THE PARANOID STRAIN IN AMERICAN POLITICS: Liberals resort to conspiracy theories to explain Obama’s problems. “Following two years of poor economic performance and electoral repudiation, liberalism is casting around for narratives to explain its failure – narratives that don’t involve the admission of inadequacies in liberalism itself.” Is it fair to compare these pundits to Nazis for peddling a stab-in-the-back theory of the economy? Well, that sort of thing has been done.