David Frum: The shame and disgrace will linger

But dig into the academic research on conspiracy theories, and you realize how odd the current environment actually is. Until Trump, scholars assumed that holding the White House inoculated parties from conspiracism. They viewed conspiratorial thinking as a weapon of the weak, which couldn’t seriously threaten the republic because its adherents wielded so little influence in government.

That’s what makes today’s GOP so unusual and so dangerous. Never before in modern American history has a political party been this paranoid and this powerful at the same time.

In their book, American Conspiracy Theories, which tracks paranoid thinking in U.S. politics from 1890 to 2010, the University of Miami political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent conclude that “conspiracy theories are for losers.” Such theories, they argue, are “most likely to issue from domestic groups who fail to achieve power, objectives or resources.” This makes sense. The more dispossessed you feel, and the less you identify with the people running the government, the easier it is to imagine them hatching a shadowy plot to screw you. Studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for instance, found a “widespread belief, particularly in the African American and gay communities, that the AIDS epidemic was a deliberate conspiracy by government officials.” At the time, many black people and gay people felt deeply alienated from the Reagan and Bush administrations. (Not to mention that the federal government had in fact spread disease among African Americans in the past.)

As people feel more empowered, however, their political paranoia tends to fade. “Large winning groups,” note Uscinski and Parent, “feel less anxiety, more in control and less need for conspiracy theories.” After their side wins the White House, partisans generally see fewer nefarious plots. Colin Dickey, who is writing a book about conspiracy theories, noted last year in The New Republic that after Barack Obama won the White House, the percentage of Democrats who told pollsters that 9/11 was an inside job fell by half. “When a Republican occupies the White House, conspiracy theories swarm around Republicans and capitalists,” Uscinski and Parent write. “When it is a Democrat’s turn, conspiracy theories dog Democrats and socialists.”

Adam Serwer: Trump’s inner circle keeps violating the Stringer Bell rule

Yet in the Trump era, that’s no longer true. While Democrats’ susceptibility to conspiracy theories may have risen since Trump’s election, the GOP’s doesn’t appear to have gone down. The percentage of Republicans who believe Obama wasn’t born in the United States, Dickey notes, has not fallen since Trump took office. “Today,” write the political scientists Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum in their 2019 book, A Lot of People Are Saying, “conspiracism is not, as we might expect, the last resort of permanent political losers but the first resort of winners.”