Americans are seized by conspiracy theories, and as a result, democracy is in peril—so conventional wisdom holds. This familiar refrain resurfaced in the days after Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 campaign, when a flurry of mostly right-wing accounts began circulating claims that the president was in fact dead or dying. However, just a few weeks earlier, after the attempt on Donald Trump’s life at a Pennsylvania rally, it was liberal influencers who spread the idea that the shooting was a false flag to boost the former president’s image.
Overall, these developments reinforced the conclusion that, contrary to what is often claimed, the conspiratorial mindset crosses party lines: What QAnon is to conservatives, BlueAnon is to liberals. Indeed, it has often seemed that the two parties were in competition over the last decade to produce the most febrile and harebrained explanations for the country’s problems, as a convenient alternative to actually trying to solve them.
But this excitable outlook has a much older pedigree than many might realize. Ever since the nation’s founding, Americans have eagerly trafficked in conspiracy theories and “misinformation.” Long before the internet, such narratives circulated in pamphlets and broadsides—including the nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence. Understanding that American democracy emerged and flourished not in spite of conspiratorial thinking but because of it might help us find a way beyond our present political impasses.
By the summer of 1776, the unfolding crisis that turned the 13 colonies against Britain had become irreparable. Discontent over a lack of representation in Parliament, the bloodshed that began at Lexington and Concord, and the radical sentiments stirred up by pamphlets such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense worked in tandem to hasten a single outcome: revolution. As the Continental Congress voted in Philadelphia on a resolution to assume independence, it fell on the Virginia delegate Thomas Jefferson, aged 32, to draft a document outlining the Patriots’ purpose in establishing a new form of government.
The result was a milestone in the history of political thought and rhetoric. But Jefferson’s document wasn’t just a positive articulation of ideals; much like Common Sense, it was a polemical manifesto that sought to discredit more than to affirm. The target of its indictment was a man, King George III, whom it depicted as a tyrant and usurper. If America was, as suggested by the historian Bernard Bailyn and others, born of a contest of liberty against power, then the monarch personified power—and the corruption that comes when political authority is vested in a royal court, rather than the people.