Gun Play

Conspiracy, Complicity, Critique Peter Knight (bio) The coronavirus pandemic and the storming of the Capitol have created a perfect storm of conspiracism, especially visible on social media. Many commentators have returned to Richard Hofstadter's analysis of the "paranoid style in American politics" to make sense of the surge of conspiracy-minded populism and the spread of disinformation. Conspiracism is usually framed as beyond the pale of rational discourse, a symptom and a cause of the delegitimization not only of the media, scientific expertise, and democratic institutions, but also of the very idea of objective truth (see Rosenblum and Muirhead 2019 on the nihilistic tendencies of the "new conspiracism" of post-truth politics). But does Hofstadter's diagnosis of the paranoid style still make sense today, when, for example, President Trump himself was one of the most significant "superspreaders" of misinformation about the coronavirus and the 2020 election (Evanega et al. 2020)? Although Hofstadter acknowledges that the paranoid style is a persistent trait in American politics, he nevertheless insists that it is "the preferred style only of minority movements" (1996, 7). Hofstadter, like other consensus historians and sociologists in the 1950s and 1960s, wanted to explain but also to stigmatize what they regarded as mass political delusions (see Butter 2014; Thalmann 2019). In effect, they wanted to diagnose but also quarantine conspiracism as a dangerous tendency, to put clear water between conspiracy thinking and more respectable ways of making sense of historical causality. Either you believe that nothing happens by accident, that nothing is as it seems, and that everything is connected (Barkun 2013), or you think that way of understanding historical causation and collective agency is a delusional fantasy. In contrast, this essay will explore the territory between conspiracy and not-conspiracy, focusing on notions such as collusion, complicity, and critique, which are neither the same as conspiracy, nor simply its opposites. The question is whether it is possible, under conditions of neoliberalism that make it harder than ever to trace lines of corporate and governmental accountability, to talk about problems of collective action and occluded power without lapsing into a conspiracy theory. Only by recognizing the affinities and disavowals between the rational mainstream and its marginalized, irrational counterparts can we begin to understand the seductive appeal and expressive functions of conspiracy theory as an act of communal political [End Page 197] identification, rather than merely a "crippled epistemology" (Sunstein and Vermeule 2009, 211) whose mistaken propositions can be combatted through fact-checking corrections. To do so, I'll first sketch out cock-up, complexity, and contingency theories, before going on to consider how conspiracy theories constitute both a distorted critique of neoliberalism, while at the same time also distracting and diverting their believers from more concerted forms of political opposition. The Conspiracy Theory of Society What is the opposite of a conspiracy theory? One common answer is what might be termed contingency theory, the assumption that there is no underlying plan or meaning to history. Another—closely aligned—possibility is the cock-up theory (as it is termed in the British colloquialism; see McKenzie-McHarg and Fredheim 2017), the notion that things rarely go to plan, often as a result of incompetence rather than intention. A third, related option is complexity theory, the idea that order emerges spontaneously out of a complex system without there being anyone behind the scenes secretly in command. All three answers assume that there is a clear divide between conspiracy theory and its opposites, with conspiracy theory viewed as an unsophisticated, inaccurate, and harmful mode of thought. Although the expression "conspiracy theory" had been used from time to time in the late nineteenth century, Karl Popper provided the first explicit definition of the phenomenon and its opposites (Thalmann 2019; McKenzie-McHarg 2020). He began to formulate what he called "the conspiracy theory of society" (2002, 94; his italics) in two lectures delivered in the late 1940s, before working this argument into the American edition of the second volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1950. It is "the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence...

