Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Is there any way to stop the spiral toward mistrust and conspiracies?

Why conspiracy theories flourish on the right
by David Roberts

Sep 13, 2016, 8:45 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/2015/12/10/9886222/conspiracy-theories-right-wing

Short answer? Nope. And a prescient article for certain.

There are some horrible incentive structures built into current conservative politics. Conservative media, activists, and politicians have every reason to convince their most engaged supporters that the whole system is rotten and can’t be trusted — it makes it easier to fill their heads with nonsense about Sharia law, Agenda 21, and all the rest, which in turn increases their intensity and engagement.

The researchers put it this way:

[C]onservative politicians and pundits can more readily rely on conspiracies as an effective means to activate their base than liberals. And to the extent that ideologically motivated endorsement is most evident among the least trusting of the knowledgeable conservatives, there is all the more incentive for conservative elites to stoke the fires of distrust.

But as we’ve seen, if that process goes on long enough, it produces two unpleasant results. First, the most engaged conservative voters will be more and more adrift in a paranoid fantasia, wrapped in an epistemic bubble filled with conspiracy theories, hassling politicians about them and making it effectively impossible for lawmakers to do their job in a reasonable way, as Nunes pointed out.

And second, they won’t trust conservative elites any more than they trust liberals, scientists, or the media. That means they are not only deluded but unchecked, beyond the influence of any moderating force, easy prey for demagogues and hucksters. They become the conspiracy-addled tail that wags the political dog.

And that’s exactly what we’re seeing unfold on the right. Low-trust, high-knowledge conservatives — a.k.a. the conservative base — are bending the political system to their will on the basis of fever dreams that neither the media nor politicians can afford to ignore. Lacking the language or institutional means to dismiss popular conspiracy theories for what they are, feckless US political and media elites are instead normalizing them, “defining deviancy down” as the old phrase goes.

The research suggests that there is only one way to mitigate or reverse this process: restore some level of trust in the US political system. But conservative elites — who have the ear of their base — have no incentive to do so, and it’s not clear that anyone else has ability to do so. Declining trust in institutions is broad and deep in America; it may very well be unstoppable. As long as it continues, conspiracy theories will play a larger and larger role in public life.