I am going to have to delve into this study on the reasons people share disinformation on their social networks. I didn’t initially think it would be of much interest to me, but I turned out to be very wrong. The impulse towards creating chaos and destruction coming from marginalized groups, or groups losing status, probably has a lot to do with not only why Donald Trump was elected and retains substantial support but also with why people are continuously shooting up schools, college campuses, malls, concerts, county fairs, movie theaters, and innocent bystanders of all types.

Thomas Edsall does a good job of taking a initial look at the results of the study, and I recommend his piece to you. One interesting thing to know is that 24 percent of the people surveyed said they felt “society should be burned to the ground,” while 40 percent said we should just let our political and social institutions “burn.” Additionally, 40 percent said “we cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over.”

The people who answered these questions affirmatively were highly correlated with support for the president and somewhat less correlated with support for Bernie Sanders. They were negatively correlated with support for Hillary Clinton and, I imagine, they are probably negatively correlated with support for Joe Biden too.

The self-proclaimed societal arsonists were also the ones most likely to share disinformation while knowing it is false.

The basic impulse is anti-establishmentarianism, and this gets into a theme I’ve been wrestling with now for years. While I have wish list of progressive reforms a mile long, my primary motivation for being involved in politics is simply to deny power to nihilists, particularly nihilists of a conservative stripe. The way to do that is to get power for yourself, which entails becoming the establishment that everyone loves to revile.  In the end, I want our government and our leadership to be responsible and informed by the best available information. I want our media to do a good job of being an establishment press rather than pretending that we’ll one day get our news only from blogs and alt-weeklies. I want people to believe in the power of government to do good and big things, and I want that faith to be justified. So, I don’t really want to tear down the establishment, let alone simply sow distrust and chaos.  I want the establishment to do a much better job of running the country and of exercising leadership around the world.

Yet, sometimes it definitely feels like things are so rotted through that only a cataclysm that disrupts everything can give us the fresh start we need. For many, Trump was supposed to be that cataclysm but his presidency hasn’t made anything better. At most, it has clarified to a lot of people what the GOP is all about and made clear why denying power to the Republican Party party is paramount in my value system. But it hasn’t given us any kind of fresh start.

This also touches on my complaint about the left in America, as exemplified by the Democratic Party, has now bought into the idea the world should be understood primarily by identity rather that economic status. When coal miners in Kentucky start a protest to get their back pay, that is something the left should be all over like white on rice. But the coal miners are white, conservative in outlook and work in a county that gave the president something close to 80 percent of their vote. These folks are gravitating to a fascist form of right-wing populism because they accurately perceive that the left has nothing to offer them. When the left abandons working people because they work in the wrong industry or hold some retrograde beliefs, those former diehard Democrats don’t sit on their hands. They become advocates of chaos.  They fuel fascist movements. Some of them lash out with senseless violence.

The left is in denial if it thinks there are communities that don’t need their full-throated support, particularly communities that undergoing massive economic contraction and loss of status.

I don’t want to make seem that these developments are solely or even primarily the fault of the left because they are not. Attacks on unionized labor have had a cumulative effect, and the right has stoked religious, racial and nationalist passions for cynical short-term political advantage. Conservatives are the originators of the anti-establishment message that the government can do no good.

But the left can’t cooperate with this and gladly pick up the suburban support that comes their way in a realignment. If the right becomes the party of the socially and financially marginalized in any community, it instantly leads to the most dangerous and un-democratic kinds of governments.  For one thing, the people left behind start sowing chaos with one of the new powers they have, which is their social media accounts.

There’s a cost and tradeoff to everything, but the left can never forget that it’s number one job is to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, protect wage earners, make sure people get health care, and provide upward mobility and economic fairness. When the left gets sidetracked from its core mission, it empowers the worst instincts of people on the margins and it endangers literally every progressive advance of the last century and a half, as well as the peace of the world.