Reviewed by: Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography Bruce Kuklick David S. Brown , Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual BiographyChicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xxiv+291 pp. Notes, Bibliographic Essay, Sources, Students of Richard Hofstadter, Index. $27.50. In the mid-twentieth century Richard Hofstadter was one the finest historians of the United States. Uncommitted to work in primary sources, he was perhaps not at the level of Perry Miller, Vann Woodward, and Edmund Morgan. But Hofstadter had a greater range and wider influence than these men, and the combination of intellectual and political history that he wrote was unique, as was the penetration of his intellect and his appealing sensibility. Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, the son of a Lutheran mother and a father who was a secular Jew. The son went to the local University of Buffalo. While not as impoverished as this biography is inclined to make him, Dick Hofstadter "married up" after he fell in love with Felice Swados, the daughter of a Buffalo Jewish doctor who was also a student at the University. Swados introduced Hofstadter to the Marxist intellectual left of the 1930s, although he was himself a successful and intelligent student leader. In the years after their graduation, the couple had a tempestuous start to their marriage, but over the next several years they built a life in New York City. Felice became the medical columnist for Time; Dick productively completed a doctoral degree in history at Columbia University. They both continued their radical activities. In the late 1930s he was briefly a member of the American Communist Party, although Dick quickly resigned because of the authoritarian nature of the organization. Even then, however, he was more removed and skeptical than Felice, with more of an historian's impartiality and sense of the tragic. Felice's unambiguous commitments moved him, but Dick was, literally, only half-inclined to the Jewish left. Swados died of cancer in 1945, after they had moved to Washington, D.C., where Hofstadter was teaching at the University of Maryland. But a year later the devastated young man obtained a position at Columbia. At the same time he met and married Beatrice Kevitt, another capable woman with literary and editorial talent. In 1948 Hofstadter published what I still think is his masterwork, The American Political Tradition. A series of sharp portraits of leading politicians, [End Page 574] the book owed much to Hofstadter's leftist background. It was indebted to Marxist analyses, or at least to those of the sort promulgated by the great historian, Charles Beard, who saw economics as central to the study of national life. But Hofstadter did not see a clash between capitalists and their opponents in the United States. He viewed the entire tradition of American politicians as committed to a certain kind of exploitative social system, although his book did not quite have the edge suggested by this last phrase. Hofstadter became known as a "consensus" historian who had a monolithic sense of the American experience, although this monolith was not benign as was that of other practitioners of consensus. In the 1950s Hofstadter, now a prominent Columbia faculty member, moved away from some of the economic preconceptions of The American Political Tradition. Instead, in his two other important books, The Age of Reform (1955) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965), he brought to bear on the American experience a group of concepts that he took from his study of the social sciences. Overall, these two books undermined his previous materialist interpretation of politics. Instead, Hofstadter found that irrational fears, psychological maladjustments, and concerns about status might motivate leaders and movements more than a rational appraisal of self-interest. In retrospect, this 1950s social science does not appear very enlightening, and so Hofstadter's absorption of it is not to be praised. On the other side, so many of his fellow historians attacked him for his interdisciplinary bent that his generous outreach looks more than daring. Hofstadter's own personal politics shifted, too. He became a staunch if critical defender of the social democratic liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and its impulses in the 1950s and 1960s. In...

The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, <i>by Richard Hofstadter</i>

This text offers an overview of conspiracism in the United States from the 1950s to the present. Even if contemporary conspiracy mongering extends certain practices and attitudes that were already well-known at the time of Richard Hofstadter’s classic study of the “paranoid style in American politics” (1964) and Robert Goldberg’s more recent study of “the culture of conspiracy in modern America” (2001, 2010), it also introduces new techniques by savvy strategists, such as Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, who exploit the economic vulnerability of many and the status loss anxiety of many others to destabilize the faculty of judgment of American citizens, increase polarization and suspicion between opposing camps, and weaken confidence in public institutions and democracy. This new conspiracism, we claim, serves to console the most vulnerable and turn the attention of the American public away from a forty-year social trend (conspiracy or not) which would be a neoliberal globalization that deepens inequalities and advances most often with total impunity to advance the interests of powerful deciders and loyalists—the first being to retain power and their control over narratives of power. The paper concludes with some recommendations for combatting this highly cynical and corrosive new conspiracism.

