•Aggressive. If an authority figures gives them the green light to attack someone, they lower the boom.
•Biased. Holding prejudices against racial and ethnic minorities, non-heterosexuals, and women.
•Contradictory beliefs. Opposite beliefs exist side by side in separate compartments in their minds. As a result, their thinking is full of double standards.
•Poor reasoning skills. If they like the conclusion of an argument, they don’t pay much attention to whether the evidence is valid or the argument is consistent.
•Dogmatic. Because they have gotten their beliefs mainly from the authorities in their lives, rather than thinking things out for themselves, they have no real defense when facts or events indicate they are wrong. So they just dig in their heels and refuse to change.
•Dependent on social reinforcement of their beliefs. They think they are right because almost everyone they know, almost every news broadcast they see, almost every radio commentator they listen to, tells them they are. That is, they screen out the sources that will suggest that they are wrong.
•Limited in their exposure to contrary viewpoints. Because they severely limit their exposure to different people and ideas, they overestimate the level of agreement with their ideas. Conviction of being in the majority bolsters their attacks on the undesirable minorities they see in the country.
•Easily manipulated. People may pretend to espouse their causes and dupe them to gain their own advantage.
•Weak power of self-reflection. They have little insight into why they think and do what they do.
The authoritarian personality’s demand for leadership by powerful authority figures also helps explain their vehement rejection of the leadership of such liberal politicians as Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton. An authoritarian by nature wishes to follow the orders of the president, but cannot do so when someone viewed as an illegitimate usurper holds the position. Proving the fundamental illegitimacy of these figures—as a sexual pervert, a Muslim foreigner, and a lying crook, respectively—has been the driving preoccupation of their various campaigns to attack these politicians.
Authoritarianism as a worldview creates a certain kind of cognitive dissonance, a feeling of unreality, because it runs smack into the complex nature of the modern world and attempts to impose its simplified, black-and-white explanation of reality onto a reality that contradicts and undermines it at every turn. Thus, conspiracism is appealing to the people who tell pollsters they “don’t recognize their country anymore.” They are bewildered by the new brown faces and strange languages that people their cultural landscapes. They may long for a 1950s-style suburban America and are angry that the world no longer works that way.
Conspiracy theories offer explanations as to why the country is no longer what they wish it to be, why it has become unrecognizable. These narratives come to represent deeper truths about their world, while repeatedly reinforcing their long-held prejudices. They help them to ignore the uncomfortable nature of the changes the world, the nation, and its society are undergoing. Simply put, conspiracism provides a clear, self-reinforcing explanation for a sense of personal disempowerment.
Oddly enough, projection—interpreting others as results of tendencies that are actually one’s own tendencies—also is a factor in the spread of conspiracism. One study found that the people who were particularly inclined to suspect others of engaging in conspiracies were themselves inclined to conspire against others. Another study found that conspiracists—even as they accused activists on the political left (particularly black activists) of fomenting violence—were themselves more prone to engage in violence; hence their mounting threats to start a revolution and a civil war after the 2016 election if Hillary Clinton were to win, followed by the wave of ethnic violence they unleashed in the wake of their actual victory at the polls.
This propensity for projection is especially noticeable in the most important aspect of Alt-America: its real-world agenda, which is to impose its worldview on the rest of us. Alt-Americans fret and stew over imagined plots to round up Americans and place them in concentration camps or even execute them in a mass genocide, and fear the imposition of a dictatorial regime in which they have no say. Yet their own political agenda would result in the rounding up and incarceration of millions of people, while imposing a dictatorial regime shaped in their own political image that would silence any kind of leftist impulse.
In fact, in print and on YouTube, many Alt-Americans freely fantasize about their desire to execute liberals, terrorists, “race mixers,” and other traitors. I call this desire eliminationism—a politics, and its accompanying rhetoric, whose goal is to excise whole segments of the population in the name of making it “healthy.” This mindset is a common feature of authoritarianism; the Holocaust was a particularly horrifying case of eliminationist genocide perpetrated by an authoritarian regime. Eliminationist rhetoric lays the groundwork by being dehumanizing, the kind of talk that reduces human beings to vermin and diseases, such as when you hear immigrants described as “rats in a granary,” or Muslims as “a cancer”—beings fit primarily for elimination. The rhetoric gives tacit or explicit permission for the final essence, violent acts, beginning with hate crimes and escalating into mass roundups and genocide.
Eliminationist rhetoric is common to Alt-America, as the public frequently saw in the Trump campaign. It was, after all, a campaign initially predicated on a racially charged conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States (a requirement for any president). The campaign’s opening salvo, against Mexican immigrants, was openly eliminationist in calling for their mass deportation, and soon included similar demands for Muslims and the LGBT community. Trump’s constant campaign message was unmistakable as to just how he intended to “make America great again”: get rid of these people, deport them, prevent them from ever entering the country in the first place, and lock up or silence the rest of them.
This is the point at which Alt-America represents a real danger to American democratic institutions, threatening to displace them with a crude and frightening authoritarianism, enforced by state-sanctioned vigilantism. One of Alt-America’s most powerful and abiding effects is to displace people from a sense of concrete reality by putting them in an epistemological bubble that insulates them from facts, logic, and reason. From within this kind of bubble, objectifying other people, rendering those outside the bubble as the Other, and then demonizing them, is almost inevitable. Once other people are conceptualized this way, inflicting violence not only becomes simple but in fact may even appear to be necessary. Certainly, that is how they rationalize it.
As Alt-America has grown, so has the violence that inevitably accompanies it: acts of domestic terrorism, hate crimes, and threats of “revolution” and “civil war,” backed by a wave of citizen militias. All of them gained impetus during the Obama years and there was a significant wave of such incidents in 2015 and 2016, very likely fueled by the Trump campaign.
Indeed, the Trump campaign itself had an effect on the ground similar to that of eliminationist rhetoric generally: it seemingly gave permission, in its stubborn refusal to bow to “political correctness,” for people to act and speak in an openly bigoted and spiteful fashion. It was as though the campaign lifted the lid off the national id, and the violent, vicious tendencies that had been held in check for years came crawling right out.
It’s difficult to put a finger on exactly how large the Alt-American universe is; at any one time there’s no clear measure of how many people subscribe to its worldview. From ratings data we can see that Alex Jones’s Infowars audience at times exceeds 2 million weekly listeners and viewers, but that doesn’t indicate how many people actually believe what he says. Some listeners are critics and skeptics amused by his hyperemotional rants.
Polling data give us a clearer idea. A 2013 survey of American voters by Public Policy Polling about various conspiracy theories found the following:
•37 percent of voters believed global warming is a hoax; 51 percent did not. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans versus 11 percent of Democrats said they thought global warming was a hoax. Among independents 41 percent said global warming was a hoax and 51 percent said it wasn’t.