Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (12 page)

In Rochester, New York, not far from the hot zone of anti-Masonic fervor, a publisher named Thurlow Weed bought a local newspaper. When the Masons refused to produce Morgan’s murderers, Weed put his publication behind the anti-Masonic cause. However, he did so in such a purely pragmatic way that the anti-Masons soon became a legitimate political force. Gradually, talk of secret rituals gave way. In its place, Weed—and his eventual ally William Seward—brilliantly exploited legitimate grievances of class, and the inevitable issues that were arising from the growth of the country.

Neither Weed nor Seward had any use for Jackson, and both
men did believe in a Masonic elite that endangered democratic institutions; Wilentz points out that they called for a “Second Independence” from the elite. But they grafted anti-Masonry onto their National Republicanism by tempering the more outré elements of the conspiracy theory, and by channeling the emotions raised by that theory into pragmatic, even liberalizing, politics. By 1832, Weed and Seward had helped build a political party so big that it held the first national nominating convention in U.S. history. The anti-Masons now held the balance of power in the political opposition to Andrew Jackson, and the party’s most surprising convert was a retired politician from Massachusetts named John Quincy Adams.

Stewing in Massachusetts, the aristocratic Adams had soured on politics generally and on political parties in particular. He was not overfond of his countrymen, either, and at first he considered the conspiratorial basis for anti-Masonic politics to be an unpleasant inflammation of distant hayshakers. However, Adams found in the evolving movement a new constituency. It was rougher than he might have liked it to be, but its enthusiasm revived the old man. In 1830, he was elected to a seat in the House of Representatives.

By then, as Wilentz writes, anti-Masonry was spent as an independent political movement, but it had played a critical role in transforming the National Republicans into what would become known as the Whig party. Among Whigs, it was the politicians whose careers had begun in anti-Masonry who often were ahead of the party, particularly on the issue of slavery, which was gathering a fearsome power within the country’s politics. In 1835, William Henry Seward bolted the anti-Masonic party that he’d done so much to promote and joined the Whigs.

For the next fifteen years, Seward and Weed and the other anti-Masons worked within the Whig party to close the ideological
gap. They didn’t talk much about the Masons anymore, but the anti-elitist energy that had fueled the anti-Masonic movement in upstate New York was easily translated into a dislike of southern plantation society when the slavery issue became inflamed. The abolitionist movement pressed on the Whigs from the outside while Seward and the rest of them pushed from the inside, until the party could bend no further. Gradually, as their conspiracy theorizing fell away, and their visions of a dark Masonic cabal went up in smoke, the democratizing part of the anti-Masonic movement stayed, and it helped to defeat the slave power in America, which actually
was
the conspiracy that was running the country.

The Whigs imploded. Seward and his fellow renegades left, founding the Republican party and, eventually, nominating Abraham Lincoln. Seward would serve Lincoln as secretary of state until he was nearly killed in his home on the same night Lincoln was shot in Ford’s Theatre. It was a confederacy of drunks and idiot children that attacked Lincoln and Seward, not the Masons. That would have been crazy. And still, nobody was sure who they’d pulled out of Oak Orchard Creek all those years before, although some people continued to have their suspicions.

NOT
far from where the Masons gathered in Newtonville, and not long after the Masons held their open house, the Royal Order of Hibernians opened their hall to a convention of UFO enthusiasts and some fellow travelers: there was some interest on display in Bigfoot, and in lost civilizations. The Hibernians had already decorated for their annual Halloween party. The walls were adorned with old movie posters—
King Kong
and
The Bride of Frankenstein.
Black and orange balloons bobbed to the ceiling in every corner of the hall.

Browsing through the literature, it was easy to see the lasting impact that Ignatius Donnelly’s work had had on the national historical counternarrative. Even those volumes arguing that Atlantis had an alien origin conformed to Donnelly’s notions as to where the place was and what had happened to it. And clearly, Dan Brown’s labors had done as much for the Illuminati-Templar-Masonic publishing industry as it had for the membership of the Masons themselves.

But the main focus of the conference was lights in the sky—or, in several cases, lights under water. There was about the whole evening a sense of faintly acknowledged bunkum mixed with a charming desire for a kind of personal revelation, for acquiring hidden knowledge. There was nothing theoretical about what these people knew. The conspiracy or conspiracies were almost beside the point. It was the hidden knowledge that was important, a Gnosticism for the media age, with action figures for sale.

“There’s a little P. T. Barnum and a little Don King to it, I guess,” said Jack Horrigan, who organized the conference. “There’s some substance to it, and then there are the guys from the Planet Beltar, and this is a photo of their alien spaceship. Pass it on.”

The essential Americanness of the whole thing was hard to deny. The isolation of conspiracy theories as mere commercial commodities, tightly circumscribed within the Three Great Premises, has not been a good thing. It has forced upon conspiracy theories the role of history’s great patent-medicine show. The creative imagination at work in them never crosses over into what’s glibly described as the real world. How different would American politics look if people generally applied to it what every poll says they believe about what happened in
Dealey Plaza? The people looking into Iran-Contra could have used a little of the attitude Ignatius Donnelly brought to the works of Shakespeare. Not that Donnelly was right, but that he allowed himself to believe there was knowledge hidden somewhere to which he had a right; in pursuit of it, he summoned all his creative powers, which, as we’ve seen, were considerable. To demand to know is the obligation of every American. That it occasionally leads people down blind alleys, or off to Atlantis, is to be celebrated, not scorned.

