A Quick Note

On Nikki Haley, Donald Trump, 

and Chaos

Chaos Is Not The Pejorative She Suggests

By Pem Schaeffer

pemster4062@yahoo.com

January 4, 2024

Nikki Haley, sensing she is enjoying a modest “surge” in polling for the Republican candidacy for President, has settled on a bumper sticker tagline claiming “Chaos follows Donald Trump wherever he goes; really, it does.”  Her conviction in doing so is that chaos is a pejorative, and is disqualifying.

I would argue the opposite.  A tenet of Chaos Theory is that progress, or positive change, can only happen at the boundary between order and chaos.  Order, by its very definition, favors the status quo, the norm, the expected.  It resists progress, or more precisely, positive change.  Chaos, on the other hand, is random in nature, unpredictable, and impossible to control.

So it is that progress most often takes place at the boundary between the two conditions: the expected norm, and the unpredictable, which no one wants.  A mixture of the two allows for the unexpected, yet desirable advance to occur.

So much as she may regret saying so, the “chaos” that follows Trump is what differentiates him from the carbon copy bureaucrats, swamp critters, and establishment figurines in bloated government.

For an example of this form of “chaos,” take a look back into how Trump took hold of the refurbishment of the Wollman Ice Rink in Central Park and turned the “same old, same old” establishment on its ear while saving significant dollars and completing the job ahead of schedule.  

Some might say that the migration of those tired of living under the reign of “Divine” Monarchs to the shores of America was an act of chaos targeting the established order.  Similarly, the Declaration of Independence they approved was a deliberate act challenging the established order….one could say it’s where chaos met at the boundary with order.  The Boston Tea Party could be looked at in the same light.

And if the Revolutionary War was not chaos rising organically against the established order, what was it?  

So there is ample history to assert that the American Experiment, this great quest for government of the people, by the people, and for the people, to guarantee the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, is the embodiment of chaos clashing with established order, and achieving momentous progress in so doing.  And creating a model for societal organization and governance that has no equal elsewhere in the world.

In light of this, I would say that Nikki Haley might want to rethink her chaos bumper sticker attack unless she is signaling that deep down inside, she believes America needs Donald Trump to bring his unique brand of ordered chaos back to the Federal Government apparatus so that figuratively, it “starts making ice again.”  

And we can all start “skating” anew to great American tunes.  With Old Glory waving above us all.

If you do not take an interest 

in the affairs of your government, 

then you are doomed to live under 

the rule of fools.

Plato