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Political anthropology

The Besieged People

How populism turns distrust into an infrastructure of power across platforms, AI, and democratic life.

·Martín González Senosiain
Editorial illustration of Donald Trump before a crowd in Washington, with visual references to conspiracism, social media, enemies within, and the SAVE America Act.

There was a time when exposing a hidden plot could destroy a presidency. Watergate was not only a case of political espionage or an American institutional crisis. It was a scene of revelation. A part of power was shown doing what public rules forbade. The gap between the system’s declared image and the practices of those who ran it became unbearable, triggering a political, judicial, and moral reckoning that ended with Richard Nixon’s resignation.

The comparison with the present is unsettling. Today, visible transgression does not always end political careers. Public humiliation of opponents, ongoing suspicion toward journalists, judges, universities, or electoral systems, and even the circulation of unsubstantiated accusations can become tools of mobilization. Donald Trump’s speech on the National Mall on July 4, 2026, offered several direct illustrations. After invoking equality before the law, he suggested that he had not been treated “that well” and quickly moved on. Later, when speaking about the rebuilding of the military, he said he ought to refer to a “third term” and immediately withdrew the phrase, saying he did not want controversy. Neither remark, by itself, proves a concrete institutional program. Yet both reveal a significant rhetorical operation. Personal grievance and the constitutional limit become shared winks rather than grounds for public sanction. Trump, Orbán, Bolsonaro, Milei, and Netanyahu are not equivalent, nor do they emerge from the same political systems. But each participates, in different ways and to different degrees, in a moment when authority no longer rests solely on institutional respectability and can also be built through the display of grievance, rupture, and antagonism.

The premise of this note is simple, even if its implications are not. Conspiracism is not an anomaly outside contemporary politics, nor is it merely an individual failure of rationality. It becomes politically effective when populism transforms real hardships—precariousness, inequality, loss of control, insecurity, and cultural uncertainty—into stories of hidden enemies, internal betrayals, and threatened bodies. Conspiracy does not replace politics. It reorganizes it around a grammar that personalizes structural problems and turns social complexity into a moral battle.

This note draws on the European CONSPIRE course, taken through the Complutense University of Madrid. It is an Erasmus+ higher-education initiative coordinated by the Università degli Studi di Torino. Its consortium brings together the University of Turin, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the University of Tartu, the Istanbul Technical University, and Aalborg University, alongside CesUE. Hosted as a MOOC on Turin’s platform, the course is organized around six modules on community organizing, health, media, religion, politics, and science. It does not treat conspiracy as a psychological eccentricity. It studies it as a phenomenon that can affect health, critical thinking, democratic trust, and relational life.

2008 as a hinge

The 2008 financial crisis did not by itself create the rise of populism or the spread of conspiracy theories, but it made one thing clearer. The market was neither a neutral arbiter nor a meritocratic machine. Banks rescued with public funds, foreclosures, unemployment, austerity, and the concentration of wealth made it difficult to sustain the promise that obeying the rules was enough to secure a dignified life.

For decades, neoliberalism had presented social life as a sum of individual trajectories. Housing became an investment. Work became employability. Education became human capital. Identity became a branding project. When that promise fractures, discontent looks for forms of representation. It can move toward a democratic critique of economic structures, corporate concentration, or territorial inequality. It can also become the accusation that someone, in secret, deliberately designed the harm.

Populism enters at that point. It does not need to offer a detailed analysis of global finance, labor precarity, or the loss of public services. It can instead offer a far more immediate narrative. Problems are no longer the result of complex processes, but of an elite will concealed behind institutions. The crisis of 2008 did not make that shift inevitable, but it created particularly favorable ground for it to take hold.

Suspicion is not conspiracy

Distrust toward governments, corporations, parties, media organizations, or scientific authorities is not irrational in itself. Governments, companies, and security agencies have conspired, lied, withheld information, and protected particular interests. A healthy democracy needs institutions that can be criticized and a public able to be suspicious when evidence warrants it.

The crucial distinction lies elsewhere. Democratic criticism requires proportionate evidence, admits uncertainty, and recognizes that social processes have multiple causes. A conspiracy theory turns every contrary piece of evidence into fresh proof of a cover-up. The former can revise its conclusions. The latter is designed to resist refutation.

CONSPIRE’s sociology module draws on Hayagreeva Rao and Henrich R. Greve (2024) to shift the question from who believes to how theories circulate and become persuasive in particular social systems. The point is not to diagnose pathological individuals, but to study networks, platforms, conversation, and conditions of uncertainty that make certain narratives habitable.

