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The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television: Politics, Public Relations, and Journalism in and

Patrick Jones, Gretchen Soderlund

American Quarterly, Volume 69, Number 4, December 2017, pp. 833-856 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/680488

Access provided by University of Hawaii @ Manoa (21 Dec 2017 15:45 GMT) The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television | 833

The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television: Politics, Public Relations, and Journalism in House of Cards and Scandal

Patrick Jones and Gretchen Soderlund

irty little secrets always come out.” So says , the beleaguered protagonist of ABC’s Scandal, and so says a 2015 “Dposter from the conservative student group Turning Point USA, which made news after the 2016 election for its “Professor Watchlist” of left-leaning, activist professors.1 In this poster, a close-up of Pope hovers above Turning Point USA’s signature slogan, “Big Government Sucks,” while smaller print references the Obama administration’s Fast and Furious and NSA scandals. Another Turning Point USA poster displays ’sHouse of Cards protagonist, Frank Underwood, saying “the road to power is paved with hypocrisy and casualties.” From Scandal and House of Cards to Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games, Turning Point USA’s leaflets and posters take advantage of popular culture’s recent fascination with tyrannical leaders to drive home its libertarian message: big government cannot be trusted. The conservative group hopes there is slippage among audiences’ understanding of fictionalized dramas and the way we think about American government. Driven by a similar expectation, the streaming service Netflix commissioned a long-form “sponsored content” article for the Atlantic on the history of presidential power couples. “The Ascent: Political Destiny and the Makings of a First Couple” traces the goal-oriented partnerships of successful actual first couples like Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and of less-successful couplings like Richard and Pat Nixon.2 A linguistic analysis of dominant and submissive language used by the fictiveHouse of Cards first couple, Frank and Claire Un- derwood, serves as coda to this multimedia advertisement/article. Made with the assistance of linguists from two major universities, “The Ascent” features an n-gram chart that tracks fractures in Frank and Claire’s marriage as they develop and deepen over time. Despite Turning Point USA’s and Netflix’s different goals (inculcating conservative college activists and drawing viewers to Netflix, respectively),

2017 The American Studies Association 834 | American Quarterly

their spin-off media banks on the notion that popular culture shapes audience engagement with politics and history. Both suggest that television characters like King Joffrey Baratheon, Olivia Pope, and the Underwoods are political and historical figures in their own right. However, what unites all these characters is not only the space they occupy in political discourse but the fact that all of them achieve power by exercising their virtuosity in conspiratorial behavior. We argue that these protagonists’ schemes and machinations reflect a conspiratorial mode in popular culture and elsewhere in which conspiracy serves as the hinge connecting interpersonal relationships to political decision making. To unpack this conspiratorial mode, we focus on Scandal and House of Cards, two of the most popular and acclaimed political dramas on television. We chose these shows because both have maintained large, faithful audiences for at least four seasons, both take place in current-day Washington, DC, and both feature similar plotlines despite surface differences. Further, they offer similarly bleak visions of the political. However, rather than understand these political dramas as ideological reflections of political cynicism and distrust of government in the contemporary moment, we think of them as participants in a particular political/conspiratorial logic that is being recited, with different intensities and inflections, across social fields, from entertainment television and conservative talk shows to political campaigns, social media, and social movements. In many respects, the conspiratorial mode we trace here—which both uni- versalizes conspiracy and scales it down to the maneuverings of a small group of schemers—takes a sharp representational turn from the twentieth-century’s coldly rational conspiracies. In House of Cards and Scandal, fluctuations in affective, interpersonal economies drive political change. In style and con- tent, these shows share more in common with seventeenth- and eighteenth- century theater, which often portrayed individual social and political actors as inherently deceitful and secretive, than they do with Cold War narratives of large-scale conspiracy, institutional actors, and subversion from within. As the historian Gordon Wood has shown, the belief that human duplicity could set historical events in motion lay at the heart of political thought and artistic production during the Enlightenment, in part because it resolved one of the epoch’s central contradictions: the difference between what people say and what they do.3 However, the programs we analyze here do not simply rehash a centuries-old aesthetic or conspiratorial logic; their rendering of conspiracy has qualities unique to the technologically mediated world in which we live. Most notably, in these productions, the dynamics of revelation, exposure, and The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television | 835 scandal differ radically from both Western Enlightenment and US Cold War narratives of conspiracy, in which plotters seek, at all costs, to avoid all three. Adverse exposure in House of Cards and Scandal is not a disaster or tragedy. It is just something to be carefully managed by power brokers and politicians in relation to other overlapping conspiracies. Further, the characters in these shows themselves deploy conspiracy and scandal as public relations tools. An ongoing barrage of scandals, sometimes publicized, sometimes neutralized, becomes the fortress or smokescreen that allows the political machinations of House of Cards and Scandal to operate beyond the public’s gaze. Scandals become almost self-generating, so routine and expected that they lose their emotive capacity (indeed, Scandal might as well have been called The Death of Scandal). In what follows, we explore four dimensions of this new conspiratorial mode as it is manifested in popular culture. First, we argue that it sidesteps the epistemological considerations that were so central to twentieth-century conspiracies. Conspiracy becomes ontological, the very substance of politics itself as opposed to a deviation from politics as usual. In this mode, making a scheme publicly known is not an extinction-level event for the conspiratorial world. In fact, the constant exposure of partial conspiracies performs important maintenance work that ensures the integrity of a conspiratorial politics. Second, we trace an alternate lineage for conspiracy that locates it within the strategies and tactics of professional public relations. Exposure and scandal generation, which long existed in the service of investigation, are no longer tactics of the conspiracy theorist. In this new mode, they become the management tools that conspirators (now the primary protagonists) and political actors use to fortify their own plans—not the weapons used to take them down. We show how public relations, as a set of tools, strategies, and means for managing relation- ships, allows for the growth of a conspiratorial world that kaleidoscopically configures and reconfigures itself behind closed doors. Third, we contend that conspiracy alienates the public and the political in these productions. Scandal, communicated to the public by a denuded journalism, becomes the means by which a sealed-off, conspiratorially constituted political world communicates with an amorphous, unwitting, and depoliticized public. The result is that in each show the public becomes a metaphor used by those in power to conjure a nonpolitical reality, distant from the real machinations of power. Finally, we suggest that affect is key to understanding the political worlds in which these shows’ protagonists operate. Affect, manifested as relations of jealousy, anger, loyalty, or love, drives conspiracy and becomes the glue that holds the social 836 | American Quarterly

and political together. The web of secrets that characters weave as they engage in conspiratorial behavior renders their intimate relationships political. We conclude with a discussion of conspiracy and the 2016 presidential election. We suggest that the simultaneous celebration of competence and artifice in these shows redefines political engagement along affective lines for an audi- ence increasingly cynical about formal politics and accepting of behaviors that would, in past political seasons, be seen as scandalous.

