Conspiracies, Morality, and Politics

Conspiracies, Morality, and Politics

Peter Schultz

 

                  Being conspiratorial is essential for achieving political success. And successful conspirators dress up their conspiracies as moral campaigns. Successful conspirators are able and willing not to be good, as needed. For example, by relying on, allying with criminals, drug dealers, or other disreputable types.

 

                  Politics tends toward the melodramatic, that is, as being redemptive, as seemingly moral, even though it is essentially conspiratorial. As a result, politics ironically tends toward corruption, both of societies and of individuals, despite all the alleged moral drama that seems to be on going and normal. The moral fable that is thought to characterize the Watergate affair serves to cover up multiple conspiracies or cover-ups, e.g., by John Dean, Alexander Haig, Woodward and Bernstein, the Washington Post, the CIA, the FBI, James McCord, E. Howard Hunt, and of course Richard Nixon.  

 

                  Take note of the following from Carl Oglesby in his book The Yankee and Cowboy Wars: “Conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal politics by normal means…. [The] Yankee-Cowboy interpretation … is dead set against the omnipotent-cabal interpretation … in that it posits a divided social-historical American order, conflict-wracked and dialectical rather than serene and hierarchical [where] results constantly elude every faction’s intentions because all conspire against each and each against all….”

 

                  Oglesby’s interpretation is an interpretation not just of America and its order, but of the political generally or universally, including what are labeled “totalitarian” orders like Nazism or communism. Politics is never “serene and hierarchical,” is always “conflict-wracked and dialectical;” that is, is so in every regime, aristocracies as well as oligarchies, in monarchies as well as tyrannies, and in polities as well as democracies.

 

                  There might have been A Cruel and Shocking Act, [ironically the title of a book on the Kennedy assassination that denies its conspiratorial character]; while that act might well be cruel but it should not be shocking. Such assassinations are normal or the norm politically. In fact, for all its gruesomeness and its horror, the Holocaust was not a unique event. Those who affirm the political, as Carl Schmitt did, are embracing cruelty or, in current lingo, “shock and awe.” But the challenge should be taming the political, not affirming it. Even Machiavelli taught this, as did Montesquieu as well.