Rao and Greve also offer a more productive image of those who take part in these narratives. It is the figure of the bricoleur. This is not necessarily someone who has memorized a closed doctrine. They may combine fragments of news, videos, religious traditions, family experiences, legitimate criticism of power, memes, political speeches, and pieces of scientific information. Inconsistency does not always weaken the narrative. At times, it allows it to adapt to different audiences and moments.

A theory about vaccines, suspicion toward the European Union, an allegation of electoral fraud, a narrative about migration, and a warning about so-called “gender ideology” may seem like separate issues. Yet in certain cultural ecosystems they are connected through the same intuition. An elite is hiding the truth, manipulating the population, and threatening a way of life considered authentic. That intuition works less as a specific theory than as a grammar for reading the world.

From the paranoid style to mass politics

Modern history is marked by this grammar. During the French Revolution, counterrevolutionary sectors attributed change to Freemasons, Jacobins, and Illuminati. Later, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion offered an antisemitic forgery capable of explaining capitalism, socialism, liberalism, secularization, and national crisis as expressions of a single global Jewish machinery. Its force did not rest only on the hatred it spread. It also offered a total, binary, closed explanation of the world.

Fascism turned that structure into a political program. National decline was no longer explained through social conflict, military defeat, historical inequalities, or failures of government. It was attributed to internal communities of traitors, minorities, or cosmopolitans who had supposedly corrupted the nation from within. Authoritarian communist regimes developed different versions of the same logic through purges, accusations of deviationism, and campaigns against alleged enemies of the revolution. American McCarthyism moved that pattern into the Cold War through suspicion of communist infiltration in government, culture, education, and film.

In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter called this recurring form of political imagination the “paranoid style.” The concept requires care. It should not be used to medicalize whole populations or to ridicule every form of distrust. Rather, it helps identify a narrative structure marked by obsession with the enemy’s omnipotence, apocalyptic certainty about an imminent danger, and the conviction that every contradiction confirms the plot.

These forms of political imagination did not disappear. They reappear today in the figure of the “great replacement,” in theories about “globalism,” or in allegations of “social engineering” found across some populist discourses. Trump’s July 4 speech illustrates this mechanism without having to fit a closed conspiracy theory. By warning that communism could reappear within the country and comparing it to a cancer that had to be removed, he framed a political threat as a pathology to be eliminated preventively. What matters analytically is not criticism of an ideology in itself, but the shift from disagreement to a vocabulary of contamination, urgency, and expulsion. The internet did not invent the invisible enemy. It expanded its speed, scale, and capacity to mutate. Yet the figure of a secret enemy that links scattered ills and attributes them to a coordinated will belongs to a much longer history. This helps explain why contemporary politics can turn resentment into the identity of a besieged people.

The people and their enemies

CONSPIRE’s political module distinguishes between a conspiratorial mentality and specific theories. The first is a general disposition to imagine that elites, governments, or secret groups control decisive events. The second refers to particular issues such as 9/11, climate change, the pandemic, the Moon landing, or chemtrails. The distinction matters because it makes clear that not everyone who doubts an institution accepts a conspiratorial view of the world.

Populism works well with this disposition because it organizes politics as an opposition between a morally pure people and corrupt elites. As Michael Butter explains, conspiracy theories are not a necessary feature of all populism, but they can serve as a highly effective secondary resource for explaining why elites would act against the people.

Populism builds two axes of antagonism. Along the vertical axis, the people confront distant elites such as technocrats, European institutions, banks, corporations, or global powers. Along the horizontal axis, the people define themselves by excluding those who are not considered part of the authentic community, including migrants, religious minorities, feminists, LGBTQI+ people, activists, or those cast as cosmopolitans.

The first axis can contain a democratic critique of privilege, economic concentration, or deficits of representation. The second turns hardship into exclusion. When the two are articulated together, the aggrieved people cease to be an open social category and become an imagined community that needs internal enemies in order to feel united.

Populism is not exclusive to the right. It can also appear in left-wing movements that frame politics as an opposition between the people and elites, and that deploy conspiratorial narratives “upward” against corporations, great fortunes, or international financial institutions. European disputes over austerity and the conditions imposed by the troika revealed a grounded critique of the political reach of financial conditionality. At times, however, that critique can slide into a personification of economic power as a faceless global elite. The difference from right-wing populism lies less in the structure of antagonism than in the direction of grievance. One points upward, while the other may direct it toward minorities and vulnerable groups. Comparative research nonetheless suggests that right-wing populism more often draws on conspiratorial narratives, especially when it identifies internal enemies.

