At the end of 2016, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, The Oxford English Dictionary made “post-truth” its word of the year, Merriam-Webster picked “surreal,” and Dictionary.com chose “xenophobia.” Loath to put too fine a point on it, the American Dialect Society went with “dumpster fire.” At least in recent times, official words of the year have tried to capture the political and social anxieties of their moment, and the ascent of Trump—a onetime birther who espoused noxious falsehoods about immigrants, appeared brazenly unconcerned with ethical boundaries, and openly associated with the notorious conspiracist and Infowars founder Alex Jones—seemed to portend the entry of once-fringe ideologies into the mainstream.



REPUBLIC OF LIES by Anna Merlan Metropolitan, 288 pp., $28.00

CONSPIRACIES OF CONSPIRACIES by Thomas Milan Konda The University of Chicago Press, 432 pp., $30.00

Much like their candidate, many of Trump’s most visible and fervent supporters, drawn largely from the nativist right wing, were disposed to wild conspiracy theories. The election year saw the explosion of Pizzagate, the theory that Democratic Party officials (along with the artist Marina Abramovic) were operating a child sex trafficking ring out of an unassuming pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C. From Pizzagate developed QAnon, whose proponents speculated, among other claims, that former Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz had hired MS-13 to assassinate DNC staffer Seth Rich. That, in turn, resurrected the “Clinton body count,” a long-running belief that Bill and Hillary had, between them, engineered the deaths of dozens of associates and political enemies.

It would be easy to see this deluge of misinformation, half-truths, and outright fabrication as an exclusive product of the Trump era. After all, the new president and his administration fanned the flames of conspiracism and mistrust by railing against “fake news” and recharacterizing their own dubious propaganda as “alternative facts.” Yet today’s climate of paranoia has much deeper roots. In her book Republic of Lies, the investigative journalist Anna Merlan uncovers the origins of several modern conspiracies, ranging from the frenzy around Pizzagate to the belief that the CIA deliberately created and spread aids among African Americans. Meanwhile, political scientist Thomas Milan Konda’s book, Conspiracies of Conspiracies, maps out a family tree of the sprawling, frequently anti-Semitic theories that the United States has nurtured stretching back to the eighteenth century.

What emerges from both books is a pattern: Conspiracism surfaces in sync with the ups and downs of a nation, taking root in its excesses and its crises, and flourishing particularly among groups who feel economically or politically marginalized. People end up susceptible to outlandish ideas not because they’re inordinately foolish or ill-intentioned, but because they’re living in times of enormous socioeconomic instability and political discord. Put another way, conspiracy theories aren’t eroding democracy so much as they signal that a democracy is already decaying. Combating them effectively has less to do with sounding the alarm than with taking up a broader fight for economic equality and for robust, democratic social institutions.

For the uninitiated, Merlan’s book is a riveting tour through the tangles of some of the most prominent conspiracy theories in circulation today. Blending first-person reporting from a variety of conspiracist gatherings with a measured survey of the existing research on conspiracy theories, she explores why and how demonstrably untrue ideas germinate. Behind each quack theory she finds groups of people who feel powerless or alienated in some significant way. “Conspiracy theories tend to flourish especially at times of rapid social change,” Merlan notes. Such theories, far-fetched though they may seem, often “outline a path to a better life and provide hope for the future.”