How can so many Americans believe the election was stolen?

There have been few surprises this past month in how Donald Trump has dealt with the reality of his electoral defeat.

Anyone familiar with his career could have predicted that he would claim to have been cheated out of victory. Anyone watching how he wielded power (or, more often, didn't) as president could have predicted that his efforts to challenge the election results would be embarrassing, ridiculous and dismissed with prejudice in court.

And anyone watching how the Republican Party dealt with his ascent could have predicted that its leaders would mostly avoid directly rebuking him, relying instead on the inertial forces of American democracy, the conscientiousness of judges and local officialdom, and Trump's own incompetence to turn back his final power grab.

So far, so predictable. But speaking as a cynical observer of the Trump era, one feature of November did crack my jaded shell a bit: the sheer scale of the belief among conservatives that the election was really stolen, measured not just in polling data but in conversations and arguments, online and in person, with people I would not have expected to embrace it.

The potency of this belief has already scrambled some of the conventional explanations for conspiratorial beliefs, particularly the conceit that the key problem is misinformation spreading downward from partisan news outlets and social media fraudsters to the easily deceived. As I watch the way certain fraud theories spread online, or watch conservatives abandon Fox News for Newsmax in search of validating narratives, it's clear that this is about demand as much as supply.

A strong belief spurs people to go out in search of evidence, a lot of so-called disinformation is collected and circulated sincerely rather than cynically, and the power of various authorities — Tucker Carlson's show or Facebook's algorithm — to change beliefs is relatively limited.

But what has struck me especially, is how the belief in a stolen election has spread among people I wouldn't have thought of as particularly Trumpy or super-partisan, who aren't cable news junkies or intensely online, who didn't even seem that invested in the election before it happened.

Drawn from my conversations in the past few weeks, here's an attempt at a taxonomy of these unlikely seeming fraud believers.

I say "normie" to reflect the reality that being open to the possibility of conspiracies is itself extremely normal and commonplace. There is nothing unusual, statistically speaking, about believing that a Cold War-era deep state assassinated John F. Kennedy or that the government is concealing evidence of UFOs. Conspiracy theories are common among Democrats as well as Republicans: Witness the polling on Russia's supposed tampering with vote totals in 2016 or George W. Bush's supposed foreknowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks; recall the voting-machine theory spun to explain John Kerry's narrow defeat in 2004.

This means you don't need a complex story about Facebook or Fox News to understand why a person who isn't intensely political might nonetheless be open to the idea that an election settled by tens of thousands of votes in a few key states was actually fixed for the winner. That kind of openness is just human nature — and not the worst part of human nature, either, given that conspiracies and coverups exist (the military really has been hiding weird evidence of UFOs!) and even wrongheaded theories often partake of a reasonable skepticism about elite malfeasance, from the Gulf of Tonkin era to the Jeffrey Epstein case.

What's happened in the past month with our open-minded normie, though, is that this openness has been validated by the president of the United States and his retainers in a way that other forms of conspiracy curiosity are not. There is a long-standing pattern in both political parties of gently encouraging conspiracizing. (The Diebold-stole-Ohio theories in 2004 were given oxygen by prominent congressional Democrats; MSNBC's Russiagate coverage was not exactly cautious in the theories that it entertained.)

But Trump is obviously different — higher-profile and more radical. He's a president, not a cable TV host or a congressman, and he's shouting allegations, any allegations, with no pussyfooting, hedging or deniability involved.

This, in turn, instills a perpetual suspicion about anything that seems to have too much of a liberal consensus defending it, especially any idea that gets mocked and laughed at more than it gets rebutted. And it creates a strong epistemological bias toward what you can only find out for yourself, as opposed to what Yale's experts or Twitter's warning labels or the New York Times might tell you.

In many cases the outsider-intellectual's approach generates real insight. (Anonymous right-wing Twitter was way out ahead of the coronavirus threat, for instance, at a time when official liberalism was still fretting more about xenophobia than the virus itself.) But it also tends to recapitulate the closed-circle problems of the official knowledge it rejects.

Thus the outsider-intellectual type looks at the no-voter-fraud consensus and immediately goes out in search of cracks in the pillar of official truth, anomalies that official certainty elides. A lot of the supposed evidence of fraud that circulates online comes from these efforts — not from grifts or lies (though grifters and liars do pick them up) but from sincere analyses of election data, which inevitably turn up anomalies here and there, which confirm the searchers' assumptions, which closes the circle and convinces them that the official narrative is false and voter fraud is real.

This final camp includes many of the people reading and circulating the outsider-intellectual analyses — people on the right whose perceptions of what liberal institutions and actors are capable of doing have been altered by the coronavirus era.

Many liberals have spent the Trump years worried about a kind of Reichstag Fire moment, a crisis that Trump might use as an excuse to consolidate authoritarianism. But a lot of conservatives experienced May and June of the COVID era as a mirror image of those anti-Trump fears — as a crisis that seemed to be deliberately exploited for revolutionary purposes by politicians and activists of the left.

Then, based on a single activist-amplified case of police brutality, the same experts and politicians suddenly abandoned restrictions for the sake of left-wing protests … which the official media pretended were peaceful even when they cut a violent swathe through American cities … which included a wave of iconoclasm against key symbols of American history … even as a new ideological vocabulary seemed to suddenly take over elite institutions … and dissenting figures were purged … and in the background the world's elites loudly announced that they were seeking a "Great Reset," a post-coronavirus new world order.

For the radicalized, all this felt stage-managed, prearranged — both as a further escalation in the establishment's battle against Trump, a successor to the Robert Mueller investigation and the impeachment push, and as an attempt to use the weirdness of the COVID situation to consolidate radical power within elite institutions.

Experiencing and interpreting the summer of 2020 this way primed people to expect further escalation in the fall: After all, if liberals exploited a pandemic to stage-manage an ideological revolution, why wouldn't they exploit all the weird features of pandemic voting to stage-manage the election outcome?

No doubt some of my liberal readers will find this question too ridiculous to even merit an answer. You can't argue someone out of a conspiracy theory, a common axiom goes, which means the only appropriate response to these ideas is condemnation and a kind of quarantine — to be achieved, presumably, through better Facebook algorithms, the comprehensive political defeat of the Republican Party and some sort of "have you no sense of decency, sir" courage from news anchors and political leaders whenever right-wing paranoia re-emerges.

I don't see any way that such efforts will work. (Certainly on the evidence of 2020, the Republican Party isn't going anywhere, let alone about to be "burned to the ground" as some anti-Trumpers hoped.)

But I've been argued in and out of a few outré theories in my life. (Only the best outré theories, I assure you.) And if you accept that there's more reasoning involved in conspiracy theorizing than official wisdom suggests, then once such theories achieve a certain prominence, there's an obligation to actually make the case against them rather than just laugh them away.

I am certain that these issues are connected to a larger and more important question for the future of the right. At the moment, the voter-fraud narrative is being deployed, often by people more cynical than the groups I've just described, to help an outgoing president — one who twice lost the popular vote and displayed gross incompetence in the face of his administration's greatest challenge — stake a permanent claim to the leadership of his party and establish himself as the presumptive Republican nominee in 2024.