A few weeks ago I spoke at a Hands Off rally in Williamsburg. I had just read Raymond King’s short book, The Psychopath Mantra: Chaos is Power, and focused my speech on ways the conservative movement uses the methods outlined in the book to create a chaotic environment that they use to grasp and hold power. The short version: American fascists work hard to keep people wondering what’s going on so they can take control of institutions and use them to complete their goals while most folks are distracted.
I want to discuss the connection between chaos and power, and how today’s current conservative elites use chaos to distract enough people to achieve their goals. First, however, a short discussion of King’s book, because I think he gives us a broad outline showing how they have accomplished so much.
King characterizes the book on his website as taking the reader “inside the predatory mind of the ruling class,” and it does that, though not terribly well. He numbers the paragraphs for some reason, he does not give examples, and he does not attempt to make a cohesive argument. He makes excellent points and offers important insights, but he does not state a thesis or create a logical argument in support of one. Indeed, the book has a satirical vibe, as if he’s written a self-help book for aspiring members of the ruling class.
Nonetheless I read his argument as follows: the ruling class consists of shameless psychopaths who manipulate morality, set themselves up as martyrs by constructing a concept of sacrifice that gives them prestige, create resentment among the masses, and reconstruct truth to suit their needs, all in an effort to take and hold power.
King describes morality as “the invisible hand that steers the course of history,” and notes that “in the right hands, morality becomes the ultimate expression of power.” “Elites hold power,” he writes, “by creating and enforcing their own moral code.” Elites want to make people think their values are absolute, and “come down from the heavens.” Morality, in the minds of “psychopathic elites,” is a tool, not a mandate, but they will frame it as objective truth when speaking to the masses. King, as I noted, does not offer examples, but some argue that religion exists because our ancestors did exactly this.
Further, King writes that people who hold power do so because they “define the boundaries of our imagination.” He recommends that aspiring elites “seize power over the ideas that motivate the masses” rather than worry about what others think. People in charge have no true ideology, he says. “It’s what people think you believe that matters.” Make them believe they have something to fear and that you have the courage to take that on in their place. This brings people hope, King says.
“Gaslighting to cultural elites is a form of art,” King writes. “The highest form of power is attained when everything you say is a lie and people want to believe you.” One key way to make this work is to manipulate people’s sense of fairness, which King suggests is an illusion. Society cannot function without a shared sense of fairness, which elites need to maintain carefully. This requires a certain shamelessness – an ability to claim accomplishment for behavior or ideas others feel ashamed about. Legitimacy depends on consensus, and as long as the masses see elites as the arbiters of truth they have the power to confer legitimacy in ways that support their ends.
King paints a broad brush of the elite class, and does not distinguish among ideologies – he in fact suggests that true elites have no real ideology and recreate themselves as needed to maintain power. He does this, however, in the form of a parody of a self-help book aimed at aspiring elites, full of advice on how to rise to power. So I’ll pass on making a claim that conservatives are more likely to use his methods than liberals, especially since I think we could find examples on both sides. In any event, it’s clear that since the beginning of the Trump era, the conservative movement – which has become more and more a fascist movement – used chaos to take power and keep it. Here I make that argument, and I’ll use King’s framework.
I’ll start by noting that I think about morality in general as a shared understanding of right and wrong. This is a moving target of course, and these understandings cover a broad spectrum. Killing is immoral, except when it’s not. Sometimes shading the truth smooths social interactions. We balance moral principles every day, and these disagreements form the core of political disagreement. Some of us would argue that billionaire-level wealth in a world where innocent children starve and die needlessly from disease is fundamentally immoral. This is not an argument against wealth, but a case regarding how to define a moral distribution and use of that wealth.
Since the 1980’s conservatives successfully shifted the moral landscape to make this kind of obscene wealth acceptable and even admired, so much so that today’s billionaires seem to have no compunction hoarding it rather than creating museums and libraries and charities that at least make a show of helping the least of us. More recently they have shifted the moral landscape with respect to how we treat one another, both socially and individually. A businessman or corporation that contracted for a service and then simply refused to pay the bill would have been considered immoral. A cheat. People involved in such a scam could have become wealthy, but never successful socially or politically. Today people accept this as a way to become wealthy and grab power because that is the goal. They vote for them for President, and then cheer when that President invites his billionaire friends to dismantle the systems that make government moral: social support and justice regimes.