Scandal

Since its debut in 2012, Scandal has been one of the most popular television shows on primetime, with millions of viewers tuning in Thursday nights to watch the exploits of Olivia Pope, a savvy, quick-thinking political whose crisis management firm specializes in delivering high-end clients from difficult situations. However, problems cannot be fixed by winning over hearts and minds alone: “collateral damage” mounts quickly. Played by , Pope combines formidable foresight, intellect, and gut instinct, which is the secret to her professional success and allure. Her ongoing affair with Republican president Fitzgerald Grant, who often needs her more than she needs him, guar- antees her a seat at the highest-stakes tables in Washington, DC. Her strained relationship with her father, Rowan Pope, who is “Command” at the shadowy Deep State Government division B613, and her romance with former B613 agent Jake Ballard further position her within a deeply conspiratorial milieu. While racial politics are only occasionally foregrounded in Scandal, the show features an African American leading lady and one of the most diverse casts on primetime. According to Nielsen data, it does well across the coveted eighteen-to-forty-four demographic and attracts a large and loyal African American audience.4 The show was cocreated by , whose work includes Grey’s Anatomy and How to Get Away with Murder, and whose television production company, , dominates ABC’s Thursday night lineup. Olivia Pope’s character is modeled, in part, on , who calls herself “America’s #1 Crisis and Reputation Management Expert.” Smith worked for the George H. W. Bush White House, seeing it through crises like the Clarence Thomas nomination, the first Gulf War, and the 1992 Los Angeles riots.5 She is co-executive producer of Scandal and, in 2012, published the book Good Self, Bad Self: Transforming Your Worst Qualities into Your Biggest Assets. The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television | 837

House of Cards

In a deal worth over one hundred million dollars, Netflix outbid HBO and AMC for House of Cards, guaranteeing two seasons of the show upfront. Based on the 1990 BBC miniseries of the same name, House of Cards was the stream- ing service’s first foray into scripted entertainment and its first experiment in the simultaneous release of an entire season’s episodes.6 The show follows the Machiavellian maneuverings of power-couple Frank and Claire Underwood ( and ) as Frank rises from South Carolina Demo- cratic senator and majority whip to president of the . Set in a highly stylized version of Washington, DC, Frank’s ascent is based solely on cunning, manipulation, and a Macbeth-style willingness to kill off characters who stand in his way. House of Cards’ Washington is an insular city where any- thing goes and formal political processes have been chucked out the window. While its audience size is difficult to quantify, the political drama is enor- mously popular among Netflix subscribers.7 The show has been nominated for thirty-three Emmys, with its acting and screenwriting garnering particular acclaim.8 The drama’s most notable feature, however, is its darkly cynical take on the political process, which some critics suggest marks a “shift from political idealism to social cynicism.”9 Like the English original, the American version also features fourth-wall-breaking asides. When Frank turns to the camera and reveals his true feelings about other characters, detailing his sordid plans, he creates an out-of-earshot intimacy with the audience that allows viewers to identify with him. From lobbyists to hatchet people, from journalists to the secret service, the show creates a dark universe made of personal transgres- sions and secrets. House of Cards’ delicate mixture of slow-paced cynicism, fever-pitched melodrama, and deft promotional strategies makes the show’s conspiratorial world feel strangely intimate and familiar, allowing it to resonate with the contemporary political moment in the United States in a singular way.

From Conspiracy Theories to Conspiratorial Worlds

In 1947 Karl Popper defined as “the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon (sometimes it is a hidden interest which has first to be revealed), and who have planned and conspired to bring it about.”10 Extrapolating from Popper, a conspiracy occurs when a motivated, self-interested group devises and enacts a plot to bend some portion of the world to its design. Twentieth-century conspiracies ran the gamut from 838 | American Quarterly

those that attained widespread credibility (Watergate or Project MKUltra) to those whose credibility quotient faced an uphill battle (UFO abductions or Bill Kaysing’s attempt to expose the landing as a hoax).11 If these con- spiracies were marked by secrecy and invisibility, conspiracy theory, then, was aimed at making their conspiratorial relationships visible. In a sense, conspiracy theorists are publicists for the conspiratorial model of social relations Popper describes above. Thus, those who expose conspiracies—be they independent researchers, partisan activists, whistleblowers, detectives, or investigative jour- nalists—perform multiple functions: they bring specific conspiracies to light, throw wrenches into said conspiracies, and, culturally speaking, promote the broader existence of conspiracy as a social force and explanatory mode. If Popper saw in conspiracy theories the rise of an unsophisticated socio- logical model, Richard Hofstadter recognized that conspiracy theory had deep historical roots in the United States. Hofstadter’s “Paranoid Style in American Politics,” written at the height of the Cold War, suggested that American politi- cal discourse was shot through with a “paranoid mode of expression.”12 From the Puritans’ fear of Catholics to the anticommunists’ House Un-American Activities Committee, the nation has long imagined itself existing precariously in a “hostile and conspiratorial world” besieged by a wide and shifting array of enemies.13 Hofstadter launched an approach to thinking about conspiracy theory we call epistemic-rational. Following Hofstadter, a number of scholars and cultural critics viewed conspiracy theory as a dangerous symptom of populist irrationality and impediment to the achievement of political goals, especially on the left.14 For the epistemic-rationalists, the prevalence of con- spiracy theories is a barometer of the ease with which popular opinion can be seduced by elite demagoguery. The 1990s and early 2000s saw the rise of a competing approach to con- spiracy theories that we call epistemic-cultural. George Marcus, for instance, notes that much of the earlier work, including Hofstadter’s, had no appreciation for the “reasonableness” of conspiratorial thinking.15 Far from existing on the fringes of American society, conspiratorial thought, he argued, was central to US and Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War and can be found in variants of social theory. The epistemic-cultural scholarship recognizes conspiracy theory as a popular “form of explaining power and as a practice of interpreting the world.”16 Much of it focuses on how and why individuals believe in conspiracy theories, how belief informs political practices, and whether conspiracy cultures contain radical political potentialities.17 Jack Bratich, for example, posits a field of knowledge/power in which forms of dissent are marginalized and managed The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television | 839 through their classification as conspiracy theory.18 The touchstone for both the rationalists and the culturalists is the Cold War, which Kathryn Olmsted argues promoted a “certain conspiracist style—a deep pervasive fear of hidden plotters.”19 For many of these authors, conspiracism is a historically emergent phenomenon tied to US policy that had tangible psychological consequences for Americans’ understanding of social and political reality. For scholars working in the epistemic-cultural vein, popular culture is a site where conspiracy culture flourishes.20 Peter Knight, for example, suggests that the entertainment media played a crucial role in diffusing the “rhetoric of conspiracy” into American culture through its narratives of infiltration, sedition, existential threat, social manipulation, and technological overreach.21 Timothy Melley argues that, by the 1990s, conspiratorial rhetoric, following the postmodern turn, had become fragmented, disorganized, and disconnected from formal political structures.22 He suggests that a distinct post–Cold War conspiratorial culture emerged in response to social and technological devel- opments, leading to “agency panic,” a profound sense of destabilization and dislocation that accompanies the realization that our lives are not our own.23 In popular culture, agency panic was expressed through conspiratorial narratives highlighting the mechanisms and institutions of social control, as in the 1990s television series The X-Files. The science-fiction crime thriller, which ran on Fox for nine seasons, followed FBI special agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully as they investigated the Bureau’s titular X-Files—unsolved cases that often involved the paranormal and extraterrestrial. Critics have noted the degree to which the show’s plotlines posed epistemological questions about truth and reality.24 The show’s slogans, “I want to believe,” “The truth is out there,” and “Trust no one,” succinctly capture these epistemological concerns, but complicate a rationalist quest for truth by invoking belief and trust as con- stitutive bases of knowledge. Similarly, its protagonists embody two different epistemological paradigms as they confront unexplained phenomena: Scully is a brilliant medical doctor and empiricist who seeks rational explanations for the unexplained phenomena she encounters, while Mulder is a savant- like bloodhound seeking the truth even if it is located outside conventional explanatory systems. In the show, conspiracy theory is inextricably bound to knowledge; unimpeachable evidence that the US government is collaborating with extraterrestrials might always be just beyond their grasp, but Scully and Mulder doggedly pursue the truth (now an empty signifier) no matter how elusive or costly. 840 | American Quarterly

