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Down the rabbit hole

Some of you will recognize the title. It stands for “Where We Go One, We Go All,” which is a motto used within the QAnon conspiracy. I keep getting asked about it and I want to write briefly on it. To start, I want to make a prediction.

A public official is going to be indicted relating to the CARES Act and steering or controlling government contracts.

This happens with every big spending package and has been going on all the way back past the Teapot Dome scandal. A government official is going to try to win friends, influence people, and make some cash along the way.

Now, were I to wrap that matter-of-fact assertion based on historic pattern into an elaborate conspiracy of deep staters, rich people, Hollywood, and child molesters, you’d get QAnon.

It reminds me of my mom’s fascination with Nostradamus when I was a kid. He gets a few things that are arguably accurate and therefore everything else is presumed accurate, even if it is not. A translation of the name ‘Hister,’ suddenly becomes a bold prediction of Hitler with a misspelled name.

This isn’t hard. One must just have a sense of history, some creativity, and in the case of QAnon, the ritualized pranksters of 4Chan, where every great conspiracy, prank, and trolling activity organizes. Having a pool of gullible people in need of answers because they’re convinced life is set against them helps too.

It is that last part that is most critical here.

Governance conspiracies tend to come from the political losers.

In the 1980’s, Congress held hearings after Democrat agitation on whether George H. W. Bush had flown in an SR-71 Blackbird to Spain to meet with Iranians to negotiate the release of hostages. Democrats had become convinced, with Bush on the verge of securing the nomination for President, that he must have engaged in some shenanigans to get Reagan elected.

In the 90’s, Republicans became convinced that anyone who trifled with the Clintons died. That conspiracy still lingers with some and has become woven into rightwing jokes for the rest of us. Come on, who hasn’t laughed at an Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself joke?

In the 2000’s, Bush was in power due to Halliburton and we were all about getting oil from Iraq for American corporations. Then he wasn’t going to leave the White House and Dick Cheney would install himself as a dictator.

With Obama, it became FEMA camps, birth certificates, and communist plots against the west. With Trump, the Russians have taken over and installed a puppet government.

The party on the outs and the losers always concoct bold conspiracy theories to not just explain their losses, but their views from the outside in. Everything is sinister when one does not hold power.

But QAnon comes from the right. It is a conspiracy premised on a deep state plot to overthrow Donald Trump. When things don’t align with the conspiracy, things get twisted. It was, for example, always obvious that Bob Mueller would find no coordination between Trump and the Russians. QAnon could posit that Mueller would reveal as much and instead turn the tables on the Democrats. It looks prophetic. But it was always obvious there was on there, there.

What is striking is that Trump has won and the GOP held Congress for his first two years. But the conspiracies came nonetheless from Trump’s own side — winners don’t concoct governance conspiracies, and yet….

What it suggests to me is that Trump’s supporters have never appreciated they actually won. I don’t blame them. The media and Democrats have never given him credibility or appreciation for his win. It has always been that the Russians stole it.

Trump’s supporters, in turn, have acted like they lost and descended down the rabbit hole of conspiracy to figure out how they lost. They settled on the deep state.

Historically, the party out of power that descends into conspiracy has to let the fever burn out before recapturing power. Here, the Trump team already has power. I suspect, if he wins again, it will be without the popular vote. But if he loses, I fear this conspiracy fever is going to get even hotter. It will make for a long pilgrimage in the wilderness.

The last problem is that because Trump’s supporters operate as if they lost and have gravitated towards conspiracy, it is going to make it hard to build a winning coalition in 2020. Moreso, it will continue making it hard to govern in this time of crisis. Already, QAnon and Trump supporters have turned against any of the President’s advisors who want to keep people at home. His top healthcare experts are seeing the conspiracy wheels turn against them.

None of this is sustainable and QAnon, which posits a deep state conspiracy to take out the President, is going to fester and a sizable portion of the right will collapse because of it, making it both not viable and not helpful to actually beating back the growth of government.