I am not one for conspiracy theories. Occam’s razor generally leads one to prefer explanations involving incompetence or individual malfeasance over larger, complex, well-orchestrated wrong-doing.
That’s a malicious caricature of what a conspiracy is. A conspiracy is several people secretly working together toward a wrongful goal, using wrongful methods.
Conspiracies are common in history. Not only do criminals and revolutionaries often work secretly, so do many legitimate organizations (intelligence organizations, secret police, political groups) and these often act wrongfully.
Conspirators are gamblers. Sometimes conspiracies succeed and sometimes they fail. Conspirators don’t expect to get total control of everything; they just intervene secretly and maliciously in a situation in the hopes of getting whatever they hope to get. It’s like baseball — batting .333 is success. There’s plenty of stupidity and chance and incompetence involved in any situation, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t conspiracy too..
Some of the things Enron did were conspiratorial. Secrecy, dishonesty, lawbreaking, coordinated activity. Their scheme almost worked. Examples can be multiplied.
Liberals have brainwashed themselves into laughing scornfully whenever a conspiracy is spoken of, and they also are too willing to grant the intellectual honesty of their opponents. Often a political argument consists of one side saying whatever is necessary to buy time until a fait accompli has been achieved. Spokesmen who seem stupid aren’t necessarily stupid themselves; they’ve just correctly estimated the stupidity of their audience.
Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and post-WWII anti-communist conspiracy theories led liberals to assume that all conspiracy theories are false. They also had an ulterior motive. People who talk about conspiracies are thereby confessing that they’re outsiders. But liberals all think that they’re insiders, and it’s uncool for insiders to get all upset about business as usual (i.e., the normal dishonesty which makes the system function) . Conspiracists are ejected from the old boys network because they threaten to blow the cover of some of the other insiders.
Conspiracism starts with the conviction that the system is stacked against you and that you can never win, and liberals don’t want to believe that. As the conservative triumph starts to bite, maybe some of them will wise up.
From a comment here.
Trollblog 
November 24, 2012 at 7:57 pm
Conservative triumph?
November 25, 2012 at 7:49 pm
The only thing that the ‘conservative triumph’ is going to bite, is the asses of the conservatives.
November 28, 2012 at 1:39 am
Obama is the conservative triumph. He’s playing their game. Since 1980 conservatives have transformed America, and the worst is yet to come. The 2008 economic collapse was the worst since 1937, if not 1929. It represented a tremendous challenge, one which the Democrats did not meet. The Republicans are trying to push their programs through in the aftermath of this disaster, against weak Democratic resistance, and if they succeed things will be still worse.
You can sneer at Rove and Limbaugh all you want, but they won and we lost. Every champion wins until he loses, and that’s what they did.
November 5, 2013 at 10:08 pm
I don’t know about a conservative triumph. The Democrats have managed to permanently establish their new client population (Mexicans) who reliably vote Democratic. They are the New America and will happily vote for free Medical care, food stamps, a guaranteed national income and whatever other Social Democrat/Socialist plans the Democrats implement. Replacing all the cranky tea party/populist white folks is a fait accompli at this point. All the white women are aborting and contracepting themselves into oblivion. What’s not to like?
November 5, 2013 at 11:27 pm
Rove lost. He and Bush called for open borders (“willing worker/willing employer”) in January, 2005 and it has come to pass. Rove’s error was thinking that his New Americans would vote Republican. They haven’t and they won’t. The Democrats offer a much better deal.
November 10, 2013 at 2:53 am
The US has been permanently transformed and in the future will increasingly have a Confederate-style impoverished, uneducated, disenfranchised, demoralized lower class and a disappearing middle class. That is the conservative triumph.
Conservative won in part by absorbing a major part of the Democratic Party (neocons and neoliberals). This restructuring is the big event of the last couple of decades. All the chickenshit issues Big Bill talks about are very secondary. Big Bill can go to hell.
This isn’t about R vs. D, guys.