By Luis Hernández Navarro on April 24, 2023
Ignacio Ramonet, photo: Bill Hackwell
Ignacio Ramonet is one of the most relevant public intellectuals in Latin America. His essays on communication are studied in journalism schools in the continent, his books of conversations with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez are read almost all over the world and his reflections on politics and the media are an obligatory reference in the progressive and alter-globalization fields.
In conversation with La Jornada, he reconstructs how on January 6, 2021, with the assault on the US Capitol and the attempted coup d’état by Trump, a new era opened: that of conspiracy theories. The nightmare, which inspires the formation of armed militias and vigilante justice – he warns – is not over. Trump’s threat, a universal example of infamy, is still in place.
-Your new book dissects the intertwining of politics, communication, social networks and emerging movements of the extreme right in the U.S. Why the title The Age of Conspiracism?
IR: The idea for the book comes from the impact on me of the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, just before the new President Joe Biden took office. It was an assault promoted by Donald Trump, the loser of the election, who claimed he had not lost and was the victim of fraud.
“The images of thousands of people storming the Capitol, fighting the U.S. National Guard that prevented them from passing, constitute the first violent occupation of the seat of American democracy, where the Senate and the House of Representatives are located. It had one goal: to stop the vote count and prevent Biden from being proclaimed. In this way, Trump would see his mandate prolonged. It was a coup d’état.
“I said to myself: surely underneath what we are seeing, there is something much more significant. how is it that tens of thousands of people were mobilized to storm the Capitol, what was in their minds, who had put those ideas in their heads?” he said.
“For two years I did a survey, interrogating sources and trying to find the real reason behind this watershed. I concluded that it was the expression of a new extreme right-wing conspiracy theorist.
“It became clear to me that that assault was not going to be orphaned, that it was going to be imitated, as it happened. Everyone remembers the images of January 8 of this year, when the assault on the three seats of power in Brazil took place. But it had happened before, in January 2022, in Ottawa, Canada, when far-right truckers took over the Canadian Capitol to prevent a vote on a law forcing them to justify their vaccination to cross the border.”
– “When I use a word,” said Humpty Dumpty to Alice, the heroine of Lewis Carroll’s novels, “it means what I want it to say…, no more and no less. And, he added, “The question is to know who is in charge…, that’s all.” How did Trump turn this maxim into a reality that guided the common sense and the imagination of very broad sectors of the population?
IR: He doesn’t say: ‘words mean what I want them to mean’. He assures that ‘the facts are what I want’. You can bring me objective, scientific, measured, verified facts, but I have different facts and they mean something very different. How was it possible that Trump was able to subjugate millions of people like a pied piper with a theory lacking solid foundations such as fraud?
“During the four years of his term he devised a theory to dehumanize the leadership of the Democratic Party so that Trump’s supporters would see them as criminals. He developed the pizzagate theory, which ‘proved’ – and people believed it – that the Democratic leadership, particularly Hillary Clinton, but also Obama, Kamala Harris and those who supported them, were a gang of pedophiles, whose real passion was sexually assaulting children they abducted. Or that they had gangs that kidnapped them and stored them in the basements of the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor in Washington, and there sexually assaulted them, eventually devoured them, sacrificed them to Satan and ripped out a hormone of eternal youth called adrenochrome.
“How is it possible that anyone could believe that? Donald Trump had 153 million followers on his social networks, and most of them believed this story. His goal in the 2016 election was to portray Hillary Clinton not as his electoral adversary, but as a pedophile who should be in jail.
“Trump concocts this conspiracy and his audience picks it up. A sect that calls itself QAnon, which worships Trump not as a political leader, but as a religious leader, develops it. For them, Trump is the prophet, the envoy of a divinity or a power, whose mission is to defeat this group of pedophiles.”
Democratizing the media
-In analyzing the role of social networks in the construction of this Trumpist common sense, you point out that they do not transmit ideas, but they spread feelings and create communities. Does this cast aside the view that social networks allow the democratization of information?
IR: Since the 1970s we have been calling for the democratization of information. Let’s remember the MacBride report, in which García Márquez participated. The idea was as follows: communication, information in particular, the press, radio and television at that time, were in the hands of a few monopolistic groups, which gradually became multimedia groups. First they were newspaper groups, then radio, then television, but in the end they were groups that had everything: press, radio and television. These groups monopolize information. The citizen depends for information on one of these groups, among which there are also the states or governments that own the official media.
“The idea was: how to make it possible for citizens to have their own media? All that was too expensive. Today, the democratization of information has been achieved because we all have telephones that allow us to have access to the whole world, to send messages everywhere, to criticize whatever we want to criticize. If tomorrow a newspaper says something, I can say in my network that it is not true. Maybe my effectiveness is not like that of the radio, but I can communicate with the world. I am not devoid of communicational weapons as before.
“However, there is a huge imbalance and the question is how networks work. Networks are an element of freedom, they work. As you say, they transmit more feelings and emotions than information. They serve to communicate, not to inform. They create a feeling of belonging. Like when we are in a stadium and we support our team. Today what is dominant is that many people prefer to believe and not to know, to have faith in a leader or a leaderless. That happened with the people who stormed the Capitol.”
-In analyzing the success of Trumpist fanaticism, you start from a class analysis of the sectors that support him. Does that category serve to analyze this phenomenon?
IR: Yes, but people are not necessarily aware of it. Who are Trump’s supporters: the white middle class impoverished by 40 years of neoliberalism. The children of the generation that became middle class with a lot of effort have as a perspective when they leave college to be an Uber driver or to be in Amazon or pizza delivery. There is an impoverished white middle class, which has to find an explanation as to why it became poorer. It needs to find a culprit. And, for them, the culprits are ethnic minorities, Latinos, Afro-descendants who steal their jobs, or new technologies that leave them unemployed. They are locked into reactionary, racist, defensive and aggressive anti-minority thinking. That’s why they follow Trump.”
-Is there light at the end of the tunnel?
IR: Of course there is. We are optimistic by nature because we are leftists. We think Trump is going to have greater difficulties. But we live in a very difficult time: coming out of greed, the war in Ukraine, the problems that are arising with climate change. The mission today is to defend the truth, with arguments, with facts. It is not possible to defend it with a meme, with a message of a single word or image. We are moderately optimistic, but we are optimistic.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English