Why (Some) Leftists Cling to Conspiracy

The news that Bernie Sanders was withdrawing from the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination hit like a truck, and seeing it coming didn’t entirely soften the blow. Leftists, progressives, and other various Bernie supporters felt the sting of defeat for the second time in four short years. It wasn’t a new feeling, but this time the loss hit a bit harder: unlike in 2016, Bernie had not been an underdog the whole race; in fact, for a minute there it seemed like he actually had a shot. Then, all of a sudden, after several strong showings in early primaries and caucuses, he lost race after race on Super Tuesday as the entire moderate wing of the party coalesced around Biden.

Instead of being up against an incredibly savvy political operative who spoke confidently and clearly about her plans, his main primary opponent was often unintelligible, and in his moments of lucidity seemed to vacillate between disinterest and dismissiveness. In the middle of a growing pandemic that was causing a global health crisis, Bernie’s message of healthcare for all should have resonated more than ever. In the middle of a period of forced unemployment for a grave public necessity beyond anyone’s control, a platform seeking sweeping improvements to our social infrastructure and strengthening the bonds that we share with our neighbors and communities should have resonated more than ever. In the face of a looming extinction-level ecological collapse, Bernie’s message of taking decisive, bold action to combat climate change should have resonated more than ever. In the midst of the chaos of a staggeringly authoritarian and corrupt administration, aided and abetted by a party of feckless enablers, Bernie’s image as one firmly grounded in principles of integrity and transparency, unwavering in his conviction to the betterment of society, should have resonated more than ever.

That is to say, his loss to many of us defied explanation. It hurt. And we coped with this hurt in different ways. Some of us chose to remain optimistic, to take heart that we came closer than ever before, to take it as a sign that we can get what we want if we keep trying.

Others, well . . . went a different way with it.

I have been a member of several Leftist or heavily Leftist-influenced Facebook groups for quite some time, stretching back through Trump’s entire term and into the second half of Obama’s second term. They are and always have been an unrepresentative sample of the Left, what it wants, and how it acts (and they are of course not a sample of the US Democratic party in any meaningful way). But until Bernie dropped out, the discourse had a different tone. I enjoyed reading articles shared about the benefits of mutual assistance, learning how to grow your own food at home, and discussing the news of the day with my “comrades.” But lately, these pages have become full of bad-faith criticism, outright falsehoods, and political defeatism and nihilism. I believe that this anger and cynicism currently gripping the Left ironically has roots in its naive overconfidence in the values of the American public.

Since Bernie dropped out and Joe Biden became the presumptive nominee, I’ve watched the discourse catch fire, slowly transforming Joe Biden from the milquetoast centrist that he is, one who has shown no real interest in seriously pursuing progressive policy and is actually incredibly friendly to some pretty conservative ideas, into this grotesque, demonic, Lovecraftian horror of a caricature. The bounds of artistic (or memetic) license, of exaggeration or embellishment, are strained beyond recognition:

• It is not enough that Joe Biden has no real plan to end America’s addiction to perpetual warfare — he also supports, enjoys, and even carried out genocide in the Middle East (and at home on the Mexican border) during his time in the Obama Administration.
• It is not enough that Joe Biden has been too familiar in interacting with children, getting too close and not realizing (or perhaps not caring) that he is clearly making them uncomfortable — he is a pedophile.
• It is not enough that Joe Biden fought busing strenuously based on the misguided beliefs that busing would not effectively achieve integration, and that it would send Black children the message that they could not learn unless White children were in the room — he did it because he supported segregation (which is a difficult motive to square with his later support for housing discrimination legislation and pro-plaintiff amendments to the Civil Rights Act).
• It is not enough that Joe Biden has been credibly accused of rape — he is a rapist, and should submit himself for chemical castration or even execution.
• It is not enough that Joe Biden shamefully mishandled Anita Hill’s allegations against Justice Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearing because Biden believed in harmful societal prejudgments about sexual assault and harassment victims — he wanted Clarence Thomas on the Court (which is difficult to square with his vote against Thomas’s confirmation, and the fact that Thomas still hates Biden’s guts 30 years later).
• It is not enough that Joe Biden’s political history casts doubt on his ability to follow through on the slightly progressive facets of his platform — he never intended to follow through on any of them and is intentionally lying about it.
• It is not enough that Joe Biden previously lied about some important details about his life, such as how well he did in law school and whether or not he was active in the civil rights movement — he has never said an honest word in his life and should never be trusted to tell you the time.

A similar trend has taken hold with regards to the primary itself. Bernie didn’t just lose, the nomination was stolen from him by the DNC. The media was in on it, and they “blacked out” Bernie’s campaign from news coverage compared to others, based on largely subjective evidence. The other moderate candidates for office all divided the moderate wing for a while and then consolidated specifically to throw Bernie off in case he started winning a few primaries (it can’t be because none of them were polling in high single digits, can it?). The primaries in Wisconsin and New York weren’t canceled out of a worry about public health, and choosing the incorrect option in a false dichotomy (“public health or democracy”) rather than meeting both needs by rapidly rolling out a vote-by-mail system. They were canceled specifically to sabotage the progressive wing and because the DNC fundamentally hates democracy.

