Recently I watched two elderly men at a suburban coffee shop start giggling like schoolboys.
A waitress had brought them a slip of paper to fill in, a normal Covid-19 protocol, and they were giggling because they had hit on a brilliant plan: instead of signing their own names, they would sign as “Joe Stalin” and “Lenin”.
They were delighted by their cleverness, but it was clearly a protest, an act of defiance against the Gestapo, embodied by a waitress earning minimum wage, who was forcing them to provide private information that nobody had access to except the state and their bank and insurer and gym and literally any telemarketing firm.
I’m exaggerating for effect, of course, but so were they. And the speed and ease with which they exaggerated, taking on the role, however playfully, as victims of tyranny, came back to me this week as the US wrestled with its own fantasies of victimhood.
I’m not suggesting that all 71 million Americans who voted for president Donald Trump did so because they are paranoid fantasists. I’m sure millions held their noses and voted for him because they genuinely believe Republicans are the only people who understand the existential crises of Midwestern farmers and rust-belt factory workers.
But the past few days of protests and wild disinformation have confirmed that there are a great many people, in the US and SA, who live lives of relative comfort and privilege, yet believe they are oppressed Israelites living under the lash of Stalinist pharaohs.
Four years ago, many Trump supporters proudly and loudly embraced a new catchphrase: “Fuck your feelings.” Emblazoned on T-shirts, bumper stickers and hashtags, it summarised the right-wing belief that the left consists of crybabies and snowflakes mistaking feelings for facts.
The past four years, however, and certainly the past week, have proved that the far left doesn’t have a monopoly when it comes to confusing emotion and empirical reality. Indeed, in one of the many lawsuits the Republicans have lost since last week, the judge had to explain that hearsay isn’t evidence; in short, that wanting and believing a thing to be true isn’t the same as it being true.
It’s no wonder that conspiracy theories have found such fertile soil. But even they look different after this election, so much so that I’m wondering if it’s time to stop calling them “theories”.
Once, it was a fairly accurate word. A theory, after all, is an attempt to explain something, and genuine conspiracy “theorists” went to great lengths to gather what they believed to be evidence and to connect that evidence in a way that could, in the right light, look like logic.
Indeed, some of them amassed so much “evidence” and pursued their theories with such zeal that their notions have seeped into popular culture: whether or not you know anything about the assassination of John F Kennedy, you’ve probably heard about the second shooter on the grassy knoll.
Trumpism, however, has ended conspiracy theory’s tangential relationship with evidence. There is no evidence of widespread electoral fraud in the US. There is no evidence that Democrats and Hollywood stars are running a secret child-abuse cult. There is no evidence that US president-elect Joe Biden is going to take away citizens’ guns or that US vice-president-elect Kamala Harris is a radical leftist. And yet these beliefs are now given considerably more credence than those old theories about the CIA killing Kennedy.
But perhaps an even more compelling reason to stop calling them “conspiracy theories” is that conspiracy theorists actually believe what they say.
It is fashionable on the left to accuse Trump supporters of being mad or stupid, but this is lazy. Instead, I think many Trumpists, in the US and SA, have made a kind of bargain with themselves, selectively suspending their disbelief and misdirecting their critical faculties in exchange for the deep relief and invigorating pleasure of seeing their ideological foes taunted and belittled by powerful men.
There is simply no way that religious fundamentalists such as US vice-president Mike Pence, the angel-summoning preacher Paula White or our own Kenneth Meshoe (who sent gushing prayers to Trump) believe him to be a moral man, let alone a pious Christian. Likewise, I find it exceedingly unlikely that most Republicans or South African conservatives genuinely believe a paedophilic cabal has seized power or that any American government will ever outlaw Christmas or introduce Venezuela-style socialism.
But this is the nature of the bargain. These aren’t honest theories. They’re not even honest lies. Instead, they are a ritual incantation, taught by Twitter and Fox News; a gibberish chant of victimhood and hurt feelings that must be performed in order to belong, to be offered solace and to be kept safe from the impersonal, unsympathetic relentlessness of the future.
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