In 2007, Jonathan Chait published
The Big Con
, a mordantly funny examination of how conservatives in general, and the Republican party in particular, came to believe so deeply and fervently in the crackpot notion of supply-side economics. Chait is a fanatically moderate liberal, a bright and wonkish soul, and a positive sobersides on almost every issue. And yet, on the very first page of his book, he’s already calling supply-side enthusiasts “a tiny coterie of right-wing extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane.” And, well, boy howdy, it gets rougher from there. By page 21, we learn that “American economic policy has been taken over by sheer loons.”

However, Chait seems just a bit troubled by this. “I have this problem,” he writes. “Whenever I try to explain what’s happening in American politics—I mean, what’s really happening—I wind up sounding like an unhinged conspiracy theorist. But honestly, I’m not.” This disclaimer is utterly unnecessary. If there weren’t something of the conspiracy theorist in him, he wouldn’t have been able, clearly and hilariously, to depict the lunatic economic nonsense that the country’s dominant political party so rigidly adopted. He should be proud of sounding that way. We all need to unleash our inner Donnellys from time to time.

Modern conservatism, of which supply-side economics is the beating heart, did more than anything else to devalue traditional
American conspiracy theories. People who held to the old conspiracies did so because they knew something important was at stake. They considered the government something of value. That’s why the anti-Masons were so hell-bent on exposing the Masons who were running government.

But to the supply-siders, and to the movement behind them, government is not worth the trouble. For all their faults, the old iron American conservatives did believe in the essential importance of the American government, which was why they were so afraid of what the Bavarian Illuminati might be doing with it. On the other hand, movement conservatism is a style, not a philosophy, and the government is merely a performance space. Thus, conservative conspiracies have lost their essential lunatic tanginess. If you’ve made yourself rich and powerful deriding the government, what do you care if some shadowy cabal is running it, as long as it’s not also running the corporations who fund your research?

Every election cycle or so, we still get some tub-thumping about the shadowy liberals who are running things, but now the dark forces are the Dixie Chicks, not the Rothschilds. Where’s the threat, except perhaps to the memory of Patsy Cline?

Chait needn’t have worried. The people he’s writing about don’t care whether he sounds unhinged or not. They don’t even care if he’s right. (He is.) Their theory is valid because it has made them money and sold itself successfully. The facts are what they believe, and the truth depends on how fervently they believe it. All Chait has done is to show them for what they are—charlatans, but not cranks. Cranks are much too important. They are part of the other America—Greil Marcus’s old, weird America. A charlatan is a crank with a book deal and a radio program and a suit in federal court. A charlatan succeeds only in Idiot America. A charlatan is a crank who succeeds too well. A charlatan is a crank who’s sold out.

F
or an
unobtrusive little bookworm, Mr. Madison understood the Gut and what it could do better than most of his peers did. He saw it for what it was—a moron, to be sure, but more than that, too. The Gut is democratic. It is the repository of fears so dark and ancient and general that we reflexively dress up the Gut as good ol’ common sense, which we define as “whatever the Gut tells us.” The Gut inevitably tells so many different people so many different things at so many different times that it causes them to choose up sides. Good ol’ common sense is almost never common and it often fails to make sense. Because of this, Madison was wary of the Gut from the start, and he tried to devise a system within which the Gut could be channeled and controlled, as by the locks in a canal. “So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities,” he wrote in
Federalist
10, “that when no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions.”

Political debate channeled itself into political parties. Madison made peace with their inevitability, and he even helped Thomas Jefferson start one, but he never really trusted them, either. In retirement, he wrote to James Monroe that “there seems to be a propensity in free governments which will always find or make subjects on which human opinions and passions may be thrown into conflict. The most perhaps that can be counted on is that … party conflicts in such a country or government as ours will be either so light or so transient as not to threaten any permanent or dangerous consequences to the character or prosperity of the republic.”

Here, of course, he calamitously misjudged his fellow Americans. Following the Gut as though it were not the moron it is, Americans do have a positive genius for choosing up sides. Madison wanted conflicts to be so ephemeral as to not endanger anything important. He did not reckon with the fact that, one day, the country would become so good at choosing up sides that it brought the same unthinking dynamic to questions of life and death, war and peace, and the future of the planet that it does to arguments about center fielders or alternative country bands.

We choose up sides in everything we do. In 2006, for example, writing in the conservative
National Review
, a man named John J. Miller listed the “50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs.” Now, to be fair, Miller was a little bit out of his comfort zone. He’d emerged from the halls of the Heritage Foundation, an institution that never has been confused with the Fillmore West. Nevertheless, he soldiered bravely on, never noticing the absurdity that was piling up around his knees. For example, among the addled Tolkienisms with which Robert Plant larded Led Zeppelin’s “The Battle of Evermore,” the essential conservatism appears in a single lyric:

“The tyrant’s face is red.”

Miller somehow failed to move on to a study of those noted communist propagandists the Cyrkle, whose 1966 hit contained the following summons to revolution:

“The morning sun is shining like a red rubber ball.”

A bubblegum “Internationale,” that one.

Miller dug deep. In what may have been an attempt to send Bono into seclusion, he cited U2’s “Gloria” because it’s about faith and has a verse in Latin. (Miller fails to pay similar homage to the “Rex tremendae majestatis” lyric in the Association’s “Requiem for the Masses.”) Two songs wholly or partly about the difficulty of scoring really good dope made Miller’s list: “Der Kommissar,” as a commentary on the repression in East Germany, where only Olympic swimmers ever got really good dope, and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” as a lesson that “there’s no such thing as a perfect society.” Not even Keith Richards has ever been stoned enough to interpret that song that way.