- 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.
I just came back from doing some errands while listening to the part in Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone where he discusses the generational differences in civic engagement. He predicted civic engagement to continue to go down for a while as a result of each successive generation being less interested in engagement than the previous one starting with the boomers. I wonder what he'd have to say in response to civic hostility the likes of which are described here - it's one thing to not vote, it's quite another to microtarget racist memes to Fox News boomers on Facebook because you'd like to see the world burn.The phrase “like to see the democratic system go down” is chilling — and raises the question: 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?