We don't need conspiracy, we have dialectic materialism. Similar to how for the most part manufacturing consent also doesn't rely on conspiracy (the New York Times and Dick Cheney nonwithstanding).
The failure of liberals may be a failure to read and understand the past.
The colloquial muddying of language concerning "conspiracy theory" was probably a government psyop in response to the JFK assassination. There, the officially endorsed theory was a lone wolf theory, that one guy did it by himself without any help or encouragement, and virtually all other theories were theories that involved one or more people conspiring in some way. From there, "conspiracy theory" morphed in media to mean any theory running counter to the official theory, even when the official theory was itself a theory about a conspiracy.
So, right-wing conspiracy theories tend to be more like: these three people secretly own everything through a hidden system of written contracts. Like "there's a secret room beneath Comet Pizza, specifically, where they buy and sell a chemical extract from the blood of scared babies"
And left-wing conspiracy theories tend to be more like: all the people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us. Like "billionaires are fucking us over. Since media companies are owned by billionaires a large part of what they broadcast is just pro-billionaire propaganda."
Conspiracy theories involve "people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us" by definition, that's what a "conspiracy" is.
And the right definitely believes that people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us. The "they" behind Pizzagate was "the Democratic Party."
And then there's "Cultural Marxism" (a conspiracy theory about the nefarious communist influence of Jews in academia), the "groomer" panic (a conspiracy theory that transgender identity is a cover for organized pedophile rings) white replacement theory, DEI, China anything and countless other conspiracies the right believes in that are based on some kind of racial or gender essentialism or prejudice.
The left has its share of that too, but the distinction you're trying to draw here makes no sense.
> "Conspiracy theories involve "people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us" by definition, that's what a "conspiracy" is."
No, that's not conspiracy. Conspiracy requires deliberate collusion between members of the conspiracy, it requires conspiring. If you have several people behaving in a way that appears coordinated because those people have aligned values and incentives, then it might be possible that those people have talked to each other and come up with some sort of a plan, which would make it a conspiracy, but it's also possible that no such organization exists and they're each independently doing whatever they think is correct in their circumstance. In that case, the emergent group behavior looks like a conspiracy but literally isn't a conspiracy.
This is what Manufacturing Consent talks about. I wish people would read it.
We don't need conspiracy, we have dialectic materialism. Similar to how for the most part manufacturing consent also doesn't rely on conspiracy (the New York Times and Dick Cheney nonwithstanding).
The failure of liberals may be a failure to read and understand the past.