Like many liberals, I've been by turns amused and confounded by the persistent oddness of many anti-Obama activists. Whether Tea Party members, Republican members of Congress who are just odd (like Michelle Bachman of Minnesota or Steve King of Iowa), or media figures like Glenn Beck or disgraced ousted Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, there are mechanisms and forces involved that defy easy categorization. While it is easy enough to rest upon the various anxieties brought on by recession, stubborn unemployment, and the sudden change in major-party leadership at a national level, including having a woman as Speaker of the House and an African-American President, these "causes" or "conditions of possibility" do not account for the persist belief in non-factuals - that the President and his Administration are either, or by turns, communist, socialist, fascist, radical liberation theologians, and Muslims; that the President of the United States was born in Kenya and raised in Madrassas in Indonesia; that he exhibits, in the odd turn of phrase Gingrich used last week, a "Kenyan anti-colonial" ideology.
Nor is it possible to dismiss these persistent public statements as the result of simple ignorance, or racism. It is not "the media's fault", because that would entail blaming not just those channels of information that reinforce these odd ideas - AM talk radio, FOXNews - but the entire gamut of sources from which we gain our information about the larger world, including the internet and the mainstream press both of which have done an admirable and persistent job exposing these claims as false. While the phenomenon of "agnotology" certainly accounts, at an individual level (and perhaps group level as well) for some of the persistence, it cannot account for all of it.
I have been re-reading, for the first time in several years, Jeffrey Victor's marvelous study of the Satanic cult conspiracy theory, Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend. One key to unraveling the confounding persistence of rumors of Satanic cult activity - including ritual child abuse, murder, cannibalism, and the infiltration of government and society to undermine its values and mores - is understanding specific events as examples of what Victor calls a "rumor panic". He offers various examples of rumor panics as illustrative, a famous one being the Satanic ties of Proctor & Gamble. Now, at the link, this is offered up as an example of the intellectual heft of agnotology; even in the face of evidence that falsifies each and every claim made by those who insisted P&G was actually a front for Satanism. These beliefs persisted, boiling up every few years as those original fliers, over thirty years old now, continuing to circulate.
As the various mechanisms behind rumor-panics are explained, and as one particular rumor-panic - a Satanic cult panic in the far western New York town of Jamestown, in 1988 - is studied in detail (including a chronology of the development of the rumor panic dating from the previous autumn), it dawned on me that these mechanisms and social and social-psychological triggers might just be present in the various outbursts of strange statements and conspiratorial theories surrounding our President.
I think this is at least an interesting possibility, worthy of deeper study.
UPDATE: Oh my God. I think it safe to say that someone has replaced Doug Feith as the stupidest fucking guy on the planet.
I am including this as an update on this post because it demonstrates how truly stupid people somehow have seats of authority - in this case, the op-ed page of The Washington Post - abdicate their responsibility to think critically about our politics and society. This gobbledygook is really horrible. In a just world, Richard Cohen would get the ax.
Virtual Tin Cup
