The Left Is Pushing Conspiracy Theories To Feel Better About 2016

Was Sen. Joe McCarthy a bad guy? The answer to that question seems to be changing. Before late 2016, we were expected to believe that his attempt to root out communists in the federal government was a witch hunt stemming from a jingoistic paranoia about Russia.

Then Hillary Clinton lost. How could it be? Her being the most corrupt presidential nominee in U.S. history or running an embarrassingly disconnected campaign is a priori ruled out, because that would mean that a Democratic candidate was worse than a Republican one. The dialectic of a fundamentalist belief in democracy alongside the reality of losing elections results in a mental compromise: Republicans don’t win elections, they steal elections.

This election was so big that it couldn’t have just been Republicans, as dastardly as they may be. It was, uh, the Russians. Yeah! Remember those jerks? Donald Trump is their Manchurian candidate, and Vladimir Putin planted him in the White House by flipping 100,000 Rust Belt voters. This is a fashionable thing to believe, brought to you by the same people who called any scrutiny of Hillary Clinton’s health a “conspiracy theory.”

As crazy as the Russia hysteria is, it’s understandable Democrats would push the narrative that voters having more information from hacked servers was a bad thing. Catastrophic losses demand taking a moral inventory when those who are suffering are also responsible. In context of politics, with all its inertia and moneyed ideological interests, moral accounting is particularly hard because it can imply that certain positions need to change. So what we get instead is a kind of deflective McCarthyism.

I am not entirely comfortable with that pejorative, though. McCarthy was proven to have been basically right by the time documents were declassified in the 1990s proving there actually were communist spies, such as Alger Hiss of the State Department and Harry Dexter White of the Treasury Department, at very high levels of the U.S. government. But those are facts. Facts are not relevant to this discussion, because we’re talking about what we feel deep down inside. The narrative will fill in any space between feelings and the actual state of the world.

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