Enemies within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America [Hardcover]

Goldberg argues that Hofstadter's theory looks in retrospect too bound to the ideas of deviant psychology popular after WWII. Instead, he sees conspiricism, rightly, I think, as a struggle for power. To demonstrate his thesis, he takes five well-known recent examples of conspiracy thinking: the "master conspiracy" (i.e. the Birchites Robert Welch's fabrication of the New World Order which postulates an elite who run the world through the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign relations, " "The Rise of the Antichrist (exampled through Pat Robertson's take on Revelations), "The View from the Grassy Knoll" (the Kennedy assassination), "Jewish Devils and the War on Black America" (a brief history of the exploitation of the exploitation of the ill-feeling between Louis Farrakhan and Jews, and "The Roswell Incident" (the "cover-up" of the alien invasion in 1947, and the mainstreaming of these theories through TV -- the X-Files, Independence Day, etc.)

What's fascinating is that Goldberg shows how these various conspiracy often borrow from and reinforce each other. The KKK, Farrakhan and Robertson, for instance, all point to the "Jewish banking conspiracy" or ZOG of running the world, pulling the strings behind the scenes, duping the masses into thinking the governments they live under have any real power while the real masters start wars, and kill national leaders like Kennedy when those leaders interfere with their grand designs. Farrakhan, like those who accuse the government of a disinformation campaign over the so-called Roswell incident, teaches his followers that there is "mother plane" circling the earth, ready to pick up the faithful when the time of tribulation ends, a strand of belief that links them also to the revelations scenario of Robertson and other millenialist preachers.

Goldberg summarizes all these discourses with admirable clarity, showing how all use using circular logic, exclude other explanations, and, in the process form dense self-referential webs of commentary that cannot be breached by reason. Whether its the Illuminati, ZOG, the hand-picked members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Masons, or aliens who have infiltrated the highest reaches of power, the story is always the same: a powerful elite whose only scruple is the preservation of power, and the making of profits is behind everything. Conspiricism, in Goldberg's view, offers the faithful complete and seamless explanations for the radical discontinuities and fragmentation of modern and post-modern existence.

He also shows how the entertainment industry has found this all very profitable. The mainstream media has learned from Oliver Stone's remake of the Kennedy assassination, that rewriting history to conform to fringe theories can capture the public imagination, and more important, loose the purse strings. Conspiracy theories have also been mainstreamed by U.S. corporations notes Goldberg, such as U-Haul, which uses the standard bulb-headed, big-eyed alien icon on the side of its New Mexico trailers and moving vans as emblematic of that state.

Goldberg notes with equanimity that there have been cover-ups fostered by government bureaucrats, and that these cover-ups have eroded the public's faith in its institutions, i.e., the infiltration of the FBI into the Black Panthers, the Black Muslims, or the paranoid scrutiny of Martin Luther King by Hoover's men, the black men whose syphilis was never treated in Tuskegee as part of an "experiment," etc. Given these abuses of power, Goldberg says conspiricism gains in credibility and influence. At the same time, he argues that this conspiricism is serving to debilitate belief in government to an unwarranted extent. When Ronald Reagan expressed the idea that "government is not the solution, but that it is the problem," he gave voice to a group of countersubversives that later managed to make David Koresh a hero, who spun a web of egregious nonsense about Vincent Foster's suicide to support and extend their attacks on the Clintons and, in the process, driven nearly mad with hatred, turned the U.S. government into a machine to wreak vengeance on a too-amorous young woman and her prevaricating paramour.

He notes the proliferation of "Gates" from the original "Watergate," to include such "conspiracies" as "Whitewatergate," "Travelgate," "Irangate," has blurred them all into one messy symbol of the business-as-usual corruption of the U.S. government, when in fact some of these events did constitute abuses of power, while many more did not. What countersubeversives know is that if you can get your label to stick to an issue, a label that either contains the seed of your side of the argument or negatively characterizes your opponents side, you have already half won the battle. Thus the jockeying around such phrases as "Tort Reform," which more correctly should be called "The Liability Ceiling Law."

Conspiracy thinking is not new in America. But, Goldberg notes, the intensity of this type of thinking has picked up considerably the past five decades. Most recently, he says, driven by an insatiable desire for profits, the purveyors of infotainment have raised the volume of conspiricist claims to such a pitch that it is difficult to advance less scabrous theories against them. Reasonable theories don't draw audiences, he suggests. They can't sell ad space. They don't foster fanaticism, build mass support, or scare into submission citizens or politicians who hold opposing views.