By Michael A. Hancock | Commentary, Substack
By now, the pattern is as familiar as it is sinister. A protest erupts into violence. A crisis becomes an opportunity. An institution is denounced, discredited, and dismantled. And always, always, someone else is to blame.
This is not coincidence. It is strategy.
We are witnessing the methodical deployment of chaos as a political narrative—a calculated tool of progressive activism that feeds on division, cultivates instability, and then offers itself as the only remedy.
The idea that chaos can be wielded as a political weapon is not new. Lenin believed revolution must spring from crisis. Saul Alinsky advised radicals to “rub raw the people’s resentments.”
But the modern American Left has refined the process into something more ambient, more permanent. Instead of inciting chaos in bursts, it has institutionalized chaos—codified it into the culture.
This is not a passing phase. It is a governing philosophy.
The progressive chaos narrative is composed of three key parts. First: perpetual crisis. Second: perpetual victimhood. Third: perpetual revolution.
Let us begin with crisis. From climate panic to systemic racism, from trans genocide alarms to the alleged collapse of democracy, progressivism thrives in the language of emergency. The nation, we are told, teeters constantly on the brink of destruction.
And the cause?
Never mismanagement, never excess, never internal contradiction—but the enemy: conservatives, corporations, Christians, the Constitution.
In this framework, America is not a work in progress. It is a crime scene.
Crisis legitimizes extraordinary measures. It suspends rules. It justifies censorship, overrides tradition, and abolishes due process.
But only if you control the narrative.
And here lies the genius of the progressive chaos machine: they create the fire and claim the hose. It is the Left that dismantles school discipline and then blames declining achievement on structural racism. It is the Left that defunds police and then decries crime as a failure of capitalism. It is the Left that opens the border and then invokes humanitarian catastrophe to federalize immigration policy.
And when the chaos grows unmanageable? The answer is always more Leftism.
Second, victimhood. Every progressive claim to power is based not on success but on suffering: the more broken the individual, the more righteous the cause.
A functioning society—stable families, merit-based institutions, and personal responsibility—diminishes victimhood.
Therefore, it must be subverted.
If boys perform poorly in school, masculinity is toxic. If inner cities collapse, whiteness is to blame. If a person fails, the system failed first.
This worldview is not merely pessimistic. It is parasitic.
Victimhood becomes not a condition to be alleviated but an identity to be protected.
In such a culture, healing is betrayal. Empowerment is suspect.
The goal is not to overcome adversity but to eternalize it—because progressivism needs a permanent underclass of moral leverage.
This is why the Left obsessively redefines terms: inequality becomes oppression, disagreement becomes violence, and chaos becomes justice. Everything is upstream from language, and in the hands of the chaos narrative, language is a weapon.
READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT HANCOCK’S SUBSTACK HERE
Michael A. Hancock is a retired high-tech executive, visionary, musician, and composer, exploring diverse interests—from religion and arts to politics and philosophy—offering thoughtful insights on the intersections of culture, innovation, and society.
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