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KEYWORDS: populism, conspiracy theories, 2020 election, COVID-19 DOI: https://doi.org/10.4079/2578-9201.1(2022).02
Right-Wing Populism in the United States: The Intersection of Conspiracy Theories and Mainstream Political Thought SARAH CORSO INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS & FRENCH, ESIA ‘21, sarahcorso129@gwu.edu
ABSTRACT
On January 6, 2021, conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic culminated in the storming of the U.S. Capitol Building by right-wing insurrectionists. This paper examined the aftermath of those attacks by exploring the correlation between right-wing, national politicians’ rhetoric and the beliefs of individuals from Altoona, Pennsylvania, a small town in the Rust Belt of the United States. To study these phenomena, this paper used a two-pronged methodology of first qualitative social media research of tweets posted by Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mitch McConnell, and Lindsey Graham, and second a quantitative survey of beliefs of residents of Altoona. The sampled tweets from the weeks before, during, and after the 2020 election, as well as the week of January 6, 2021, revealed trends in the propagation of conspiracy theories around the election and the pandemic, especially in tweets written by populists Trump and Greene. These tweets correlated the propagation of conspiracy theories in tweets and whether these four right-wing politicians were identified as populists. Furthermore, the survey yielded polarizing results that contribute to the current literature about a subset of populist followers who are highly educated and present low levels of trust in the government. Overall, this paper attempts to identify trends in beliefs among one ardent Republican base, and in right-wing populist politicians’ rhetoric, that correlate to a continued intersection of conspiracy theories and mainstream political thought in the United States.
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INTRODUCTION When right-wing militants and election deniers stormed the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, the American public and the world were shocked into a new awareness of a strange underbelly of political thought in our current age of misinformation. Encouraged by various government officials’ and politicians’ lackluster denials—or outright encouragements—of the existence of fraud in the United States’ 2020 presidential election, right-wing extremists in the U.S. attempted to take the seat of American democracy by force. Many of these people attended the “Save America” rally earlier that day, where former president Donald Trump remarked that protestors should go to the Capitol and “make [their] voices heard” (Naylor, 2021). So deeply do many of these individuals believe that they are not at fault for the events of January 6, that some claim they were not part of the assault on the Capitol building at all. Instead, right-wing pundits have proposed that “Antifa,” the ever-nebulous far leftwing faction, allegedly had undercover members acting as fascists in the rally’s crowds (Grynbaum,
Alba, & Epstein, 2021). The conspiracy theories whirling around the results of the 2020 election were not the only ones being propagated by individuals in power. Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, the reliability of vaccines has been called into question by former president Donald Trump (Stolberg, 2021), as well as by popular conservative news media personalities such as Tucker Carlson (McCarthy, 2021). As vaccines have become more widely available in the United States, vaccine skepticism continues to cast doubt upon the ability of the American public to effectively combat the virus and its variants (Russonello, 2021). The suggestion that vaccines are ineffective has transformed a public health emergency into a political debate. By using these conspiracy theories and doubts about vaccination to rally the more fervently anti-government members of their voting base, both the Republican Party and former President Trump have successfully established a foundation within the conservative wing of American politics for mistrust of the government. With conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the pandemic in mind, this paper analyzes the question: How is the
