistical capacity to implement some of Trump’s declarations). Trump governs by dictate, but America is well-suited to governance by dictate, and so often what happens is that Trump fails to govern at all. Consider how many of his signature red-meat endeavors have been reduced to executive proclamations mired endlessly in years-long judicial fights. Consider also consider the current war in Iran, which was undertaken without the faintest tactical consideration of what options were available to other participants in the fight, and has become an embarrassing quagmire rather than a dramatic regime change.
How can Trump’s most committed supporters explain his failures? They are uninterested in these abstract structural barriers, in the ways that a system of constitutional logic might constrain Trump’s will. The answer instead is that their champion is righteous, but that he is beset on all sides by antagonists who seek to subvert his restoration of American greatness. Why would anyone be opposed to greatness? Because the antagonists are villains, of course. The explanation is not so different from that of the financial conspiracy we began with. This is the logical foundation of QAnon, with its endlessly lurid tales of satanic cabals of elites who draw power from abusing and consuming children.
In 1952, the Scottish historian Dennis Brogan published an essay on America’s self-mythologization of its power. He described the country as beleaguered by a stubborn belief in its own ability to reshape the world as it willed. Brogan’s American delusion is the global manifestation of our character. Centuries of exceptionalism and manifest destiny and the calling to build a city on the hill that shines a light to all the world have engendered a certain narcissism of the individual which we project onto the country as an extension of our will.
We live in a world of complex and interlocking systems and competing agencies, and Americans seem condemned to understand the results of these systems in terms of will and effort. The natural result is an ever-escalating conspiracism intended to explain the bad wills that endlessly proliferate. QAnon was not the end. The next conspiracies will be stranger still and all the more powerful in their hold on consciousness, because they will be even more necessary. Conspiracy is not a product of individual weakness or stupidity. It is the natural result of a conspiracy-shaped hole in our collective psyche. Nature abhors a vacuum.