Conspiracy Theories
Matt Yglesias kindly pointed to my short piece on paranoia in the Obama era. I think I was making a slightly banal observation — that our political culture is growing more kooky and paranoid — but I was really making the observation as a vehicle for writing a paragraph that I decided to edit out of the piece. I will include it here for your amusement or displeasure.
So despite the fact that Obama has been a church-going Christian for most of his adult life, more than a tenth of the country believes that while roaming the streets of Jakarta as an elementary schooler, Obama met some wily bearded imam who lured him into his roving Muslim-mobile with delicious minaret-shaped candies and converted him to radical Islam. Dazzled by his obvious intelligence, and convinced long before David Axelrod that Americans were itching to elect a half-Kenyan youth as president, he also sold young Obama on the idea of keeping his Islamic zealotry under wraps. That way he could transform America into a radical Islamic caliphate without anyone ever noticing.
I’m sorry, but I just find the idea of minaret-shaped candies extremely amusing. Let Reihan be Reihan! Part of the reason I axed the graf is that it seemed a little mean-spirited. A tenth of Americans might think Obama is a non-secret Muslim, and they feel uncomfortable with Muslims like yours truly for a variety of complicated reasons. That’s the thing about radical pluralism — we need to learn to live with deep, deep disagreements as a matter of necessity.
Civic assimilation is everyone’s first choice, of course, but the kind of contending worldviews I’m thinking of can emerge within an existing ethnolinguistic community: amputees-by-choice are not ethnic aliens; rather, they are normative aliens.
Reihan, I hate to wish upon you a life of poverty and obscurity, but I hope they never offer you a column in The New York Times. ‘Cause they would never let Reihan be Reihan.
— Noah Millman · Apr 29, 04:33 PM · #
In the heyday of the Bush years a comparable minority thought Bush blew up the towers.
I don’t worry too much about kooks, not because they are marginal, but because they tend to cancel each other out. Which is no reason not to decry kookery, of course.
— Blar · Apr 29, 04:49 PM · #
Blar – Well no. You left out “or took no action to stop them.” Now, I personally don’t beleive even that, but I would (a) consider that much less “kooky” than a belief that Bush blew up the towers (as well as much less kooky than the “Obama is a Muslim” belief), and (b) strongly suspect that most of that 1/3 believed the less kooky half of the proposition.
— LarryM · Apr 29, 04:58 PM · #
Reihan, do you still work at The Atlantic? Yglesias’ commenters may seem to think otherwise.
— Klug · Apr 29, 05:23 PM · #
“Comparable minority,” Blar, and yet, three times as large. Because for some time now, the Demos have had more kooks and more anger-fest kookery than the Repubs. (Oh Demos, do just admit it for once! The word is “more.”) And to use LarryM’s kook-friendly words for my own purposes, the Democratic leadership and punditry “took no action to stop them,” or more accurately, took virtually no action to distance the Democratic Party from such hate-kookery. Here in Virginia, the monied slick who gave Michael Moore’s contemptible lie-fest-film the first Democratic mainstream pass of respectability, Terry McAuliffe, has a shot of winning the Democratic nomination for governor. I sure hope the good Dems in VA take a stand for civility and give him the cold shoulder.
Even if it is absurd to the point of laughable, it must be said that this Obama-is-a-Muslim stuff is vile. Betrays a gross habit of enemy-think that dominates a certain type of Republican American.
As for those who voice doubt about the sincerety of our president’s profession of Christian belief when they’re speaking to a pollster, well, I think they’ve made the less compelling guess, but his behavior with Wright’s church and the political circumstances of his conversion (see the TNR piece, “The Agitator” by Lizza from a few years back) has given them a more reason to wonder about this than is usually the case. But I think it would be quite impolite and uncivic to wonder about it in public, or in published material. On religion, it’s best in our politics to assume that the public figure is what he says he is. I know a blog-comment approaches published material, but I’m breaking my own rule to suggest a reason why the “he’s not a Christian” or “unsure” answerers of polls aren’t necessarily viciously or deludedly crazy, the way those who answer “he’s a Muslim” really are.
— Carl Scott · Apr 29, 06:31 PM · #
I disagree that civic assimilation is everyone’s first choice. The independent, free-minded nature of American youth seems to fly in the face of it. That said, the freedom with which Americans are endowed to have kooky conspiracy theories is what makes America (and to a lesser extent my home country of Canada) a model for the world on how different ethnics groups can live together more or less peacefully. Finally, America doesn’t even have an official language, which is step #1 (as we have learned in Canada, somewhat painfully) for true assimilation.
— Alexander · Apr 29, 06:35 PM · #
Reihan, how may I purchase some of your delicious minaret-shaped candies?
And I think you’re entitled to a little mean-spiritedness on this one. Look at Blair’s comparison:
- crazy lefties thought Bush had some role in a crime that killed thousands – crazy righties think Obama follows a religious faith that isn’t Christian
Merely being Muslim is apparently the moral equivalent of being a mass murderer in the minds of some segment of the population. I’d get mean too.
— Erik Siegrist · Apr 29, 06:39 PM · #
Significantly more than a 10th of Americans believe the moon landing was faked, and I would guess that you could find polls showing that 10% or more believe the Earth is actually flat, or just about any other absurdity.
Some fraction of people are a) ignorant or b) screwing with the pollster on any given topic.
— TW Andrews · Apr 29, 06:54 PM · #
TW Andrews: I made a similar point a while back; in fact, according to the numbers I dug up nearly a third of Americans in the 1970s (wild times, those) thought the landing was faked, and about four-fifths of us still seem to think that Oswald got help in shooting JFK. One can only hope that a good deal of this is a matter of screwing around rather than honest reporting of beliefs.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 29, 07:01 PM · #
John, since the minority view must a priori be the crazy one, that should have been phrased as “about one-fifth of us still seem to think that Oswald acted alone”… ;)
— Erik Siegrist · Apr 29, 07:36 PM · #
Speaking of paranoia, there’s more than a little irony in Matt’s line:
“So despite the fact that Obama has been a church-going Christian for most of his adult life,”
when you consider where Obama was going to church and what his carefully chosen spiritual mentor was preaching about, oh, say, the origin of AIDS.
— Steve Sailer · Apr 29, 08:06 PM · #
Oswald didn’t have help? But what about back and to the left??
— Max Socol · Apr 29, 11:12 PM · #
@Larry: I was talking about this bit in particular.
Which seems pretty unequivocally kooky. Were you thinking of the similar Rasmussen poll from around the same time? Because I understand that it was problematic, which is why I didn’t cite it.
@ Erik: Presuming you meant me, I was comparing the “kookiness factor” between the two conspiracies, not anything intrinsically moral. It’s worth pointing out that the nutty rightist conspiracy is not only that Obama is a secret Muslim, but also that he secretly wants to enable the restoration of the caliphate. I don’t know which conspiracy is more repugnant, but both are equally nuts.
— Blar · Apr 30, 11:48 AM · #
Matt’s line? That was Reihan — I didn’t write that.
— Matthew Yglesias · May 1, 07:55 PM · #