The Ontology of Conspiracy

As the above discussion suggests, for all but the conspirators themselves, the acts of revealing, representing, and theorizing conspiracy are deeply epistemologi- cal exercises that foreground difficult questions of knowledge, proof, validity, and belief. Conspiracies are seemingly not knowable without an outsider (or outsider–insider) making them visible and intelligible. In the epistemologi- cal sense, conspiracies are abstruse but permeable entities, capable of being penetrated by a leak or an act of deep detection that produces evidence and attempts to alter public understandings of an event or set of relationships. Deep Throat’s advice to Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men is emblematic of the epistemological model of understanding conspiracy: “In a conspiracy like this, you build from the outer edges and go step by step. If you shoot too high and miss, everybody feels more secure. You put the investigation back months.”25 Conspiracy, however, becomes unhinged from epistemology in Scandal and House of Cards. These hit shows reveal the conspiratorial world, not just the representational strategies of the conspiracy theorist. They do not celebrate the exposure of conspiracies, nor do they depict those who wish to expose them as heroic or even competent. Like the shows’ labyrinths of claustrophobic, dimly lit stage sets, from which escape seems impossible, little exists beyond the conspiratorial realms themselves. Thus the political worlds Scandal and House of Cards depict are not epistemological. Characters are united by actions and relationships, not by shared beliefs or ideology. These relationships, founded in conspiracy, make up the totality of possible social and political arrangements the shows proffer, and the truth, or its revelation, represents no threat to this order. This shift toward ontology is not limited to television. It reflects a broader mode of thinking in which conspiracies are seen as the primary motivation of political actors and inform the public’s engagement with the political.

Conspiracy, PR, and the Practice of Fixing

Because the plans that characters in Scandal and House of Cards concoct are never foolproof, the invocation, necessity, and practice of “fixing” structure both shows. Characters lose control of events, carefully laid plans go awry, debilitating secrets are nearly revealed, and Pope, the Underwoods, and their small circle of allies attempt to fix the problems. Fixing, in these shows, means anything from reframing media messages, manufacturing crises, and blackmailing to figurative and literal character assassination. In this section we argue that public relations and crisis communication, and their epistemic The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television | 841 implications, the malleability and fungibility of truth, are central to these shows’ vision of political rationality. This indebtedness to public relations is overt in Scandal: Olivia Pope and Associates is a swashbuckling public relations agency (swashbuckling, because it operates without a professional code of ethics, save its own moral assessments and utilitarian calculations, and has an array of nontraditional tools, including torture and murder, at its disposal). Political competence and ingenuity are linked to the ability to concoct publicity stunts and temporarily manage crises. Despite frequent appeals to the “republic” and “justice,” Scandal discards any investment in the system or certain codes of political behavior (House of Cards has no guiding principles like social justice, morality, or the social contract). Democratic, deliberative politics, banished from both shows, leaves behind an entertaining accounting (almost a biopic) of manipulative behaviors, an individual record of one’s efforts and triumphs. Public relations and conspiracy first crossed paths during the Progressive Era, but to very different effect. If in House of Cards and Scandal public relations is the mechanism through which scandal and conspiracy are promulgated, the irony is that professional public relations arose in the early twentieth cen- tury precisely to extract conspiratorial imagery from the national discussion. Professional public relations emerged after 1900 as a response to the growing popularity and political power of investigative journalism, which exposed the economic monopolies that millionaires like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Clay Frick, and Cornelius Vanderbilt had built up during the Gilded Age.26 The era’s investigative reporters saw themselves as writer- activists who brought events that took place in the shadows of backrooms into the sunlight of publicity. For them, political and economic life in the United States was an oligarchy, and their task was to carefully detail the connections among the country’s wealthiest individuals and its elected officials and reveal these truths to the public. Though it is little recognized, early twentieth-century investigative reporting used a conspiratorial style to explain the operations of social and political power in the United States. The specter of concentrated power infused their writing, and they developed what Christopher Wilson calls an “anti-monopoly idiom” that described all manner of social problems as monopolies.27 While Hofstadter does not mention the Progressive Era in his “Paranoid Style” essay—and, indeed, the Progressive Era is a relatively neglected moment in the literature on conspiracy—large-scale conspiratorial thinking was normalized during this period. Unlike Marxism and developing strands of European sociology, individuals, whose misdeeds and ruthlessness investigative reporters carefully chronicled, 842 | American Quarterly

