Conspiratorial Political Science: What We Need

Conspiratorial Political Science: What We Need

Peter Schultz

            Conventional political science sees politics as primarily composed of battles over particular public policies, e.g., US policy toward China, toward Russian, toward the environment, toward education, and so on and so on and so on. So presented, politics is not seen as a series of battles between, say, republicans and oligarchs, or between democrats and aristocrats, between the not-wealthy and the wealthy. These larger issues are ignored, even buried by conventional political science, to the point that it seems we no longer have to deal with them.

            One problem with situation is that although it appears that our politics is all about a series of battles over particular public policies, in fact those larger battles are being fought and decided with consequences of the utmost importance. But these larger battles are being fought clandestinely, covertly, and it behooves us to take note of this.

            This is where what I am calling a “conspiratorial political science” comes in handy; is, in fact, indispensable because conspiracy theories reveal or at least hint at the battles over these larger issues. For example, the question “Who killed JFK?” points toward the possibility that JFK was killed by, say, a conspiracy of right-wing oligarchs who were convinced that Kennedy, if allowed to continue as president, would undermine the authority they had been enjoying prior to Kennedy’s election in 1960.  Or consider the question: Was the Watergate scandal a way to remove Richard Nixon in a coup, a coup engineered by those who were opposed to Nixon’s Vietnam policies, his China policy, and his policy of détente with the Soviet Union?

            And this helps explain why conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists are treated by many with disdain: Because such theories threaten to expose (a) what is actually going on and (b) that what is going on calls into question the legitimacy of the reigning political honchos because these honchos have achieved or are maintaining their power by undemocratic, un-republican means. Conspiracy theories replace the view of conventional political science that politics is normally, ordinarily about open disputes and battles over particular public policy questions, a view that implicitly embraces the view that the existing political order is legitimate. So, in conventional political science, any suggestion that the reigning political order is illegitimate seems out of order. According to conventional political science, attempts at clandestine changes should be dismissed as mere conspiracies and, hence, not worth serious attention because they do not constitute normal, ordinary politics. They are aberrations, often the aberrations of distorted minds.

            As a result, many aspects of our political battles are ignored or buried, e.g., the fact that the Nixon administration was being spied on by the Pentagon, or the fact that JFK cancelled a scheduled trip before his fated trip to Dallas because there had been intell that there would be an attempt to assassinate him. And this means that much of the reality of our political battles disappears or is repressed, and as a result we don’t actually know what is going on in our own government. What looks like, say, competing foreign policies are actually competing imperialistic schemes, schemes embraced by different groups seeking power. And none of these groups want these competitions to be decided in the public arena because, of course, in a nation that aspires to be republican, imperialism cannot be openly embraced. If the nation is to wage war imperialistically, this must be done on the sly, must be dressed up to look like reluctant war-making. But again and again, this reluctance is overcome. Or, as conventional political scientists like to say, the US keeps making the same mistakes over and over and over. But, in reality, these wars aren’t mistakes. They are being waged, clandestinely as it were, to serve one faction or another.

            Often, it is asked: Why don’t things in the US change, even in the face of significant public dissatisfaction? One reason is that our elections don’t decide public policy in the United States. What decides public policy in the United States, as is true I would imagine of every national political order, are the conspiracies that happen before, during, and after our elections. Until we understand this, we will go on as we have been for a long time now, allowing our conspirators to decide our fates.