Conservatives are really obsessed with chaos. They call it “anarchy” and they call a society in chaos an “anarchic society”. This may seem obvious, but I think it’s a good idea to talk about it. From the conservative view, chaos is always right around the corner because somehow their preferred hierarchy will be upended and then, suddenly, everything will be on fire. That’s literally what they believe. They don’t seem to really have any kind of understanding of how, exactly, women wearing pants or Cardi B publicly talking about her sex life is going to cause everything to catch fire, but that’s definitely what is going to happen — and that’s why decent 5.56x45mm ammo is still 73 cents per round.
For many issues, the real problem conservatives have with it isn’t the issue itself, but rather this ever-present subtext of chaos (which they call anarchy). When they rail against abortion, the subtext of every claim and concern they voice is that if women don’t follow the course of action that has been ordained by the hierarchy, the next thing you know, everything will be on fire. It’s not about babies — it’s about chaos.
Most of the conservative logic around how a society might become chaotic is completely bananas, but one part of it makes sense, and that is their severe anxiety about the police potentially being defunded. Whether that defunding would be a marginal decrease in police funding to move tax money to other government functions that would actually help people, or whether it be the complete abolition of the police, conservatives are scared shitless by defunding the police.
That’s a little bit odd because it is conservatives who are always most loudly talking about how they need to be armed — and if they’re all armed, you would think we would not need to pay a few of them to be armed. It’s also weird because even though the police are conservative, they don’t serve conservatives but rather capital (i.e., wealthy people), and you’d think conservatives would have noticed that, oftentimes, they are the ones catching law enforcement’s bullets (Ashli Babbitt comes to mind).
However, it does make some sense. Police are, in fact, the people who are the ultimate enforcers of the social hierarchy — because they are the agents of violence serving the ruling class — and they are all conservatives, so it does make sense that they would follow the wishes of other conservatives. While it is true that police will always favor capitalism over conservativism (they don’t have a choice if they want to keep their jobs), it’s also true that they usually don’t have to choose between the two. For example, conservatives love to hate poor people, and capitalists want people to be poor, so the fact that it is the police who directly keep America’s half-million homeless people from occupying the 17 million empty houses in the country makes both capitalists and run-of-the-mill conservatives happy.
Because police are the enforcers of that social hierarchy that keeps people from having what they need (in order to benefit a tiny minority of ultra rich assholes), it is the police that are most directly responsible for creating poverty.
We can have order, though, without it being the current order.
Other order is possible.
Capitalism is an illegitimate order, because capitalists are not better than us (they are in fact worse). If we want an illegitimate order, we could have a different one. For example, we could have a society where the Catholic Pope is the highest authority, or a society where a Muslim cleric is the highest authority; those would both be theocracies. We could have a society where the highest authority is inherited; that would be a monarchy. We could have a society where the taller you are, the more power you have. None of those are legitimate order.
When people say they are anarchists, conservatives really tremble in fear, because they believe that anarchists want chaos. Exactly the opposite is true, though; anarchists want order — anarchists want more and better order, in fact. Anarchists rightly see the suffering, poverty, death, and destruction of capitalism as chaos and they want a legitimate order. Similarly, they see the suffering, destruction, and death of racism, sexism, and other aspects of fascism as chaos. To anarchists, order is only legitimate if it is democratic.
Anarchy is order. Anarchy is democracy taken seriously.
A hierarchy of domination is chaos.
It is conservatives who are clinging to the chaos of this illegitimate order, because they support either the supremacy of super-wealthy capitalists or a more traditional hierarchy that is more complicated but even more illegitimate. It really comes down to a lack of imagination, fear of change, and fear that other groups of people will treat conservatives the way they have treated others. They don’t understand that the violence they fear is ultimately caused by the illegitimate hierarchy that they support.
Conservatives, whether they are Democrats or Republicans, do not want democracy. Both groups believe that most people are too selfish and stupid to have direct political power, and so they have these ideas about what group of people is superior enough to lord over the rest of us. Conservatives are only angry about someone ruling over them if it is the wrong someone in their view.
All of this is important to understand because the fear of chaos in conservative culture is so basic that they don’t talk about it clearly. If you don’t understand that this subtext is present globally in conservative arguments, their arguments just seem nuts; it becomes a lot more difficult to work against those arguments if they don’t make any sense to you. Change does result in an uptick in chaos, but change is inevitable, and if we can make changes that move us toward a more legitimate order (real democracy), the end result is order.