The Qanon of the 1790's

Gee, one of the (increasingly rare) good reads from Slate - an account of the American conspiracy belief in the Illuminati - and how remarkably similar it is to modern conspiracy belief.  

Morse unspooled a bizarre conspiracy theory alleging that a shadowy cabal of villains called the “Illuminati,” an offshoot of the Freemasons, were aiming to destroy everything that Americans held dear. This group of philosopher zealots, according to Morse, had “secretly extended its branches through a great part of Europe, and even into America.” Their goal was to abolish Christianity, private property, and nearly every foundation of good order around the world. According to Morse, they opposed marriage, encouraged people to explore all kinds of “sensual pleasures,” and proposed a “promiscuous intercourse among the sexes.” Just a few masks short of a Stanley Kubrick film, Morse’s story of the Illuminati played upon the darkest nightmares of the nation’s many devout Christians.

Morse told his congregation that the Illuminati hoped to infect the people of America through a kind of cultural warfare. They were spreading their doctrines by worming their way in among “reading and debating societies, the reviewers, journalists or editors of newspapers and other periodical publications, the booksellers and post-masters” and infiltrating all “literary, civil and religious institutions.” The most prominent Illuminatus named by Morse was Thomas Paine, whose radical pamphlet The Age of Reason (published in installments in 1794, 1795, and 1807) had caused a political stir in the United States.

If the Illuminati were beginning to corrupt the United States, according to Morse, they had gone much further already in Europe. The evil society’s greatest triumph to date, Morse wrote, was its recent work to hatch the French Revolution and disguise it as a mild, moderate event following the model of the American Revolution. With France’s increasing radicalism, anticlericalism, and disorder, it seemed obvious to Morse that the French Jacobins, the political faction that seized control of the nation in 1792, were simply Illuminati by another name.

Morse got most of this story from a book written by a Scottish academic named John Robison, who in turn took many of his ideas from the abbé de Barruel, a French priest. Robison’s book provided rich source material for Morse’s imagination. It was full of dramatic details, such as an account of the Illuminati possessing “tea for procuring abortion” as well as a mysterious “composition which blinds or kills when spurted in the face.” The Illuminati, according to Robison, defended suicide and discouraged patriotism and property owning. Claiming to worship human reason above all else, they practiced a blinkered ethics in which the means always justified the ends, as long as those ends were the growing power of the organization.

That is extraordinarily similar to the types of conspiracy mongering the modern American Right (and their nutty Australian acolytes) believe now.   Indeed, towards the end of the article it notes:

The names and characters change over time, but the basic template has remained remarkably durable over the centuries: A small, yet nearly omnipotent, group of amoral globalist elites secretly directs world events. This paranoid vision has persevered in large part because it helps their believers to make sense of a rapidly changing world. The faceless structural forces remaking our present—such as globalization, accelerating inequality, deindustrialization, racial justice movements, and cultural fragmentation—require explanation.   

 The article explains, by the way, that the reason the Illuminati conspiracy took off so well was that it was seen as an explanation as to why the French Revolution had gone off the rails.   

But it just seems a significant chunk of Americans have always, for odd reason, been especially prone to paranoid conspiracy beliefs.