Eubulides wrote: > > This of course banalizes/trivializes the ascription of the term > conspiracy. When the Dems. meet to plot strategy over legislation at > Morton's Steak House on Prospect St. in Georgetown [DC] is that a > conspiracy or just politics as usual? Just where/when does one draw > the conspiracy/nonconspiracy line when one is suggesting > narratives/explanations of political behavior by various groups and > factions of the populace? > > The polysemous concept *conspiracy* is an essentially contestable/ed concept.
The word, like all words, points to a number of different concepts (signifieds I believe they are called). Some but not all of those concepts are themselves polysemous and/or contested. But the kind of conspiracies that are claimed by those (usually) labelled conspiracy theorists are the kind which would be labelled such in a court of law. A conspiracy to kill the war-criminal John F. Kennedy. A conspiracy to blow up the World Trade towers, the conspiracy to enter into illegal agreements in order to finance illegal military aid to the Contras. The 'collusion' (which is probably never planned in a meeting in the corner pizza hut) between DP & RP leaders is not such a conspiracy, and I agree that to call it such banalizes/trivializes the term. For practical political purposes, it is only worthwhile focusing on those conspiracies the existence of which is so easily established that use of it consists not in proving it but in pointing out its implications. If you need to write a whole book merely to present the evidence, then it's irrelevant whether it happened or not, it is a political dead end, or worse: it deflects activists from more fruitful arguments. The Iran/Contra case shows the kind of conspiracies that often occur. A limited action for specific purposes, not the kind of action that in any serious way changes history. And those kind of conspiracies don't even have to remain secret to work; all that is necessary is that they enable "plausible deniability." Daniel says that the Tonkin Bay scandal did move people to the left. But the movement that ultimately publicized the Tonkin Bay 'conspiracy' was a movement built on quite other grounds. If we had focused on it to begin with there would never been a movement. Carrol > > Ian
