Cass Sunstein’s Thought Police

Cass Sunstein’s Thought Police

January 27, 2010

A journalist I know who’s somewhat more receptive than I am to conspiracy theory told me about a high-ranking official in the Obama administration who advocates using federal agents–covert or overt, employees of the government or secretly remunerated independent experts–to “cognitively infiltrate” conspiracy groups in order to correct their “crippled epistemologies.”

The worst of it, she said, is that he defines conspiracists so loosely–as people who believe “that powerful people have worked together in order to withhold the truth about some important practice or some terrible event.” Practically any organization of political dissidents would qualify. Like, people who believe that the Vietcong didn’t really attack a US destroyer in the Tonkin Gulf, or that Nixon knew more about the Watergate break in than he admitted. Who believe that Cheney and Bush lied about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction during the build-up to Desert Storm, that JFK’s assassination didn’t happen as the Warren Commission said it did, and that American officials sold missiles to Iran to raise funds for Nicaraguan contras. Who’s to say that Birthers and Teabaggers and Truthers aren’t being targeted already? “Cognitive infiltration” may just be a fancy word for chat room trolls–but it’s downright Orwellian too, summoning visions of disinformation campaigns, agents provocateurs, and domestic spies.

The official is Cass Sunstein, the long-time University of Chicago law professor (he has since moved on to Harvard), who is currently serving as director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a department of the Office of Management and Budget. No obscure wonk, Sunstein is the author of countless books and articles; in fact he is a kind of a rock star in the left-leaning intellectual/policy world. He has been the consort of a number of extravagantly glamorous and brainy women (English professor Lisa Ruddick and classicist Martha Nussbaum; he met Samantha Power during the Obama campaign and married her in the summer of 2008) and is frequently touted as a potential Obama nominee for the Supreme Court.

Though he is detested as a wild-eyed leftist by the likes of Glenn Beck, who ridiculed him for his advocacy of animal rights and his supposed hostility to the Second Amendment, and at one point dubbed him “the most dangerous man in America,” the conservative establishment has generally been well-disposed towards him. “Mr. Sunstein…is no conservative–far from it,” wrote The Wall Street Journal. “But his writings on regulation and the herd mentality deserve a voice in the incoming Administration. From his new post as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs inside the White House, he would have an opportunity to put into practice some of the ideas he has written about as an academic.” (Click here to read the whole thing.) Sunstein has frequently come under fire from hard-line progressives, who are appalled by the same “minimialist” approach to regulation that won over the WSJ, not to mention his support for John Roberts’ appointment to the Supreme Court, his defense of John Yoo, his pragmatic opposition to prosecutions of members of the Bush administration, his support for FISA’s grant of retroactive immunity to telecoms, and his openness to Internet “censorship.”

Co-authored with Harvard Law School Professor Adrian Vermeule and published in The Journal of Political Philosophy in 2008 (it can be downloaded as a PDF file here), “Conspiracy Theory” is a 30-page-long academic paper that

1) Surveys scholarship on the etiology of conspiracy theories (it takes a social science approach, concluding that they are formulated within closed cognitive communities that have limited access to alternative sources of information, and whose beliefs are self-reinforced by peer pressure–in short, that they are a product of distorted thought systems rather than psychoses, hallucinations, or demagoguery alone) and

2) Contemplates whether or not governments should try to contain or neutralize such theories, if and when they are presumed to pose a genuine threat to public safety.

Islamic conspiracism abroad, for example, drives Al Qaeda recruitment and encourages suicide bombers. Domestically, a white supremacist who believes that the US government has been hijacked by Satanic Zionists might feel justified in, say, blowing up the Federal building in Oklahoma City. Haitians who believe that HAARP was the cause of their recent woes might threaten US aid workers. But Sunstein and Vermeule aren’t interested in law enforcement per se–rather, they are asking (and “Conspiracy Theory” is no White Paper; its tone is subjunctive throughout) whether governments can effectively neutralize false ideas (and their presumption is always that the conspiracy theories that need to be combated are objectively false) by injecting correct ones into the thought systems that sustain them; whether information can be an antidote for a thought contagion. Here’s how they put it:

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