Where Emerson exalted America's independence from the past and from Europe, and embraced the need for the constant re-creation of the self, conspiracy theorists instead see a nation in thrall to outside forces. There's no uncertainty. If Emerson chose contingency, paranoids choose determinism. Not surprisingly, American political paranoia has often been read as a kind of escape from freedom. One of the striking things about the public discourse on politics and the economy, after all, is how impotent people say they feel, how distant the levers of power seem to them.
Many people simply feel irrelevant.
Paranoia provides not only an explanation but also a potential solution. That's not an easy task, since the conspiracy's defining characteristics are its overwhelming power and its stunning ability to dissimulate. But at least it's a task that gives one purpose. It took the turmoil of the 1960s, though, to let paranoia really develop as a style, both in American film and, perhaps more lastingly, in the fiction of such writers as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. The X-Files is any indication.