embodied power in these early twentieth-century productions. The reading public, in turn, responded with widespread distrust of business and government alike (particularly local government). Professional public relations emerged to confront this situation, to mediate between the press and the public and cast business and government in a less-conspiratorial, friendlier light. To that end, publicity specialists, often former reporters themselves, established publicity bureaus that attempted to smooth out and redirect the muckraking press’ relentless salvos of negative coverage by providing positive copy about corporations. They also created spectacles and events that turned audience at- tention away from the unequal concentrations of wealth as well as unethical and brutal corporate practices. Given journalism’s reputation as a “Fourth Estate” and bulwark against government and corporate conspiracies, the treatment of journalists in Scandal and House of Cards is revealing. In these dramas, the perspective shifts from the epistemological endeavors of investigators, whistleblowers, and eyewit- nesses to the ontological worlds of the conspirators. Although journalists are peripheral and disposable characters, each show opens with a significant (and significantly affective) romance between a reporter and a character at the center of a conspiracy. In Scandal, Cyrus Beene, who goes on to become President Grant’s chief of staff, was a coconspirator (along with Olivia Pope, the energy billionaire Hollis Doyle, Supreme Court Justice Verna Thornton, and the future First Lady Mellie Grant) in the Defiance, Ohio, voting machine fraud that delivered the White House to President Grant. For Scandal’s first three seasons, Cyrus is married to James Novak, a reporter he met during the presidential campaign. James longs for marriage and children, and willingly gives up his journalism career to be with Cyrus. Cyrus is a loving husband, but his aloof, secretive behavior trips James’s suspicions; working independently, James investigates the voting machines in Defiance and finds proof of election rigging. But it is not until Cyrus uses James as a sexual lure to bring down a political opponent that James decides to expose his husband’s monstrous politi- cal maneuverings. However, minutes before he goes public with information that would compromise the Grant administration, Cyrus has James and two other journalists gunned down in the street. House of Cards also begins with a conspiracy, a relationship, and a reporter’s murder. In the first season, House Majority Whip Frank Underwood has designs on the White House. His plan to become vice president involves sup- porting Peter Russo, a little-known Pennsylvanian congressman with a penchant for drugs, alcohol, and women, for . Through a labyrinthine set of The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television | 843 maneuvers, Underwood uses Russo to exploit the sitting vice president’s main weaknesses, envy and ambition, so that he will resign and Frank can assume his position. Frank eventually poisons Russo with carbon monoxide, a murder that Doug Stamper, Frank’s right-hand man, disguises as suicide. Meanwhile, Frank enters into a sexual relationship with Zoe Barnes, a young, naive reporter who feels that she is not taken seriously at the Washington Herald. The two use each other to advance their respective goals: Frank leaks Zoe information that helps undo Russo and advances his broader agenda, while Zoe uses her connection with Frank to become a major player in DC journalism, eventu- ally becoming a White House correspondent. After Zoe leaves the Herald for Slugline, an online venture, she begins to doubt Underwood’s account of Russo’s death. As she and two other journalists connect the dots, Frank grows fearful of exposure and pushes Zoe into an oncoming train. Like a retelling of All the Presidents’ Men in which Woodward and Bernstein are swiftly disposed of and G. Gordon Liddy is shown to be not only a genius but a romantic at heart, the epistemological is quickly killed off in these new productions, signaling a shift in dominance from journalism to public rela- tions. Conspiracy becomes relational, grounded in a rationality that emphasizes simulation and the incessant management of public knowledge. The shift is celebrated through the ceremonial sacrifice of journalists. But the fact that the ritualized killing occurs at all suggests the shift is relatively new (the produc- ers seem to be saying: “enjoy this fine historical moment”). Conspiracy, in this sense, becomes how one manages relationships and maintains power in a world in which public relations becomes the very field of reality on which characters operate. Aside from James and Zoe, the major conspiracies in Scandal and House of Cards are not accessible to outsiders. Indeed, for a journalist to come close to a conspiracy, the traditional epistemological means through which truth is ascertained (research, documentation, proof) are insufficient. Instead, to un- cover or expose conspiracy requires an affective ticket into the conspiratorial realm. In a world where conspiratorial relationships are intimately charged, a journalist needs to sleep with a conspirator to achieve a holistic view of the conspiracy. In House of Cards, Zoe sleeps with her colleague and former boss, Lucas, and eventually shares the details of her affair with Frank. Lucas begins investigating Frank after Zoe’s death, but Frank imprisons him under contrived charges as he closes in on the truth. After his release in the fourth season, Lucas tries to convince various parties that Frank is a murderer. When no one listens to or believes him, he comes unhinged and attempts to avenge 844 | American Quarterly

Zoe’s death by assassinating Frank. Meanwhile, the only other journalist in whom Zoe confides, Janine Skorsky, leaves the profession and begins teaching at a small college. Her fear and anxiety so deep that she develops a Xanax addiction. Journalists, therefore, are disposable lightweights who offer no real opposition to the contrivances of members of the inner circle. Entrance into the conspiratorial world requires a shared secret, in the form of an affair, a crime, or an act of violence. Journalists, incapable of balancing their desire to expose with the intimacy of the bounded conspiratorial world, are eventually undone by these contradictory imperatives. But if, as we have argued, an interminable series of adjustments and fixes constitutes the social universe of these shows, with politics becoming an end- less series of crises to manage, then at whom are these fixes aimed? It is not the public, because, as we show, the public is largely absent from these new political dramas, as a shrunken, impotent public, rendered nonpolitical, is a key feature of conspiratorial ontologies.

