So Long Systems, Come on Conspiracies

News comes so fast now it can be hard to recall yesterday’s events; the firehose trained on us warps time, creating the sense of a swirling ever-present. When I can shake this off, though, I find myself returning to 2020, the year far-right think tanks and activists created a panic with three letters: CRT.

CRT quickly became a right-wing media obsession, with Fox News pushing it roughly 20 times a day. The effort has produced astounding results, with states introducing hundreds and passing dozens of bills that PEN America calls education gag orders restricting school speech, activities, books, and curriculum.

What strikes me now is how MAGA turning a systems theory called Critical Race Theory into a conspiracy called CRT presaged what we’re experiencing today.

Critical Race Theory posits that understanding race requires examining how our social and economic systems produce disparate outcomes based on race. In a few short years, MAGA convinced many that it wasn't a scholarly lens meant to illuminate but a conspiracy to indoctrinate. MAGA faithful leapt to the lie that America’s kids were being steeped in a racist, Marxist ideology harmful to them and the nation.

I’ve long understood the CRT panic as a way to weaken public K-12 schools and universities. Now I see it as emblematic of how MAGA takes systems thinking—and even systems themselves—and replaces them with conspiracies.

Why MAGA Prefers Conspiracies to Systems Thinking

Systems are complex. In his book The Unaccountability Machine, economist Dan Davies points to the 2008 financial crisis as an inflection point in the decline in faith in institutions and the rise of far-right populism. Our institutions and systems, Davies argues, had become so large and complicated that it enabled a lack of accountability. People were justifiably enraged that the powerful could wreak devastation on so many and escape punishment.

Our systems—including agencies and governments, corporations and industries—are ridiculously complicated. How they interact with each other and how we interact with them adds layers of complexity. To protect the public against systemic harm requires deep study by serious experts across fields. In the wake of the 2008 crisis, some elected officials, most notably Elizabeth Warren, undertook the kind of work needed to analyze the 2008 crisis and reform our financial system to avoid a repeat disaster—and to communicate this work along the way.

But MAGA understood it’s easier to keep things short and simple. They focused on the idea that, to use my dad’s WWII-era language, the lousy bums screwed us poor slobs. The simplicity and lack of detail allows for the lousy bums to be a moveable target and MAGA swiftly moved that target off financial firms. Rather than push the Republican Party to reform systems and institutions, to impose controls on the powerful, MAGA sought to convert anger into electoral heat. It worked.

Then MAGA went further, taking the very language describing complex systems and efforts to change them, such as CRT and DEI, and used it to redirect citizens away from understanding and reforming systems and toward conspiracy thinking.

One problem with systems: the public is part of them. Pointing this out can cause trouble for systems thinkers. Critical Race Theory involved looking at which groups tended to benefit from or be unaffected by systems as well as which were harmed. MAGA flipped this into the falsehood: CRT blames White people for everything. You’re calling all White people racists.

Recognizing you are part of systems harming you and/or others can be painful. It means, even if your role seems insignificant, you should understand them better. This takes time and work—work that may lead to more work if you realize you should change your behavior or engage in advocacy. (Drivers complaining about traffic don’t want to think about how they are traffic.) If you understand a system, you understand your role in it—as colleague or consumer, user of services or voter.

Conspiracies, in contrast, hold you apart. With conspiracies, your role is believer. They ask nothing of you. And conspiracies, though they can be adjacent to or dot-connected to real problems, have no solution other than magic. If the solution demands magic, all you have to do is believe in those who seem magical, which MAGA and its wizard are happy to pretend-play at. Only he can fix it.

Conspiracy thinking is also energizing in ways systems thinking isn't. Large, entrenched systems can produce helplessness, even doomerism; they overwhelm. It’s hard to know where to start and how to mark progress. Conspiracies, if sweeping and dramatic, provide an us/them dynamic with dangerous but vincible villains. As historian of rhetoric Jennifer Mercieca explains, they can make you feel powerful: conspiracy “makes heroes out of believers.”

While the MAGA magicians do their magic, they may invite help. If you choose to be part of the drama, you can. You can personally drive a dress-wearing teacher out of his job or drive to a pizza place and break into a storage room. You can drive a fist or pole through a window at the US Capitol.

MAGA Conspiracies Make the Leap from Campaign to Governance

Both running systems and reforming them require deep and broad knowledge and expertise. They require critical and interdisciplinary thinking. Research and collaboration. Transparency and consensus-building. Things that take time. Conspiracy thinking thrives when they are inhibited.

In the minds of its followers, MAGA has replaced an understanding of an octopal government bureaucracy with belief in a conspiracy called the Deep State. There are no functioning agencies staffed with experts trying to deliver on legislative and executive directives, only black boxes filled with political hacks loyal to one party—ideologues thwarting the people’s will.

To rational thinkers, when government systems become too large and complex for accountability, streamlining them and adding controls is part of the answer. Of course, conspiracies such as the Deep State evade rationality. With Trump 2.0, MAGA is hollowing out agencies and oversight and appears to be replacing them with the very conspiracy it imagined: a cabal of corrupt hacks.

