Americans are seized by conspiracy theories, and as a result, democracy is in peril—so conventional wisdom holds. This familiar refrain resurfaced in the days after Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 campaign, when a flurry of mostly right-wing accounts began circulating claims that the president was in fact dead or dying. However, just a few weeks earlier, after the attempt on Donald Trump’s life at a Pennsylvania rally, it was liberal influencers who spread the idea that the shooting was a false flag to boost the former president’s image.
Overall, these developments reinforced the conclusion that, contrary to what is often claimed, the conspiratorial mindset crosses party lines: What QAnon is to conservatives, BlueAnon is to liberals. Indeed, it has often seemed that the two parties were in competition over the last decade to produce the most febrile and harebrained explanations for the country’s problems, as a convenient alternative to actually trying to solve them.
But this excitable outlook has a much older pedigree than many might realize. Ever since the nation’s founding, Americans have eagerly trafficked in conspiracy theories and “misinformation.” Long before the internet, such narratives circulated in pamphlets and broadsides—including the nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence. Understanding that American democracy emerged and flourished not in spite of conspiratorial thinking but because of it might help us find a way beyond our present political impasses.
By the summer of 1776, the unfolding crisis that turned the 13 colonies against Britain had become irreparable. Discontent over a lack of representation in Parliament, the bloodshed that began at Lexington and Concord, and the radical sentiments stirred up by pamphlets such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense worked in tandem to hasten a single outcome: revolution. As the Continental Congress voted in Philadelphia on a resolution to assume independence, it fell on the Virginia delegate Thomas Jefferson, aged 32, to draft a document outlining the Patriots’ purpose in establishing a new form of government.
The result was a milestone in the history of political thought and rhetoric. But Jefferson’s document wasn’t just a positive articulation of ideals; much like Common Sense, it was a polemical manifesto that sought to discredit more than to affirm. The target of its indictment was a man, King George III, whom it depicted as a tyrant and usurper. If America was, as suggested by the historian Bernard Bailyn and others, born of a contest of liberty against power, then the monarch personified power—and the corruption that comes when political authority is vested in a royal court, rather than the people.
What is seldom noted is that for all the timeless eloquence of its preamble, the Declaration of Independence rests on a series of demonstrably false, vague, exaggerated, superfluous, and hypocritical charges. The historian Andrew Roberts, author of a recent biography of George III, dedicated a chapter to refuting what he describes as “Jeffersonian propaganda,” in which the Founding Father “piled charge upon charge, possibly hoping that sheer quantity would mask the lack of logic and legal quality.”
For instance, the first charge accused the king of refusing “his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good,” without mentioning any specifics. Another charge held that George stationed “standing armies [in the colonies] without the consent of our legislatures”—but these same armies provided the only military defense against the French and their Native American allies from 1754 to 1756, while the colonists shouldered only about 10 percent of the costs of their protection.
Yet another charge accused the king of plotting “to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws,” a repetition of the Patriots’ common demand that Parliament not decide policy for the colonies. But Americans had accepted the legitimacy of parliamentary actions for 150 years, previously objecting, through the 1765 Stamp Act Congress, only to its authority to levy internal taxes. Other charges, such as those concerning the British use of Hessian and “savage” auxiliaries, were meant to depict London’s conduct of the war as out of bounds, even though the colonists, too, had relied on foreign and indigenous allies. A deleted clause even blamed the slave trade on the king, which would have been the height of hypocrisy given that Jefferson, along with 40 of 55 of his fellow co-signers, was a slaveholder. By Roberts’s count, of the declaration’s 28 charges, only two could withstand a historian’s scrutiny and be considered true.
“American independence could thus arguably be attributed more to passion than to reason.”
But as we know, the declaration’s “misinformation” is more than compensated for by the poetry of its composition and the force of its conviction: It was Jefferson’s sublime writerly powers far more than the substance of his political case that succeeded in winning the battle for “the opinion of mankind.” American independence could thus arguably be attributed more to passion than to reason: to an excitement over grand theoretical notions of liberty as opposed to an appreciation for its sober, practical exercise in the fields of law and government.
