The QAnon Delusion Has Not Loosened Its Grip
Millions
of Americans continue to actively participate in multiple conspiracy theories.
Why?
By Thomas B. Edsall The New York Times
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from
Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.
A
conspiracy theory promulgated by Donald Trump, the loser of the 2020
presidential election, has gripped American politics since Nov. 3. It has been
willingly adopted by millions of his followers, as well as by a majority of
Republican members of Congress — 145 to 108 — and by thousands of Republican state and local officials,
all of whom have found it expedient to capitulate to
the fantastical claim that the election was stolen by the Democratic Party, its
officeholders, operatives and supporters.
Trump’s
sprawling conspiracy theory is “being reborn as the new normal of the
Republican Party,” Justin Ling wrote in
Foreign Policy on Jan. 6.
A Dec 30 NPR/Ipsos poll found
that “recent misinformation, including false claims related to Covid-19 and
QAnon, are gaining a foothold among some Americans.”
According
to the survey, nearly a fifth of American adults, 17 percent, believe that “a
group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control
our politics.” Almost a third “believe that voter fraud helped Joe Biden win
the 2020 election.” Even more, 39 percent, agree that “there is a deep state
working to undermine President Trump.”
The spread
of these beliefs has wrought havoc — as demonstrated by the Jan. 6 assault on
Congress, as well as by the overwhelming support Republicans continue to offer
to the former president.
Well before
the election, on Aug. 22, 2020, my news-side colleagues Matthew Rosenberg and
Maggie Haberman described the rising strength of conspiracists in Republican
ranks in “The Republican Embrace of QAnon Goes Far Beyond Trump”:
A
small but growing number of Republicans — including a heavily favored
Republican congressional candidate in Georgia — are donning the QAnon mantle,
ushering its adherents in from the troll-infested fringes of the internet and
potentially transforming the wild conspiracy theory into an offline political
movement, with supporters running for Congress and flexing their political
muscle at the state and local levels.
Conspiracy
theorists are by definition irrational, contradictory and inconsistent.
Polarization, the Covid-19 pandemic and the specter of economic collapse have
engendered suspicion. Many on the right see “liberal elites” pulling strings
behind closed doors, and paranoia flourishes.
According
to Joseph E. Uscinski and
Adam M. Enders, professors of political science at the University of Miami and
the University of Louisville, conspiracy theorists do not “hold coherent,
constrained policy positions.” In “Who Supports QAnon? A Case Study in
Political Extremism,” Uscinski and Enders explore what they identify as some of
the characteristics of the QAnon movement: “Support for QAnon is born more of
antisocial personality traits and a predisposition toward conspiracy thinking
than traditional political identities and motivations,” they write, before
going on to argue that
While
QAnon supporters are “extreme,” they are not so in the ideological sense.
Rather, QAnon support is best explained by conspiratorial worldviews and a
predisposition toward other nonnormative behavior.
Uscinski
and Enders found a substantial 0.413 correlation between those who support or
sympathize with QAnon and “dark” personality traits, leading him to conclude
that “the type of extremity that undergirds such support has less to do with
traditional, left/right political concerns and more to do with extreme,
antisocial psychological orientations and behavioral patterns.”
The illogic
of conspiracy theorists is clear in the findings of a 2012 research paper, “Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories,”
by Karen M. Douglas and Robbie M. Sutton,
members of the psychology department at the University of Kent, and Michael J. Wood, a
former Kent colleague. The authors found that a large percentage of people
drawn to conspiracy thinking are willing to endorse “mutually incompatible
conspiracy theories.”
In one
study, for example, “the more participants believed that Osama Bin Laden was
already dead when U.S. Special Forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more
they believed he is still alive.” In another study, “the more participants
believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that
she was murdered.” For those who hold such beliefs, the authors wrote, “the specifics
of a conspiracy theory do not matter as much as the fact that it is a
conspiracy theory at all.”
Douglas, in
an email, wrote that “people are attracted to conspiracy theories when
important psychological needs are not being met.” She identified three such
needs: “the need for knowledge and certainty”; the “existential need” to “to
feel safe and secure” when “powerless and scared”; and, among those high in
narcissism, the “need to feel unique compared to others.”
Uscinski
and two collaborators, in their 2016 paper, “What Drives Conspiratorial
Beliefs? The Role of Informational Cues and Predispositions,”
describe how they identify likely conspiracy believers by asking respondents
whether they agree or disagree with the following statements:
“Events
like wars, the recession, and the outcomes of elections are controlled by small
groups of people who are working in secret against the rest of us”; “Much of
our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places”; “Even though
we live in a democracy, a few people will always run things anyway”; “The
people who really ‘run’ the country, are not known to the voters.”
Believers
in conspiracies will often automatically dismiss factual claims disputing their
beliefs. Jovan Byford, a senior lecturer in psychology at the
Open University in England, makes the case that
Conspiracy
theories seduce not so much through the power of argument, but through the
intensity of the passions that they stir. Underpinning conspiracy theories are
feelings of resentment, indignation and disenchantment about the world. They
are stories about good and evil, as much as about what is true.
