Essay On Conspiracy Theory

The public’s deteriorating relations with the government worsened post 9/11 due to the government’s increasing secrecy and lack of transparency. Not only did Americans distrust their government but they also resented it, which laid the ground for the reemergence of conspiracy theories. While many historians agree that conspiracy theory is a vital feature of modern society that merits attention, there is an ongoing dispute, among historians, about how best to study conspiracy theory. Recent historians approach the topic based on the historic event. While other historians undertake the more subtle challenge of looking at what conspiracy theory behavior means, tracing it from early 1700s up to recent years. Initial historical forays into conspiracy theory focused more on witchcraft; these findings had undermined the reasonableness of conspiracy theory in the 19th and 20thcentury. However, there has been a revival of interest in understanding conspiracy theory that focused on 20th and 21st century cultural and political evolution. The research results have been spectacular, showing how the new pattern in conspiracy arose and how they related to culture and political …show more content…
The crucial array of historians provides an ample framework for the first conspiracy society in modern America. Richard Hofstadter offers a competent account of conspiracy theory as a root of a radical fringe to erode social solidarities using “political rhetoric to get at political pathology.” The very nature of conspiracy theory, Hofstadter argues, is the feature of deeply disturbed mind with aggravated affinity for bad cause. In its earliest manifestation, according to Hofstadter “paranoid style is pejorative, and it is meant to be…for bad causes than