Pandemic, Politicization, and Post-truth: Conspiracy Theory and the Crisis Nexus in the United States

The current popularity of far-right, authoritarian populism in the United States includes a flourishing popularity of conspiracy theory. Although Trumpism rose several years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, since 2020 many of the right-wing populist outcries have involved the explicit rejection of vaccination, mask wearing, and other preventive measures, framing them as forms of despotic elite interference. In particular, the issue of vaccination has become contentious and highly politicized throughout the pandemic, with stories touted by QAnon and others placing vaccination as a central pivot around the speculated conspiracies in which various government and scientific elites nefariously cooperate to dominate the populace. The sudden enormous popularity of these suspicions begs for explanation. This paper offers a piece of this explanation, centering specifically on crises of legitimation and epistemology. The exposition here is partly empirical and partly theoretical. For the empirical analysis, a variety of descriptive and inferential findings from the ‘Vaccination, Health, and Values’ survey will be described. The survey was administered over social media in September of 2021, and contains a variety of measures such as the Trust in Science and Scientists Inventory, the Epistemological Style Inventory, Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale, a 3-component Populism scale, the Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale, and a variation on the World Health’s Organization’s Vaccine Hesitancy Scale. A series of multiple regressions consistently reveal significant associations between populism, right-wing authoritarianism, belief in conspiracy theory, epistemology, and trust in science and scientists. These findings are discussed in relation to a theoretical framework that brings together several concepts that are more typically discussed separately. One of these is the notion of ‘epistemic crisis.’ The use of the term here is especially informed by the writings of Laudan, but is also informed by recent uses of the term that concern the psychosocial effects of social media. As used in this paper, the concept of ‘epistemic crisis’ indicates socially chronic doubt on three connected levels: concerning what is true (‘the what’), how to decide what it true (‘the how’), and who knows or decides the truth (‘the who’). Using QAnon and the COVID-19 health crisis in the United States as the central point of reference, this concept is brought into conversation and synthesis with ideas from Habermas and Hofstadter concerning legitimation crisis, the ‘paranoid style,’ and anti-intellectualism. The epistemic crisis, legitimation crisis, and health crisis are connected elements in what can be understood as a crisis nexus. The crises are useful to discuss as analytically distinct, but they are interrelated culturally and politically, contributing to one another. Epistemic crisis and legitimation crisis meet and mutually activate in the populist distrust of science and scientists, which inspires behavior that contributes to the health crisis. The current popularity of conspiracy theories in the United States occupies this space, where ‘scientific elites’ are not only distrusted but framed as nefarious or corrupt, and there is widespread destabilization concerning ‘the how’ or ‘the who’ that might arbiter competing claims to ‘the what.’