On Burning It All Down
When I was a precocious lad, a well-meaning elder (I’ve forgotten who) took me aside and asked, “Do you know the difference between rebels and revolutionaries?” Unsure where the question was leading, I shrugged. “Rebels know only what they don’t want. Revolutionaries know what they don’t want, but also what they do want,” my mentor explained.
I remembered that exchange while reading a February 2023 study by Danish political scientist Michael Bang Petersen and two colleagues that found evidence of what they call a “need for chaos” motivating roughly five percent of American voters. Said voters are wannabe social dominators who feel marginalized. Petersen and crew define the need for chaos as “a desire for a new beginning through the destruction of order and established structures.” In short, these voters are so alienated—occasionally for good reason — that they yearn to burn down America and start fresh. But they’re almost uniformly rebels, with no plan for what comes next.
Petersen et al’s research helps explain why these Americans, who often spread their views via social media shitposting, tend to despise Biden and revere Trump. Biden is a pure product of America’s established order and structure. Trump, though an authoritarian and aspiring dictator, is also an agent of chaos, flagrantly flaunting the law, baldly denying empirical fact, and vowing to destroy “the deep state.” That’s the kind of leader voting-age Americans who fancy themselves rebels (or the rebels’ educated cousins, contrarians) can get behind.
Another notable insight: “We find that Need for Chaos is highest among racial groups facing historical injustice — in particular, Black males — reflecting their higher concerns about their societal standing.” While the study notes that “white men react more aggressively than any other group to perceived status challenges,” the association Petersen found between minority males and burn-it-down rebelliousness may explain why some pollsters have reported increased support for Trump among black and brown voters.
No doubt if you brought the millions of white, black, and brown chaos voters together they’d offer radically different visions of a new America — and no doubt there’d be radically different visions within each community too. They’re just rebels, after all. They’re not thinking far ahead.
Which is scary because we’ve understood since Thomas Hobbes’s heyday that chaos is even worse than despotism. Chaos means no limit to violence and injustice. Dictators perpetrate violence and injustice, but do so to impose control and order, which means as long as you’re not on their enemies list, you’re probably safe. Contrast that with what you’d face in a chaotic environment like Haiti, where everything’s breaking down and if the gangs don’t get you, the hunger and disease will.
There’s an alternative to chaos and despotism, and that’s the Enlightenment-infused democracy we currently have. (Go ahead, enjoy the irony of a liberal making the conservative argument that we should maintain the status quo.) In his 2018 magnum opus Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker laments that “it’s the nature of progress that it erases its tracks, and its champions fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come.” America is nowhere near perfect. But when I was born, Jim Crow was the law of the land; women were second-class citizens; DDT was sprayed in populated areas; and life expectancy was under seventy. We’ve progressed way beyond those disgraces, and many more.
But few people contextualize our current situation that way. Progress, however they define it, either hasn’t happened or isn’t happening fast enough, so the system must die. To yet again quote Pinker, “A liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it will always have problems, but it’s better to solve those problems than to start a conflagration and hope that something better arises from the ashes and bones.”
What my old mentor implied is that rebellion is easy — a juvenile approach to deadly serious matters. The solutions offered by revolutionaries may also be childish, but they’re seldom as terrible as chaos, and sometimes they’re significantly better than the old order. So the advice offered to me half a century ago stands: if you don’t like the system, don’t just burn it down. Come up with something better.
(My thanks to the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson for spreading word of the Petersen group’s research.)
