Mass deportation. Prosecute rivals. Abolish FDIC. Cabinet choices. Partisan federal employees. Eliminate debt ceiling. Abolish birthright citizenship. Retake Panama Canal. Abandon Ukraine. Annex Canada. Criminalize wokeness. Abolish Palestine. Enact Article V of the Consitution. Dismantle NATO. Tariff wars. Fascist authoritarian tendencies. Pardon insurrectionists. Abolish the Twenty-Second Amendment. Criminalize abortion. Military strike against cartels in Mexico. Elon Musk.
Chaos. Pure chaos. He hasn’t been inaugurated yet, and many of us are already fatigued.
Stable governments have always been good for business, the economy and the mental welfare of its citizens. What’s that line in the Preamble of the Constitution describing one of the purposes of forming a more perfect Union?
Oh yeah. “Ensure domestic tranquility.”
Characterizing the incoming president as insane or incompetent to excuse this chaos is a proposition taken at one’s peril. The proposed chaos is not due to insanity or incompetency, even though such characteristics exhibited by 45/47 might be true.
Steve Bannon, the incoming president’s former advisor and sycophant, said that a second term will be characterized by “never-ending chaos.”
The incoming administration ignores stability and purposefully seeks to capitalize on as much chaos as possible. But why would any governing entity champion such turmoil? What is there to gain?
A lot, actually.
Political scientists have recently begun examining governance through the lens of chaos theory. Chaos theory, also known as the “butterfly effect,” was developed by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the early 1960s. He described the movement from stability to instability, order to disorder.
Lorenz asked, “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”
Chaos theory maintains that systems can proceed toward radically different outcomes due to minute changes in their variables, i.e., the flutter of a butterfly wing. An initial difference between two systems with a 10-5power variable may initially appear to create very similar trajectories. However, they eventually will diverge considerably.
Applying chaos theory to governance recognizes that the concept of a stable democracy, despite its imperfection, relies on the assumption that an underlying order exists. Yet, small changes can lead to radically extreme mayhem, threatening democracy’s fragility.
We are witnessing how minor, random changes in the past have led to major political movements whose cumulative impact has brought us to this moment. The current chaos is the product of the flap of a butterfly wing.
The first spark may have been the biased ideas of a medieval priest who promoted his faith, gender and ethnic group as superior to inspire a crusade against those he labeled as infidels. Over the centuries, the trajectory of the initial flap of the butterfly’s wing–in the form of some preached sermon–resulted in the Western Hemisphere centuries later as Manifest Destiny, among other movements.
The rise of dispensationalism. The demise of Reconstruction. Indian Wars. Jim and Jane Crow. Woman suffrage. The demise of the Gilded Age. Gunboat Diplomacy. The New Deal. Civil Rights. The women’s movement. The demise of the New Deal. The rise of the religious right. The rise of Newt Gingrich’s scorched-earth politics. Fox News. 9/11. Election of a Black man as President. The social birth of a reality TV star.
The minuscule changes that led to these significant shifts have cumulatively led to the current mood of disenfranchisement among those for whom the government was originally designed to protect, and for whom ensuring domestic tranquility was meant— namely, those Christians with male privilege and political power derived from their whiteness. As ludicrous as it might sound to minoritized groups, white male Christians see themselves as the truly marginalized.
They believe this while still controlling the political, social, and economic levers of power. For them, this perception is their reality.
A 2016 study discovered that almost half of white Americans (49%) believe they suffer from discrimination. Nearly half of Americans (49%) believe Christians are the most persecuted group within the U.S. Six in ten (62%) argue discrimination is as big a problem for them as those faced by Blacks and Latines.
A psychological need develops, per political scientists, to create societal attitudes by which to rectify supposed white male Christian victimhood.
When the system is perceived as rigged against white male cis-gendered Christians, they use chaos to invert power structures and, in the process, retain social status. In their minds, chaos will lead to the end of so-called “reverse discrimination,” protecting the unqualified from having to compete against more capable women and people of color. Chaos will also bring an end to incels– “your body, my choice.”
Hostility toward institutions once perceived as quasi-sacred (the FBI and courts of law), belief in lies and conspiracy theories (Obama is a Muslim, Democrats drink the blood of babies), and discriminatory stereotypes against The Other (Muslims, immigrants, transgender folk) developed. Despite the facts, this all happened because such beliefs align with the existing worldview of those claiming white male Christian disenfranchisement.
The Steve Bannons of society embrace and encourage this moment’s extreme and never-ending chaos as their path toward liberation. They seek to “make America great again” by recentering a whiteness that was never de-centered.
Democracy may see its demise, not because of who was elected, but because of that fluttering wing from centuries ago.
Professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, and a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.
