After over a decade using Metafilter, I think I am going to have to take a step back. I’m not closing my account, but I am going to try and avoid the site for a while. Every time I visit, I am incensed to find someone whose moral center I trust posting disappointing BlueAnon conspiracies.

BlueAnon refers to conspiracy theories posted by and for U.S. Democrats. These conspiracy theories are usually not as extreme as their QAnon counterpart’s claims of child sexual abuse. Instead they are usually focused on electoral concerns.

Common BlueAnon theories:

• 2024 election was fraudulent due to vote tampering by Musk or Russia (election tampering is a common QANON claim as well).
• No one would care about a genocide if it weren’t for Russian propaganda.
• Biden really wanted to end the genocide but for reasons could never voice that opinion and had to continually send more weapons to Israel.
• There are things conspiring to keep Dems in office from proposing any good policy. This is a general complaint, but there were elaborate explanations specific to student loan debt that were disproven the two times that Biden did indeed cancel student debt.
• Harris would have won except the country would never elect a Black president, or the country would never elect a woman president. Or some other reason related specifically to Russia or the American left.

The goal of these particular conspiracy theories is to create a version of the world in which external forces are preventing elected Democrats from taking any positive action. Dem politicians are doomed from the start because of vast conspiracies against them. Some theories have such similarity to QAnon conspiracies that they don’t pass even a sniff test, while others could be plausibly argued if you left out any data that conflicted with it. For instance, claiming that Harris wasn’t elected because “the left” won’t vote for a Black woman ignores the women of color that leftists supported when centrists Dems wouldn’t, such as Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, India Walton, and Jessica Cisneros. It also ignores the fact that there was a time when it seemed very much like she would do better in the election. During Brat summer, donors and volunteers were lining up despite the genocide to contribute to the success of Harris and Walz. I personally know people who were protesting the genocide during the day and phonebanking for Dem candidates at night. By the time the Walz/Vance debate rolled around, the Democrats’ messaging changed and their new approach led to diminished excitement. An analysis of Harris’ loss that ignores that shift isn’t aiming for truth. We have evidence that the campaign vibes shift came from tenured Democratic party operatives, and that the party still ignores messaging suggestions from Walz and others. BlueAnon theories ignore this and any other campaign decisions because the entire goal of BlueAnon is to absolve the Democratic party of any responsibility.

Instead of the politicians themselves being responsible, blame is shifted to nefarious others. In fact, the nefarious others are often the same forces that Americans have been blaming for over a century: Russia and the left. The symmetry between these conspiracy theories and previous theories should serve as a red flag, but instead it only makes the theories “feel” correct. Those of us who are middle-aged and older were raised on the threat of Russia as an all powerful enemy whose shadowy ways could be the cause of any negative forces in the U.S. This mental path is so well-worn that it’s comforting for us to retread it.

None of this is new. The 1964 essay ”The Paranoid Style in American Politics” starts:

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing.”

Sound familiar? The author, historian Richard Hofstadter looks back to political paranoia regarding the Masons in the 1700s and many other examples of conspiracies in the two centuries between. He says that modern (in this case, 1964) paranoia stems from a different source, though, a feeling of being dispossessed within national politics. “America has been largely taken away from them and their [rightwing] kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” One of the primary dangers of this thought mode is that the logical political goal, if you believe your life is controlled by an all powerful enemy, is the obliteration of that enemy. When the “enemy” is half of the U.S. or your potential political allies on the left, the tendency is to damage coalitions and retreat from mass action.

I think Hofstadter’s essay is still fundamentally correct, but that BlueAnon, unlike its QAnon counterpart, is largely motivated by fear and learned helplessness. Without the conspiracies, we have to confront the fact that there is no functional opposition party in the U.S. The leaders that we placed our hopes on, that we elected to prevent fascism, either are not up to the job or actively aiding the fascists. Having invested most of our energy into this one failed party, we think we have no other political levers to pull. I sometimes feel helpless, and I was not as emotionally invested in the Democratic party as liberals are. The terrible onslaught of trauma from genocide, climate change, and other crises is unbearable without something to believe in, so people are building an illusion of a party that they can still count on.

I am seeing this conspiratorial thinking spreading both in its reach and scope. On Facebook and Instagram, friends were outraged to find that they were “forcibly following” Trump and Vance when the simpler explanation is that they were following the Presidential and Vice Presidential accounts, which transitioned to Trump and Vance after the election. On Metafilter, conspiratorial thinking appears in analysis of other current events such as the D.C. plane crash and even personal conversations where users speculate on other users’ mental health. For my own mental health, I am going to opt out. For the health of Metafilter and other liberal communities, posters need to be honest about if they are posting from panic or from facts, otherwise we’ll be supporting the fascists by using their own critical framework.