By Dave Lindorff

With the polls continuing to show Barack Obama holding a steady or
even growing lead heading into Election Day, especially in the key
swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Colorado, New Hampshire
and Virginia, and with Democratic challengers looking strong in at
least 10 Senate races and dozens of open-seat or Republican-held House
races, it’s looking like this will be a big win for Democrats, both in
the presidential and the Congressional races.

Hopefully one thing such an across-the-boards win will lead to
would be a withering away of the self-destructive conspiracy-theory
paranoia that has gripped much of the Left over the last eight years.

Once largely emblematic of the far Right, which saw black
helicopters of the dreaded United Nations behind every mountain, Jews
running everything, Communists working nefariously under every bed,
fluoridation plots, an immigrant assault on the Anglo-Saxon gene pool,
and a liberal cabal out to steal their assault hunting rifles, now the
Left is awash in the same kind of fevered thinking.

Chief among the leftist conspiracy theories are that the
Bush/Cheney administration was behind the 9-11 attacks, that the
current administration has plans to cancel or annul the November 4
election and institute martial law, that there are plans for a “false
flag” attack on American forces which will be used to justify an
all-out war against Iran, that there is a false-flag terror attack
planned inside the US set for before the election, designed to throw
the vote towards John McCain, that the Wall Street meltdown and
subsequent bail-out are a deliberate scheme to steal the nation’s
assets and funnel them into Republican pockets, and that Republican
operatives have the technological capability, and plan to steal the
current election by manipulating the results on the electronic voting
machines used by many election districts. In a variant of the Right’s
anti-Semitic ravings, the Left attributes god-like powers to the Israel
lobby and its formal lobbying organization, the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC)

Never mind that some of these conspiracies are mutually exclusive
(if Bush and Cheney are going to declare martial law, they should have
no need to steal the election), or that it’s getting pretty late in the
game for others to actually happen. The common thread running through
these conspiracies is that “they” (the Republicans, AIPAC or the ruling
corporate elite, as the case may be), have superhuman powers beyond our
wildest imaginations, as well as flawless execution, and are going to
achieve their evil ends no matter what we do.

Following this line of thinking (if it can be called that), there’s
no point in voting, because “they” are going to steal the election
anyhow (and that, of course, is if the election is even held next
week!). There’s no point in going to rallies or marches in Washington
DC, because “they” are going to attack Iran and start World War III
anyhow. Public protest is also dangerous, because “they” are going to
declare martial law, and then all of us who go out and publicly oppose
the government will end up locked away in detention camps in the Mojavi
desert.

I confess, as a journalist, to having unwittingly aided and abetted
some of this conspiracy thinking, for example with my reporting on the
evidence that all four of the so-called “black boxes” from the two
planes that hit the World Trade Center on 9/11 were recovered, and that
the FBI actually has them, despite its testimony to the contrary before
the 9-11 Commission. I make no apology for, and still stand by that
report, which was based upon reliable sources at the National
Transportation Safety Administration and in the New York Police
Department, but I want to stress that such a report does not justify
going beyond asking the logical question, “What is the government
hiding here?” to making the wild speculation that it means the
government planned and carried out those attacks.

I also reported on solid evidence in 2006 that the Bush/Cheney
administration was moving several aircraft carrier battle groups into
position in the Persian Gulf in advance of Congressional off-year
elections in what appeared to be possible plans for an attack on Iran.
I still believe that may have been the administration’s game plan, but
that it was derailed by senior Republican leaders who prevailed on
James Baker, chair of the Iraq War Study Group, to release his team’s
bi-partisan study three months early, which called for negotiations
with Iran and Syria in order to bring peace and stability to the Iraq
region. I would add that this is a far cry from imagining that the
administration was planning to fake an Iranian attack on American
forces.

I am not saying that governments don’t engage in treacherous
conspiracies. Certainly the faked tale of a Gulf of Tonkin incident was
a conspiracy designed to allow the Johnson administration to begin an
all-out war against the Vietnamese. And certainly there was a
conspiracy in the Bush/Cheney administration during 2002 and early 2003
to mislead and lie to the Congress and the American people about Saddam
Hussein’s alleged links to 9-11 and to global terrorists. But those
relatively simple conspiracies actually prove my point—both have been
clearly exposed thanks to leaks, turncoats, and good investigative
reporting.

What I am saying is that the grander conspiracies being concocted
in the more fevered brains of some people on the Left do not hold up
under careful and critical inspection. The biggest failings they share
are two: first of all, conspiracies as grand as multi-state election
thefts via electronic fraud, and the carrying out of a two-front,
high-casualty mass terrorist act on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, require the cooperation of such large numbers of people that
leaks, turncoats, informants and simple screw-ups are inevitable; and
secondly, this administration in particular has shown itself to be
phenomenally inept, intellectually stunted, and tactically clueless.
The War in Iraq, which was supposed to be a “cakewalk,” has been an
unmitigated disaster for Republicans. The War in Afghanistan is a
fiasco. The War on Terror, while a success in terms of helping
Republicans win seats in Congress in 2002, and Bush to win re-election
in 2004, has been a bust longer term. Management of the US economy has
been a model of incompetence. So has the grand plan to crush Democrats
and create a dominant Republican Party for the next century. The Rovian
campaign strategy of lies, smears and dirty tricks, while initially
successful, appears to have worn out its effectiveness in just three
two-year national election cycles.

None of this would matter except that I think the Left’s embrace of
conspiracy-theories has become profoundly damaging to the whole
progressive movement. Conspiracy thinking produces a deep cynicism
towards positive action and towards the kind of long-term organizing
upon which real social and political change depends. When people think
that the fix is in, they are not inclined to put time and energy into
the hard work of organizing unions, working to get local candidates
elected to office, running for positions on party committees, etc.
Conspiracy thinking also leads people on the left to completely write
off the Democratic Party as a vehicle for progressive change, as the
notion that “they” run everything is broadened to include in the term
“they” the elected Democrats in the White House and Congress. Democrats
may be weenies, but such a conflation of Republicans and Democrats is
also self-defeating nonsense, as is the notion that Obama is “just
another tool” of the corporate/imperialist power structure. Democrats
are not just Republicans by another name, and Obama is not just McCain
or Bush with a better tan.

The reality is that if Obama is elected president, and if Democrats
end up gaining solid control of Congress, it will be critically
important for progressives to organize powerfully to press this new
government to do the right things—promptly ending the two wars in the
Middle East, taking strong and far-reaching action to tackle global
warming, restoring some basic equity to the economic and tax system,
making health care affordable and available to all, restoring the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights, demanding punishment for those in
the current administration who have committed crimes, and so on.

We cannot expect Obama, or the Democrats in Congress who have
proven themselves to be such gutless compromisers, to take significant
progressive actions on their own. They must be driven by force of
public action to do the right thing.

Maybe when this election goes right and isn’t stolen, making Obama
the president, and debunking the vote-theft fear-mongers, and when
Obama goes on to be inaugurated in January, without being blocked by a
military coup, these paranoid conspiracy theories will fade away and
people on the Left will start working to make change happen instead of
imagining reasons why it can’t or just moaning that “they” are going to
destroy us all.
___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net