The Disappeared Public

Among other things, House of Cards and Scandal are dramas about the lengths that leaders will go to ensure political survival. The Underwoods are modern- day Macbeths who will stop at nothing to cling to their ill-begotten power. All of Scandal’s central characters have at times worked to protect the Grant administration from usurpers. Leadership, in these worlds, is not attained legitimately, either by mobilizing large blocks of the electorate or building winning coalitions. Instead, characters tamper with voting machines, back- handedly plot the undoing of erstwhile political allies, and coldly dispose of anyone threatening their ambitions. Both shows represent the United States as an election-rigged autocracy in which a small cadre of people wield power without input from citizens, who are largely invisible and impotent. In these conspiratorial political worlds, the public is effectively disappeared, an opera- tion that dislocates elections, foreign policy decisions, and policy debates from voters, public opinion, or any other observable administrative and deliberative process. The small group of power-hungry manipulators who make political decisions encounter the public only when their backs are against a wall or as a metaphor for an apolitical world. The public, then, becomes a nebulous reality occurring elsewhere. Scandal invokes the public through metaphors about light. But sunlight does not indicate transparency or the “social good” as it did during the Pro- The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television | 845 gressive Era. Instead, sunshine is a metaphor for a nonpolitical fantasy world divorced from the political intrigue driving the show. Olivia and her lover, Jake, fantasize about fleeing troubles and affective entanglements and “standing in the sun” together. Since they cannot live a normal life within their political sphere, emancipation requires evacuating that environment. They do escape the political for an island paradise in season 3’s finale. However, roughly five minutes into season 4, Olivia gets pulled back to DC for a funeral, and their “in-the-sun” screen time ends abruptly. If freedom and happiness are associated with an escape from the affective, conspiratorial attachments that define one’s political life, Scandal’s scenes largely take place in a cold, gray Washington, DC. The message is clear: sunshine is for other people, for the public. If you want to be part of the political world, you have to give up on your personal ideals and any notion of a public politics. Olivia and company aspire to escape the dark and live in the light, to wear the “white hat” instead of the “black skull cap,”28 but salvation is elusive—not because opportunities do not present themselves or they do not know how to attain it, but because the public and the political are incommensurable with each other. The public’s apolitical unreality is also evident in House of Cards, where both Claire and Frank find momentary “escape” on metaphorical islands. When the series begins, Claire’s island is the photographer Adam Galloway, a former lover to whom she runs when the political pressure boils over. Frank’s island is Freddy’s BBQ joint, a DC restaurant in a poor neighborhood where he goes at seven in the morning to eat ribs and escape Washington politics. However, as the show unfolds, both Adam and Freddy Hayes, the proprietor of Freddy’s BBQ, are drawn into and consumed by Frank and Claire’s political quagmires. If in Scandal Olivia and Jake’s affective entanglements and obligations inexo- rably pull them away from their island Eden, in House of Cards Claire and Frank embody their political reality, producing a black hole–like gravity that crushes everything near it. Perhaps because of this destructive tendency, Claire and Frank also find respite in solitary exercise and leisure activities. Claire has her frequent late-night runs, and Frank enjoys his rowing machine and video games, especially Call of Duty. For Frank, video games do not emancipate him from the political as much as offer a momentary anonymity that allows him the opportunity to reconstitute his political reality in another sphere through a different set of relationships. He stares at the screen with a childlike innocence and gleefully destroys other players—in these moments he is a conspiracy of one slowly absorbing the entire world. 846 | American Quarterly

The boundaries between a capable political world and an ineffectual public are made particularly clear in “The Lawn Chair,” a Scandal episode about police brutality.29 The DC Police Department asks Olivia to “fix” the ensuing controversy after a white police officer murders a black teenager. The situation intensifies when the teen’s father, convinced that his son did not provoke the officer, arrives with a shotgun and holds the crime scene hostage. Olivia initially tries to use her connections to fix the problem, promising the father that the US attorney general will personally oversee the investigation into his son’s death. However, the AG will not come down because Olivia has temporarily broken up with the president and lacks some of her typical powers. Crowds gather to support the boy’s father, while Marcus, the protest leader, accuses Olivia of working with the police and questions her racial identity and political beliefs. In doing so, he is also questioning her existential status—Olivia is suddenly out in the open, forced to operate in a world where race, partisanship, and class function differently than they do in her conspiratorial milieu. Chastened by Marcus’s attack and convinced of the young man’s innocence, Olivia switches sides and joins the protesters, effectively becoming part of the public. In a telling shot, just as the police prepare to shoot the boy’s father and violently suppress the growing crowd, the officer in charge sees Olivia and cancels the operation. The message is clear: the only reason the police cannot forcibly disperse the crowd is because Olivia lives in a different political reality, one above their pay grade. The political elsewhere is made even clearer in the episode’s resolution. Olivia and her team prove the boy’s innocence by hacking police video from that night. The white officer is charged with murder, and the AG initiates an investigation into the DC police. The murdered teenager does not get justice because of the protests. The public has no efficacy; it is not political. Rather, Olivia’s personal involvement relocates the problem into a different political reality where it can be addressed and solved. In House of Cards, the public’s otherworldliness is captured in a scene in which Frank campaigns at a college and attempts to engage a young demonstra- tor chanting “Blunderwood, Blunderwood, Blunderwood” by asking what she thinks he should do. “You should resign,” she says. Frank repeats, gently, that he is not asking for her vote, but simply wants to know what she would do in his position. The protester responds, “You are ruining our country.”30 The exchange is awkward because Frank has no relationship with actual voters. A deep ontological chasm divides Frank’s world from that of the protester; his bashful engagement with the public shows how foreign that world is to him. Moments later, Frank is shot by Lucas Goodwin, the enraged ex-reporter, in The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television | 847 yet another pathetic attempt by a journalist to exercise power. Here, the force of the public is articulated as a gunshot. In both shows, liminal characters are transformed when they cross the stark boundary between the public and political worlds. In Scandal, one border figure is former vice president and occasional Grant administration enemy, Sally Langston. An arch-conservative and moralist, Langston is an insider cast out of Scandal’s conspiratorial world. As Grant’s vice president and then as his presidential opponent, she feverishly attempts to seize power while hiding a secret: she murdered her gay, adulterous husband. After losing the election, Sally becomes host of an O’Reilly Factor–style news show called the Liberty Report. In her role as political talk show host, she mediates the public’s relation with the political world, conveying her insider knowledge of Washington, DC to a vast imputed audience. But rather than hear the whole story from an insider, the Liberty Report audience only learns a sliver of the intrigue, which is delivered as bite-sized bits of scandal. Sally’s own sordid secret keeps her from relaying the truth about the conspiratorial political world. As a liminal figure, she is always policing the public–political boundary—keeping big, untouchable secrets while exposing selective details. Members of the media, therefore, serve as proxies for the public in both dramas. In House of Cards, the protester and Frank have nothing to talk about, while Lucas and Frank share boundary-crossing secrets. As an intermediary, Lu- cas can enter and briefly alter the political world. However, journalists’ attempts to influence events only result in an internal reorganization of the political reality and the generation of new conspiratorial relations that are unrelated to the public’s concerns and actions. In both shows, the public’s normative force only occurs through its occasional and often brutal relation with the political. Because the two worlds are incommensurable, scandal becomes the language through which the walled-off conspiratorial and public worlds speak to each other, as with Sally’s Liberty Report. Since the political does not directly com- municate with the public, political change does not occur through engagements with the public. Instead, it occurs through changes in conspiratorial relations. In the next section we argue that these relations are construed not as structural in these political dramas but as interpersonal and affective.

