In their mythology, the Greeks believed that Chaos was the beginning of all things, the primordial force out of which sprung the primordial gods. Later mythologies, especially the Romans, rebooted the concept to our modern conception of chaos as wildness and disorder. (Ovid called it a "shapeless heap.") But I think it's properly humbling to adhere to the original Greek concept of chaos as the place from which we all came, and to extrapolate that there's a powerful impulse in all of us to return to where existence began, a temptation to shrug off evolved humanity and just let everything burn.

In The New York Times on Thursday, columnist Thomas Edsall calls our attention to an award-winning academic study of the hardest of El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago's hardcore supporters. In brief, the paper illustrates that, among this slice of the American electorate, the temptation to chaos is well nigh overwhelming. From Edsall:

It argues that a segment of the American electorate that was once peripheral is drawn to “chaos incitement” and that this segment has gained decisive influence through the rise of social media.“The rise of social media provides the public with unprecedented power to craft and share new information with each other,” they write. In the political arena, this technological transformation allows the transmission of a type of information that portrays “political candidates or groups negatively” and has “a low evidential basis.” The “new information” transmitted on social media includes “conspiracy theories, fake news, discussions of political scandals and negative campaigns.” The circulation of this type of information (which the authors label “hostile political rumors”) has been “linked to large-scale political outcomes within recent years such as the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

There was a sense of wildness on the fringes of the 2012 campaign that was clearly rooted in the ongoing opposition to the idea of an African American president. Everyone who covered that election—which, after all, was contested between two relatively rational politicians—felt its pull. There was a kind of distant orbiting asteroid belt in the universe of that election composed of ideas that were at best crazy and at worst crazy and violent. This phenomenon did not go away during Barack Obama's second term; the asteroid belt got closer and closer until, finally, it crossed the orbit of political reality during the 2016 election and the massive collision produced what we have now. Again, from Edsall:

Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux find that those who meet their definition of having a “need for chaos” express that need by willingly spreading disinformation. Their goal is not to advance their own ideology but to undermine political elites, left and right, and to “mobilize others against politicians in general.” These disrupters do not “share rumors because they believe them to be true. For the core group, hostile political rumors are simply a tool to create havoc.”

We've all lived with the milder forms of this phenomenon for decades. Everyone who ever made the "Everything is crooked/fixed" argument contributed to it, as did the adherents of such shibboleths as, "My vote doesn't matter," "I am not political," and, my personal favorite, "They're all the same." Political apathy, say the authors of the paper, has curdled into a virulent form of political nihilism.

In an email, Petersen wrote that preliminary examination of the data shows “that the ‘need for chaos’ correlates positively with sympathy for Trump but also — although less strongly — with sympathy for Sanders. It correlates negatively with sympathy for Hillary Clinton.” In their paper, Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux contend that “the extreme discontent expressed in the ‘Need for Chaos’ scale is a minority view but it is a minority view with incredible amounts of support.” The responses to three of the statements in particular were “staggering,” the paper says: 24 percent agreed that society should be burned to the ground; 40 percent concurred with the thought that “When it comes to our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn’ ”; and 40 percent also agreed that “we cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over.”

Public with banners supporting Donald Trump, in the celebrations in Warsaw of the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the World War II on Sunday in Warsaw. To mark the occasion of the Nazi invasion of Poland, President Trump said: "I just want to congratulate Poland." NurPhoto Getty Images

Obviously, there is a huge social-media component to how the fringe came to the outskirts of the mainstream.

In these circumstances, “a few chaotic thoughts that lead to a few clicks to retweet or share is enough. When the echoes of similar processes across multiple individuals reinforce each other, it can add up to cascades of hostile political rumors,” conspiracy theories and fake news. The intense hostility to political establishments of all kinds among what could be called “chaos voters” helps explain what Pew Research and others have found: a growing distrust among Republican voters of higher education as well as empirically based science, both of which are increasingly seen as allied with the liberal establishment.

But the most terrifying part of all, as Edsall shrewdly notes, comes in an e-mail exchange Edsall had with the head of the organization that gave this paper its award.

It remains an open question whether those with higher chaotic motivations also turn their “motivations” into action. One could expect that those higher on chaotic motivations are more likely to protest and actually revolt against the political system. Moreover, I could see a role for chaotic motivations in understanding why people support populist politicians. Populist politicians share a message that the elites in, for instance Washington, Paris, Berlin and London, are corrupt, evil and self-centered. Perhaps this rhetoric resonates well with a tendency to like to see the democratic system go down.

The temptation to return to chaos is strong. It may be all this president* has left, and that is very far from a good thing.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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