The Anti-Hillary, Pro-Trump Arsonist Crowd

Hmm, it seems that libertarian Trump fanboys aren't the only group that considers Trump support strategically productive.

Michelle Goldberg reports:

On Wednesday,[Christopher] Ketcham published a piece in the Daily Beast titled “Anarchists For Trump—Let the Empire Burn.” Ketcham, who writes that he donated hundreds of dollars to Bernie Sanders, now plans to support Donald Trump in the general election. “What’s needed now in American politics is consternation, confusion, dissension, disorder, chaos—and crisis, with possible resolution—and a Trump presidency is the best chance for this true progress,” he writes.  “This is a politics of arson. I’d rather see the empire burn to the ground under Trump, opening up at least the possibility of radical change, than cruise on autopilot under Clinton.”

This is a more forceful rendition of the argument that Susan Sarandon floated on MSNBC in March, when she said, “Some people feel that Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately if he gets in, things will really explode.” It’s a jejune version of the Bolshevik slogan “The worse, the better,” which meant that deteriorating social conditions would radicalize the populace and empower the left...

Ketcham thinks he’s shocking the bourgeoisie by opening a window into a nihilist demimonde. “Travelling across the country, I keep meeting people who voted for Sanders in the primaries but mutter under cover of night and a few drinks that they’ll vote for Trump in November,” he writes. “Friends out in the wildlands of the intermountain West, hard gun-toting anarchist redneck Amy Goodman progressives, say so. Big-city journalists, too. I suspect that the left-contrarian, anti-Hillary, pro-Trump arsonist crowd is larger and wider-spread than the cubicled creatures in the Clinton campaign have accounted for.”

It is not difficult to imagine that during a Donald Trump presidency some of these "pro-Trump arsonists" might live up to the arsonist part of their name and help the "confusion, dissension, disorder, chaos—and crisis" along. How would Trump react? My feared scenario: increased surveillance, active use of the National Guard and perhaps a more an expanded TSA on the highways of America.

 -RW