Conspiracy as Affect

According to Andreas Schedler, election-rigged autocracies seek “to reap the fruits of electoral legitimacy without running the risk of electoral uncertainty.”31 848 | American Quarterly

As the “winning coalition” in election-rigged systems shrinks from a majority coalition of voters to a smaller group of conspirators, so the bonds of loyalty that tie the coalition to the leader intensify. Loyalty is strong in these systems because of the high cost of political ostracism if a challenger successfully over- throws the incumbent.32 Since the secrets and knowledge that insiders possess are potentially regime toppling, leaders pay a similarly high price for loyalty. Thus much of the drama of these new political shows arises from the torsions and tensions of ambition, loyalty, secrecy, power, and love. We argue that the locus of these emotional states is the conspiracies themselves; affect is the nexus connecting the individual character and the conspiracy. To understand these fictive worlds, therefore, it is necessary to examine affective relationships, often expressed as secrets shared between characters and the environment that emerges from these relations. Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank as well as Lauren Berlant advance affect as a sociocultural concept that renders the emotional noise of everyday politics audible.33 Affect diverges from a psychological focus on emotion by connecting human feeling to the social and political world without reducing it to cognition or embodied pleasure or pain. Complex and infinitely combinable, affects “can be, and are, attached to things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions, and any number of other things, including other af- fects. Thus one can be excited by anger, disgusted by shame, or surprised by joy.”34 We suggest that in Scandal and House of Cards affect is the glue holding the conspiratorial world together. Emotion and affect operate in two registers in House of Cards and Scandal. First, individual characters are motivated by their particular emotional makeup, comprising a range of other-oriented and often-conflicting emotions. Pride, envy, or love, for instance, are emotional states one experiences in relation to other people. When a character finds herself torn between hubris, conscience, devotion, and love, which feeling will prevail? Decisions based on these war- ring emotional states are often far more disastrous than any external threat of exposure. For example, Frank in House of Cards hates to be bullied and can make dreadful decisions based on pride and an absolute refusal to be pushed around. He is willful, at times to his own detriment. Other characters are torn between loyalty and betrayal, and the political worlds they inhabit are constantly under stress by the proliferation of conspiracies and others’ efforts to undermine them. Second, when these emotions are put in relationship with others, they become affective, capable of carrying political implications and possibilities. The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television | 849

Frank’s partnership with Claire, for instance, renders him both strong and vulnerable. As they grow distant in season 3, an affective anomie sets in that only ends when Lucas shoots Frank the following season. Frank and Claire’s reinvigorated partnership buoys Frank and drives most of season 4’s plotlines. But unlike Frank, whose only intimate relationship is with Claire, Claire has fulfilling intimate relationships with two other characters: Adam Galloway, the photographer, and Tom Yates, a writer Frank has commissioned to write a book on America Works, his administration’s signature piece of legislation (and with whom Frank also enjoys a kind of intimacy). If intimacy can render a character weak or strong, it can also shore up a conspiracy. When Frank ap- proaches Tom about his affair with Claire and asks whether the author still plans to write a scathing magazine spot about the Underwoods, Tom responds: “I could never betray her like that.”35 Skill and competence in both shows are connected to the ability to read oth- ers and judge the affective (and therefore political) outcomes of certain actions. In Scandal’s world, this skill establishes Olivia as a powerful behind-the-scenes political player. Gut instinct, not intellect, informs Olivia’s most important decisions. Olivia rationalizes these decisions by reminding others that her gut rarely falters. Her clients, lovers, and associates stake their lives on Olivia’s gut because it works so well. It knows people. It understands how to manipulate others’ desires and weaknesses. Olivia’s missteps occur when her gut fails her, which only happens when her feelings about Jake, her father, or Fitz make her vulnerable. Olivia, Frank, and Claire might have some personal charisma and charm, but none are Svengalis who have built up a cult of personality. They are successful because of their skill at conducting affective forces. Affect renders the political world knowable and malleable to the few who possess real instinct. Political failure occurs when emotion weakens their affective instincts. Further, affect is the ontological substance of conspiracy in these political dramas. Insiders share secrets that must be carefully managed. Characters become existentially entwined through the sharing, keeping, and careful management of these secrets. Affect’s constitutive role is evident in Frank’s relationship with his right-hand man, Doug Stamper, a brooding, recovering alcoholic. Doug protects Frank’s most intimate secrets—he affectively belongs to Frank. By managing Frank’s secrets, Doug makes Frank’s political world possible while also shading that world’s edges. Frank’s world would fall apart without Doug, and Doug would be nothing without Frank. Similarly, in Scandal, Olivia and Fitz’s sticky-as-syrup affair is the show’s launching point. The love-torn characters leave a tide of conspiracies with different affective 850 | American Quarterly

dimensions in their wake as they desperately pursue each other. Fitz flirts with sacrificing his presidency and marriage for Olivia, and Olivia repeatedly sac- rifices her integrity, her white hat, for Fitz. Indeed, a primordial pool of affect and public relations gives birth to Defiance, the show’s founding conspiracy. In a flashback episode, Cyrus convinces Olivia to help rig the election by arguing, “People like Fitz, they go down in history. People like us, we create the history. We run this world so he can lead it.” Olivia responds that Fitz’s election must be legitimate. Cyrus retorts, “The way this world works, the people is you and me and Hollis and Mellie and Verna. We’re the people.”36 Cyrus’s speech plays on Olivia’s love for Fitz by suggesting that love has political implications—in this case, it means rigging the election so Fitz can be president. The political worlds of Scandal and House of Cards are affectively volatile, dangerous places, where shifts in relationships render serious political changes. Affective, politi- cal forces seep into the public through sound bites or micro-scandals that are either promulgated by the conspiratorial world or leak out of them. Through the sharing of secrets, the shows encourage audiences to believe that they can know the affective character of political actors, giving them the opportunity to confidently make political choices based on the personal “char- acter” of politicians. Conspiracy, not policy, is the means by which politicians advance their goals, and conspiracy is motivated by affect. Divining the affect of politicians is the only clue the public has to understanding their motives and predicting their deeds. Political engagement is an affective activity—an intimate form of political participation. Increasingly we have seen these affec- tive tendencies pervade political discourse, lending the conspiratorial worlds of House of Cards and Scandal an eerie and disturbing normative force in both entertainment media and the realm of US electoral politics.

