The modern paranoid style in American politics
Paranoia has long had its place in American politics. The Know-Nothings were convinced there was a Papal plot to subvert the United States. (How did they find out? -ed. Shh! Deny everything!) Richard Hofstadter wrote a classic essay on conspiracy-mongering in 1964: The paranoid style in American politics.
Democrats are not immune, apparently. According to a recent Rasmussen survey, 61% of Democrats either believe that President Bush either knew of the 9/11 attacks in advance or they're "unsure." Republicans, on the other hand, reject that idea by a 7-1 margin (meaning only 14% of Republicans are nuts), while independents do so by almost 3-1.
Think about that for a moment: nearly two-thirds of one of the two major parties in American politics believe an American president knew about a catastrophic terrorist attack, one that cost thousands of lives, in advance and did nothing to stop it. Charles Krauthammer would, I'm sure, ascribe it to Bush Derangement Syndrome, and he may be right. But I think it also reflects the larger and longer-term tendency toward paranoia in American (and perhaps the world's, in general) politics.
Many, many Americans, for example, were convinced that FDR knew of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in advance, in spite of the sheer lunacy of the idea that an American president would enter a war by getting half his navy sunk. Yet, even today, some still believe that. Others are sure Vice-President Johnson ordered the assassination of JFK.
I'm not sure what prompts otherwise sane people to fall for such stupid ideas, but I have a couple of theories, based only on personal observation. One is that the Party out of power is the one most vulnerable to conspiracy theories. I think the "FDR knew!" idea was strongest among Republicans, who had been trounced in elections time and again by Roosevelt. Out of power, it's easy to believe that your hated enemy is doing something dirty behind the scenes.
The same would be true of Democrats today: their time as the natural governing party, which began with FDR's victory in 1932, had been gradually coming to an end since Reagan first won the White House in 1980. A major crack in their throne appeared in 1994 when the Republicans captured the House, and the empire collapsed when Bush beat Gore in 2000. Unable to accept that the majority of Americans rejected the vision of the Great Society and did not want to expand the New Deal, that most Americans did not want to turn the country into a social-democratic state, they convinced themselves that it couldn't be their ideas that were wrong -- there had to be something nefarious behind it: conservative talk-radio and evangelical Christianity being two favorites. When Bush then came along and beat them in three straight elections, keeping the White House and taking both houses of Congress, their hatred of him made it easy to believe he must have known about 9-11.
There's another theory that fits, and I think it's complementary to the first: people need conspiracies to bring order out of chaos, to give themselves a sense of control over events they cannot in reality control. To take the Pearl Harbor example: "It couldn't be that those Japs beat us on their own! Roosevelt had to be in on it!" Or, for those to whom economics are an eternal mystery: "The high price of gas just has to be a scheme by Big Oil!"
The same can be said about the "Bush knew" meme: unable to accept that a bunch of religious fanatics armed only with box-cutters could, on orders from a medieval lunatic hiding in a cave on the far side of nowhere, pull off the deadliest attack in American history, it was all too tempting to ascribe a malicious foreknowledge to the man who had humiliated them over and over: George W. Bush.
So FDR and Dubya have something in common. Now there's an idea to drive my liberal friends nuts. 
LINKS: Captain Ed has more analysis of the numbers in that survey.
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