Conspiracism and radical conservatism align over a shared hostility to the administrative state
Evidence
What explains the alliance of conspiracists and radical conservatives is their mutual hostility to active government, in particular to the complex business of regulation and enforcement located in the administrative state. The administrative state, with its capacity to design and implement complicated, long-term policy, is the legacy of the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Because of this legacy, conservatives have always been wary of it, and radical conservatives opposed to it. The new conspiracism shares and amplifies this opposition. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 222
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s political-sociology reading on the administrative state and welfare backlash; also parallels the anti-institutional analyses found in works like Coogan or the Milgrom trade-institution material. — connects to: Conspiracist claims now align symmetrically with partisan identity on both sides — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 36; Contemporary mistrust of government has multiple structural causes beyond conspiracism. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 84; Neoconservatism and neoliberalism unite mainly through shared hatred of the welfare state