Conclusion: A Conspiratorial Polity: Affect, “Fake Politics,” and the 2016 Presidential Election

If the election of Donald Trump can be partly blamed on the proliferation of what Democrats and liberals are calling “fake news”—purely fabricated stories, many of them trafficking in conspiracy theories, that proliferate on social media—­­then dramas like House of Cards and Scandal are entertainment television’s equivalent of fake news. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, both shows encouraged a blurring between television politics and Washington politics. Scandal’s fifth season featured candidates with similar résumés and policy proposals to Donald Trump’s and ’s.37 At the height of The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television | 851 the primaries, readers of ’s web version were encouraged to cast votes for their favorite Scandal candidates, whose platforms were detailed alongside campaign posters with slogans like “Embrace America’s Tomorrow.”38 Netflix/House of Cards encouraged this blurring even more than Scandal/ABC; it commissioned pieces like the aforementioned “Ascent,” and, in a far more grandiose gesture, it collaborated with the acclaimed painter Jonathan Yeo and the Smithsonian’s Portrait Gallery to unveil a massive portrait of Kevin Spacey as Frank Underwood, which now sits down the hall from the Presidential Portrait Gallery. Yeo had this to say about the installation:

The Smithsonian encouraged this deliberate blurring of the distinction between reality and artifice and the fact that the painting is obviously of a performance, but it’s a performance in particular of a fictional character in a real job. The fact we’re doing it in the city where the real events happen, in a gallery where they have the most famous collection of political portraits in the world, and obviously most of the best presidential portraits. It plays on that further.39

At roughly the same time, television critics were gauging the respective realism of Scandal and House of Cards. columnist Alyssa Rosenberg claimed that Scandal, not House of Cards, was the more realistic show, the one that really “got” the wildly unpredictable political primaries of 2016. She described House of Cards as “the establishment to the insurgency of ‘Scandal,’ Jeb Bush to Shonda Rhimes’s Trump-like showmanship.”40 Television critics at the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and A.V. Club all weighed in on each show’s realism quotient.41 Such assertions of realism indicate that each show attained hyperreal status, becoming what Umberto Eco calls an “authentic fake” or what Jean Baudrillard calls the fourth “order of the image,” where simulations come to seem more authentic than the things to which they refer (much as the “fake news” of Breitbart or lone fake news entrepreneurs strikes many Trump supporters as more authentic than stories from “real” news outlets, which they view as lies).42 The message of Baudrillard’s hyperreal, and of Scandal and House of Cards, is that all that is required to “take your place among the greats” is to produce a simulation on par with other versions. This reality effect stems, in part, from these shows’ “trust your gut” resonance, their implicit confirmation that we do not need to know about issues, policy, history, or current events to understand the political world. Within this context, categories like truth, falsity, or reality make less sense than those of resonance, intuition, and affective confirmation.House of Cards feels real. Posts circulating on Facebook before the 2016 election that Hillary Clinton was participating in a child sex-trafficking ring operating out of a 852 | American Quarterly

Washington, DC, pizza joint resonated with members of the electorate who already viewed her as a supervillain. It makes intuitive sense that a spate of bomb threats against Jewish community centers might be false flag operations conducted by opponents of the president to “make people look bad,” as Presi- dent Trump suggested during a February 2017 meeting with state attorneys general. In other words, believability relies neither on a truth–falsity distinction nor the depth and provability of a claim but on the serrated logic of public relations in which the index of a story’s plausibility is its ability to conjure the political world through a logic of exposure. While the term post-truth has gained traction among commentators since the 2016 election, it strikes us that what has shifted are the standards of verification, such that, for some, a fact is required to be affectively rather than epistemologically supported. In other words, the only way to judge the “truth” of a claim is through its interpersonal and instrumental value to a political group. Does it resonate with that group’s understanding of a politician’s affective “character?” Does it build and main- tain relationships and bring about some desired result? (Not coincidentally, relationship building and the instrumental production of belief constitute the bread and butter of public relations.) House of Cards and Scandal themselves rely on an affective conspiratorial model to keep audiences watching. Audiences and critics know that the shows are fictive, but they suspect that they have accomplished something substantial: representing politics as it really is. This reality effect, in part, derives from the same dynamic of secret sharing that builds relationships, secures loyalty, and generates mutual admiration in the shows. This process can be glimpsed in a scene from season 3 of House of Cards, in which Frank and the writer Tom Yates play a cat and mouse game. Tom wants to understand Frank so that he can write an authentic account of the president’s rise from poverty to the White House. But Frank continually deflects the author, refusing to tell him anything authentic about himself. In one episode, he chides Tom: “You don’t know what it’s like to go through life looking over your shoulder. Having secrets no one would understand—.”43 Tom, in response, confesses that he did not write his best-selling book: the real author was a friend who died and left behind a bril- liant unfinished manuscript that Tom completed and called his own. For this confession, Frank rewards Tom with an authentic revelation about his marriage to Claire—“I’ve always, from day one, been ashamed she said yes when I asked her to marry me.”44 In these mutual admissions, we see simultaneous shame and pride around simulation and secrecy. But if Frank and Tom recognize each other in these admissions of dishonesty, there is also a mutual recognition of competency, of the ingenuity it requires to achieve success. The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television | 853

Just as shared secrets draw the two men together, so being privy to confiden- tial, behind-the-scenes information pulls the audience into the affective fold. Viewers get to partake in these shows’ conspiratorial worlds, now configured as the site of politics. Frank’s trademark asides render the audience intimate friends and political insiders, encouraging us to empathize with him, even root for him, to recognize him as a winner, someone who can achieve political victo- ries. But because the political has been rendered affective, political competency is recast as winning despite deep ethical fallibilities, personal weaknesses, or even an outright failure to represent a voting public. Weaknesses (in terms of both personal characteristics and attachments to scandal) are okay as long as you prevail in the end. Triumphing, overcoming, or surviving does not entail reconciliation, regret, or change, and it is this linking of personal fallibility with virtuosity and success that makes up the substance of the secret shared with the audiences of House of Cards and Scandal, and that makes the message of both shows far more amenable to the politics of Trump than their creators might suspect. Because intimate relationships take precedence in ontologically conspiratorial worlds, competence in these productions requires a far different skill set than the political expertise, diplomacy, and statesmanship we associ- ate with successful politicians and policymakers. When affect is politicized, jealousy, hatred, revenge, or love take on greater immediacy than abstract poli- cies or complex social issues like racism, gender equality, poverty, or climate change, which become nearly unintelligible within the framework on offer. Throughout the 2016 election cycle, Trump the candidate weathered an avalanche of serious and disturbing allegations that threw his judgment and character into question. He denied, dismissed, redirected, and bristled at each scandalous story about bankruptcy, Trump University, or racialized housing policies and tenant intimidation. On , during interviews, and at rallies, he viciously lashed out at his accusers and chosen enemies: Hillary Clinton, Ted and Heidi Cruz, the media, Megyn Kelly, Judge Gonzalo Curiel, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, Alicia Machado, undocumented immigrants, Muslims, Mexicans, the Black Lives Matter movement, and women in general. While Democrats and liberals believed that each scandal would be his undoing, he not only survived, he triumphed. He did so, in part, by naming his foes, turn- ing political battles into interpersonal ones and reducing politics down to its ostensibly affective, interpersonal core. Trump used conspiracy to build his base and establish the freewheeling performative terms of his campaign. He spread birtherism and repeated National Enquirer allegations that Ted Cruz’s father was involved with the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald (based on sketchy 854 | American Quarterly

photographic evidence). Obama and Cruz were foreign, dangerous, conniving, and possibly seditious. Trump, on the other hand, used his personal failings to provide the mediated backdrop for his eventual victories. Like Frank whisper- ing to his audience, Trump speaks through Twitter to a personalized public attracted to candor, spectacle, and the radical intimacy of the experience. A conspiratorial politics requires simultaneous competency in whimsy, sorcery, sociopathy, perversity, persistence, and empathy. For both House of Cards and Scandal, the public political process is a sham, a ritualistic artifice concealing a conspiratorial real. Political actors participate in the theatrics of electoral politics while secretly operating in a political world unintelligible to democracy. Trump, likewise, does not try to expose his political enemies by delivering “facts”—the content of his accusations do not matter—instead, through his affective and evocative rhetoric, his conspiratorial incantations, and his sheer bullying, he magically conjures the conspiratorial worlds that House of Cards and Scandal offer as political reality, and reaps the benefits.

