The Left’s Conspiracy Politics Far More Successful than Right’s

The Democratic Party’s closing argument for the 2024 campaign season had little to do with policy or good governance. Rather, it was a stark warning about semi-fascists led by a modern-day Hitler coming to strip minorities of rights, execute journalists, send people to camps, erect a real-life Handmaid’s Tale, and initiate a Christian theocracy. Scary stuff. Communicating through “dog whistles” and propped up by “dark money,” these Fifth Columnists had even cataloged their devious plans in a scary-sounding book called “Project 2025.”

Over the past decades, the American Left and its institutions have ratcheted up political paranoia to the extent that its policy prescriptions — even what it views as our most pressing societal problems — are often tethered to groundless or sensationalized anxieties, myths, revisionist histories, pseudoscientific alarmism, and outright lies. For modern Democrats, every political loss, no matter how inconsequential, is a chilling threat to “democracy.” H. L. Mencken famously quipped, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” From the Russia collusion conspiracy to Jim Crow 2.0 to climate change, on the left, it’s hysteria and apocalypticism all the way down.

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David Harsanyi

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner.

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The Democratic Party’s closing argument for the 2024 campaign season had little to do with policy or good governance. Rather, it was a stark warning about semi-fascists led by a modern-day Hitler coming to strip minorities of rights, execute journalists, send people to camps, erect a real-life Handmaid’s Tale, and initiate a Christian theocracy. Scary stuff. Communicating through “dog whistles” and propped up by “dark money,” these Fifth Columnists had even cataloged their devious plans in a scary-sounding book called “Project 2025.”

Over the past decades, the American Left and its institutions have ratcheted up political paranoia to the extent that its policy prescriptions — even what it views as our most pressing societal problems — are often tethered to groundless or sensationalized anxieties, myths, revisionist histories, pseudoscientific alarmism, and outright lies. For modern Democrats, every political loss, no matter how inconsequential, is a chilling threat to “democracy.” H. L. Mencken famously quipped, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” From the Russia collusion conspiracy to Jim Crow 2.0 to climate change, on the left, it’s hysteria and apocalypticism all the way down.