"The Trump Voters Whose ‘Need for Chaos’ Obliterates Everything Else/Political nihilism is one of the president’s strongest weapons."

Headline for a NYT op-ed by Thomas Edsall. I'm blogging this because an order-and-chaos theme has happened to emerge on the blog this morning and also because I think it suggests that Trump voters are not fascists. I'm assuming fascism is grounded in an excessive need for order.

Let's read:

Last week, at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, the winner of the best paper award in the Political Psychology division was “A ‘Need for Chaos’ and the Sharing of Hostile Political Rumors in Advanced Democracies.”... [Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and Kevin Arceneaux argue] 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.

I don't know about "decisive," but otherwise this seems like a good observation. But I'm going to resist Edsall's idea of making the problem specific to Trump voters.

The circulation of [conspiracy theories, fake news, discussions of political scandals and negative campaigns] has been “linked to large-scale political outcomes within recent years such as the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

But that doesn't mean that only the winner's voters were susceptible to that sort of material! Also, I wouldn't limit the problem of "chaos incitement" to social media. Mainstream media does it too.

The authors describe “chaos incitement” as a “strategy of last resort by marginalized status-seekers,” willing to adopt disruptive tactics. Trump, in turn, has consistently sought to strengthen the perception that America is in chaos....

That sounds like an appeal to people who don't like chaos! Does Edsall even notice this blatant contradiction?

[Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux] conducted six surveys, four in the United States, in which they interviewed 5157 participants, and two in Denmark, with 1336.... 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.”...

That does indeed sound like a scary level of enthusiasm for destruction in modern-day human nature, but I don't see how you pin that specifically on Trump voters. Edsall just says:

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.”

"Correlates" — but how strongly? And isn't that just saying some people want more change and some people want more stability? Is the willingness to risk change really a need for chaos? I know I'm risk averse and I tend to want a centrist, middle-of-the-roader — a pragmatist who doesn't get any big ideas. But I don't think the people who are comfortable with more risk and want radical change have some crazy urge for the state of chaos. To vote for Trump was to take a big risk, but if there was a need motivating them, wasn't it to get back to what looked like a solid old idea of America?

I'm skipping over a bunch of stuff, but let me give you Edsall's last few sentences, which, perversely, appeal to the readers "need for chaos":

How worried should we be about a fundamental threat to democracy from the apparently large numbers of Americans who embrace chaos as a way of expressing their discontent? Might Trump and his loyal supporters seek to bring down the system if he is defeated in 2020? What about later, if the damage he has inflicted on our customs and norms festers, eroding the invisible structures that underpin everything that actually makes America great? A political leader who thrives on chaos, relishes disorder and governs on the principle of narcissistic self-interest is virtually certain to find defeat intolerable. If voters deny Trump a second term, how many of his most ardent supporters, especially those with a “need for chaos,” will find defeat unbearable?

It's quite rich to ask if Trump supporters will try to "to bring down the system if he is defeated in 2020." If that's what chaos-needers do then I'd say a lot of Hillary supporters had a need for chaos. They certainly put an intense effort into canceling the results of the 2016 election.