Perhaps, as with any piece of holy writ, the specific points of the narrative of America’s civil scripture may have been ahistorical, but the larger moral truths they attested to, such as “that all men are created equal,” are forever valid and incontrovertible. Still, how can a revolutionary declaration, the first to be issued in the Age of Reason, begin with a lofty appeal to “self-evident” truths yet seem to have so little respect for standards of truth and evidence? Furthermore, how can such an unbalanced and contradictory way of thinking—which was widespread among the founding generation—have led to the establishment of an enduring democratic republic, the first of its kind and the most successful in the modern world?
This is the paradox of the distinct political culture that the declaration spawned. Much of the nation’s subsequent history can be interpreted as one long cycle of reincarnation for the Jeffersonian worldview: each generation, borrowing from its moral vocabulary, has developed its own central animating conspiracy theory. The post-revolutionary period was rife with factional accusations of conspiracy to subvert the young republic; in the succeeding generation, the Jacksonians saw Nicholas Biddle’s national bank as the instrument of a financiers’ plot to undermine liberty, while the Whigs saw Jackson as a royal despot intent on doing the same. In the antebellum years, pro- and anti-slavery forces alike saw the other side as abetting grave existential conspiracies, be it the Slave Power or the specter of Abolition; and in the 20th century, New Deal reformers and their conservative opponents likewise viewed each other in similar terms, as stooges of the “economic royalists” or dupes of a “socialistic plot.”
In other words, American democracy has survived and reinvented itself at every turn in part because of the impetus provided by each generation’s florid conspiratorial imaginings. As intellectual historian Daniel Walker Howe wrote in response to Richard Hofstadter’s claims about the supposed affinity between the “paranoid style” and history’s worst causes: “In American history, at least, the good causes making use of the paradigm have been more important than the bad.” In other words, these narratives helped earlier generations of Americans to make sense of the world, organize information, and, above all, guide their political actions, both reflecting and contesting the moral values held by society at any given point in time.
Perhaps, then, the task today lies not in purging the political arena of any and all forms of conspiracy theory and misinformation, as some in the expert class wish, but rather in marrying these modes of thought to larger visions of programmatic change—those that can harmonize liberty and power, reason and passion, the critical and the constructive instincts in politics.
This is what happened with many of the successful “good causes” that the conspiracy paradigm has helped to advance and bring to fruition, from the Declaration onwards. After the Revolution, the Founders stumbled through a half-decade of weak government before enacting the Constitution, which reconciled them to the case for a strong federal state as a means of defending liberty and popular sovereignty, thus tempering, to a degree, the fear of executive power that underlied their original revolutionary impulse. The Lincoln Republicans and New Deal Democrats triumphed in their respective battles against Slave Power and the economic royalists, and didn’t hesitate to build dynamic new regimes and institutions in place of what they had just overthrown: For within their own conspiracy paradigms, there existed both passionate critiques of the old order and counter-models with which to replace it. Looking at today’s politics, one gets the sense that the latter half of this equation is missing—something through which the energies awakened by conspiratorial thinking might be transmuted into a positive and revolutionary enterprise.
“Conspiratorial thinking will remain an indelible part of the nation’s political culture.”
Whatever the case, conspiratorial thinking will remain an indelible part of the nation’s political culture, as it has been in the past. Instead of condemning it, Americans might consider what it really means. As Howe reminded us, prior to acquiring its negative definition, “conspiracy” simply meant “any union or combination (of persons or things) for one end or purpose.” The notion that citizens who share common ends should band together and make plans to advance them is, if anything, at the heart of what it means to live in a free society—and it is precisely what disaffected Americans don’t do enough of, which might explain the gap between the rise in populist demands for a new political course and the absence of a clear governing agenda that can satisfy them. In this sense, the American people in 2024, far from suffering from a feverish excess of conspiratorialism, aren’t nearly as conspiratorial as they should be.