More recently conservatives have shifted the moral landscape with respect to how we treat each other and think about belonging. They did this by suggesting that some of us simply do not count as Americans because of religion, skin color, ethnicity, sexual orientation, cultural background, level of patriotism, or work ethic. Or that we only belong if we play a certain role in society – they see independent women as disruptive and immoral, for example. This is populism: defining who counts and who does not in a society. This makes bigotry and discrimination acceptable, and creates fear among both those who belong – fear that someone who doesn’t will take their place – and among those who don’t, who now must worry about their ability to navigate a society that now sees them as outsiders.
This is all classic fascism: reshape morality in terms of whether we should fear the other, and create the conditions for oppression against those seen as enemies, whether or not they have acted so. This creates chaos in no small part by making us fear our neighbors.
These fascists have further created chaos by using extreme rhetoric to create imaginary threats and exaggerate or create evil that does not exist. While some immigrants will commit crimes, they simply do not pose a threat to American society as a group – indeed, in most cases they simply want to become a part of it so they can prosper. This is as true of the person who walks three thousand miles from Guatemala looking for a job because climate change ended their subsistence farming existence as the one who overstays an education visa to complete a difficult dissertation. Fascists used images of desperate people seeking a better life to create a narrative of invasion, and supplemented this with isolated stories of gang members taking over neighborhoods, or people from strange lands kidnapping pets to eat them. These people are not existential threats to our way of life that justify changing our norms about how we as a society find and prosecute those we should remove from society. Trump and his supporters have found a way to motivate supporters by fear of the other by creating boogeymen in their imaginations.
They do this by lying, shamelessly, and with a straight face. Immigrants in Ohio do not kidnap pets and eat them. Non-citizens do not vote. Democrats did not create an open border policy so they could then have immigrants without legal residence here vote for them. Immigrants do not fraudulently collect social security. Covid vaccines do not kill every young person who takes it, and Bill Gates did not use the vaccines to inject nanobots or a tracker into American arteries. Ping Pong Pizza did not host pedophile parties in the basement it does not have. These are all shameless lies that fascist elites told in order to create fear of imaginary threats that require extraordinary and extra judicial measures in defense of our way of life.
Trump and his minions have indeed made gaslighting a form of art, and they have convinced too many Americans that they cannot believe their own eyes. He clearly does not have the common man top of mind, and the masses should see this by how much time he spends away from his job on golf courses. The man tells blatant lies, and people believe him because he has reshaped our understanding of fairness. Affirmative action is unfair to them, whether or not intended to right historical wrongs, in part because many people do not recognize the historical wrongs. “You were born here, so it’s unfair that immigrants prosper while you suffer” is a very effective message. But they believe him because they need to – if he’s wrong, they are, and should have done something differently. The highest form of gaslighting as art is the one that creates scapegoats for individual failure.
This moral shift and the gaslighting that takes advantage of it creates conditions that allow Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and Trump himself to keep Americans off balance with a constant stream of new outrages. One day they’re attacking a university for attempting to open a path to success for minorities and the historically disadvantaged. The next it’s a new outrageously high tariff on imports from important allies, or changing them in mid-stream. Or extra-legal kidnapping of people and shipping them off to foreign prisons for the crime of expressing views they don’t like, without due process, warrants, or court hearings that establish a crime was or may have been committed.
All of this creates a kind of chaos that protects their power by keeping us off balance and worried about others in our own social class rather than facing the real problem: massive wealth hoarding that does not improve society and instead creates division. This is true for both the working class and the middle class, however defined. Working class Americans worry about labor competition with immigrants. Tariff regimes that shift on a dime create economic uncertainty among Americans with retirement plans. Deporting immigrants and people here legally for university worries everyone – using ICE enforcement agents to round people up, including US citizens, give us all reasons to worry and stay quiet. I’m a citizen, but what is my recourse from a Salvadorian jail where I have no way to communicate with loved ones or attorneys? Too many of us focus on what Trump’s economy does to our retirement plans to focus on the damage he does to due process and the justice system.
Americans who want to protect our Republic and the freedoms enshrined in our Constitution need to ignore the distractions. In the end it’s all an effort to establish an oligarchy similar to that in Russia, where the super wealthy control all commerce and have the ability to eliminate or send to exile their enemies, whether or not the formal legal regime permits this. We need to focus on how we can retake our society from the billionaires.