1. "Excuse me ma'am, I speak wingnut." Ben Carson's comments linking the Kavanaugh accusations to the Fabian Society might sound like gibberish. But if you are fluent in right-wing mythohistory, it's perfectly logical.
2. It's not sufficiently appreciated that, aside from the New Deal proper, one of the biggest traumas on the American right was the massive victory of the Labour Party in the UK in 1945.
3. In 1945 an avowedly socialist party won power not in some alien country (like Russia) or small Western European country (like Sweden) or a rural hinterland (Saskatchewan) but in England, America's ally in 2 wars and seat of a global Empire.
4. The Labour Party victory in 1945 scared America's capitalist class: if socialism could win democratically in England, it could eventually win everywhere, even America.
5. Out of the Labour Party victory, right-wing American business committed itself to a propaganda project to discredit socialism, leading to the production of countless books, articles, pamphlets, comic books, & even animated shorts.
6. This was the era where truncated excerpts from Hayek's Road to Serfdom appeared in Reader's Digest and were circulated by the millions. Also: Elmer Fudd explained capitalism:
7. In the context of this anti-socialist push, the right had to explain how exactly did Labour Party win in England? That led to the emergence of a conspiracy theory or a bit of mythohistory: the Fabian Society was the root cause.
8. It's important to understand that going back to the French Revolution (blamed on the Illuminati & Masons) the right has always preferred to see radical political change as a result of conspiracies rather than caused by large social forces & democratic mobilization.
9. I'd argue that structurally speaking, some sort of conspiracy theory or mythohistory is necessary for the right. If they acknowledged change came from mass mobilization of groups with grievances (workers, women, POC) then they'd have acknowledge real grievances.
10. So instead of acknowledging politics based on mobilization against real problems (economic injustice, patriarchy, racism, imperialism) the preferred theory to blame some small group of eggheads (Illuminati, Masons, Fabians, Frankfurt School, Soros, etc).
11. The weird thing is that the Fabians were, in context of socialism, the most moderate form of social democracy: advocates of slow, gradual change over many decades or centuries: the herbivorous left.
12. Tangentially, the high-brow version of this is conservative intellectuals blaming large historical change on some philosophical heresy: gnosticism, nominalism, Machiavellianism, etc. As if ideas caused reality rather than reflected it.
13. So: in 1940s and 1950s, lots of right-wing Americans were grousing about Fabians. Ben Carson is echoing this distant conspiracy theory in his remarks.