Byford
continues:
Lack
of evidence of a conspiracy, or positive proof against its existence, is taken
by believers as evidence of the craftiness of those behind the plot, and their
ability to dupe the public.
There are
five common ingredients to conspiracy theories, according to Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Mark van Vugt, professors of psychology at the Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam, in their paper “Conspiracy Theories: Evolved
Functions and Psychological Mechanisms.”
First, they
write,
Conspiracy
theories make an assumption of how people, objects, or events are causally
interconnected. Put differently, a conspiracy theory always involves a
hypothesized pattern. Second, conspiracy theories stipulate that the plans of
alleged conspirators are deliberate. Conspiracy theories thus ascribe
intentionality to the actions of conspirators, implying agency. Third, a
conspiracy theory always involves a coalition, or group, of actors working in
conjunction. An act of one individual, a lone wolf, does not fit the definition
of a conspiracy theory. Fourth, conspiracy theories always contain an element
of threat such that the alleged goals of the conspirators are harmful or
deceptive. Fifth, and finally, a conspiracy theory always carries an element of
secrecy and is therefore often difficult to invalidate.
Van
Prooijen elaborated on his analysis in an email:
Conspiracy
theories are a powerful tool to demonize opposing groups, and in extreme cases
can make people believe that violence is necessary. In this case (Jan. 6), the
crowd clearly believed that the elections were stolen from their leader, and
this belief incited them to fight for what they believed was a just cause. Most
likely the conspiracy theories make them perceive themselves as a sort of
“freedom fighter.”
Van
Prooijen sees conspiracy thinking as deeply rooted in the evolutionary past.
Our
theory is that conspiracy theories evolved among ancestral humans to prepare
for, and hence protect against, potentially hostile groups. What we saw here, I
think was an evolutionary mismatch: some mental faculties evolved to cope
effectively with an ancestral environment, yet we now live in a different,
modern environment where these same mechanisms can lead to detrimental outcomes.
In an ancestral world with regular tribal warfare and coalitional conflict, in
many situations it could have been rational and even lifesaving to respond with
violence to the threat of a different group conspiring against one’s own group.
Now in our modern world these mechanisms may sometimes misfire, and lead people
to use violence toward the very democratic institutions that were designed to
help and protect them.
Why, I
asked, are Trump supporters particularly receptive to conspiracies? Van
Prooijen replied:
For
one, the Trump movement can be seen as populist, meaning that this movement
espouses a worldview that sees society as a struggle between ‘the corrupt
elites’ versus the people. This in and of itself predisposes people to
conspiracy thinking. But there are also other factors. For instance, the Trump
movement appears heavily fear-based, is highly nationalistic, and endorses
relatively simple solutions for complex problems. All of these factors are
known to feed into conspiracy thinking.
The events
of Jan. 6, van Prooijen continued,
underscore
that conspiracy theories are not some “innocent” form of belief that people may
have. They can inspire radical action, and indeed, a movement like QAnon can be
a genuine liability for public safety. Voltaire once said: “Those
who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities” — and he
was right.
In their
2014 book “American Conspiracy Theories,”
Uscinski and Parent argue that “Conspiracy Theories Are For Losers.” They
write:
Conspiracy
theories are essentially alarm systems and coping mechanisms to help deal with
foreign threat and domestic power centers. Thus, they tend to resonate when
groups are suffering from loss, weakness or disunity.
To
illustrate how the out-of-power are drawn to conspiracy theories, the authors
tracked patterns during periods of Republican and Democratic control of the
presidency:
During
Republican administrations, conspiracy theories targeting the right and
capitalists averaged 34 percent of the conspiratorial allegations per year,
while conspiracy theories targeting the left and communists averaged only 11
percent. During Democratic administrations, mutatis mutandis, conspiracy
theories aimed at the right and capitalists dropped 25 points to 9 percent
while conspiracy theories aimed at the left and communists more than doubled to
27 percent.
The “loser”
thesis received strong backing from an August 2020 working paper, “Are
Conspiracy Theories for Losers? The Effect of Losing an Election on
Conspiratorial Thinking,” by Joanne Miller, Christina
E. Farhart and Kyle Saunders,
political scientists at the University of Delaware, Carleton College and
Colorado State University.
They make
the parallel argument that
People
are more likely to endorse conspiracy theories that make their political rivals
look bad when they are on the losing side of politics than when they are on the
winning side, regardless of ideology/partisanship.
In an
email, Miller compared polling from 2004, when John Kerry lost to George W.
Bush, to polls after the 2020 election, when Trump lost to Biden:
A
2004 a Post-ABC poll that
found that 49 percent of Kerry supporters but only 14 percent of Bush
supporters thought that the vote wasn’t counted accurately. But this year, a
much larger percentage of Trump voters believe election fraud conspiracy
theories than voters on the losing side in previous years. A January 2021 Pew poll found
that approximately 75 percent of Trump voters believe that Trump definitely or
probably won the election.
