The Chaos Strategy Is Working

"Flooding the zone" with you-know-what has never been more effective.

Photo by Debbie Ducic on Unsplash

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Donald Trump, who wakes up each morning wondering what kind of dissension and anger he will be able to create over the course of the day, is about to take control of the federal government. The world’s richest man is a far-right internet troll, using his ownership of one of the most important social media platforms to spread misinformation and hate to his hundreds of millions of followers. The world’s third-richest man just announced that his social media platform, the most widely used on Earth, will cease its already inadequate fact-checking to allow more “free speech,” particularly of the right-wing kind.

We are in an age of informational chaos, and the Democrats and liberals who stand in opposition seem less equipped than ever to confront it. This may not be new, but it’s only getting worse.

In 2018, Trump advisor Steve Bannon explained the MAGA communication strategy. “The Democrats don’t matter,” he said. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” In other words, seize control of the information system by poisoning it with a torrent of misinformation, lies, distraction, irrelevance, conspiracy theories, hate-mongering, rage-bait — anything and everything but the facts and reasoned argumentation that are supposed to be the bedrock of democratic deliberation. That’s how you win. While “flood the zone with shit” describes well what Trump and the Republican Party were doing over the course of his first term in office, only now is it achieving its full realization.

How liberals think politics works

The main reason liberals are so flummoxed by this strategy is that they’re not just operating on a different understanding of how to persuade the public, they’re playing an entirely different game with different rules and goals.

Democrats go about politics as though they’re making a case to a jury: We present our side, including explaining why our opponents’ arguments are wrong, and at the end the public will deliberate and render a judgment based on which side had the better case. That’s how you win elections, and in the process build support for the policy agenda you intend to enact.

Within that structure, there are a series of debates that can be won or lost, depending on who has the better argument. What should our immigration policy be? Should taxes be raised or lowered, and which ones? What’s the best way to expand health care access?

Some Republicans participate in that debate; they make speeches in Congress, and they give interviews to traditional news organizations explaining what they want to do with power. But as a whole, that’s not how they see their project. They understand the progression of politics not as some linear exchange of arguments in which facts can be established and disseminated, and truth ultimately prevails and a decision is made. Instead, they look at the debate as a roiling cauldron, endlessly bubbling, swirling, and splashing. It has no direction and no endpoint.

In the world they have done so much to create, there is no final conclusion on, say, whether the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, no point where we all agree on what the truth is and we move on to other disputes. Nothing is ever settled. There are always more people to yank down into rabbit holes, more voters who can be confused, more doubt to be sown.

In this way, they more fully appreciate what communication has become in the internet age. As Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield recently wrote in The Atlantic, “The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine. A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away, and the incentives of the modern attention economy—people are rewarded with engagement and greater influence the more their audience responds to what they’re saying—means that there will always be a rush to provide one.” Flooding the zone with shit is the perfect strategy for that environment, because it feeds into the information stream an endless supply of justifications, rationales, and stories, the veracity of which is utterly irrelevant.

Are you watching the horrific fires in Los Angeles? Here’s a firehose of shit for you, blaming them on DEI or bad water management or environmentalists or the fact that the mayor was out of town or “Gavin Newscum” (Trump’s favored epithet for the governor), or whatever idiotic thing you might be inclined to believe. And it doesn’t matter which piece of it you do believe, or whether some parts of it contradict other parts; what matters is that you’re caught in the chaos.

When “free speech” means chaos

This is the perfect moment for Facebook to abandon its efforts at fact-checking, which will make the platform even more amenable to the free movement of misinformation. That policy change is part of Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to move Facebook to the right, part of his own reinvention as the most banal kind of right-wing tech douchebag, complete with prominently displayed gold chain, love of mixed martial arts, and a new desire to bring more “masculine energy” to his company.

When conservatives say “free speech,” what they mean is not actual free speech, of course. There are plenty of things you can’t put on Facebook or X; for instance, you can’t put beheadings or child pornography there, and on X you also can’t call someone “cisgender,” which Elon Musk considers forbidden hate speech. If you call out the white supremacist sludge on his site, Musk may attempt to sue you into oblivion, as he has done with the media watchdog group Media Matters.

No, “free speech” means a shit-flooded zone, one where content moderation exists, but it makes sure to allow the frictionless movement of the most rancid lies and hate. The chaos is the point.

If you get your information from these sources, even becoming “informed” only makes the world seem more chaotic. There is no distinction between the vital and irrelevant, the meaningful and the trivial, and the true and false. The 78-year-old Donald Trump, it turns out, had been preparing all his life, even when he was working the old-fashioned media and trying to get his name in the New York tabloids, to be the perfect politician for this moment.

And yes, Democrats are there, trying hard to compete; some do it better than others. But by and large, they still adhere to the rules of the news media they grew up with, dutifully conducting fact-checks and presenting cogent arguments for their preferred policy solutions. They wind up like someone a block away from you, trying to get you to hear what they’re saying, but even if it makes sense it’s hard to focus on what they’re telling you because there are five other people standing around you screaming nonsense into your ears.

Here’s a poll that was taken in April, before Joe Biden exited the race:

The people most likely to vote for Trump were the most disconnected from politics, those with the least ability and/or inclination to sort through the shit-flooded zone to find the truth. Trump didn’t have to convert them to conservative ideology or convince them that restructuring the civil service is a good idea; he just had to get enough of them pissed off or disillusioned or mad for as long as it took to put him back in office.

Even in this environment, Democrats do win plenty of elections. You might recall that in 2020, Joe Biden insisted that after four years of Trump’s madness, people were desperate for a return to normalcy. It might have been true, at least to a degree. But chaos doesn’t care whether you want it to colonize your mind and reshape your world; it does its work whether it’s invited or not. And it will always return.