Let’s tally it up. In the world of the Very Online Left, the American voter has been provided a Democratic nominee who is a genocidal, segregationist rapist pedophile who lies like he breathes and who has outright fabricated the most watered-down progressive policies ever in an attempt to manipulate the Left to support him while secretly wanting to see die-hard conservatives fill the Supreme Court, and who holds such utter contempt for us that he expects us to vote for him simply because he isn’t Donald Trump.

He is going to be the Democratic nominee because a group of oligarchic bigwig fatcat corporatist conspirators at the DNC organized a nationwide media blackout for the one truly Progressive candidate, and they cackled and rubbed their hands together as they tossed untold millions of votes for Bernie directly into the trash. Even after he dropped out, they decided that the risk of him getting enough votes to influence the platform in some way was so great that they should cancel primary elections in two states and suffer the incredibly bad optics that surely would (and did) follow.

What’s the common thread here?

A refusal to acknowledge that the Left does not yet speak for America.

When Bernie dropped out, Leftists were confronted with the message that our moral crusade did not enjoy the popular support we thought it did. I (and I wager most of my fellow Leftists) met that news head-on, and resolved to continue fighting to expand our influence over the years to come, to continue to hold the the feet of whoever is in office in January 2021 to the fire and to continue to demand more from our leaders than symbolic gestures. But many of us instead retreated into denial and conspiracy.

Much research has linked belief in conspiracy theories to a feeling that one has lost control, or to being faced with an uncomfortable uncertainty. When events or natural phenomena make us question our own beliefs about ourselves or the world, ascribing those phenomena to the work of self-interested humans brings these difficult questions within the realm of our understanding, or provides us with a quick answer that doesn’t require much cognitive work. This isn’t to say that those who believe in conspiracy theories are (necessarily) stupid, but that they generally do not have the time, the energy, the will, or the access to explore the various complexities of the issue. I believe similar behavior is at work here.

Surely, the conspiracy-minded Left thought, the American people believe the things I believe. It’s just common sense! It is the compassionate, decent, humane, dignified, sustainable position to take. They refused to acknowledge that Leftist policy, what they (and I) view as the only sensible and compassionate way forward, is not the majority view in the country they themselves often describe as the most conservative nation in the developed world. In a country where, to summarize a meme, our “far left” is most of Europe’s “center-right,” they refuse to believe that the majority of Democrats do not support someone who calls himself a Socialist.

The cynic in me says they refuse to see this because they cannot imagine a world in which their superior position isn’t immediately obvious to every observer. But deep down, I think they simply expected more from their fellow voter. They had faith that the other voters were just as interested as they were in fundamentally changing the country to be more just, more sustainable, and more compassionate.

Our loss was a repudiation of that faith. But instead of accepting that their faith was (as yet) misplaced, they cling to it: my fellow voter didn’t let me down, “they” did. Disfiguring the blandest politician ever into a Kafkaesque monstrosity and comic book villain is not political mud-slinging, it’s a defense mechanism. It’s a way to tell themselves no one would choose this guy. No one would vote for this guy. If Joe Biden is just a milquetoast centrist in a political party dominated by other milquetoast centrists, it’s harder to deny that he may just have won fair and square, that the majority of voters were with him and not with us. By making him into a monster, we can push that possibility out of our minds. But wait: if he’s a genocidal, segregationist monster, surely a country thirsty for progressive policy wouldn’t support him. The self-doubt creeps back in. So, we say that such a monster could only be the product of a rigged system. And if that rigged system doesn’t entirely exist as we require it to for our own reassurance, we will imagine one.

When you fail to achieve something important, and especially when you fail again on your second attempt, that failure calls you to examine whether you made an error. It calls you to ask yourself whether you let the people down who were counting on you. Attributing the loss to a conspiracy by your opponents reassures you that you are right, that your strategy is right, that you did the best you can, that people did listen, but that a small group of nay-sayers ruined everything. By creating an external target for our anger, we push down the anger we feel towards ourselves.

In this way, it appears to me that the most toxic and seething voices on the left are not overly cynical, but rather overly naive. Naive about the state of American politics, naive about the strength of Leftist ideals in the American political conversation. The anger does not come from a place of hatred for Joe Biden or the center-left, but a place of self-blame and mourning. So, while I will continue to engage in exhausting and frustrating arguments in these groups, trying to push back on the torrent of misinformation that has met me every time I refresh Facebook in recent weeks, I will do so knowing that such anger comes from a place of tremendous hurt, and a steadfast faith in the fundamental virtue of the American voter.

And I will do so knowing that time is on our side.