Over the
long haul, Miller wrote, “I find very little correlation between conspiratorial
thinking and party identification or political ideology.” But, she quickly
added. “the past four years are an outlier in this regard.”
Throughout
his presidency, Miller wrote,
former
President Trump pretty much governed as a “loser.” He continued to insist that
he would’ve won the popular vote in 2016 had it not been for widespread
election fraud. So it’s not surprising, given Trump’s rhetoric, that
Republicans during the Trump presidency were more likely to endorse conspiracy
theories than we’d have expected them to, given that they were on the winning
side.
The
psychological predispositions that contribute to a susceptibility to conspiracy
thinking are complex, as Joshua Hart, a
professor of psychology at Union College, and his student, Molly Graether,
found in their 2018 paper “Something’s Going on Here:
Psychological Predictors of Belief in Conspiracy Theories.”
Hart and
Graether contend that “conspiracy theorists are more likely to believe that the
world is a dangerous place full of bad people,” who “find it difficult to trust
others” and who “view the world as a dangerous and uncontrollable.”
Perhaps
more interesting, Hart and Graether argue that conspiracy theorists are more
likely “to perceive profundity in nonsensical but superficially meaningful
ideas,” a concept they cite as being described by academics in the field as “b.s. receptivity.”
To test for
this tendency, psychologists ask participants
to rank the “meaningfulness” of such incoherent and ludicrous
sentences and phrases as “the future elucidates irrational facts for the
seeking person,” “your movement transforms universal observations,” “the whole
silence infinite phenomena” and “the invisible is beyond all new immutability.”
The scale is called “Mean perceived meaningfulness of b.s. sentences and
genuinely meaningful sentences,” and can be found here.
Adam Enders argued
in an email that:
There
are several characteristics of QAnon acolytes that distinguish them from
everyone else, even people who believe in some other conspiracy theories: they
are more likely to share false information online, they’re more accepting of
political violence in various circumstances.
In
addition, Enders writes,
QAnon
followers are, in a sense, extremists both politically (e.g., wanting to overthrow
the U.S. government) and psychologically (e.g., exhibiting many antisocial
personality traits).
Polarization,
in Enders’s view, when joined with conspiracy thinking, produces a toxic mix:
As
polarization increases, tensions between political parties and other groups
rise, and people are more willing to construct and believe in fantastical ideas
that either malign out-groups (e.g., “Democrats are Satan-worshipping
pedophiles”) or bolster the in-group (e.g., ‘we only lost because you
cheated’). Conspiracy theories, in turn, raise the temperature of polarization
and make it more difficult for people from different partisan and ideological
camps to have fact-based discussions about political matters, even those that
are in critical need of immediate attention.
Conspiracy
thinking has become a major internal, problem for the Republican Party, which
is reflected by the current turmoil in party ranks over two newly elected congresswomen, Marjorie Taylor Greene of
Georgia and Lauren Boebert of
Colorado, QAnon sympathizers with long records of florid, antagonistic
conspiratorial accusations.
There is
some evidence that the Republican establishment has begun to recognize the
dangers posed by the presence in that party of so many who are preoccupied —
obsessed is not too strong a word — with denying the incontrovertible truth of
Trump’s loss and Biden’s win in the 2020 election.
Even Mitch
McConnell, perhaps the most cunning and nefarious member of the Republican
establishment, has come to see the liability of the sheer number of supposedly
reputable members of the United States Senate caving in to patent
falsehoods, warning colleagues earlier
this week of the threat to their political survival posed by the “loony lies
and conspiracy theories” voiced by allies of QAnon in the House of
Representatives.
“Somebody
who’s suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that
horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK
Jr.’s airplane is not living in reality,” McConnell declared. “This has nothing
to do with the challenges facing American families or the robust debates on
substance that can strengthen our party.”
McConnell
has a history of bending with the wind, accommodating the extremists in his
party, including Trump and Trump’s allies, and he voted in support of the claim that Trump’s second
impeachment trial is unconstitutional. If the conspiracy wing of the Republican
Party becomes strong enough to routinely mount winning primary challenges to
mainstream incumbents, McConnell may well abandon his critique and accept a
party moving steadily closer to something many Americans (though not all) could
never have imagined: the systematic exploitation of voters gullible or
pathological enough to sign on to preposterous conspiracy theories in order to
engineer the installation in Washington of an ultraright, ethnonationalist
crypto-fascist white supremacist political regime.
The problem
of keeping the extremist fringe at arm’s length has plagued the Republican
Party for decades — dating back to Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society —
but nothing in recent American history has reached the crazed intensity of
Donald Trump’s perseverating, mendacious insistence that he won a second term
in November. That he is not alone — that millions continue to believe in his
delusions — is terrifying.
