I knew a guy who was the president of a co-op house at UC Berkeley (basically, a student-run housing system decoupled from the university). They had regular meetings and he described one of the challenges: while most people who came to the meetings just wanted to vote on measures to buy food and change policies, there was a subgroup that "just wanted to fuck shit up". You know, like during a protest there are always some people who go around doing unncessary damage to unrelated/innocent businesses. They just enjoy breaking things and enjoy making people mad.
It's not a perfect analogy but I see Trump and his cronies as a "fuck shit up" contingent- they seem to genuinely enjoy making their enemies unhappy by breaking things, regardless of the societal cost of their actions.
I was at some of those meetings, though unlikely to be the exact same ones :)
At the meetings I attended the furious debate was whether we allowed a volunteer group cook food in our kitchen to feed homeless people.
The interesting thing about this debate was that to make a decision, you had to have a position on what the coop was,
Was it cheap housing for students, or was the cheap housing something that emerged from committing to a practice of cooperative behaviour?
Supporting the volunteers cooking in our kitchen came at a cost, many volunteers were homeless, some had mental health issues.
I felt it was morally right to let them use our kitchen,
And I know that for this I did get labeled by some as pursuing chaos as performative social justice points and to upset opponents,
But from my perspective I sincerely believe it was the right thing to do.
When parallels like this are revealed, it really makes me wonder how the orange cult people and I ended up on such different paths, both as a response to dissatisfaction with the status quo, why have the stories they’ve been told resonated with them when they seem so inauthentic to me, and why is the more progressive ideology that seems reasonable to me so distasteful to them
I like this analogy. I've had the thought many, many times over the last 8 years that many people seem to like breaking things because their perceived enemies will be unhappy.
Was this co-op perhaps Barrington Hall? I had good friends that lived there while at UCB. To my young eyes it was absolute anarchy.
It's not a perfect analogy but I see Trump and his cronies as a "fuck shit up" contingent- they seem to genuinely enjoy making their enemies unhappy by breaking things, regardless of the societal cost of their actions.