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

Abstract

This essay traces an emerging tendency in popular culture to view conspiracy as the very substance of politics as opposed to a deviation from a nonconspiratorial norm. Television dramas like Scandal and House of Cards, which in some respects revive eighteenth-century conspiratorial imaginings, mark a radical rupture from twentieth-century depictions of coldly rational schemes, institutional actors, and subversion from within. In these shows, exposure and scandal generation are no longer investigative tactics used by conspiracy theorists to take down conspiracies. Instead, they are tools and strategies that plotters use to manage their relationships with the public and each other. The lineage we trace sidesteps the Cold War, locating the new conspiratorial mode within the strategies and tactics of public relations. 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 and largely powerless public. Political change occurs not through deliberation, policymaking, or activism but through reconfigurations in the interpersonal entanglements of conspiratorial actors. In the conclusion, we consider how the conspiratorial mode on offer in House of Cards and Scandal resonates with the current political climate in the United States.