Collective narcissism helps explain that transition. It is not simply national pride. It is the perception that one’s own group is exceptional, yet has been unfairly humiliated, blocked, or scorned by other forces. That grievance turns the restoration of greatness into a political promise and makes it easier to search for culprits. The nation stops being imagined as a plural community and becomes an innocent victim under siege from external powers and internal traitors.

National exceptionalism is not conspiratorial in itself. It becomes relevant when declared greatness is tied to suspicion of internal decline. On the National Mall, Trump presented the United States as the crowning achievement of human history and as a nation without equal before warning against “communists” in the country. The sequence turns the exceptional homeland into a threatened good and helps explain how collective grievance can make political difference look like a moral rupture.

The body as the nation’s border

Contemporary conspiracy theories do not revolve only around elections, governments, or international institutions. They often focus on the body. The individual body, the family body, and the national body appear as territories in danger, besieged by forces that seek to contaminate, replace, control, or transform the population.

Health conspiracies offered a clear illustration during the pandemic. Vaccines were presented as instruments of surveillance, genetic modification, sterilization, or population control. These were not only stories about a medical technology. They activated a broader suspicion toward governments, pharmaceutical companies, international organizations, and scientific authorities. The body became the last frontier against a power portrayed as illegitimate.

So-called “gender ideology” works in a similar way. Reproductive rights, sex education, protection against gender-based violence, recognition of trans identities, or marriage equality are described as an agenda imposed from outside. The Istanbul Convention, intended to prevent and combat violence against women, has been presented in several contexts as a Trojan horse against the family, national sovereignty, or the moral order. The “great replacement” theory condenses the same structure. It combines nationalism, racism, demographic anxiety, and control over bodies to claim that an elite is orchestrating the replacement of white or Christian populations through migration, natalist policies, feminism, abortion, or cultural pluralism.

The connection between these narratives is not accidental. Health and gender conspiracies share the same intuition. The body—individual and collective—is the territory where control over the future is at stake. Vaccines, contraception, sex education, migration, and reproductive rights appear not as matters of public policy, but as tools of demographic transformation orchestrated by elites. This shared grammar allows a person who distrusts vaccines to find the “great replacement” theory familiar, and vice versa. Not because either belief automatically entails the other, but because they share the same moral architecture of a pure people, a threatened body, and a hidden agent seeking to destroy it. This logic becomes especially explicit when a political opponent is described in medical language. Comparing an ideology to cancer is not a health claim, but a device that transfers a logic of eradication into the political realm. The metaphor matters because it narrows the space for disagreement. One does not deliberate with a disease. One treats it, contains it, or removes it. In this way, defending the national body can shift from an image of care into a grammar that makes preventive exclusion imaginable.

CONSPIRE’s module on religion and spirituality broadens this reading. Not every religion is conspiratorial, just as not every alternative spirituality leads to rejection of science. Yet certain forms of religious nationalism and conspirituality turn political conflicts into spiritual wars. The authority of evidence becomes subordinate to the charisma of someone who claims to possess revelation. Disagreement ceases to be debate and becomes proof of moral corruption.

Attention as an infrastructure of power

It would be a mistake to attribute the rise of conspiracism to a single technological cause. Platforms do not vote, write political programs, or invent racism, misogyny, or social resentment on their own. But they do reorganize the conditions of visibility. They make some forms of discourse more profitable, faster, and more repeatable than others.

Artificial intelligence does not invent this grammar of grievance. It operates on it. Recommendation systems automatically order which content becomes visible and which is relegated. The European Union’s Digital Services Act recognizes that very large platforms can shape opinion at scale and requires them to assess and mitigate risks to media pluralism, electoral processes, public health, and well-being. Generative models, meanwhile, lower the cost of producing and varying texts, images, voices, and synthetic profiles.

Their political effect, however, is not automatic. A piece of content fabricated or amplified by automated systems becomes persuasive only when it finds networks that interpret it, leaders who legitimize it, and communities willing to circulate it as evidence. AI should therefore not be understood only as a tool for detecting or producing disinformation. It is also part of the infrastructure that organizes attention, distributes credibility, and makes it harder to distinguish between experience, testimony, simulation, and propaganda. UNESCO’s Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms stress that responding to disinformation and conspiracy theories requires shared responsibility among platforms, public institutions, media, civil society, academia, and affected communities.

