We might all be better off if Bobby Kennedy hadn’t been shot in the head. Only a few hours after declaring victory in the 1968 California primary, clearing a path to the Democratic nomination for president and setting himself up to take on Richard Nixon in November, the New York senator was gunned down in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel by - allegedly - a Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan, furious about Kennedy’s stance on the Six-Day War and his promise to send Israel fifty Phantom jets. Hubert Humphrey won the primary and Nixon won the election by less than 1%, putting the last nail in the coffin of the New Deal and ushering in a new era of Republican political dominance. Had Bobby left the hotel by the ballroom instead of the kitchen, the last fifty years of American history might look very different.
Of course no-one believes the official story. Bobby, like his brother John, was slain by a deep state cabal, a shadowy coalition of the CIA and the Mafia using psychic techniques inherited from the Nazi sorcerers of the Thule Society. Sirhan Sirhan’s lawyers have repeatedly claimed that he was hypnotised, and manipulated into taking the shot by a seductive mystery woman in a polka-dot dress. His name has been linked to Dr. Louis Jolyon West, the government mind-control expert who worked on MK-ULTRA and examined Jack Ruby in the weeks after he shot Lee Harvey Oswald. John Pilger - Australian journalist and conspiracy enthusiast who happened to be an eyewitness to the assassination - has declared himself convinced there must have been a second shooter.
The more you read about this stuff, the more plausible it all begins to feel. The CIA were actually conspiring with the Mafia, they were actually studying mind control, they actually recruited a lot of Nazis and the range of heinous deeds they officially admit to are no less insane and implausible than the assassination of a president. They’d overthrown the elected leaders of one country after another - Mossadegh of Iran, Arbenz of Guatemala, Lumumba of the Congo, Sukarno of Indonesia. Why should America be any different?
The late 60s and 70s were defined by economic collapse, urban riots, corruption in the White House and widespread distrust of the government. There was a distinct feeling in the air at the time that the American experiment was over, that the country could never take itself seriously again. Right now, of course, history seems to be repeating itself as farce.
Conspiracy theories are always with us, but they seem to be most popular in times of social unrest and democratic illegitimacy, when nobody’s happy and it’s hard to believe that the government would even in theory be capable of executing the will of the people. The 21st-century left sometimes flirts with them, speculating about the Epstein flight logs and Pete Buttigieg’s plot with Shadow, Inc. to manipulate the Iowa caucus. We have nothing, however, on the neonationalist right. It’s now entirely conventional among Republicans to believe that Donald Trump is waging a secret war against a global coalition of Moloch-worshipping pedophiles, who control Hollywood and murder children to extract life-prolonging adrenochrome from their brains. Over seventy candidates who believe in the QAnon theory are running for Congress. At least one - Marjorie Greene of Georgia - is likely to win.
Curiously, despite their liberal pedigree, the Kennedy family are supposedly allies of the movement. JFK’s son, the QAnon people believe, faked his death in a plane crash to hide out in Pittsburgh under the name Vincent Fusca, and will re-emerge in this year’s election to act as Trump’s new running mate. Conspiracy stuff has a way of scrambling the distinction between right and left. It seems to appeal to people who hold a mix of beliefs not represented in conventional politics - that the state, for instance, should pay for medicine while also deporting all Muslims. Trump ran on exactly this kind of scrambled platform - opposing free trade and the Iraq war while also supporting a border wall and a brutal new immigration regime. It makes sense. If you can’t vote for someone who believes what you believe, it’s going to be easy to suspect that your democracy is not representative. You start to wonder who else is actually making the decisions.
The Trumpists’ love of conspiracy theories has made it very tempting for liberals to define themselves in opposition, as the few remaining people who are capable of rational assessment of the facts. The emerging political conflict, they suggest, is not between left and right. It’s not between social democracy and free-market economics. It’s certainly not between labour and capital. It’s between sanity and madness. It’s between people who think that Hillary Clinton is a brain-eating lizard person and people who understand, correctly, that she is not. There can be no compromise in this struggle. You cannot compromise with people who have parted ways from reality so completely that they are, effectively, mentally ill - that they cannot be trusted to know that the Earth is round, let alone to make decisions about whether or not the United States should nationalise its healthcare system. There are certain people, this analysis suggests, who must necessarily be excluded from the democratic process. They are simply not competent to participate.
And this line of argument, of course, has immediately been turned against the radical left. On an episode of the 538 Politics Podcast, the purest available distillation of liberal technocracy, producer Galen Druke defines the idea that “the 1% controls the economy” as a conspiracy theory, a “fever dream for the radical left”, on the basis that it’s not explained that way in any economics textbook. Of course economic textbooks don’t say that, because the discipline of economics is largely controlled by the 1%. The Nobel Prize for Economics, for instance, is fake - invented in the late 60s by the Swedish Central Bank in order to legitimise conservative economists and attack their social-democratic government. The history of capitalism is full of things like this - rich people coordinating behind closed doors to promote their mutual interests using underhanded and undemocratic means. That’s pretty much what capitalism is, and what anticapitalism is designed to oppose. Writing it off as a fever dream, conflating leftism with the QAnon beliefs that COVID-19 was planned in a Chinese lab and the Pentagon keeps a time machine called Project Looking Glass in Area 51, is a great way to expand the category of people who are just too insane to be permitted a stake in democracy.
Conspiracies are obviously real. Powerful people really do gather in secret rooms to plot against democracy. This is completely clear if you think about it for more than a second. The liberals even have their own conspiracy theories - they think that Vladimir Putin is the mastermind behind Trump and Brexit, hacking voting machines and manipulating gullible Bernie bros in order to undermine civil society around the globe. We all know that our systems of government are not completely transparent, and somewhere somebody powerful and evil is doing creepy stuff we don’t know about. Believing this doesn’t make you insane. It’s not conspiracy theories that are the problem - it’s the lack of democracy, the inability of our politics to reflect our collective desires, that makes them necessary.
The paranoid 70s gave way to the neoliberal 80s, where America’s fear of the state was weaponised against the whole Keynesian establishment, the spectre of big government exploited to set people in revolt against every centralised institution and manufacture a society where every worker was out for himself. Everyone’s politics have been hopelessly confused ever since. The assassination of Bobby Kennedy fascinates me because it seems to represent a turning point, the last moment when this future was avertable. It’s just plausible enough that he was the victim of some kind of sinister plot - a bleak psychic experiment masterminded by closet Nazis at the heart of the American government, obsessed with hippie pinko subversion and sweating over the prospect that their era might be coming to a close - that I can’t entirely dismiss it.
It can be hard to sympathise with this stuff, especially if we’re comparatively comfortable in our own lives and we feel like the liberal technocrats are on our side. COVID deniers endanger our health, QAnon believers sometimes shoot up pizza restaurants and a lot of these people turn out to just be blatant racists and anti-Semites. But we can’t build a mass movement without understanding the pressures that compel people to believe in conspiracy theories, and finding a way to speak to everyone’s sense that politics isn’t working and we are governed by forces beyond our control. We can’t exclude anyone from our democracy, no matter how crazy they seem, or we’ll start proving the paranoids right. We need to be able to relate to conspiracy theories. Anyway, some of them might just turn out to be true.
Matt Halton is a Brisbane-based writer who's interested in radical takes on history. You can find him on Twitter: @circusarmy. He's also written a crime novel, Croatoan, which you can find online here.