In Government We Distrust

PETER: If you’re just tuning in, this is BackStory, and we’re talking about the long history of conspiracy thinking in America.

ED: So we got an interesting comment on our website, guys. Shane, who’s a high school teacher, writes, “My students repeatedly fixate on the same few stories. Did FDR know about Pearl Harbor and let Japan attack on purpose? Is there really an Area 51? Is there evidence of aliens? Was 9/11 carried out by the US government or with the knowledge of the US government? What’s with the Masons and the big eye and pyramid on our money? That must mean something sinister, right?

What is interesting to me,” he says, “is that they’re all about distrust of government. And yet they seem to have a strangely contradictory sense of government as both bumbling and all-knowing.” So Brian, a lot of this is 20th century. It seems to me that you might be able to help us get started on this.

BRIAN: I do think that, certainly since World War II, the government is seen as all-knowing. No surprise there. This is when the CIA is created, right after World War II. After 9/11, this is when we create the Department of Homeland Security. We devote an extraordinary amount of resources in the government to knowing everything.

And who could argue that the government is not bumbling? Because much of what Congress has done, certainly since the late ’60s and mid-1970s, is reveal plots by the American government– plots that failed, coups that were not successful. And I don’t think it’s surprising that exactly when the government begins a huge expansion from World War II onward conspiracy theories become more and more focused on the government, as opposed to other parts of society. But I wonder whether the government was the object of conspiratorial thinking back in the 19th and the 18th century, Peter and Ed.

PETER: Well, Brian, the federal government did not loom in my period.

BRIAN: It lurked.

PETER: It didn’t even lurk. Government are us. Those were our people. It’s self-government. That identification of the people with their government, that’s democracy.

The conspiracies were all against that self-government because the whole world was rigged against us. That is, all the kings, all the aristocrats, all the autocracies, the Catholic Church, all these powerful institutions which are hierarchical, and therefore anti-American, which could pull strings. That’s the thing about the American government– you can’t pull strings behind the scenes because it’s us and because there is transparency. We can see what’s happening.

When you have great institutions like the Catholic Church, when you have emerging institutions like the great banks, when you have the Rothschilds, when you have the Bank of England, when you have these powerful individuals who control great wealth and who are not responsible to us, then threats are coming from everywhere and anywhere except from us. The idea that the threats are from within, that’s a very modern idea.

ED: And precisely because the federal government is seen as so weak, it creates the conditions for all other kinds of conspiracies to flourish.

PETER: Exactly right, Ed. Yes.

ED: Because there’s nobody in charge. So if the pope wants to come in and take over the country, who’s going to stop him?

BRIAN: And that’s such a good point, Ed. Because I know at the very beginning of the 20th century, many people would explain the rise of a more powerful national government as a way to deal with, in essence, a conspiracy by the trusts, by the large moneyed interests, to monopolize business in the United States, to control the railroads. And it’s really only the government that can step in to counter.

PETER: So it’s in effect the recognition of danger, risk, vulnerability, conspiracies out there in the big world that requires the US government to become like the things it fears, that we fear. So we’ve invented a national security state in order to protect our liberties that, of course, endangers our liberties.

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ED: It’s time for another short break, but don’t go away. When we get back, a journalist argues that getting to the bottom of the JFK assassination is still critical 50 years later.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory, and we’ll be back in a minute.