Rao and Greve propose looking at platforms as an attention market. Attention is scarce. It is impossible to verify, listen to, and assess everything that circulates with equal care. In that market, what is novel, dramatic, and emotionally intense gains a competitive advantage. A narrative that connects scattered facts through a hidden threat produces suspense, offers a mission, identifies heroes and villains, and allows participants to feel part of a community that has awakened in the face of a deceived majority.

The concept of the superspreader helps specify how that attention works. Not every account has the same ability to set interpretive frames. Some people, organizations, and media outlets concentrate audiences, credentials, charisma, or economic capacity. They are nodes capable of turning a marginal narrative into legitimate, visible, repeatable content. CONSPIRE applies the category to the ecosystem of health disinformation, but its usefulness is broader. It also helps explain the role of political leaders, media voices, and micro-celebrities in moving a peripheral suspicion into public debate.

The Disinformation Dozen offers an illustration rather than a definitive measure of all vaccine misinformation. In 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate analyzed a sample of 812,000 posts and shares on Facebook and Twitter and estimated that as much as 65 percent of the anti-vaccine content in that sample could be attributed to twelve figures and their organizations. Meta challenged the design and conclusions of the report, so the figure should not be treated as an exhaustive census. Even so, the case is useful for recognizing a hierarchical structure of influence. Disinformation does not arise only from an undifferentiated mass of anonymous accounts, but also from figures with huge audiences and the ability to confer authority on harmful narratives.

Platforms do not all work in the same way. In open spaces, visibility depends heavily on recommendations, trends, and public metrics. In messaging environments or closed groups such as WhatsApp and Telegram, interpersonal trust also carries weight. A message sent by someone close may receive less scrutiny than identical content from an unknown source. The problem is therefore not only algorithmic. It is also relational.

The World Health Organization defines an infodemic as an overabundance of information, some accurate and some not, that can create confusion and distrust toward governments and public-health responses. Its approach stresses that data alone are not enough. Managing an infodemic requires information that is understandable, localized, evidence-based, and conveyed through appropriate intermediaries, with communities at the center.

The platform, then, is not merely a channel. It is an infrastructure in which affects, hierarchies, identities, and rewards are organized. Public discussion no longer moves only through news media, parties, unions, universities, or neighborhood associations. It also moves through short videos, closed groups, memes, livestreams, verified profiles, and engagement metrics.

When the narrative captures institutions

Conspiracism becomes especially dangerous when it stops being a marginal narrative and becomes a tool of government. At that point, suspicion toward opponents can justify pressure on critical media, universities, courts, civil-society organizations, or minorities.

The shift from a totalizing diagnosis to a concrete measure deserves special attention. At the same July 4 event, Trump called for passage of the SAVE America Act, an initiative that, as this note was finalized, had been approved by the House of Representatives but had not advanced in the Senate. In his public formulation, he called for voter identification, proof of citizenship, and sharply restricted mail voting. It is not necessary to assume that everyone who supports electoral reform shares the same intention in order to recognize the analytical problem. The narrative of “cheating” can become regulatory architecture, and civic belonging can become conditional on more demanding documentary requirements. The issue is not that every electoral rule is conspiratorial, but that an unproven suspicion can be presented as sufficient grounds for redesigning access to a basic political right.

The Turkish case examined in CONSPIRE shows that narrative control does not depend only on online falsehoods. It can be sustained through defamation lawsuits, judicial pressure, administrative licensing, media ownership concentration, and economic fear among those who might fund critical spaces. The consequence is a gradual narrowing of the public sphere. Some issues become dangerous to discuss. The boundaries of what is permissible become ambiguous. The official narrative ends up imposing even the terms through which the opposition can name reality.

This is not an isolated case, though mechanical equivalences should be avoided. In Hungary, a February 2026 ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union found that the country had violated EU law and freedom of expression by preventing broadcaster Klubrádió from continuing to operate. In Poland, the same Court concluded in December 2025 that serious irregularities in appointments meant the Constitutional Tribunal could not be regarded as independent and impartial. These are different national processes with distinct political trajectories, yet they show that the erosion of checks and balances can take legal, media, and administrative forms as well as discursive ones.

The lesson is not that every conservative or nationalist policy is authoritarian. It is more precise. Democracy begins to degrade when power treats the opposition not as a legitimate adversary, but as part of a conspiracy against the nation. Safeguards can then be presented as obstacles, pluralism as decadence, and criticism as sabotage.

