Republican conspiracy belief considered

Peter Beinart has a good piece in The Atlantic looking at the somewhat puzzling question as to why the American Right, despite holding the Presidency and a lot of power elsewhere, are still believing so many conspiracies.   How much can I extract?:

...over the past week, Trump’s defenders have spread one conspiracy theory after another about the intelligence-community insider who exposed the call. Stephen Miller, Breitbart, and Fox News have all called the whistle-blower an agent of the “deep state”—a phrase, popularized by Alex Jones, suggesting that a cabal of spies secretly run the government. (The conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer once likened this notion to believing in the tooth fairy.)

On its face, this descent into self-delusion isn’t surprising. In the Trump era, Republican conspiracy theorizing has grown omnipresent. Trump himself has suggested that Antonin Scalia might have been murdered, climate change is a Chinese hoax, Ted Cruz’s father was involved in John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Clintons may bear responsibility for the murder of Jeffrey Epstein, and wind turbines cause cancer. In 2016, more than three-quarters of Trump supporters said Barack Obama was “hiding important information about his background and early life.”

But dig into the academic research on conspiracy theories, and you realize how odd the current environment actually is. Until Trump, scholars assumed that holding the White House inoculated parties from conspiracism. They viewed conspiratorial thinking as a weapon of the weak, which couldn’t seriously threaten the republic because its adherents wielded so little influence in government.

That’s what makes today’s GOP so unusual and so dangerous. Never before in modern American history has a political party been this paranoid and this powerful at the same time.

In their book, American Conspiracy Theories, which tracks paranoid thinking in U.S. politics from 1890 to 2010, the University of Miami political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent conclude that “conspiracy theories are for losers.” Such theories, they argue, are “most likely to issue from domestic groups who fail to achieve power, objectives or resources.” This makes sense. The more dispossessed you feel, and the less you identify with the people running the government, the easier it is to imagine them hatching a shadowy plot to screw you.  ...

Beinart goes on to explain that if a party is in control, its members generally start believing less in conspiracies.  But it hasn't worked that way with Republicans, and the question is why.

The best explanation is that even though a white male Christian Republican holds the presidency, many white Christian Republican men still feel persecuted by those in power. Trump and other top Republicans fan this belief constantly.

Beinart goes on to argue that the white male Christian loss of power is largely fantasy, but:

...white male income has stagnated in recent decades, the country has grown more racially and religiously diverse, and gender norms have changed. And this has helped Republicans convince their supporters that they are America’s real victims. Republicans, according to polling this year by the Pew Research Center, are more likely to say that men face a lot of discrimination than they are to say women face a lot of discrimination. They’re more likely to say that whites face a lot of discrimination than to say blacks or Hispanics do. And they’re more likely to say evangelical Christians experience discrimination than Muslims do.

This itself reflects a detachment from reality. And it has made many Republicans susceptible to the conspiratorial thinking that, in the past, was reserved for groups that really were on society’s margins. 

 All very interesting and all very plausible.  Makes no mention of how the internet has (inadvertently) ramped up the ability of conspiracy belief to spread and be maintained.   That is a huge part of the story.

The worst aspect, though, is that the key global problem of climate change has had action from America (and Australia) stymied because of (parts of) the Right's persistent conspiracy belief about it in the face of well grounded scientific evidence.