"Rip it all down! Let Rome burn." Many are crying out for a Second American Civil War!

By David Haggith - February 23, 2024

Since we are in what I’ve called “The Year of Chaos,” I found several articles in the news today particularly interesting in how they came together. The first one is about why some Americans actually want chaos, and they are not all the usual Antifa crowd.

Have A Danish . . . Conspiracy By Design

A Danish scientist developed a study in which he gave Americans a variety of conspiracy theories that he completely made up against Democratic politicians and Republicans. The people enrolled in the study were asked if they would share the stories online. The results surprised him:

There were many people who seemed willing to share any conspiracy theory, regardless of the party it hurt…. These participants didn’t seem like stable partisans of the left or right. They weren’t even negative partisans, who hated one side without feeling allegiance to the other. Above all, they seemed drawn to stories that undermined trust in every system of power. Petersen felt as though he’d tapped a new vein of nihilism in modern politics—a desire to rip down the Elites, whatever that might mean.

While that desire to just chaotically rip the system apart, regardless of who was in charge, was once the province of Antifa and other anarchists, Petersen found that not to be the case anymore, and the numbers of those who just needed to create chaos were a lot higher than one would have thought just a few years back, but maybe not higher than we’d think now:

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…. 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.” To sum up their worldview, Petersen quoted a famous line from the film The Dark Knight: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

What I see in that is that most of the voters who were subjects in the study only wanted to destroy the other side, since only 5% of voters couldn’t care less about party affiliation or a plan to build anything better. For them, it was just, “Rip it all down!”

What about the rest, which would be 25% of all voters. Some still say the whole system needs to be ripped to shreds. The study’s author said that White men were particularly sensitive to changes in society, but the greatest number of riled-up folk wanting chaos were Black males. The author of the article notes,” Anti-elite conspiracy theories and tear-it-all-down rhetoric can appeal to groups who feel, sometimes quite rightly, aggrieved by long-standing injustice.”

What the author doesn’t say is that people in any group—Black, White or otherwise—can sometimes quite rightly feel aggrieved by long-standing injustice. Who wouldn’t? If you despair that the system will never deliver genuine justice, then you just might want to burn it to the ground.

Take, for example, this guy:

“Our system needs to be broken,” Johnson said. And only Trump, whom he acknowledged as “a chaos creator,” could deliver the crushing blow. Johnson … has a job, a family, and, clearly, a formidable financial portfolio. Still, he said he hopes that Trump “breaks the system” to create “a miserable four years for everybody.” We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions; we need to tear them down and start over.

I would suspect that is a good part of the desire for chaos—people feeling so frustrated with “the system” or disenfranchised by it that they hope just ripping it to shreds will force us to build something better. However, to build something back better (not the Biden way), you have to agree on what “better” is. Where there is no vision, the people perish. I am concerned, however, that we have moved far and perhaps permanently from any common vision of what the country should be. But I cannot see that tearing it to shreds and living in ashes is somehow better.

The Need For Chaos

We’ve seen this desire for raw chaos (anarchy) on the Left for decades where it is not a surprise to me:

I recalled some of the radical rhetoric from the summer of 2020: “If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it,” Hawk Newsome, the chairman of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, said during an interview with Fox News. “I could be speaking figuratively; I could be speaking literally. It’s a matter of interpretation.” When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking, “Just let them all burn.”

What has felt really, strangely disorienting to me is . . .

[SNIP]