The "Chaos" Strategy
Republicans want you to believe that society is collapsing
Around the nation, college students are protesting Israel’s war on Gaza, but if you don’t live within a few blocks of one of those campuses — especially the ones where the administration has been so impossibly dumb as to think the way to make protests go away is to call in the cops — this fact has almost certainly had no practical effect on your life. Your personal safety has not been threatened, your commute to work has not been disrupted, and your access to shopping, parks, or other life amenities has not been curtailed.
Yet Republicans would have you believe that these protests are causing “chaos” from sea to shining sea, that the nation is on the verge of a complete breakdown of law and order that threatens every American. The solution to the protests is for the kids saying things conservatives don’t like to shut up, and if they won’t, some good old-fashioned skull-cracking is necessary to protect the rest of us from their anarchic criminality.
This has become the dominant theme of the right’s response not just to these protests but to the state of the country in general: America is in chaos. You hear that word repeated over and over; to take just one example, when Speaker of the House Mike Johnson went to Columbia University for a photo op, he demanded that the university’s president “resign if she could not immediately bring order to this chaos.” While Columbia students have since taken over a university building, that hadn’t happened at the time; they were just occupying the quad. On the other hand, one student did yell “Mike, you suck!” so it was probably pretty scary for him.
People who have actually reported from the protests (see here or here) have by and large found them to be well-behaved. Are there problematic things being said at some of them? Yes there are. Have there been antisemitic incidents around some of them? Yes there have. But nearly everything resembling “chaos” has come in the crackdowns. Scenes of violent confrontation you’ve witnessed on TV or social media have occurred when the police moved in, often in riot gear to remove and arrest students and sometimes faculty (and in at least one case, when counter-protesters stormed a protest). At the universities where the administrators had the sense to just let the students have their say, there has been almost no violence. But this is how Republicans portray what’s happening:
“We’re having protests all over,” said Donald Trump. “Charlottesville was a little peanut. And it was nothing compared — and the hate wasn’t the kind of hate that you have here, this is tremendous hate.” Charlottesville, you’ll recall, was a gathering of neo-Nazis and white supremacists, which inspired Trump to proclaim that there were “very fine people on both sides.” Other Republicans have taken to referring to the protests collectively as “riots,” despite the fact that the only violent behavior in most of them has come from police. Twenty-seven Republican senators sent a letter to the attorney general and secretary of education thundering that “pro-Hamas rioters have effectively shut down college campuses” and demanding that federal officials “act immediately to restore order” and “prosecute the mobs.” The Wall Street Journal editorial board laments “America’s New Mob Rule.”
It’s not just the protests
These protests have been nothing short of a godsend for the GOP, which can use them to pretend to care about antisemitism, divert attention from the thing the students are actually protesting, continue their long war against higher education, and bitch about Kids Today, who supposedly lack the good sense and civility that characterized the youth of, well, whenever you were young.
Furthermore, the chaos narrative fits in with their broader claims about life in America today, which is supposedly a nightmare of economic misery and violent mayhem, where people have to dodge murderous gangs just to make it to the store to buy a gallon of milk for 25 bucks and immigrants are pillaging our communities.
Not where you live, of course, but everywhere else. This is the trick: convincing people that even as their own days proceed in an ordinarily mundane fashion, chaos awaits just a few miles away, particularly in American cities, which liberals and their permissive policies have turned into hellholes of crime. This is a regular feature of conservative rhetoric, whether it’s from politicians or Fox News hosts or “bro country” singers.
If you point out that in fact crime is dropping quite dramatically, Republicans will laugh in your face. How can you not realize that America is in chaos? After all, that’s what they see every night on “Hannity”! And sure, the only immigrants they know are washing their dishes or putting a new roof on their neighbor’s house, but haven’t you seen the hundreds of “CHAOS AT THE BORDER!!!” segments on Fox? It’s a jungle out there! If you doubt, just head over to bidenbloodbath.com, a website set up by the Republican National Committee to warn people about the immigrant “invasion” (another word repeated endlessly on the right). Or check in with your favorite Republican PR ghoul, who will tell you that we’re on the verge of a complete breakdown of the social order:
The only solution is harsher policies and political figures promising the crackdowns that will at last make you secure in the homes where you now huddle, terrified that the far-left mob is coming for you and your family. If it’s chaos you fear, your vote for the GOP is clear.