Conspiracies are fueled by a rejection of the value of human, social, and economic interdependence. Trump’s tariff debacle is based on this. He doesn't believe in global interdependence. International trade is not a system to be tweaked, reformed, or worked within to our national advantage. It is instead a conspiracy against the US by cheating and thieving foreign governments, one to be fought with 90-day magic. Trump’s unnecessary trade war is conspiracy become economic policy.

Other MAGA conspiracies are making the leap from campaign to policy, just as the CRT conspiracy went from 2022 midterms fodder to codification in state laws censoring schools and libraries. This conversion process continues: in one example, Trump’s debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen have been inserted into Oklahoma’s social studies standards:

The Republican-led state's new high school history curriculum says students must learn how to dissect the results of the 2020 election, including learning about alleged mail-in voter fraud, "an unforeseen record number of voters" and "security risks of mail-in balloting.

At the federal level, environmental conspiracies are becoming policy. MAGA has long politicized waste, smearing energy-saving as an unAmerican plot. Think about Trump’s rants about sinks and toilets and Jim Jordan’s elevation of appliances to the Holy Trinity in a tweet: “God. Guns. Gas stoves.” This inanity is becoming policy. Grid operators were perplexed by Trump ordering fossil-fuel powered plants to stay open that they don’t need; they’ll pass the extra cost onto customers. Lee Zeldin says Trump’s EPA will be “fixing” the emissions-cutting stop/start function on cars, bemusing even gearheads who find them irritating.

Much of what’s happening is simultaneously ludicrous and dangerous. One frightening example: the public health conspiracies MAGA used to ratchet up rage about the pandemic and its response. HHS, now led by long-time anti-vaxxer RFK Jr., is turning vaccine conspiracies into policy. Expertise being antithetical to conspiracies, this month he dismissed every one of the experts on the CDC immunization advisory panel. The recently released MAHA Report, though it reflects some systems thinking about corporate influence, suggests more conspiracies, including those surrounding autism, will become policy.

“For truth to win,” historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari states, we need “curation institutions that have the power to tilt the balance in favor of the facts.” MAGA started with schools and libraries, essential curation institutions in every community, before moving on to Washington.

The weakening of agency research arms from the Department of Education to the CDC is a key way Trump and MAGA can escalate making conspiracies official US policy. If legislators, regulators, businesses, and the public don’t have reliable information for policy-making or for communicating how those policies might be misguided or dangerous, bad decisions can more easily and swiftly be made, reversed, and remade.

To work, systems rely on information collection and sharing. When the MAHA Report needed sources, the Trump Administration admitted, sometimes they were simply made up. Again, conspiracies don’t require accurate facts and data, expert sources, or consensus. Now, US government policies don’t either. So RFK Jr. can say “that he has unilaterally struck the recommendation that healthy children and healthy pregnant people get Covid-19 shots — a move that experts say is unprecedented.” Unilaterally.

The rule of law itself is a system. When those responsible for enforcing the rule of law believe in, spread, or act on conspiracies, they can break that system. A recent piece in The New York Times suggested that the conspiracists appointed to run the FBI and the DOJ are struggling to deliver on promises to the MAGA faithful that they would punish their favorite imagined villains:

There is a basic recognition among the president’s advisers and allies, at least in private, that expectations have been allowed to get too far out in front of the facts. But bridging the gap between campaign messaging and reality is never easy, particular in an administration that espoused maximalism, bravado and bending the truth to fit its tactical objectives.

No comfort should be taken from their struggle. A MAGA mob more delusional than leadership with leadership pressed to meet their demands is to be dreaded.

Recent events reinforce this. While they may be mad that Trump’s DOJ isn’t locking up enough political prisoners, there is glee in MAGA’s ranks. It’s over the administration’s actions on its premier conspiracy, which Trump used to launch his first campaign: an invasion of the homeland by criminal migrants coming to destroy the American way of life. Indeed, turning this campaign conspiracy into policy by further unfettering ICE has led to the arrest, imprisonment, and indictment of Democratic politicians.

And via his most authoritarian moves so far, Trump is making the “foreign invader” conspiracy into policy, sending planeloads of people to gulags in El Salvador and South Sudan without due process, arresting immigrants in courthouses who are following the law by appearing there, rounding up those doing backbreaking work in meatpacking plants, seizing work-seekers outside Home Depot, and hunting down farm workers toiling in the sun. He has sent, against the wishes of a state governor and city leaders, the US military to police civilians, relying on the excuse of an immigration invasion.

Turning mass deportations into policy has meant masked and unidentified agents ripping innocent people from their homes, workplaces, and off the streets, separating families, and enabling the imprisonment of documented residents and students for exercising freedom of speech, assembly, and association.

It has involved violating court orders and, according to a whistleblower, purposeful obstruction of justice by the DOJ. That whistleblower reported a senior DOJ official was thinking about "telling the courts 'fuck you.’" That FU official has been nominated by Trump to a lifetime judgeship.

Working systems make it harder for conspiracies to thrive in the political and policy sphere. This is what decades of the far-right blocking immigration system reform has wrought. By breaking systems across every branch of government rather than thinking critically about reforming them, MAGA is working to ensure that immigration isn’t the only system that facilitates the establishment and entrenchment of Trump’s authoritarian dream.