[lbo-talk] Krugman on conspiracy theories, right & left

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Mon May 8 00:55:28 PDT 2006


The New York Times

May 8, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

Who's Crazy Now?

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Some people say that bizarre conspiracy theories play a disturbingly

large role in current American political discourse. And they're right.

For example, many conservative politicians and pundits seem to agree

with James Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment

and Public Works, who has declared that "man-made global warming is

the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

Of more immediate political relevance is the claim that the reason we

hear mainly bad news from Iraq is that the media, for political

reasons, are conspiring to suppress the good news. As Bill O'Reilly

put it a few months ago, "a good part of the American media wants to

undermine the Bush administration."

But these examples, of course, aren't what people are usually

referring to when they denounce crazy conspiracy theories. For the

last few years, the term "conspiracy theory" has been used primarily

to belittle critics of the Bush administration in particular, anyone

suggesting that the Bush administration used 9/11 as an excuse to

fight an unrelated war in Iraq.

Now here's the thing: suppose that we didn't have abundant evidence

that senior officials in the Bush administration wanted a war,

cherry-picked intelligence to make a case for that war, and in some

cases suppressed inconvenient evidence contradicting that case. Even

so, it would be an abuse of the English language to call the claim

that the administration misled us into war a conspiracy theory.

A conspiracy theory, says Wikipedia, "attempts to explain the cause of

an event as a secret, and often deceptive, plot by a covert alliance."

Claims that global warming is a hoax and that the liberal media are

suppressing the good news from Iraq meet that definition. In each

case, to accept the claim you have to believe that people working for

many different organizations scientists at universities and research

facilities around the world, reporters for dozens of different news

organizations are secretly coordinating their actions.

But the administration officials who told us that Saddam had an active

nuclear program and insinuated that he was responsible for 9/11

weren't part of a covert alliance; they all worked for President Bush.

The claim that these officials hyped the case for war isn't a

conspiracy theory; it's simply an assertion that people in a position

of power abused that position. And that assertion only seems wildly

implausible if you take it as axiomatic that Mr. Bush and those around

him wouldn't do such a thing.

The truth is that many of the people who throw around terms like

"loopy conspiracy theories" are lazy bullies who, as Zachary Roth put

it on CJR Daily, The Columbia Journalism Review's Web site, want to

"confer instant illegitimacy on any argument with which they

disagree." Instead of facing up to hard questions, they try to suggest

that anyone who asks those questions is crazy.

Indeed, right-wing pundits have consistently questioned the sanity of

Bush critics; "It looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again,"

said Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist, after Mr.

Gore gave a perfectly sensible if hard-hitting speech. Even moderates

have tended to dismiss the administration's harsh critics as victims

of irrational Bush hatred.

But now those harsh critics have been vindicated. And it turns out

that many of the administration supporters can't handle the truth.

They won't admit that they built a personality cult around a man who

has proved almost pathetically unequal to the job. Nor will they admit

that opponents of the Iraq war, whom they called traitors for warning

that invading Iraq was a mistake, have been proved right. So they have

taken refuge in the belief that a vast conspiracy of America-haters in

the media is hiding the good news from the public.

Unlike the crazy conspiracy theories of the left which do exist, but

are supported only by a tiny fringe the crazy conspiracy theories of

the right are supported by important people: powerful politicians,

television personalities with large audiences. And we can safely

predict that these people will never concede that they were wrong.

When the Iraq venture comes to a bad end, they won't blame those who

led us into the quagmire; they'll claim that it was all the fault of

the liberal media, which stabbed our troops in the back.



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