Alt-America. David Neiwert
media such as Facebook and Twitter. A horde of bloggers, homemade YouTube political preachers, and far-right ideologues echo and spread these theories. The volume and intensity of this material that’s been generated, especially since 2008, is genuinely astonishing. Equally astonishing is the extent to which you can find these ideas being increasingly voiced by ostensibly mainstream right-wing pundits on the radio and in media such as Fox News.
The material spreads readily. Any corner of the Alt-American universe can suffice to attract new believers who, sometimes in very short order, become wholesale subscribers to the many different facets of Alt-America. For example, a staple of the occupiers of the January 2016 Patriot takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was that the Constitution doesn’t permit the federal government to own public lands outside of the District of Columbia. Someone who believes that may well start spouting other “constitutionalist” theories, such as that a county sheriff is the supreme law of the land, superior to federal authorities, and expressing fears that there is a plot to drive white men off the land and into the cities, to take away their guns and Second Amendment rights as well, and so on from there.
For Americans outside the Alt-America universe, “cockamamie” doesn’t begin to describe how such ideas sound when Alt-Americans begin spouting unintelligible lingo at them. Some may question the Alt-Americans’ sanity and their intelligence. Yet various studies and polls of subscribers to conspiracy theories and Patriot movement beliefs have shown that the majority of Alt-Americans are better educated than the average American and have incomes well above the median. Their beliefs and worldviews are frequently based on close readings of arcane documents (legal and otherwise); they also often possess an extraordinarily detailed knowledge of various putative “facts” that, on close examination, turn out not to be facts at all. Alt-Americans are neither stupid nor unlettered; what they are instead is oddly gullible, eager to absorb any “fact” if it supports their worldview, and insistent that people who believe official explanations or mainstream media narratives are the real gullible fools, or “sheeple,” as their lexicon prefers.
Alt-Americans share a set of personality traits that distinguish them from people who are less prone to join them, yet they simultaneously operate in the same universe as everyone else. This is why they are able to function perfectly well alongside the rest of us, why they seem so normal, even likable at times—until those moments when their world bangs up against ours and they attempt to assert their ideas.
The political scientist Eric Oliver of the University of Chicago argues that conspiracy theories are “simply another form of magical thinking,” Oliver explained in an interview. And as with all types of magical thinking, people engage in conspiracy theories in order to cope with difficult emotions. Usually this emotion is the apprehension that is triggered by an inexplicable or unusual event. In struggling to restore our emotional equilibrium, we search for patterns. In looking for patterns, we use mental shortcuts called heuristics. These heuristics include our tendency to ascribe intentionality to inanimate objects or to assume that things that resemble each other share core traits … Because conspiracy theories articulate these heuristics, they may feel more intuitively compelling than other explanations, particularly to people in distress.”
The legal scholars Cass Sunstein and Adam Vermeule explored the spread and pervasiveness of conspiracism in a widely read study of the subject. They say the phenomenon is perhaps best understood if first we “examine how people acquire information.” They observe that there is an epistemic, real-world challenge for all of us in figuring out what is real information and what might be false or delusionary: “For most of what they believe that they know, human beings lack personal or direct information; they must rely on what other people think.” This is no minor issue: What we believe to be true shapes how we view the world, the behavior of others, and the meaning of events. We have to depend on other people—our parents, friends, teachers, the people who write the books and newspapers we read, the people who produce the television and movies we watch—to provide us with that array of information, facts, and opinion.
We all have built-in methods for sorting through the blizzard of information the world confronts us with. Most of these begin with trial and error—we pretty quickly discover that false, misleading, or distorted information can bring us to grief from life experience. Eventually we settle into patterns of gathering information that we become comfortable with as we learn to recognize reliable sources of facts. For most of us, this system of sorting through and figuring out the world usually revolves around established sources of reliable facts such as educators, experts, and journalists, as well as our personal acquaintances and family members.
In an era of high-speed communications and instant technology, this task of sorting through information has become more acutely personalized and haphazard than it was in the past. The arrival of the Internet as many people’s primary source of information has rendered much of the flow of our facts into 140-character tweets and video sound bites. As the Internet becomes cluttered with highly ideological propaganda mills and fake news sites, and as a flood of tweets and Facebook posts spread falsehoods alongside genuine information, it’s become exponentially more difficult to sort out just what information is accurate and what is not.
Most people alive in the twenty-first century have developed a healthy skepticism toward what they’re exposed to by a mainstream media landscape that is littered with biased “analysts” and representatives of corporate interests out to make a buck. But some people have elevated that skepticism to an unhealthy level, so that they view everything produced by the mainstream media or official government or academic sources with a typically self-reinforcing form of highly selective skepticism. They cannot believe any kind of official explanation for events, actions, or policies, but instead seek an alternative one. When this happens, their extreme skepticism flips into extreme gullibility, so that they become suckers for conspiracy theories that confirm the narrative they want to believe.
This shapes—or rather, distorts—their relationship to authority. Any kind of authority that exists outside of their universe, particularly sources with the taint of mainstream liberalism (embodied by Obama, Clinton, and the Democratic Party), is viewed as illegitimate and untrustworthy and is to be vehemently rejected and ardently opposed. In the meanwhile, any authority within the Alt-America universe, especially political figures, conspiracist pundits, and Patriot movement leaders, are revered as reliable authorities. Some of Donald Trump’s followers refer to him as Glorious Leader, or GL.
The personality trait common to most conspiracists and dwellers in Alt-America is authoritarianism. Most people think of authoritarianism as a political phenomenon in which whole nations are subjected to dictatorial rule, and it’s typically considered in light of the authoritarian leaders who lead such regimes. But it’s also a phenomenon studied in depth by psychologists, whose focus is on the masses whom they control, ordinary people who willingly sacrifice their personal freedoms in the name of an orderly society shaped to their personal beliefs and prejudices.
How could supposedly freedom-loving Americans subscribe to an authoritarian worldview? Psychologists have established that most people have some authoritarian tendencies, but these are balanced by such factors as personal empathy and critical thinking skills. In some personalities, however, a combination of factors such as strict upbringing, personal trauma, of a harsh rearing environment can produce people who are attracted to the idea of a world in which strong authorities produce order and stability, often through iron imposition of law and order.
The psychologist Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba, one of the world’s leading experts in this personality research, has compiled a list of authoritarian personality traits that help explain the motivations of Donald Trump’s supporters. Not every authoritarian exhibits every trait, of course; conversely, everyone shares these traits, but not to the high degree of the authoritarian personality:
•Ethnocentric, strongly inclined to experience the world as a member of their in-group versus everyone else. Their strong commitment to their in-group makes them zealous in its cause.
•Fearful of a dangerous world. Their parents taught them, more than parents usually do, that the world is dangerous. They may also be genetically predisposed to experiencing stronger-than-average fear.
•Self-righteous. They