Notes We would like to thank our anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. The authors contributed equally to the essay. Their names are listed alphabetically. 1. George Yancy, “I Am a Dangerous Professor,” New York Times, November 30, 2016, www.nytimes. com/2016/11/30/opinion/i-am-a-dangerous-professor.html. 2. “The Ascent: Political Destiny and the Makings of a First Couple,” Atlantic (Sponsor-Content: Netflix), ca. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/house-of-cards/the-ascent/271/. 3. Gordon Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 39.3 (1982): 401–41. 4. Frank Pallotta and Brian Stelter, “African-Americans Propel Prime Time TV Hits like ‘Empire,’” CNN Money, January 28, 2015, money..com/2015/01/28/media/empire-blackish-murder. 5. “Judy Smith | Crisis Management Expert,” www.judysmith.com/. 6. Steven Rosenbaum, “Netflix’s Risky Strategy for ‘House of Cards,’” Forbes, February 5, 2013, www.forbes. com/sites/stevenrosenbaum/2013/02/05/netflix-riskystratedy-for-house-of-cards/#35cfb30d287a. 7. Andrew Wallenstein, “Netflix Ratings Revealed: New Data Sheds Light on Original Series’ Audi- ence Levels,” Variety, April 28, 2015, variety.com/2015/digital/news/netflix-originals-viewer- data-1201480234/. 8. “House of Cards,” Television Academy, www.emmys.com/shows/house-cards. 9. Bob Samuels, “From to House of Cards,” Huffington Post, February 17, 2014, www. huffingtonpost.com/bob-samuels/from-the-west-wing-to-hou_b_4803155.html. 10. Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 2002), 352. In Popper’s view, conspiracy theory is essentially wrongheaded social theory: the social world is too wild and unpredict- able, human ingenuity and foresight too limited, to predict or control the outcome of human actions. So, perhaps oddly, here is Popper, founding figure of postpositivism, basically undercutting the power of predictive social science. 11. Bill Kaysing, We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle (Cornville, AZ: Desert Publications, 1981). The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television | 855

12. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965). 13. Ibid., 4. 14. See Daniel Pipes, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (New York: Touchstone Book, 1999); Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Robert S. Robins, and Jerrold M. Post, Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). 15. George E. Marcus, “Introduction to Volume: The Paranoid Style Now,” in Paranoia within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation, ed. George E. Marcus (: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2. 16. Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 90. 17. See Jodi Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 18. Jack Z. Bratich, Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). 19. Kathryn S. Olmsted, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 9. 20. See Thomas Patrick Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From the Kennedy Assassination to the X-Files (London: Routledge, 2000). 21. Knight, Conspiracy Culture, 44. 22. Ibid., 40–45. 23. Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 24. Stephanie Kelley-Romano, “Trust No One: The Conspiracy Genre on American Television,” Southern Communication Journal 73.2 (2008): 105–21; Simon Irvine, and Natasha Beattie, “Conspiracy Theory, Pre-Millennium Tension, and the X-Files: Power and Belief in the 1990s,” Social Alternatives 17.4 (1998): 31–34. 25. All the President’s Men, directed by Alan J. Pakula (Los Angeles: Warner Bros., 1976). 26. Scott M. Cutlip, The Unseen Power: Public Relations, a History (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Associates, 1994). 27. Christopher P. Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens: Uni- versity of Georgia Press, 1985); Gretchen Soderlund, Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 28. “The Miseducation of Susan Ross,” Scandal, directed by Scott Foley, written by Shonda Rhimes and Raamla Mohamed, ABC, March 31, 2016. 29. “The Lawn Chair,” Scandal, directed by , written by Shonda Rhimes and Zahir McGhee, ABC, March 5, 2015. 30. “Chapter 43,” House of Cards, written by John Mankiewicz, directed by Robin Wright, Netflix, March 4, 2016. 31. Andreas Schedler, “Elections without Democracy: The Menu of Manipulation,” Journal of Democracy 13.2 (2002): 37. 32. Bruce Bueno De Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D. Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 33. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 34. Sedgwick and Frank, Touching Feeling, 19. 35. “Chapter 50,” House of Cards, directed by Kari Skogland, written by Tian Jun Gu, Netflix, March 4, 2016. 36. “A Criminal, a Whore, an Idiot and a Liar,” Scandal, directed by Stephen Cragg, written by Shonda Rhimes and Mark Fish, ABC, January 17, 2013. 37. Season 5 ended with a cliffhanger, of course; the victor will not be revealed until season 6 premieres in January 2017. 856 | American Quarterly

38. Natalie Abrams, “Scandal’s Five Presidential Candidates Pose for Your Vote in Exclusive Election Posters,” Entertainment Weekly, March 24, 2016, www.ew.com/article/2016/03/24/scandal-election- posters. 39. “Judy Smith | Crisis Management Expert.” 40. Alyssa Rosenberg, “‘House of Cards’ Is a Fraud. We Should Stop Treating It Like It’s Good,” Washington Post, March 14, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2016/03/14/house-of-cards-is-a- fraud-we-should-stop-treating-it-like-its-good/. 41. Emily Nussbaum, “Shark Week: ‘House of Cards,’ ‘Scandal,’ and the Political Game,” New Yorker, February 25, 2013, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/02/25/shark-week; Ari Melber, “The Ter- rible, True Insight of ‘House of Cards’: Bad People Run D.C.,” Atlantic, February, 12, 2013, www. theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/02/the-terrible-true-insight-of-house-of-cards-bad- people-run-dc/273063/; Ryan Mcgee, “Why Scandal Beats House of Cards at Its Own Game,” A.V. Club, February, 15, 2013, www.avclub.com/article/why-iscandali-beats-ihouse-of-cards-iat-its-own- ga-92545. 42. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1983); Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace, 1990). 43. “Chapter 33,” House of Cards, directed by John Dahl, written by , Netflix, February 27, 2015. 44. Ibid.