Henrik Ibsen and Conspiracy Thinking: The Case of <i>Peer Gynt</i>

EthosVolume 1, Issue 2 p. 153-174 Free Access Cult and Context: The Paranoid Ethos in Melanesia Theodore Schwartz, Theodore Schwartz Theodore Schwartz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, at the University of California, San Diego.Search for more papers by this author Theodore Schwartz, Theodore Schwartz Theodore Schwartz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, at the University of California, San Diego.Search for more papers by this author First published: Summer 1973 https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.1973.1.2.02a00020Citations: 25 AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat REFERENCES Bellow, Saul. 1961. Herzog. Fawcett. Belshaw, Cyril. 1950. The Significance of Modern Cults in Melanesian Development. Australian Outlook 4. Benedict, Ruth. 1934. Patterns of Culture. Houghton Mifflin. Cohn, Norman. 1957. The Pursuit of the Millenium. London. Cohn, Norman. 1961. The Pursuit of the Millennium. Harper and Row. Devereux, George. 1956. “ Normal and Abnormal: The Key Problem of Psychiatric Anthropology.” In: The Anthropological Society of Washington. Some Uses of Anthropology: Theoretical and Applied. Wash., D.C. Devereux, George. 1970. “ Normal et anormal.” (An expansion of the above article.) In: Essais d'éthnopsychiatrie générale. Gallimard. Durkheim, Emile. 1938. The Rules of Sociological Method.. Firth, Raymond. 1955. The Fate of the Soul: An Interpretation of Some Primitive Concepts. Cambridge University Press. Fortune, Reo. 1932. Sorcerers of Dobu. The Social Anthropology of the Dobu Islanders of the Western Pacific. Dutton. Fortune, Reo. 1935. Manus Religion: An Ethnological Study of the Manus Natives of the Admiralty Islands. University of Nebraska Press. Guiart, Jean. 1951. Forerunners of Melanesian Nationalism. Oceania 22. Hallowell, A. Irving.1955. Culture and Experience. University of Pennsylvania Press. Hitson, Hazel, and D. Funkenstein. 1959. Family Patterns and Para-noidal Personality Structure in Boston and Burma. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 5. Hofstadter, Richard. 1965. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Knopf. Lanternari, Vittorio. 1963. The Religions of the Oppressed: A Study of Modern Messianic Cults. Knopf. Lawrence, Peter. 1964. Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District, New Guinea. University of Manchester Press. Lawrence, Peter, and Mervyn Meggitt. 1965. Gods, Ghosts, and Men in Melanesia. Oxford University Press. Lerner, Max. 1970. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Paranoia. Los Angeles Times.. McClelland, David P. 1961. The Achieving Society. Van Nostrand. Mead, Margaret. 1930. Growing Up in New Guinea. Morrow. Mead, Margaret. 1938. The Mountain Arapesh: An Importing Culture. Anthropological papers of the American Museum of Natural History 36. Sahlins, Marshall. 1968. Tribesmen. Prentice-Hall. Schwartz, Lola. 1969. The Hierarchy of Resort in Curative Practices: The Admiralty Islands, Melanesia. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 10. Schwartz, Theodore. 1962. The Paliau Movement in the Admiralty Islands, 1946–1954. Anthropological papers of the American Museum of Natural History 49. Schwartz, Theodore. 1963. Systems of Areal Integration: Some Considerations Based on the Admiralty Islands of Northern Melanesia. Anthropological Forum 1. Schwartz, Theodore. 1968. Beyond Cybernetics: Constructs, Expectations, and Goals in Human Adaptation. Paper presented at Wenner-Gren Foundation Symposium, Burg Wartenstein. Schwartz, Theodore. 1972. Distributive Models of Culture in Relation to Societal Scale. Paper presented at Wenner-Gren Foundation Symposium, Burg Wartenstein. Souter, Gavin. 1963. New Guinea: The Last Unknown. Angus and Robertson. Spiro, Melford E. 1967. Burmese Supernaturalism. Prentice-Hall. Swanson, David W., Philip J. Bohnert and Jackson A. Smith. 1970. The Paranoid. Little, Brown and Company. Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1956. Revitalization Movements. American Anthropologist 58. Wallis, Wilson. 1943. Messiahs: Their Role in Civilizations. American Council on Public Affairs. Whiting, John W. M. 1941. Becoming a Kwoma. New Haven. Worsley, Peter. 1968. The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo Cults” in Melanesia. Schocken Books. Citing Literature Volume1, Issue2Summer 1973Pages 153-174 ReferencesRelatedInformation

Paradoxes of white moral experience

Broadening the Perspective on Gun Violence: An Examination of the Firearms Industry, 1990–2015

Health care political action committees (HPACs) historically contribute more to candidates opposing firearm restrictions (FRs), clashing with their affiliated medical societies. These societies have increasingly emphasized the prevention of firearm violence and it is not known if recent contributions by their HPACs have aligned with their stated goals. We hypothesized that such HPACs still contribute similar amounts toward legislators up for reelection opposing FR. We identified HPACs of medical societies endorsing one or both calls-to-action against firearm violence published in the Annals of Internal Medicine (2015, 2019). House of Representatives (HOR) votes on H.R.8, a background checks bill, were characterized from GovTrack. We compiled HPAC contributions between the H.R.8 vote and election to HOR members up for re-election from the National Institute on Money in Politics. Our primary outcome was total campaign contributions by H.R.8 stance. Secondary outcomes included percentage of politicians funded and total contributions. Nineteen societies endorsed one or both call-to-action articles. Three hundred eighty-five of 430 HOR members ran for reelection in 2020. Those endorsing H.R.8 (n = 226, 59%) received $2.8 M for $4,750 (interquartile range [IQR], $1000-$15,500) per candidate. Those opposing (n = 159, 41%) received $1.5 M for $2,500 (IQR, $0-$11,000) per candidate ( p = 0.0057). Health care political action committees donated toward a median of 20% (IQR, 7-28) of candidates endorsing H.R.8 and 9% (IQR, 4-22) of candidates opposing H.R.8 ( p = 0.0014). Those endorsing H.R.8 received 1,585 total contributions for a median of 3 (IQR, 1-10) contributions per candidate, while those opposing received 834 total contributions for a median of 2 (IQR, 0-7) contributions per candidate ( p = 0.0029). Politicians voting against background checks received substantial contributions toward reelection from the HPACs of societies advocating for firearm restrictions. However, this is the first study to suggest that HPAC's contributions have become more congruent with their respective societies. Further alignment of medical society goals and their HPAC political contributions could have a profound impact on firearm violence. Prognostic and Epidemiological; Level III.