When things really were chaotic
All this has me thinking about the 1968 presidential race, which occurred at a time when things really were pretty chaotic: assassinations, riots, police brutality, and protests over a war happening on the other side of the world. Running for president that year, Richard Nixon promised a return to law and order. Here’s one of his ads from that campaign:
It’s certainly arresting — the bloody imagery, the dissonant music — and one of the last images is of a change machine, with the word “CHANGE” clearly visible, amidst a pile of rubble. Nixon was presenting himself as a bulwark against the kind of social change that was being demanded at the time, including racial justice and an end to the Vietnam War.
A lot of that came to a head at the Democratic convention in Chicago, where large numbers of people came to protest and the Chicago PD set upon them with extreme prejudice, producing scenes of violence and mayhem on the nightly news. Though it was the state perpetrating the violence, what mattered was the perception that things were out of control.
This year, the Democratic convention will once again be held in Chicago, and activists angry at the Biden administration’s support for Israel will undoubtedly see it as a good opportunity to protest the president and draw attention to their cause. It remains to be seen what the city’s response will be, but one hopes it won’t involve the same brutality as it did 56 years ago.
[And if you’re wondering whether it might be more appropriate for activists to protest the Republican convention, since that party is the one that is unified in its desire to see Palestinians brutalized to the greatest extent possible, and which contains prominent officials who actually have advocated war crimes and even outright genocide? Yes they should, but they probably won’t, for two reasons. First, the smarter among them know that leftist-on-Democrat conflict is far more enticing to the news media than leftists criticizing Republicans. Second, many if not most leftists view liberals as their real enemy. It’s an old story.]
After he won that election, Nixon set about to cement a durable majority with tactics that have echoes of today. In 1970, a group of construction workers and office workers attacked antiwar activists protesting the war and the Kent State shootings, which had occurred just four days before. The “Hard Hat Riot” thrilled Nixon, who saw in it a golden opportunity to pull working-class voters away from their loyalty to the Democratic Party that had traditionally represented them. As Rick Perlstein writes in Nixonland, Nixon had no interest in offering working people any economic concessions:
But to extend to blue-collar workers the hand of cultural recognition — that was a different ball game altogether. It’s not that right-leaning politicians hadn’t tried it before — Nixon had done something like it in the Checkers Speech, when he styled the people accusing him of corruption as hopeless snobs, and himself as an ordinary striver just trying to make an honest living. But the hard-hat ascendency set into motion a qualitative shift: the first concerted effort to turn the white working class, via its aesthetic disgusts, against a Democratic Party now joining itself objectively … to the agenda of the smelly longhairs who burned down buildings. (p. 498-9)
Sounds awfully familiar, down to the “disgust” Republicans are trying to promote, with Vance telling protesters to “take a shower.”
While the campus protests will quiet when students return home for the summer, Republicans will continue to talk about them for as long as they can, spinning out a tale in which every college in America became the scene of berserker rioting that left half the country aflame. That’s the way they still talk about the summer of 2020; if you asked the average Fox News viewer, they’d tell you that in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, cities like Portland were literally burned to the ground, leaving nothing more than a pile of rubble. The fact that it’s not true is meaningless; those viewers will never visit the cities they’ve been convinced are something out of Mad Max, just as they’ll have no firsthand experience with the current atmosphere at the nation’s universities.
But they’ll know in their hearts that it’s madness out there. Bar the door, buy some more guns, prepare for the collapse of civilization if Joe Biden wins. The chaos is coming for you, and only voting for Donald Trump can stop it.
Being a veteran of the 60s antiwar protests I am convinced that these kids have a point, a point that needs to be heard. And that if university administrators need to send in cops armed and armored as if they are going into Fallujah to bash heads and arrest college kids, both the administrators and the cops need to rethink their career choices.
I applaud students from expensive schools taking an interest in the weak and vulnerable. I salute them. But I do wonder why the protests are about the Palestinians, not the people in Sudan and Myanmar who are being slaughtered, starved and raped as well. Or Ukraine. Maybe I have become paranoid but somehow this smells like the Hillary's emails revelations right before the 2016 election. It likely will harm Biden's reelection.