Is it generic Americans who are conspiracy nuts, or a certain subset of Americans?

According to a poll by the Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University, 36 percent of Americans believe it is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that federal officials either participated in the 9/11 attack or deliberately allowed the attack to occur “because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.”

Too bad that the story, by Thomas Hargrove of Scripps Howard, does not mention the party affiliation of that 36 percent, which, I suspect, would put the findings in a somewhat different light. The headline of the story would cease to be, “A Third of Americans Suspect 9-11 Government Conspiracy,” and become instead, “A Majority of Democrats Suspect 9-11 Bush Conspiracy.”

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Chartin writes:

I think your partisan lenses are distorting your view of the ignorant masses. Lots of people are willing to believe wacky things. The left likes to hold the Bush administration and Fox News responsible for so many people believing Iraqis carried out 9/11 or that lots of WMDs have been found, even though they didn’t make these claims. Bruce Willis can easily put up money for Saddam’s capture and attack the liberal media on Iraq while at the same time believing JFK’s killers are still in power. I think Philip Converse had it right: most people do not have a political ideology, do not know what “liberalism” or “conservatism” really are and do not have consistent beliefs about political matters.

LA writes:

My reply to the reader is that he himself is making too broad a generalization about people’s beliefs in liberalism or conservatism or lack thereof. There are lots of people who deny there’s such a thing as liberalism, and that we should go beyond such labels. Does that mean there’s no such thing as liberalism? It is invariably liberals who make this argument, primarily because they know that liberalism has a bad odor and they don’t want to be associated with it. That doesn’t change the fact there is such a thing as liberalism and that lots of people believe in it and that it is indeed the dominant belief system of our age.

The dominant belief system that denies its own existence, so that no on will be able to challenge it—that’s liberalism!

I don’t mean to say that Chartin’s motive here is to protect liberalism. But when people start to tell me that there are no coherent belief systems, just a bunch of different opinions with no pattern or structure, that’s not true.

On the specific question about the partisan make-up of those who believe that 9/11 was an inside job, that can be settled easily enough, if the the pollsters would ask the respondents their political affiliation. Maybe if we research the Scripps Howard poll we’ll find that the question was asked.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 09, 2007 08:04 AM | Send