The Logic of Conspiracy Theory

Diana West is a rare bird in our muddy waters of sociopolitical reality these days; she often writes and says things that ring of "conspiracy theory" (CT) yet fall short of the red flags -- which border on if not cross the line which separates reality from ludicrous and hyperventilating speculation -- that often reveal themselves in the rhetoric of typical "conspiracy theorists".  That's one of the main reasons why I keep reading her (aside from the fact that she's a very good writer and investigator in the sense of the "historian as detective").

Despite the title of my posting, I won't go into this intriguing phenomenon at any great length today, but will touch on one or two key points.

First, there seems to be a paradox in conspiracy ventilations -- a kind of vacillating equivocation between an implied characterization of the dastardly evil Conspirators as having seemingly limitless power and resources, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, implying there are, in fact, limitations on their power. (And another peculiar tendency of CT is the assumption that the motives of the Conspirators are as thoroughly sordid and diabolical as the Devil himself, apparently serenely uncomplicated by ambivalence or conflicted emotions).

So, concrete case in point, we have this description from Diana West, in a recent article --The Phony Paper Trail Through the Anti-Trump Conspiracy -- concerning what she calls the Anti-Trump Conspiracy, specifically about the Crowdstrike report on the DNC server supposedly being hacked by Russians (thus kicking off the whole saga against Trump & the Russians):

...the DNC did not permit the FBI to investigate, which, of course, doesn’t sound fishy at all. Further, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI blithely accepted the (redacted) findings that “Russia hacked the DNC” from Crowdstrike and then told the American people to do the same.

Now, if the Conspirators had limitless power, they wouldn't need a scenario where the DNC has to withhold evidence from the FBI, and then the FBI has to go along with this and thereby exhibit the strange behavior of the preeminent criminal investigation organization allowing some group to tell them what they can and cannot investigate.  No, they would just have the power to manufacture the evidence, go through the charade of having the DNC hand over the servers to the FBI, and have the FBI report the desired (false) conclusion.  Indeed, even what I described still has problem of paradox: for, if they actually had limitless power, they wouldn't need to go through any charade at all, since their totalitarian hold on society would already be in place, and Trump would never have won in the first place and continued to serve as President (unless, of course, he were a mere puppet under their thrall).  So, evidently, the fact that it went down the way it did, shows that if there are Conspirators, they don't have limitless power, but have to pursue their anti-Trump activities while maneuvering around various obstacles.

This is where it gets interesting, and raises numerous questions: If the Conspirators are limited in their power, exactly how are they limited?  This is not only a general abstract question, but also applicable to any given Conspiracy, such as the Anti-Trump Conspiracy.  One gets the sense that this particular Conspiracy reflects a cabal (Diana West uses that word in a recent posting) operating within a larger environment that is not Conspiratorial.  More questions: How do they operate? How do they manage to hide their Conspiratorial behaviors amongst their fellows with whom they have to work on a daily basis? To make this plausible -- especially given the gravity of the conspiracy (an effective and unprecedented coup against an elected, and then sitting, President) -- one would have to impute a remarkable and broadly distributed degree of naivete and/or useful idiocy. I'm not saying this couldn't, and didn't, happen; I'm only saying that in palpating the contours of this phenomenon of Trump Derangement Syndrome reaching into the heart of Washington in the specific form of this mainstream memeplex of "Russian collusion", one runs the risk of a kind of complex No True Scotsman fallacy, where simultaneously, all nefarious implications are imputed to the dastardly cabal, while all apparent, logically discernible, limitations to the cabal's power (e.g., my example above about the FBI and the DNC) are imputed to naivete and useful idiocy in the sociopolitical environment in which the Conspirators swim.

A closely related No True Scotsman fallacy: How are the Conspirators able to pull off anything big (like an assassination of JFK, or a "Russian collusion" meme that goes viral, or a 911 attack) at all, given that they are limited? Well, the No True Scotsman answer would be, whatever happened that we are calling a conspiracy just so happened to be what the Conspirators were able to get away with. But the question remains.

Depending on the conspiracy claimed, these questions reveal more or less plausible scenarios.  The most flagrant one with regard to the 911 Truther conspiracy (granted that there are variants on that theme) is, if the motive of the Conspirators was to make the American public think that Muslims were behind the attacks, why would they go to all the trouble of simulating airplane crashes into buildings (or, perhaps more credulity-straining, synchronize actual plane crashes into buildings with "controlled demolitions" of the buildings), when, as a dastardly cabal able to pull grandiose things off like this with their control of institutions and mass media, they could have just massacred 3,000 New Yorkers (or why not 10,000 or 50,000?) through a series of bombs on the ground and manufactured the culprits as Muslims? (And even more preposterous would be the clear implication that, because of the limitations of the Conspirators, they felt they had to concoct an even more elaborate & implausible coordination of terror attacks -- i.e., the one that actually transpired on September 11, 2001.)