Instapundit: Has Obama Legitimated Conspiracy Theories?

In USA Today, Glenn Instapundit
Reynolds argues that Obama has mainstreamed conspiracy
theorizing: 

Spend a little while on Twitter or in Internet comment sections
and you’ll see a significant number of people who think that the
NSA may have been relaying intelligence about the Mitt Romney
campaign to Obama operatives, or that Chief Justice John Roberts’
sudden about-face in the Obamacare case might have been driven by
some sort of NSA-facilitated blackmail.

A year ago, these kinds of comments would have been dismissable
as paranoid conspiracy theory. But now, while I still don’t think
they’re true, they’re no longer obviously crazy. And that’s Obama’s
legacy: a government that makes paranoid
conspiracy theories seem possibly sane.

The problem with government is that to be trusted, you have to
be trustworthy. And the problem with the Obama administration is
that, to a greater extent than any since Nixon’s, it is not. Do not
be surprised if the result is that people mistrust those in
authority, and order their lives accordingly. Such an outcome is
bad for America, but bad governance has its consequences.

Read the whole thing.

I’m partway there in agreement: The Obama years
have been marked by the sort of blatantly insincere encomia to
transparency, fairness, and post-partisanship that are almost
immediately revealed as false. The list includes everything from
the IRS and NSA revelations Reynolds focuses on in his column to
the adminstration’s assertions that lobbyists wouldn’t run policy,
that you could keep your health plan if you liked it, that the
stimulus would create jobs and jumpstart economic growth, and more.
The reality is that Obama’s time in office has been marked by
failure, with the very notable exception of his winning a second
term. Even Obamacare, the one thing he could point to as
“transformative,” is nothing to brag on these days (it matters,
too, that it was passed without any Republican votes; regardless of
the reasons, any law of that scope that can’t even fake a nod to
bipartisan support is almost certain to cause massive anxiety).

Yet I think Instapundit’s analysis goes a bit too far a bit too
fast. Obama was the subject of highly fraught conspiracy theorizing
before he even won the Democratic nomination in 2008. The whole
secret Muslim from Kenya birther shtick proceeded not from anything
particular he did or proposed – it clearly was thrust upon him by a
mix of racist theorizing and inchoate anxiety about the direction
of the country. And, even more important, Obama comes after eight
years of conspiracy mongering about George W. Bush – that he stole
elections in 2000 and 2004 (remember all the “not my president!”
stuff), that Dick Cheney and Haliburton was calling all the shots,
or Big Oil, that Iraq was a personal mission to avenge
assassination attempts on his life, that he planned the 9/11
attacks, and more.

Which is one way of
saying that conspiracizing is as common a feature of the American
landscape as, say, Mount Rushmore. It’s man-made, for sure, but it
never seems to go away. And it gets worse when the economy sucks
and flagrant falsehoods and deceptions by government come to light
(weapons of mass destruction, secret kill lists, you can keep your
plan, etc.). And let us be clear: Obama’s economic policies have
helped keep the economy in the doldrums.
Stimulus spending doesn’t work and layering on massive amounts
of uncertainty in the form of Obamacare (and Dodd-Frank) is no way
to boost the economy.

Reynolds is surely right that “bad governance has its
consequences.” Between the Bush years and the way the Obama years
have played out so far, it’s going to take a long time for the
nation’s politicos to dig themselves out of the crisis of
confidence they’ve inspired. That means the rest of us pay, both in
lost time and resources, as power-brokers get their act together.
And as I’ve noted elsewhere, one of the most disturbing outcomes is
that bad government may counterintuitively create
a demand for more regulation.

For a great discussion of how conspiracy theory has long been at
the very center of American political and social life, read Jesse
Walker’s
The United States of Paranoia.