This manuscript provides a history of efforts by the American Public Health Association (APHA) Maternal and Child Health Section (MCH Section) Gun Violence Prevention Workgroup (GVP Workgroup) to promote gun violence prevention (GVP) as a key public health priority both within the MCH Section and APHA, and nationally. The MCH Section established a gun violence prevention workgroup in response to the murders of twenty first-grade children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. This article presents an overview of the accomplishments and challenges of the MCH Section GVP Workgroup in a context of ever-increasing gun violence. As of 2020, firearms became the leading cause of death for U.S. children and teens. Over the past decade, a small group of volunteers helped maintain GVP as one of the top priorities of both the MCH Section and APHA. Endorsement by the MCH Section and APHA leadership facilitated MCH Section GVP Workgroup efforts including organizing a national conference, developing scientific sessions for APHA annual meetings, establishing coalitions, and providing ongoing education and outreach to APHA members. The MCH Section GVP Workgroup helped to both elevate and maintain focus on GVP as a top priority of the MCH Section and APHA, indirectly impacting national efforts to promote a public health approach to GVP. The ongoing epidemic of firearm violence highlights the importance of continuing and strengthening this work. Individuals at other national, state or local organizations might look to the efforts and accomplishment of the MCH Section GVP Workgroup in pursuing critical issues within their own organizations.

OF DISSERTATION PULLING THE TRIGGER ON DISARMING DOMESTIC VIOLENCE ABUSERS: IMPLEMENTING GUN CONFISCATION POLICY IN URBAN AND APPALACHIAN KENTUCKY The present study investigated why communities differing in culture and resources are willing and able to implement gun confiscation as part of a protective order. Specifically, this study explored whether the perceived risk of intimate partner homicide and gun violence, benefits to engaging in gun confiscation, barriers to gun confiscation, community norms about guns, and community readiness to implement gun confiscation: (a) differ in urban and rural communities, (b) are perceived differently by victim service and justice system key professionals within urban and rural communities, and (c) are related to if a community is able and willing to consistently implement procedures that mandate gun confiscation of abusers as part of a protective order. Interviews, guided by an adapted guiding conceptual framework, were conducted with key professionals (N = 133) who work both in victim services and the justice system from a targeted urban community and four Appalachian communities in Kentucky. First, implementing gun confiscation procedures to disarm abusers in rural communities does not seem likely or feasible compared to the urban community given the lower perceived risk-benefit of gun confiscation, importance of gun culture, and limited resources in the selected rural communities. Second, urban justice system professionals, in comparison to urban victim service professionals, reported fewer barriers to enforcing the gun confiscation policy and were more likely to downplay law enforcement limitations in the community and attribute the ineffectiveness of the gun confiscation policy to reasons outside their control. Third, the perceived risk of intimate partner gun violence was associated with consistently implementing in gun confiscation at the emergency protective order (short-term) level, and the perceived community approval of the policy was associated with engaging in consistent gun confiscation at the domestic violence order (longer-term) level. Fourth, both urban and rural professionals pointed out potential unintended negative consequences to implementing the gun confiscation policy, such as violation of second amendment rights and increased danger for victims who seek protective orders. The results have implications for developing more effective strategies for increasing a community’s ability and motivation to enforce gun policy that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous abusers.

