The ‘Burn It All Down’ Crowd Deserves to Be Defeated

T here’s plenty of bad news for Joe Biden in the latest New York Times/Sienna Research survey of the 2024 electorate in six of America’s most competitive states. And yet, maybe the most fascinating finding in the poll came amid an effort to identify the most nihilistic subgroup in American politics — a demographic that has allowed its discontent to metastasize into contempt for America itself. Call it the “burn it all down” crowd.

Times/Sienna pollsters asked voters to describe their outlook toward the “political and economic system in America” and the degree to which the status quo requires reform. Unsurprisingly, given the general dissatisfaction with the trajectory of America’s “political and economic system,” a majority (55 percent) said the system requires “major changes.” Less than one-third of respondents said the country needed only “minor” tweaks or no changes whatsoever. More interestingly, though, 14 percent identified themselves as radicals in endorsing the notion that “the system needs to be torn down entirely.”

The breakdown of Americans who subscribe to this revolutionary proposition is, in some ways, conventional. Just 8 percent of those over the age of 65 count themselves among the arsonists, which, because older Americans are stakeholders in that system with legacies they hope to preserve for their descendants, makes sense. But just 16 percent of America’s youngest voters (between the ages of 18 and 29) are radicals. At 21 percent, the demographic most receptive to the idea that the American civic compact needs to be scrapped are Millennials between the ages of 30 and 44.

Intuitively enough, a plurality of those who subscribe to the belief that the American system is hopelessly flawed are so disaffected that they either decline to participate meaningfully in the political process or have shunned it altogether. Twenty-one percent of those in the “torn down entirely” camp said they were voting for neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden in November. Indeed, they may not vote at all. Another 21 percent of this cohort confessed that they did not vote at all in 2020. Still, those who do want to burn it all down gravitate more toward Trump than Biden.

And yet, while a full quarter of registered voters believe Trump will be the vessel to bring about the ruin of the America that was, that’s not necessarily a mark in his favor. Voters over 65 are most likely to believe that Trump will tear down the American edifice (35 percent), second only to voters between the ages of 45 and 65 (27 percent). Younger people who are most likely to look fondly on that sort of radicalism are less likely to see Trump as a person who would tear the country down.

We can therefore deduce that this is not a value-neutral premise. By and large, the voters who believe Trump is an agent of chaos fear that outcome more than they support it. That would explain the consistent softness of Trump’s support among older voters in polling of the general electorate. Moreover, very few self-identified Republicans say Trump would bring the system to its knees. The heartening conclusion we’re compelled to draw, then, is that most politically active Americans regard tearing the system down as an undesirable outcome.

And all this jibes with the results produced when pollsters asked voters which they’d prefer as their next president: a candidate who pledges to “fundamentally change” America or one who “promises to bring politics in Washington back to normal.” A majority prefer normalcy. Just four in ten registered voters are in a radical mood. The radicals can count on a supermajority of young voters and a majority of Millennials, 61 percent of Hispanics, nearly half of black voters, and 57 percent of voters without a college degree. Once again, however, it’s unwise to bet that this group will achieve its aims. A majority of radical voters said they supported neither of the two major candidates in November, and 65 percent confessed to their non-participation in the 2020 election.

Given their questionable relevance, it’s reasonable to wonder why the radicals seem to dominate our field of vision. Ahead of the 2016 election, when Donald Trump represented such a profound departure from major-party presidential nominees of the past, the “burn it all down” crowd punched well above its weight in coverage of the political landscape. “The whole system is f***ed,” said one indicative 32-year-old self-described Democrat who planned to vote for Trump. “Why not vote for the craziest guy, so we can see the craziest s*** happen?” Others of a similar disposition and voting history admitted to reporters that their “dark side” just wanted to see what would happen if Trump won. “It’s like reality TV,” a self-reported Bernie Sanders supporter told a Times reporter that year. “You don’t want to just see everybody be happy with each other. You want to see someone fighting somebody.”

That desire for theatrics animates a small share of voters today, but they are vastly overrepresented in our media. From the marginal campus radicals paralyzing their institutions of higher learning to the Americans who carve out portions of their otherwise languid days to protest in Trump’s favor outside courtrooms, a distinct minority is making its menacing intent known. Their respective causes thrill the bored and comfortable for whom predictability is a waking death.

The press was taken with the radical outlook a decade ago, but it should not have been. It was an expression of grotesque ingratitude — a suffocating boredom with the relative placidity of life in the modern United States. Media reports from the period paint an abstract portrait of the radicals in our midst. They, we were told, had been buffeted by events, shortchanged by the political class, and disabused of the naïve patriotism in which they marinated in their youths. That was a convenient canard for a media class that was itself full of agitation for revolution, albeit not the sort of revolution that Trump was offering.

Eight years later, we can easily anticipate what accompanies the kind of moral relativism that would scuttle the American social contract just to see what comes next. It is a movement at ease with indiscriminate violence. It is undiscerning, unable to distinguish moral absolutes. It makes its peace with the imposition of hardships on others because it perceives itself to be beset by forces beyond its control or comprehension. It is not a demographic to be courted or even contained. It is to be defeated.

The American political class is visibly uncomfortable with the notion that there can be any lasting victory over the forces of disorder. From electoral politics to the world’s expanding battlefields, our exhausted patricians cannot envision anything more than narrow, temporary successes — pyrrhic victories that merely beget the next fight. Yet Americans — even the majority of Americans who want major changes — hunger not for revolution but a restoration. The party that summons the courage to defend all that is great and good about the American status quo will reap the rewards.