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European Journal of American Studies
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The Conspiracist Strategy: Lessons from American Alternative Health Promotions

Authors: Gad Yair;

The Conspiracist Strategy: Lessons from American Alternative Health Promotions

Abstract

Hofstadter's classic essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" opened a floodgate of analyses of fear and conspiracy theories in American culture. The present paper adds to those studies by providing a cultural interpretation of commercials for alternative cures. It shows that publishers of such commercials often use a "conspiracist strategy" in two interrelated steps. They first raise fears of government collusion with 'Big Pharma.' They then call citizens-cum-patients to protect their liberties from hidden machinations by buying 'hidden' or 'censured' cures. While doing so they employ a series of means to seem professional yet persecuted; scientific though in clandestine. Their graphics and apocalyptic narratives necessitate patients to take swift actions. By manipulating fears and conspiratorial suspicions, entrepreneurs promise suffering 'patriots' that by choosing their alternative cures they would win back their liberty and health. The paper discusses the general theoretical implications for studying conspiracy theories while calling for a comparative approach for observing local habitual predispositions on the one hand, and the culturally adapted conspiracist strategies for manipulating them, on the other hand. In contemporary America, for example, politicians and media outlets employ conspiracist strategies to raise fears from the 'deep state.' They succeed doing so because those conspiracist strategies and the suspicious habitus they manipulate spring from the same democratic source.

Subjects by Vocabulary

Library of Congress Subject Headings: lcsh:United States lcsh:HM401-1281 lcsh:History America lcsh:E-F lcsh:Sociology (General) lcsh:E151-889

Microsoft Academic Graph classification: Culture of the United States media_common.quotation_subject Style (sociolinguistics) Politics of the United States Habitus Narrative Sociology media_common Government Media studies Democracy Collusion

Keywords

Cultural Studies, History, Literature and Literary Theory, Sociology and Political Science, Geography, Planning and Development, Social Sciences (miscellaneous)

43 references, page 1 of 5

Altheide, David L. 2002. Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Arnold, Gordon B. 2008. Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television and Politics. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Bailyn, Bernard. 1992. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Bale, Jeffrey M. 2007. “Political Paranoia V. Political Realism: On Distinguishing Between Bogus Conspiracy Theories and Genuine Conspiratorial Politics.” Patterns of Prejudice 41 (1): 45-60. doi: 10.1080/00313220601118751.

Barkun, Michael. 2003. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America.

---. 2013. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Blendon, Robert J., Mollyann Brodie, John Benson, and Drew E. Altman. 2011. American Public Opinion and Health Care. Washington, DC: CQ Press. [OpenAIRE]

Bourdieu, Pierre. 2005. The Social Structure of the Economy. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Brotherton, Rob. 2015. Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. [OpenAIRE]

Critchlow, Donald T., John Korasick, and Matthew C. Sherman. 2008. Political Conspiracies in America: A Reader. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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  • citations
    This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
    1
    popularity
    This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
    Average
    influence
    This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
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    impulse
    This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
    Average
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citations
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
1
Average
Average
Average
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