Republican voters and conspiracism

“Conspiracism” is the neologism that Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead have invented to describe what they call “conspiracy theory without the theory,” that is, the classic Trumpian claim that “a lot of people are saying” X is the case, without bothering to adduce any evidence at all for this.

Back in my day a conspiracy theory required a mimeographed pamphlet with many charts and arrows, that could be conveniently taped to a telephone pole. Kids today . . . no sense of craft is what I’m saying.

The Manhattan Institute, a right wing think tank with if anything an agenda to make Republican voters look good, just did a nationwide survey of Republican voters, and whoa Nellie as Keith Jackson used to say: (note that the prompt here says these are conspiracy theories!)

I guess the “good” news here is that only one in three GOP voters adhere to RFK Jr.’s crackpot vaccine views, which, given the rest of this survey, is not as bad a number as I would have predicted.

That fully half of GOP voters claim to think the 2020 election was stolen — a claim for which there is quite literally not a shred of actual evidence — is by contrast highly predictable, given that this is a core belief of the current president of the United States.

The moon landing thing is one that has never made any sense to me: Why do people believe a conspiracy theory that’s not only obviously insane, but has no discernible motivation? This is the kind of thing that suggests two out of five Republicans are truly paranoid nuts, who just reflexively believe that the ever-nefarious “they” who “control everything” are just lying to The People for the heck of it apparently.

The most disturbing thing here, by contrast, is the all-too-predictable Holocaust denial. That train’s never late as Chris Rock points out:

• Holocaust denial or minimization: Nearly four in ten in the Current GOP (37%) believe the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe. Younger men are especially likely to hold this view (54% of men under 50 vs. 39% of women under 50). Among men over 50, 41% agree, compared with 18% of women over 50. Racial divides are particularly striking:
  • 77% of Hispanic GOP voters
  • 30% of white GOP voters
  • 66% of black GOP voters

The extraordinarily high figures for Hispanic and black GOP voters, and for young men generally, says something about the mental world of these demographic subgroups, who have had their minds poisoned by constant internet and social media garbage among other things.

Crank magnetism is definitely a thing, so I assume there’s a feedback loop here among these various flavors of crazy, with one type serving as a gateway to others.

Note by the way that all these people are recent voters who were willing to be surveyed, so they are no doubt quite a bit more politically engaged and informed (for certain values of “informed”) than the average American. After all, close to two out of every five people in this country who are eligible to vote can’t even be bothered to do that, when the question is whether a nice normal lady or a malignant narcissist with early-stage dementia should be president of the United States.