Just as the pluralist must be understood as distinct from elite theorists, care must be taken that the elite theorists are not confused with those who espouse conspiratorial theories. Conspiratorialists are phobic about politics. They believe that someone, usually a small group of unseen people, is secretly and diabolically controlling things from behind the scenes. Among the suspected master manipulators are communists, international bankers, Jews, and satan worshipers. The various militarnt civilian milititia groups around the country that have come to prominence since the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City are deeply embroiled in conspiratorial suspicions. They see the federal government as a sinister culprit, constantly maneuvering to deny innocent patriots their liberties.
In the 1960s, Pulitizer Prize winning historian Richard Hofstadter analyzed the conspiratorial approach to politics, referring to it as the "paranoid style." While Holfstadter concedes in his book, the Paranoid Style in Ameican Politics, that some secret planning accompanies virtually every political movement, the paranoid style imagines a plot of colossal proportions affecting millions and the threatening the very nation itself. Using isolated facts together with a curious leap in imagination to prove to their own satisfaction the existence of the conspiracy, persons asserting the paranoid style mentally catapult from the "undeniable to the unbelievable," as Hofstadter puts it. They are convined that their imagined opponent is totally evil and that their own motives are pure, but often misunderstood. Public rejection of their point of view is often interpreted as persecution, and so their stance becomes increasingly militant as they see their situation becoming more and more hopeless.
The suggestion that the nation, or indeed the world, is controlled by such secret and evil power is frequently found very attractive. It brushes aside the immense complexity of modern politics and substitutes for it a very simple scenario. If people can believe that they are manipulated by unkown uncontrollable forces, they can escape any responsibility for understanding or solving social problems. Politics is thus reduced to a very simple equation. There is a single source of our difficulties, and if only we can get at the source and root it out all will be well.
Yet the very simplicity of such theories makes them suspect. It stretches credulity beyond rational limits to suggest that a few masterminds could, without our knowing it, be pulling the strings that make the rest dance like puppets. No less bizarre is the belief that the federal government has somehow become the tool of megalomaniacs whose mission is to enslave the hapless citizenry. To some people, however, believing in an evil force is preferable to coming to grips with the complexities of reality, and accepting such fantasies represents the ultimate abdication of personal responsibility so necessary to a successful democracy.