Introduction: A Post-Racial Society?President Barack Obama was re-elected forty-fourth president of the United States for a second term in the 2012 election against Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Obama gained votes among Asians and Latinos; Latinos represented one in ten votes nationwide who overwhelming supported Obama by a three-to-one mar- gin over Romney (up from 61% in 2008). Minority voters accounted for 45 percent of Obama's support, reflecting the expanded power of African Americans and Latinos in national elections. Strong Latino turnout made previous swing states like Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada safe for Democrats in presidential politics. And even Texas, a solid Republican stronghold, may turn purple in 2016 driven by the Latino vote. Not only has America elected an African American president for two terms but also Obama won both the 2008 and 2012 elections with solid majorities. On several fronts, this was a first for the United States. This mini-symposium examines various dimensions of the ostensible role of race in the 2012 election.In 2012 Obama's campaign message to keep moving the nation forward replaced the theme of hope which dominated the 2008 election, but the strategic elements of Obama's ground game in key battleground states were similar. His army of volunteers mobilizing voters with door to door visits and phone calls sealed Obama's vic- tory in the 2012 election, as it had in 2008, not to mention the billion dollars in campaign contributions that broke all previous records and effectively ended the nation's system of public financing of presidential campaigns. In soundly defeating Romney, Obama won nearly every battleground state, including Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Wisconsin (with a narrow advantage in Florida).A common, and compelling, narrative in the public discourse is that America has become a society as demonstrated in back-to-back elections of an African American president and seventy-three African American and Latino members of Congress, a record, serving in the U.S. Congress. While such outcomes are ostensibly consistent with the post-racial description, the underlying dynamics that produced these results, and other issues of process, policy, and governance in con- temporary American politics, suggest otherwise.While white non-Hispanics made up 77 percent of the electorate in 2004 and 74 percent in 2008, they comprised just 72 percent in 2012, as minority voting rates rose. In recent presidential elections, a majority of whites voted for the Republican presidential candidate. The conver- gence of race and party affiliation is notable. Thus, a counterargument made by some scholars-including a number of papers in this symposium-contends that the supposed dawn of a post-racial America is probably more apparent than real. A fuller understanding of the role of race in the 2012 election requires careful attention to how its implications may be manifest, or latent, in ideas and attitudes, institutions, and practices of American politics (see also Smith and King 2011).While Obama overcame viperous attacks in both elec- tions to win by a convincing margin, race remains an important undercurrent of American life, politics, and electoral politics. Kinder and Sanders (1996) reveal that racial resentment remains the most powerful determinant of white opinion on such racially charged issues as wel- fare, affirmative action, and school desegregation. Tesler and Sears (2010) find that race and racial attitudes were more important in voting in the 2008 presidential election than at any time in recent history. They also argue public opinion about health care, and the Affordable Care, was connected to Obama, in part because of his race. The papers in this symposium suggest the 2012 election, like 2008, continued to be influenced by racial attitudes. Public opinion about candidates and many policy issues, from immigration to electoral rules, remains divided by race. …

Barbara Pitts McAdams, Tectonic Theater Project Company Member and co-author of the book Moment Work, describes her recent #HereToo Project, inspired by the 2018 March for Our Lives rallies across the US. She and collaborator Jimmy Mazie seized upon an opportunity to amplify the voices of lesser-known activists around the country in response to gun violence. The project gathers stories from youth activists and survivors of gun violence, and then archives and shares these stories with theatre-makers who, in turn, make their own devised #HereToo plays about gun culture as it impacts their own communities. Since many of the regional activists’ journeys began with the school walkouts after the MSD shooting, #HereToo productions utilize the events of the MFOL’s movement as a plot structure. This creates a customizable framework, allowing each iteration of #HereToo to include local content generated by participating students.

Disquieting symptoms of democratic failure abound in America today with gridlocked political institutions, high levels of political polarization, and pressing but unresolved problems such as immigration, inequality, and gun violence. Are these the results of political institutions that cannot provide effective democratic representative? For the People takes a realistic look at American democracy by linking the findings of political scientists to the scrutiny of political theorists. Charles Beitz provides the core analysis showing that there are truly democratic failures (alternatively the misadventures of American politics could be due to changing times that would stress any system) and that there are possibilities for better democratic competition that could improve democratic representation. Additional chapters by a political scientist, Martin Gilens, a political theorist, Jane Mansbridge, and a lawyer, Pamela S. Karlan, sharpen the analysis by providing empirical results, additional standards for successful democracy, and concerns about two non-majoritarian American institutions, the Senate and the Electoral College. Beitz ends the book with a response to the three commentators.

This article considers the immensity of human suffering caused by gun violence. In an attempt to understand why the United States has not been able to enact reasonable gun control measures, I explore the origins and influence of gun culture and its shaping by the National Rifle Association (NRA). This situation is discussed from theological perspectives and concepts of idolatry, redemptive violence, the spiraling effects of violence as sin, and the nonviolence of Jesus. Finally, I consider pastoral responses in caring for individuals, the faith tradition, the congregation, and the larger sociocultural context.