To judge by the reception that extravagant claims sometimes receive, this diary may have some value even if it is stating the obvious.
Historical theories, if they merit so much as consideration, have to be posed in a way that is testable. They must be susceptible to both proof and disproof.
Therefore it's not enough that a theory sounds plausible. Lots of things may strike a person as plausible, but theories are not about what is plausible. Theories have to be measured against the evidence. You formulate a theory based on a body of evidence, and then test it against all the relevant information. You seek to identify evidence that would tend to prove the theory, as well as evidence that would disprove it. You test the theory for weaknesses, and if you find any, you modify or reject it. You try to destroy your own theory to see if it can actually stand up to scrutiny.
You don't just look to line up evidence in support of your theory. That's not a method of historical argumentation, not one worthy of the name.
You're not looking for a theory that merely explains what you're seeing. You're looking for the best possible explanation(s). You seek to understand a theory's limitations and weaknesses. Anybody can postulate an explanation that connects up some or even many dots. Connecting dots is just a first step toward proposing a theory, and proposing it is just the first step toward testing it.
The person advancing a historical theory has to show (1) that the phenomenon under discussion exists, (2) that the theory is a possible explanation of it, (3) that it is a likely explanation, and (4) that it is the best explanation of all the relevant evidence.
It's not always easy to reach consensus about the likelihood of theories (3), but you have to be able to prove (1) and (2) and make a good faith effort to demonstrate (4). Otherwise you're just blowing hot air.
For example, you might theorize that the German Third Reich imploded because of corruption. But you've got to face up to the problem of advancing beyond step (1): Did it in fact implode? Perhaps it was instead crushed by military force. Maybe there's no phenomenon to test—just projection onto the world by the theorist.
Besides, and even more fundamentally, the use of the word 'corruption' is so vague as to make the theory nearly untestable even if there was a phenomenon that can be described as an implosion. What are the marks of 'corruption'? What evidence would you try to find to disprove the existence of the phenomenon (if it does exist)? If there are measures taken to prevent 'corruption', for example, does that weigh for or against the existence of the phenomenon? Do non-corrupt acts count against the theory, or are they just cast aside while we tabulate corrupt acts? Does quantity matter more than quality of corruption?
Too often, these are the kinds of issues that never even suggest themselves to the kinds of people who would offer "corruption" as the explanation for the failure of the Third Reich. They see some scattered dots (examples of corrupt behavior) and are ready to link them up into an explanatory framework because they "make sense" that way. Sure they do. Causal frameworks are invented in order to bring observations into some kind of order that "makes sense". So the fact that an explanation seems to "make sense" is just another way of saying that it was advanced as an explanation. It tells you nothing more than the fact that a human mind created the explanation.
It "makes sense" that the US lost the Vietnam War because Presidents Truman and Eisenhower died. They were great war-time leaders, and both died shortly before Saigon fell. We all know the pitfall of post hoc ergo propter hoc, the fallacy of assuming that one thing caused another because it came first in time. But notice that such formulations are both untested and (usually) untestable. How do you test for something that didn't occur? Advancing an untestable theory is a basic and common mistake, and nothing the theorist does beyond that point has merit. The Truman/Eisenhower/Saigon theory is not even worth considering unless its proponent can reformulate it in a way that it can be tested against evidence and assessed against competing theories.
I'm prompted to comment because of a poorly defined conspiracy theory that has been greeted rather uncritically on the left. This theory ("The End of America") holds that because authoritarian conspirators often (the theory says always) do similar things (the theory says 10 things) in overthrowing constitutional governments and installing fascist regimes, and because things that resemble or evoke comparisons to such things are observable in America in recent years, therefore a conspiracy exists to achieve that in the US. Or maybe not quite an active conspiracy, but the danger that a conspiracy might come to exist, someday. Or perhaps there will just be a general fascist shift without an identifiable group of conspirators. Or something like that. The theory doesn't appear to be formulated clearly enough to define it, much less to test it.
A diary from yesterday still sits on the Recommended List here, seeking to bolster and expand this conspiracy theory by insinuating that "they" have begun the essential step of creating paramilitary mercenary forces to patrol the American countryside, like fascist Blackshirts. The shocktroops for a fascist coup are the Blackwater mercenaries who are guarding Wall Street now, we're told, just as they were hired to patrol New Orleans after Katrina. Heavens!
Except that the phenomenon exists only as a phantom, as a sleight of hand. The guards on Wall St. are from a private security firm, T&M, that works in corporate security. It doesn't supply mercenaries, as far as I can tell, nor is it Blackwater.
It's a modern equivalent of the infamous Pinkerton Agency, perhaps. The Pinkertons were dangerous and destabilizing; they served as corporate America's thugs (and they still exist). But they were not part of a fascist conspiracy to overthrow the state. This part of the theory fails because it hasn't bothered to do more than posit a plausible explanation for the presence of T&M guards in NYC...one that "makes sense". To test whether it's a necessary (or at least, a likely) theory, however, one of the first things the diarist should have done is to determine whether hyper-aggressive corporate guards are unprecedented. Of course they're not, and that's where the conspiracy theory starts to collapse. So the question of precedent is not even broached.
Part of the problem is that the diary pretends that there is a phenomenon, a pattern, when really there is but a single dot on the map. Blackwater was hired to patrol in New Orleans. That was deplorable and dangerous. Yet it doesn't make a pattern by itself. Katrina was a unique crisis, and a badly bungled one. The federal government's response was anything but methodical. So it isn't credible to maintain, without further evidence, that the hiring of Blackwater in NO was part of a concerted effort to impose mercenaries upon America or to create fascist shock troops.
The diary is not proposing an historical theory because it doesn't try to test the theory. It simply connects some dots (some of which don't appear to be logically connectable) and announces "voila". It's far from clear to me how the theory could be tested.
None of this is to say that the rise of mercenary troops in Iraq and elsewhere is anything other than extremely dangerous, unwise, and destructive. Nor do I deny the possibility that behaviors outside the US can get reflected back home. That's often what happens to imperial societies; there are genuine historical patterns worth considering.
Neither am I arguing that Bush & Co. is not lawless; has not trampled many liberties in America; and cannot destroy others before they're through. Nor do I pretend that we're not seeing many ominous trends that need to be reversed, practices that need to be rejected emphatically, if we're to preserve our liberties in the long term.
But we are facing real, deep-seated problems in this country. Social, political, legal, and economic norms are being discarded at an alarming pace. The institutions that are supposed to act as checks against radical change are failing to operate effectively. We need to face these real problems head on, with clear thinking about what they are and then how they're to be addressed.
We don't need to be boxing against ghosts. As far as I can see, the putative conspiracy to create a fascist revolution is a phantom, a figment of a 10 step model, a projection of fears onto a world that is already inclined to be fearful. There are stray bits of things, dots on the map, that could be assembled into a plausible looking secret conspiracy if that's your game. There always are. There were dots on the maps in the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, which also could have been assembled into such a theory. And there were similar theorists. What is lacking now, as then, is any demonstration that the dots ought to be connected at all, much less connected in that way.