Book Review: Lance deHaven-Smith, C********cy T*****y in America

Lambert Stretter of Corrente.

When I asked for a link to Lance DeHaven-Smith’s book conspiracy theory in america (CTA) I was overwhelmed by the responses from readers, both in the comments and in the mail. (I will not single out personalities, especially on such a topic, you yourself know who!) So I consider it my duty to review. The CTA (University of Texas Press, 2013) is concise and remarkably clear, with a full scientific body; I highly recommend it.

I must now immediately pause to issue the following warning, which explains why I was embarrassed to put the full CTA title in the post title: I didn’t want the word “CT” to show up easily in searches, and if it does, I just want to to show the shy, implicit asterisks warning.

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COMMENTS WARNING

This post is not for you to distribute or expound your favorite CTs, whether in Dallas, Manhattan, Chinese wet market, lab, leaky or whatever, or anywhere else. Don’t pick them up. And don’t tell me you’re not sure what I’m talking about. Also, if you’re unsure, don’t do it. Our evil but fair moderators nail your head to the floor if you do I am implementing this policy for three reasons:

1) CT is almost impossible to moderate; the themes seem to exert an irresistible attraction, and we end up (to mix and remix metaphors) with a rat’s nest of yarn diagrams stuffed down the rabbit hole;

2) Because CT is stigmatized in “discourse”, discussing it damages the site’s reputation. If we’re going to take the risk, we’ll do it to fire some bad guy from CalPERS or to protect you all during the pandemic, not on extinct issues of purely historical significance. There are other places to indulge in CT. Go there.

3) DeHaven-Smith’s goal in writing the book is to replace CT with what he calls political science from State crimes against democracy (SCADA):

Unlike conspiracy theories, which speculate about each suspicious event in isolation, the SCAD design delineates a general category of crime and requires a comparative study of the crimes that fit that category.

4) And don’t play with this warning by asking, “God, may be what is this [a historical event in Dallas, say] Was there really a SCAD?” Because our moderators will know. This post is not for enthusiasts. There is many very modern and not-yet-branded and worked-out events for which the SCAD structure (and on both sides of the aisle) may well be suitable. Do it.

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Lance DeHaven-Smith is a political scientist at the Askew School of Government and Politics at Florida State University. He is the author science articles and books including Florida Atlas of Voting and Public Opinion (1998; I read, but can’t now trace, that watching Jebbie steal from the 2000 election “radicalized” him, as we say these days). CTA and its central concept SCAD are the fruit of research that began at least as early as 2006.

In this review, I will be posting many screenshots from the CTA PDF, highlighted in yellow. (I tried to keep the font size the same on every frame, but I don’t seem to be quite successful. First, I’ll present DeHaven’s thesis that the phrase “CT” was probably circulated by the CIA(!). Then “I I will present material that shows that “conspiracy” has taken pride of place in American political thought since the founders of the Constitution Next, I will consider CT as rhetoric Finally, I will compare CT and SCAD and consider SCAD as a form of corruption Again, all screenshots are by DeHaven -Smith, with short comments from me.

Was the “conspiracy theory” spread by the CIA?

Just asking questions… DeHaven is careful to place the CIA materials on the Appendix, but being a fan of etymology and memes, I found them so intriguing that I moved them to the top spot in this review. Here (CTA, p. 197) is CIA mailing #1035-960, which provides context (Dallas) and introduces the term “conspiracy”:

(I love the spin on “interrogation pretexts.” This is real The Greatest Generation stuff.) The terms “conspiracy theories” and “conspiracy theorists” are then used (p. 198):

Finally, domesticated propaganda campaign outlined (199):

Those of you who have noticed the phrase “comparatively researched” may also have noticed the term “propaganda assets”, which seems quite modern (if you look at you, David Ignatius. And not only you). “Tricks” (I) – (V) also seem to be very relevant.

Now, while the origin of the memo is clear, it is not clear that the CIA invented term[1]although we do have a suggestive coincidence in distribution dates[2]. DeHaven-Smith summarizes:

“Conspiracy” has a place of honor in American political thought

DeHaven-Smith insists that the Declaration of Independence was based on a conspiracy (p. 7):

in Federalist DocumentsMadison et al. Al conceptualized the activities of factions in terms of conspiracy and developed the separation of powers accordingly (55):

Lincoln’s methods for arguing against Polk’s Mexican War (75) are very similar to today’s creminology:

CT as rhetoric

The CT accusation is a conversation stop (one might even say a “national conversation” stop). Page 11:

Thus, it functions as a “defense mechanism” for political elites (9):

(The CTs seem to have developed other features not originally conceptualized by the security agencies; I call them “yarn diagrams” that build a fan base, serve as a breeding ground for brain worms like “lizard people”, etc. God knows the elites or some of the elites. factions can be like lizards But they are not really lizards, not creatures from a distant star, etc. We can look at such madness as an energy-draining and disempowering form of citizen science, albeit a political science one. It’s as if we were all going to study aerosol transmission rather than CO.2 meters but with crystals, then spending time meticulously jotting down the changing reflections and facet colors in notepads, then posting the results to GoogleDocs online for others to think about and comment on. (Save the crystals for the lizards.)

The difficulty here is that some sequences of events classified as CTs are, well, true (6):

Now let’s turn to SCAD, which is a form of citizen political science with a stronger methodology than CT.

CT vs. SCAD

The difficulty of CT as a methodology is that it focuses on (strong, bad) people rather than institutions (8):

SCAD, in contrast, focuses on groups of individuals active in institutions (12):

(Thinking about relationships between individuals and groups also allows us to use analytical tools such as Flex Nets (Wedel) and social capital (Bourdieu)) for comparison.

SCAD can be characterized as intra-institutional crimes (12):

The creators understood SCAD as “serious crimes” (11):

SCAD is a form of corruption

Elections seem to attract SCAD like flies (139):

(I really like to portray SCAD as corruption because it means that SCAD analysts can use the work of scientists like Zephyr.)

In fact, the political history of the United States can be periodized according to the types of SCADs involved (204–205). The two screenshots below show pages that neither PDF nor I do well:

Conclusion

DeHaven-Smith gives the following definition of “political class” (69), which intrigued me because, although I have often encountered the term in my reading, I have never seen it so precisely defined:

(I would add the press to his “cohesive” “self-aware group.”) Obviously, if the creators had foreseen the emergence of a “political class”, they would have created an immune system in the form of a system of checks and balances. (“ambition must counter ambition”) for him, as well as for the three branches of government. Whatever the case, we have a political class that doesn’t even need to develop immune defenses against, so to speak, Constitution’s T-cells. Of course, the SCADs that emerged from the political class – *** cough *** CDC *** cough *** – have demonstrated their ability to quickly infect the entire political organism and with little resistance. Perhaps DeHaven-Smith’s work will allow civilian political scientists to do something to disempower the polymorphic perversion of the political class without institutional boundaries, by providing better – institutional, relational, comparative – analytical tools.

NOTES

[1] Here is the usage of this term in dissertation 1960:

[2] But here is google ngram showing takeoff time:

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