NPR reports “the State Department has ordered certain public libraries nationwide to cease processing passport applications, disrupting a long-standing service that librarians say their communities have come to rely on.”
This move fits hand-in-glove with the SAVE Act, of course. The point isn’t that every precinct will demand that every person show a passport. Instead, it’s the kind of thing will introduce enough noise into the system that Trump’s DOJ can “curate” where to intervene in order to achieve the desired outcomes: GOP domination.
Has anyone made a serious effort to analyze how policy coordination (which we expect from government) mutates into conspiracies? I doubt it. I can’t imagine any field where those categories would be seen as commensurate. What policy wonk or serious poli-sci type would say policy ≈ conspiracy? Or, coming from the other direction, what “conspiracy theorist” (gawd I’ve hated that category for decades) does serious policy or, even better, administrative law?! 😹
So this mutation, from effective governance to organized criminality, will be missing the kind of theoretical attention we desperately need. Not OECD-style quant studies “measuring” this on imaginary axes, I mean: describe, define, and explain the boundaries between policy and conspiracy. My guess: no one’s doing this.
The reason for that failure is pretty simple, imo: Academia won’t reward that inquiry but it will definitely punish it. How? What field would you do this in — history, poli sci, sociology? What divisions would allow it — public policy or law? What research path could take anyone from “policy” to “conspiracy” without every responsible mentor warning them away? What job openings would allow it? What search committee would invite it? What funders would encourage it? Nope nope nope nope.
These aren’t abstract questions for me, I’ve been pondering them from the early ’90s when I wanted to do a PhD on how the idea of the “conspiracy” emerged and became the dominant default mode of popular political critique. I’ll never forget when I went to my old mentor David Damrosch with that idea. He loved it but said — this is verbatim — “they will never let you do it…” I was like WTAF?! He laughed and said: it’s a PhD — you only get to do 5 years, not 500! 😹
And yet here we are: Trump & Co have transformed much of the federal government into an extortion racket, and they’re pursuing coordinated strategies, tactics, and plans to subvert the midterm elections and buy more time to end the US’s “actually existing” democracy.
The social formation that has a serious theoretical stake in this — the US left — won’t say much either, but for different reasons: it *can’t because of how it’s dis/organized.
(1) The extreme vs moderate distinction: The left more or less measures itself by one’s commitment to viewing society as a whole as corrupt. if you cynically think it’s all just capitalism, you probably see yourself (as Musk put it) “extremely hardcore” — and won’t bother much with policy. If you optimistically see society as flawed but redeemable, you probably see yourself as progressive — more likely to engage with policy, less likely to think (let alone talk) about “conspiracies.”
(2) The theory vs practice distinction: If you’re an academic, you’d do well to avoid anything that could give others grounds to mock or malign you, like talking about “conspiracies”; and if you’re a pragmatic advocate or organizer, you’ll avoid them for different but equally solid reasons.
There are other distinctions, too: general vs specific, gender, period vs theory, class, cultural register, etc, etc. Each, in their own way, contributes to a cultural / social / political context where it’s very hard to think about how policy morphs into conspiracy. It’d be easier than it would have been when I was starting out, except (wait for it…) US academia is falling apart because a criminally conspiratorial government is trying to subvert and destroy it.
So, since the experts won’t help us out here, here’s the question: What “bright lines,” as law and policy types like to say, can we use to structure questions about how policy becomes conspiracy?
This question isn’t “academic” or “theoretical” at all. It couldn’t be more concrete or practical. And if we can’t answer it, we’ve lost. I might even argue that failure is the loss.