The Realism of Conspiracy Theories

Thanks to the World Affairs Council for the opportunity to speak to four excellent audiences in Western North Carolina last week. Here is an excerpt from our discussion of conspiracy theories, hyper-realist foreign policy, and democracy:

Any counter-terrorism or counter-insurgency expert will tell you that, at this point, detaining and interrogating suspected terrorists at GITMO is one of the least important tools in the effort to prevent terror attacks. And yet this issue was constantly brought up during Trump's campaign. And by all accounts he considers it a key campaign promise. So, why is this so important to Donald Trump and his supporters?

I believe the answer to this question lies in the fact that the anarchical arena of international politics, as it is fetishized in by Trump's "realist" approach to foreign policy, has become a kind of Baudrillardian hyperreality. By condoning torture, Trump is signifying that he lives in that realer than real world. The violence and horror that is conjured up by the word torture, in a way, becomes the marker of the real. 

This hyperreal world is the world where Vladimir Putin and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad operate. It is the world in which we imagine spies, and CIA agents, soldiers of fortune, and Russian oligarchs all doing what they do. It is a world beyond the walls of our democratic states, where all of the smart people, who aren’t foolish enough follow the norms and rules and niceties of civil society, are out there putting one over on us.

My thesis is that this international world, as imagined by this brand of realism, is essentially the same world that is conjured up by conspiracy theorists.

If we accept the necessity of torture, or harbor conspiracy theories, this shows that we understand that world—the real world. It shows that we see it clearly, and not with rose colored glasses. It marks us as undeceived. And it shows that we, in a way, are participants in it. In this way believing in the necessity of torture is like believing in conspiracy theories.

The trouble with this perspective is, first of all, that it gets the world wrong. Not that there aren’t bad people out there doing bad things and getting away with it. Of course there are. But the realist characterization of the word advanced by Donald Trump is overly pessimistic, and as such it tends to become a self-fulfilling prophesy. 

If we see the world this way, it tends to become this way. Politics tends to produce its own reality, more than the other way around. In this sense, reality and politics actually do not have as much to do with each other as most realists think.

The second, and perhaps more serious problem with this perspective, however, is that it entails contempt for democracy. 

It denigrates democracy because our democratic civil society — which we have worked so hard to achieve and to protect — is viewed as a fake world. It is the world where the dupes live. And no real action, on this perspective, certainly no heroic action, is possible here inside the polis, as it were. The real action is out there, outside the city walls, in the real world. 

I want to end by painting a different picture of what real action in the real world could be. And to do that, I will draw on the classical Greek tradition of political thought, and particularly on Aristotle’s view of politics.

For Aristotle, the best kind of human life was not a life of mere pleasure, nor was it a life of other -worldly spiritual contemplation, but rather a life of noble deeds. 

What did Aristotle mean by noble deeds? Did he mean acts of private charity? Or heroic actions in war?

He would have recognized the nobility of those kinds of heroic acts. But there is an even greater kind of action for Aristotle.

By noble deeds, Aristotle primarily meant the principled actions and judgments, and the great public speeches of statesmen and citizens. It is in this spirit that Aristotle famously wrote, “Man is the political animal. And anyone who does not live in a political community is either a beast or a god.”

In Ancient Athens, executions were not very common, but when they did take place, they were bloodless. Usually death was by strangulation or, as in the case of Socrates, by taking poison. It wasn’t because these methods were considered more humane, exactly. The reason was to mark off the space of civil society, inside the polis, from the space of war outside the polis. It would be a desecration of something sacred and precious to shed blood inside democratic society. It would be a desecration to introduce violence and necessity into what was supposed to be a space of freedom and noble acts.

If you follow US politics, you may have seen or at least read about John McCain casting a deciding vote against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. His dramatic “thumbs down” was followed by an impassioned speech (by McCain standards), not about healthcare policy, but about the fate of the Senate itself. Partisan rule-bending and parliamentary trickery has been eroding the institution for some time, and McCain has been there long enough to see that. “Let us return to regular order,” he said.

I came away with the sense that John McCain would rather be remembered for that vote and that speech than for anything he did during the Vietnam War.

McCain's legacy is not devoid of cynical posturing, but if we look only that this moment we see the type of action that Aristotle would recognize. And it is only possible inside civil society. Outside the polis walls, in the blood-soaked world of international politics and war, there is little space for such action. 

Outside of democratic society, in the Greek view, was the realm of necessity and violence. And precisely not the realm of freedom, and the good life. The realm of noble acts and the memorialization of noble acts. It is the great achievement of democracy to make a space for the principled actions of deliberation, judgment, and decision by self-governing citizens. 

In the era of Trump, what we should ask ourselves is, “what has become of the sense that the democratic public sphere is the real world, and the world in which great deeds can be done and remembered?”