The Chaos Agents

Derek Thompson talks about what appears to be a newly significant strain in politics in America and around the world: a kind of nihilistic burn it all down attitude, that isn’t based on some sort of heighten the contradictions revolutionary logic, or any logic at all:

The researchers came up with a term to describe the motivation behind these all-purpose conspiracy mongers. They called it the “need for chaos,” which they defined as “a mindset to gain status” by destroying the established order. In their study, nearly a third of respondents demonstrated a need for chaos, Petersen said. And for about 5 percent of voters, old-fashioned party allegiances to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party melted away and were replaced by a desire to see the entire political elite destroyed-even without a plan to build something better in the ashes.

“These [need-for-chaos] individuals are not idealists seeking to tear down the established order so that they can build a better society for everyone,” the authors wrote in their conclusion. “Rather, they indiscriminately share hostile political rumors as a way to unleash chaos and mobilize individuals against the established order that fails to accord them the respect that they feel they personally deserve.” 

Thompson makes the intriguing suggestion that Donald Trump’s chaotic evil is tapping into a deep desire to see the world burn in a substantial portion of the public:

Trump’s chaos vibes might fulfill a significant and otherwise unmet demand in the electorate. In the conclusion to their paper, Petersen and his co-authors write that the need for chaos emerges from the interplay between “dominance-oriented” traits (i.e., a preference for traditional social hierarchies), feelings of marginalization, and intense anger toward elites. Together, these traits would seem to apply to several voting groups: white conservative men nostalgic for a diminished patriarchy; independents who are furious about elite institutional failures during and after the pandemic; and culturally conservative, nonwhite Americans, especially men, who might feel marginalized by racism and economic inequality but also rue the latest waves of #MeToo feminism. Indeed, all of these groups are shifting toward the Republican Party under Trump.

As Karen Cassandra of Texas reminds us, the patriarchy-misogyny-authoritarian axis is a huge key to understanding Trump’s popularity not only with uneducated white men, but with significant minorities of Latino and Black men, who perceive any undermining of patriarchal culture as a personal threat. Such people would rather destroy the game altogether than play it at the risk of losing:

Deep stories are important, because they allow groups who might violently disagree about politics to understand the psychological origins of their disagreement. As I spoke with Petersen about the need for chaos, another allegorical scene came to mind-a kind of deep story of the chaos voter.

You are a middle-aged man playing a game; it could be checkers or chess. You are used to winning. But you’ve lost several times in a row, and all to the same people. Now you’re losing again, and it doesn’t feel right. You haven’t made one wrong move. Something must be wrong. Something must be rigged. They must be cheating. In a rage, you turn the whole table upside down, and the pieces scatter and shatter. Why do this? Breaking the game makes things worse for everyone. But this isn’t about making things better. It’s about feeling a sense of agency and control. It’s about not feeling like a loser. One could call it chaos. But at least it’s the chaos you chose.
“You can think of need for chaos, in a way, like flipping the board over at a societal level,” Petersen said when I shared this deep story with him on the phone. “This is a status-seeking strategy of last resort. A person feels stuck and wants to have recognition, but he feels that he cannot be recognized or valued in the current system of cultural norms, rules, and power. And so, to solve that problem, he says: ~Let’s tear it all down.'”

This reminded me of Umberto Eco’s observation about the connection between various strands of misogynistic/machismoesque cultural politics, especially gun culture, and various flavors of fascism:

Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons — doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

I’m going to do a separate post on this, but a big driver of right wing politics in this country is the sexual obsessions/frustrations of the incels, sexual harassers and assaulters, pedophiles, closet cases, and other assorted deviants who project their humiliation fetishes — see for example the centrality of the concept of the “cuck” in right wing cultural discourse — onto their political opponents.

Dobbs is probably going to be the single biggest key to the 2024 election, because a central — perhaps the central — issue of that election is the clash between people who believe in sexual and reproductive freedom for women, and people who don’t.

On one level, it really is as simple as that. And a lot of men would rather see the world burn than live in a world with liberated women.