Centrism and the Epithet "Conspiracy Theorist"

The term "conspiracy" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "[a] combination of persons for an evil or unlawful purpose; an agreement between two or more persons to do something criminal, illegal, or reprehensible."

That being the case it would seem obviously indisputable that conspiracies happen all the time, especially in political life--while it would seem that a hypothesis that some event or other was the result of a conspiracy would not be intrinsically illegitimate, but rather a thing to be judged on its own merits, or lack thereof.

Yet the term "conspiracy theorist" has become an epithet. Of course, those who defend the term's use as such try to stress that a "conspiracy theorist" is somehow not someone who merely hypothesizes that there has been a conspiracy in some particular situation, more or less plausibly, but rather displays some deep, irrational tendency to imagine conspiracy where none exists. The attempt to draw a general-purpose distinction betrays a real strain, the more obvious in as the term is so readily deployed in contemporary political discourse.

Simply put, alleging conspiracy in political life is treated as automatically suspect as illegitimate--and considering the assumptions of the political centrism that defines mainstream discourse in the U.S. it is easy to see why. After all, a "conspiracy theory" is identified as such only because the alleged "combination of persons for an evil or unlawful purpose" does not have the recognition of the "consensus" (otherwise it would be called something else), with said non-recognition a big problem given the centrist's high regard for "consensus" (not really much more than what Authority tells you things are like)."

Moreover, the allegation itself flouts centrist premises in a deeper manner. After all, the charge of conspiracy implicitly entails a suspicion of elites, and alertness to differences in power--while the centrist typically demands deference to elites, and treats differences of power as effectively nonexistent.

Simply put, the centrist holds that, certainly in a complex modern society, especially of the liberal democratic type, power is so diffused--not least among voters and consumers--that in the end everyone has it, and therefore no one has it--which pretty much rules out meaningful conspiracy as a possibility. Indeed, merely to broach the idea of people having power--to say that society is arranged in a certain way--implicitly a way in which it ought not to be arranged--is to depart the "civil," "pragmatic" politics which take the status quo as a given for an "ethical" and "ideological" politics where people talk about what should be, or might be, that is necessarily outside the bounds of legitimate discourse so far as the centrist is concerned--while given the centrist's inclination to psychologism, and in particular their view of anyone not unquestioningly accepting the status quo as mentally ill, those who suspect elites for whom the centrist demands respects can only be "paranoid."

Thus is it that anyone who points out what everyone knows--that, irregardless of centrist ideology, there are differences in power in society, and those who have power use it for their ends in ways that are neither benign nor open--sneeringly identified with tinfoil hat wearers. In the process the term, like so much else in the vocabulary of the contemporary political mainstream, obscures rather than explains reality. But it does undeniably speak volumes about the centrists who so delight in tossing the term "conspiracy theory" about, while crowning all of this with the irony that, just as centrists accuse others of being ideologues while being indisputable, highly vehement, ideologues themselves, even as they fling the epithet "conspiracy theorist" at others they give themselves a free pass with their own conspiracy theories, examples of which are by no means few.