In his novel Foucault’s Pendulum, the late Umberto Eco dreamed up a plot for our time. The book portrays a collection of enlightened skeptics who get swept into conspiracy. First to amuse themselves, and then because the crackpots they ridicule participate in the madness, Eco’s characters seal their own doom. They connect dots that are unrelated. They see cabals that don’t exist.

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Before they all die, Eco’s leading characters have learned that conspiracies are false but their effects are true – especially for those who might have simply looked for more obvious wrongs to right instead. “We offered a map to people who were trying to overcome a deep, private frustration,” one reflects. Clear meaning in an opaque world turns out to be a dodge for people aggravated by real problems but never offered the right solutions. And it is disastrous for all concerned.

In America today, it is happening for real.

Conspiracy has long haunted American politics, but the age of Trump has made it an almost universal syndrome. The left conspiracy of Russian assets in government bred the right conspiracy of the deep state and Ukrainian election interference. The boring incompetence that led to the Iowan primary fiasco generated Twitter fevers and TV speculation that the Democratic National Committee – with a software company idiotically named “Shadow”, manned, naturally, by foreign agents – has hidden designs against Bernie Sanders.

The most prominent theory of conspiracy isolates the illiberal fringe, while casting the mainstream as rational. It proceeds to call for the “cognitive infiltration” of the “extremists” to correct a “crippled epistemology”. Nowadays, similar voices insist, only the unhinged right – which at least used to gesture to facts – spins conspiracies from thin air with no pretense of truthfulness, in order to attack the foundations of democracy.

But such theories complacently deny how universal conspiracy thinking is, driven by genuine social conditions – and how pathologizing it as someone else’s problem makes things worse. Historically, conspiratorial thinking has never been anyone’s monopoly. The idea of a worldwide Jewish plot has inspired the Nazis but it was also, in the German socialist August Bebel’s memorable formula, “the socialism of the imbeciles”. Alt-right bloviations about “deep state” conspiracies make us forget that the counterculture of the 1960s was rife with anxious visions of monsters inhabiting the same abyss, as a recent Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition suggested.

If the Russian hack made any difference, it's because the fruit was hanging so low the worms were able to feast on it

The root causes of conspiracy theories are not a matter of cognitive impairment either. In what may be the first article ever written on “fake news”, the French historian Marc Bloch observed in 1921 that conspiracy theories always require specific social conditions to take hold and spread – in his experience, a fragmented society disrupted by war. While America fights endless war, it is equally relevant that its society is fragmented by unprecedented levels of inequality. In this context, conspiracy theories have become endemic to America’s brand of democratic politics. Those intent on continuing oligarchic policies that serve the interests of an increasingly small fraction of the population cannot rely on it to form a majority. They turn to conspiracy-mongering in order to capture support and deflect the social resentment generated by the policies that leave most people in the lurch.

But even when they refrain from using such tactics and lose elections, they can indulge in conspiracy-mongering. When it comes to explaining the loss of the 2016 primaries and general election, American centrists have no qualms laying the blame on shadowy forces. They should know better. After all, it was their ultimate forbear, the 19th-century French liberal François Guizot, who acknowledged that conspiracies are what weak governments conjure out of the resentment they generate in order to cover up their own mistakes. This is clearly true of current governance too. But it also applies to all those who believe their elections are being stolen while never succeeding in garnering enough votes to win.

The point is not that Russia did not intervene in 2016 – everything indicates it did – but that the obsession with conspiracies misses the point. If the Russian hack made any difference, it is only because the fruit was hanging so low that the worms were able to feast on it. Peddling or debunking conspiracy theories are just two faces of the same coin: the avoidance of true politics.

Conspiracies to ferret out sometimes exist, of course. Yet they fail most of the time. As Italian political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli observed of them long ago, “many are attempted, few have the desired outcome.” The real danger, he warned, was not that their designs would come to pass but the long shadow they cast upon politics. Once the idea of conspiracy has taken hold of the public mind, it generates real effects whether it is true or not. Even when anxieties of conspiracies afoot have some basis, concern with them regularly helps fulfill them and makes things worse.

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Conspiracies are best left to Netflix period dramas with bouffant breeches and damascened daggers. The best defense against their corrosive effect on politics, Machiavelli suggested, is a set of policies that do not alienate the vast majority of the population, leaving them wondering who betrayed them: “a prince must take little account of conspiracies when he counts the people as his friend, but when the people are his enemy and hold him in contempt he must fear everything and everyone.”

If we want to avoid the descent of politics into the factionalism of corrupt oligarchies, what we need is not the foiling of alleged plots or the debunking of conspiracy theories but a new political realism that takes a cold look at the economic and fiscal policies that have failed so many for so long.