One of the more popular conspiracy theories to come out of the 2008 US election (and good lord have there been a lot) has been the idea that a community organizing group by the name of ACORN (Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now) rigged the election for the Democrats via massive voter fraud and/or using malt liquor and cigarettes to bribe black people BUMS AND THUGS OF INDETERMINATE ETHNIC ORIGIN into voting for Obama on election day.
Hmmm – the stock market isn’t doing so well, but I might consider purchasing stock in the companies that sell Old English 40 ounce malt liquor, Newport cigarettes, and Kool cigarettes. They are probably making a killing during the election season, with ACORN getting bulk shipments to bribe bums and thugs to vote.
Now they’re being implicated as some kind of urban Gestapo, answerable only to the President, bent on destroying America by rigging the census so that Americans can be put into internment camps.
Now, there are a lot of reasons to think that ACORN is not nearly as scary as some would have you believe – though they have had some workers convicted for voter registration fraud, many of those convictions were due to ACORN seeing fishy registrations and turning over their employees to the authorities. In any case, voter registration fraud and voter fraud are quite different things; one might register Adolf Hitler to vote, but the Führer is unlikely to show up on Election Day. Beyond that, the election results were essentially in agreement with polls in the days leading up to the election. This, naturally, is no obstacle to people who think that the poll results were also part of a vast left-wing conspiracy; the McCain campaign certainly is not guiltless here, having released internal polls days before the election showing Excellent News for McCain.
ACORN is just the latest shadowy organization wrongly accused of having rigged an American election, and the phenomenon is certainly not confined to conservatives. The last time the left lost in the US, back in 2004, the scapegoat was the sinisterly named Diebold, manufacturers of electronic voting machines that were used in the election. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote an article for Rolling Stone popularizing the very dubious idea that voting machines systematically counted Kerry votes as Bush votes, alongside legitimate complaints like inadequate voting machines in poor districts and difficulties in voter registration. Since then, the Diebold conspiracy theory has spread far and wide.
Again, there are good reasons to think that the 2004 election was not stolen. Again, the results were in line with polls taken just before the election, and the discrepancies between exit polls and election results are similar to those seen in other, non-disputed elections. But conspiracy theories have a way of living on regardless.
The contrast between the supposed conspiracies to rig the 2004 and 2008 elections is interesting. Why? Well, let’s take a look:
Nationalsozialistische Democrat Acornpartei?
ACORN is an anti-poverty group, bent on promoting social justice and helping out low-income families through grassroots activism, voter registration drives, and affordable housing. Its membership includes a large number of minorities, young people, and low income earners, and the organization itself is politically liberal (or at least advocates liberal causes).
Diebold is nearly the opposite: a polished, top-down, high-profit corporation, with offices in immaculate gleaming towers and a board of directors made up entirely of middle-aged white people in suits who contribute overwhelmingly to the Republican Party.
The two organizations are two sides of the same coin: they’re scapegoats in the classic sense, symbols of the elements of American culture that their detractors hate and fear the most. American conservatism is characterized almost inevitably by some degree of xenophobia and a desire to preserve the status quo, as well as a distrust for large, politically liberal organizations (recall the McCarthyist accusations that the ACLU had Communist affiliations, and the recent spate of accusations of Marxism for many left-leaning policies and their advocates). This element of conservatism is as old as revolution – who knows when the unwashed masses are going to be dissatisfied with their lot and start to make trouble?
Diebold, on the other hand, is the perfect liberal boogeyman. The evil, slick, faceless corporation is probably the most popular movie villain of the last half-century, and for good reason – it embodies the leftist disdain for corporatism and unregulated free-market capitalism, the fear of exploitation at the hands of the rich, the distrust of racial homogeneity, and the creeping suspicion that the real power behind the throne is corporate, not democratic.
It’s overwhelmingly probable that neither organization is guilty (otherwise, why didn’t both elections go the same way? How long until Diebold’s baby-killing mercenary stormtroopers get into a pitched street battle with ACORN’s legions of AK-47-wielding Marxist Women’s Studies professors?), but veracity isn’t what makes the ACORN/Diebold conspiracies interesting. They’re conspiracies, sure, but they’re also a kind of scapegoating – and the choice of scapegoats for a defeat tells a temptingly plausible story about how the losing side views the world.
Tags: conspiracy, democratic party, GOP, moonbattery, scapegoating, wingnuttery