Conspiracy theory offers power a decisive advantage. It turns every limit into evidence of hostility. If a court ruling contradicts the government, the judiciary must be captured. If an investigation reveals corruption, the media must be part of an operation. If a demonstration challenges a policy, it must have been financed from abroad. The narrative becomes self-sealing. Everything that should require accountability is reinterpreted as evidence of the enemy.

Learning to argue without making total enemies

The response to these narratives cannot consist only of fact-checking. Fact-checking is necessary, especially for those who are still uncertain, but it rarely changes by itself a political identity organized around suspicion. When conflict touches belonging, dignity, or collective memory, a factual correction can be received as a gesture of superiority.

Education cannot be limited to transmitting verified data either. It must teach how knowledge is built, how evidence is distinguished from opinion, how the reliability of a source is assessed, and how to navigate environments of uncertainty. This competence, comparable to literacy, makes it possible to participate in complex debates without blindly depending on outside authorities or falling into simplistic explanations. CONSPIRE insists that this learning should combine critical thinking with practices of dialogue and listening, rather than becoming a checklist for spotting falsehoods.

It is also unhelpful to treat every person who distrusts an institution as incapable of thought. Distrust can have real historical roots. Racialized populations, migrant communities, LGBTQI+ people, women, impoverished neighborhoods, and neglected territories have experienced concrete forms of exclusion, surveillance, or institutional mistreatment. A democratic politics cannot demand trust without revising the conditions that destroy it.

Here, one of CONSPIRE’s most productive contributions emerges. Community organizing is not presented as sentimental reconciliation therapy or as a way to erase conflict. It begins from the idea that democratic life needs sustained public relationships among people and institutions capable of acting collectively. The comparative reading by Ozzano and Fenoglio (2024) situates this tradition in the European transfer of community organizing inspired by the Industrial Areas Foundation, a methodology aimed at building civic power rather than replacing it with assistance.

The one-to-one relational meeting is a central tool of this approach. It is not an intimate conversation or an interview designed to extract information. It is a structured encounter in which two people share parts of their histories, motivations, values, and aspirations. Its purpose is not to win an argument or immediately convert someone who thinks differently. It is to build a basis of recognition from which shared action can emerge. In the tradition of Edward T. Chambers and Michael A. Cowan, this public relationship makes it possible to identify leaders, understand interests, and generate power with others rather than power over them.

Against the conspiratorial logic that turns every difference into suspicion and every disagreement into betrayal, community organizing proposes a relational politics. It seeks to identify concrete problems, recognize divergent interests, and build collective capacity. Conspiracy creates cohesion through the enemy. Community organizing seeks to build shared power through public ties.

This is not a magic solution. Violent ideologies, structured racism, and openly antidemocratic discourses do not disappear through a conversation. Yet rebuilding spaces for listening and action can prevent isolation, uncertainty, and grievance from finding their only outlet in a community of resentment.

Making politics without turning fear into community

Conspiracism prospers where institutions have lost credibility, inequalities become unbearable, and common life fragments. It is not enough to denounce its falsehoods. One must understand the promise it offers. It promises order in the face of uncertainty, belonging in the face of isolation, heroism in the face of powerlessness, and culprits in the face of problems that seem to have no face.

Conspiratorial populism turns that promise into power. It takes a hardship that may be legitimate and reorganizes it around a total enemy. Elites stop being concrete groups with contestable interests. They become a secret machinery. Minorities stop being part of the citizenry and become a threat. Difference stops being pluralism and becomes infiltration.

The democratic task is not to restore naive trust in any institution. It is to build institutions that deserve trust through transparency, accountability, and a willingness to recognize harm. It also requires plural media, strong public services, social rights, critical education, spaces for deliberation, and policies that reduce the material conditions of desperation.

CONSPIRE is valuable because it does not separate the problem of conspiracy from the social worlds in which it becomes persuasive. It requires us to look at the relationships between health and inequality, platforms and affect, religion and authority, populism and exclusion, disinformation and the weakening of community life. Above all, it reminds us that defending a shared reality cannot rest only on correcting errors. It requires rebuilding ties, institutions, and forms of collective action that allow people to argue without turning others into absolute enemies.

The besieged people is not only an image. It is a real social experience when precarity, inequality, and lack of representation make common life feel like an encirclement. Democratic politics consists in dismantling that encirclement, not in strengthening it with imaginary enemies, but in opening spaces where difference is not synonymous with betrayal. A democracy grows stronger when criticism of power does not need to manufacture absolute enemies.

Sources

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Bibliography and verified documentation