While "conspiracy theory" does have some negative connotations, it has also given the conspiracy culture a degree of legitimacy that might otherwise be lacking. Consider that before the wider adoption of the term, one of the most influential essays on the topic was Hofstadter's 1964 piece "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," which used the far more directly insulting term "paranoids" to refer to those who tended to explain all events as the result of some conspiracy.
I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.
If we didn't have the "conspiracy theorist" term, it's quite possible that the people we now call conspiracy theorists might equally have been called "paranoids" or some other directly pejorative term. By contrast the current label is relatively neutral.
What we have here is an asymmetry in perception. The conspiracists reject the accurate labels given to them because they think it's an attempt to belittle them. They do not consider their constant suspicions to be in any way unusual (except in contrast to the sheep-like acquiescence of the general public). But because their suspicions are generally unfounded and out of the mainstream then any label their group acquires is going to eventually become perceived as derogatory.
DeHaven-Smith is an example of this asymmetry, he rejects the notion that the negative connotation of "conspiracy theory" might have anything to do with the generally baseless and often unfounded claims of most conspiracy theories, and instead argues that instead of "conspiracy theorist" one should use "conspiracy realist," and instead of "conspiracy theory" one should say "state crime against democracy" (SCAD).
He misses the point. If a group manages to get a label to stick then it's not going to change the public perception. Conspiracy theorists are not judged to be on the fringe because they are part of a group called "conspiracy theorists." They are on the fringe because they make unfounded, unrealistic, or overly speculative claims. Labels do not define the perception of a group; the labels
take on that perception. After the UK Spastics Society was renamed "Scope" in 1994, the playground insult of "spastic" for a clumsy kid was simply supplanted by the insult "scoper." If DeHaven-Smith could miraculously get large numbers of people to adopt "SCAD," then all that would happen would be that conspiracy theorists would also be called "Scadders."
I will continue to use the term "conspiracy theorist" (or the shorter "conspiracist") because the dictionary definition and common usage of it very accurately describe many of the people that I have encountered online, that I have interviewed, and that I have met in person. They are in fact people who
tend to believe in conspiracy theories as explanations for all major events in the world. I do not mean it to be derogatory, and indeed I would point out the many positive associations in popular culture. I use the term because people understand what it means.
