In fact well before Paul Revere's horse trotted off to the knackery for his last ride, America's historical twists and turns seemed always, if not at the time then certainly with hindsight, [to] pivot around the conspiracy construct. It was, as they say, ever thus.
Wheels within Wheels, Fires within Fires
To be sure the 1692-93 Witch Trials in Salem, Massachusetts for example are ample evidence of America's warm and eager embrace of conspiracy. In fact later on with his 1953 play The Crucible -- one whose many themes juxtaposed unquestioning faith and unerring suspicion, and in which one of the characters spoke of "wheels within wheels, [and] fires within fires" -- Arthur Miller drew upon the Trials as a pitch perfect allegory to contemporaneously showcase and amplify another of America's all-time great conspiracies that was raging at the time. We're talking here of course the infamous House un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigations of the 40s and 50s, the machinations of which were driven by one of America's most notorious, and some might say, most requited, of conspiracy theorists (nay zealots), the inimitable Senator Joseph McCarthy.
And here's the thing with McCarthy: In terms of his impact, it would be hard to overstate. He had one of biggest followings of any conspiracy theorist in America and across the West, with many of the most powerful and influential people in America believing in his outrageous theories and considering him a true friend and patriot. He was arguably the first real conspiracy brand of the modern era , a household name to be sure; few people in America were better known, more feared, and more loathed [than] when McCarthy was ruling the roost and dividing the nation. Even Dwight D Eisenhower, the then president of the US of A fer chrissakes, reportedly broke into a cold sweat at the very mention of his name.
Like most brands do, thankfully the McCarthy conspiracy marque succumbed to the inevitable dictates of the product life cycle and the vagaries of consumer demand. But like DDT, asbestos, tobacco, Thalidomide, and Agent Orange to name a few, they did a lot of damage in their heyday. And unfortunately, there's always another new and decidedly more toxic iteration of the original model waiting in the wings even whilst McCarthy's heirs are still strutting the political stage of today.
Speaking of the Founding Fathers, possibly the most cogent observation de Haven-Smith makes is his indispensable aide-memoire -- clearly directed at conspiracy theory debunkers in the main -- that the United States itself was in fact birthed as a direct result of a conspiracy theory, one that like so many have done, turned out to be all too true. In fact who was the aforementioned Paul Revere if he was not a prototype conspiracy theorist in the service of the Fathers' grand ambitions for fomenting revolution in order to gain independence from their oppressive colonial masters?
Herein one is sorely tempted to engage in some counterfactual hypothesising: what might the outcome have looked like if they and their 'revolting' Sons of Liberty and Daughters of the incipient American Revolution ignored or ridiculed Revere's frenzied conspiratorial urgings on his infamous midnight ride to warn them the full force and might of the British army was on its way to crush them all for daring to defy King George III and his dictates? The mind boggles at the possibilities to be sure if they had all rejected his dire "The British are Coming" invocations with the standard refrain: "Oh Paul, you're just another one of those conspiracy theorists", and then proceeded to stick him in the stocks in the middle of the town square for disturbing the peace and then sent his horse off to the knackery.
OK, I digress....
Digressions notwithstanding though, we will however return to this motif later (including the implied one about conspiracy theories that turned out to be "all too true"). But de Haven-Smith leaves us in no doubt pretty much from the off that he is not overly enamoured of those conspiracy theory deniers whose default response is to pooh-pooh all theories as ludicrous, dangerous -- indeed, even "unpatriotic hokum" -- and to denigrate all conspiracy theorists as socially challenged loony 'toon', screw loose, fruit loops or some variation on the theme.
This is not to suggest that the author buys all the conspiracy theories on offer by any means. But on this he opines the following: Most of the criticism aimed at undermining popular conspiracy narratives -- such as The JFK Thing or The 9/11 Thing -- is based on a "sentimentality about America's political leaders and institutions rather than on any unbiased reasoning and object observation".
I guess here we're talking about the benefit of the reasonable doubt versus the disadvantage of unreasonable suspicion or even unreasoned certainty. It's hard to escape the conclusion that de Haven-Smith has some difficulty reconciling this "sentimentality" with any known, rational reason for it being so. As it turns out, for many conspiracy debunkers and skeptics (and one assumes for the actual conspiracists themselves), the very foundations of modern conspiracy narratives are,
"...offensive", [and] constitute slurs against America's leaders and institutions, [slurs] that damage the nation's reputation and may encourage violence against U.S. officials at home and abroad".
De Haven-Smith says that a common mistake made by the debunkers is their easy predisposition to declare any and all suspicions about everything from everyday government, corporate or institutional secrecy and skullduggery up to and including the much touted millenarian machinations of the power elites (New World Order or Deep State anyone?), and other assorted political huggermuggers as "conspiracy theories", and on the basis of the most improbable claims, argue that all unsubstantiated suspicions of elite political crimes (or "state crimes against democracy" -- SCADs -- as he defines them), are "far-fetched fantasies" and [are also] "destructive of public trust."
Yet, it seems just as plain for those looking at least that the folks who have consistently done the most to destroy that "public trust" are the very ones in whom the "public" placed the most (and by implication, too much) trust to begin with, so this theory itself could well qualify under the heading of a "conspiracy", albeit of a singularly different 'species'.
Be that as it may, when it comes to the use of the phrase "conspiracy theory" in the pejorative, de Haven-Smith observes something of a "fatal defect" in the way most scholars and journalists (stereo)typically approach the topic: He says the "surprising" thing is that they have,
"...failed to notice that the use of the term to ridicule suspicions of elite political criminality betrays the civic ethos inherited from the nation's founders. Those who now dismiss conspiracy theories as groundless paranoia have apparently forgotten the U.S. was founded on a conspiracy theory".
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