The Devils We Know

A strange trend has begun to take shape: Teslas being vandalized, electric vehicle charging stations firebombed, and videos of the destruction circulating online like war trophies, cheered on by a certain subset of digital revolutionaries who fancy themselves warriors for justice. Watch closely, though, and you’ll see what they’re really celebrating: not resistance, not reform, but ruin, and the thrilling power they feel while inflicting it.

It is not political. It is spiritual. And it is, in a word, deranged.

I wish I could take credit for originating this insight, but Dostoevsky diagnosed this pathology long before the age of social media or billionaires with rocket ships. In The Devils, he gives us not a political novel, but a prophetic one: a vision of ideologues so hollowed by envy and resentment that they cease to be reformers and become saboteurs of civilization itself. They do not build. They do not even really oppose. They simply destroy — for the thrill of it, for the illusion of agency, for the satisfaction of dragging others into the pit they call justice.

“The desire for destruction is a creative desire,” one character proclaims.

This, we are meant to understand, is not wisdom. It is a sickness.

That same sickness is visible today. It once marched under slogans of justice. Now it hides behind hashtags and anarchist chic. Mobs that loot stores and torch police cars are defended as “mostly peaceful.” The assassination of a healthcare executive is met with celebration, and a distressing amount of equivocation: “I don’t support murder, but…”. And now, in this new phase, the symbols of innovation — electric cars, clean energy infrastructure — have become stand-ins for heretics to be punished. Why? Because Elon Musk has committed the cardinal sin of being on the other side.

It’s worth pausing on that for a moment. Musk is now public enemy number one not because of his products or his business practices, but because he refuses to play the role they’ve assigned him. He speaks out. He platforms dissent. He challenges orthodoxy. And he has ascended to the forefront of a political movement — yes, the one led by Donald Trump — that his opponents claim threatens democracy.

But let us ask plainly: what is democratic about smashing someone’s car because you dislike its manufacturer? What is democratic about threatening people into silence or intimidating them into boycotts? What is democratic about breaking laws that were democratically enacted? What is democratic about using destruction as a stand-in for persuasion?

Donald Trump was elected. His agenda, like it or not, was chosen by voters, and he has engaged Elon Musk to help him achieve his ends.  Whatever else one might say about Trump, he has acted within the framework of our democratic system. The vandals, on the other hand, have not. They have no mandate, no office, no support beyond the mob. And so, like all those who fail in the marketplace of ideas, they turn to coercion.

This is not dissent. This is not protest. It is naked anti-democratic fury, a tantrum disguised as resistance, a jihad against civilization waged by people who could not win at the ballot box and so seek victory in the ashes.

Destruction, after all, is seductive. It is the cheapest substitute for creativity, the easiest path to feeling powerful. To build something — an idea, a business, a nation — requires effort, talent, discipline, self-denial, risk, and time. To destroy it? Just a rock through a window. Just a match and some gasoline. It is the preferred method of the envious, the embittered, and the irrelevant.

I used to say our politics were divided between the makers and the takers. But that’s no longer quite right. We are now divided between the builders and the breakers. Between those who labor to create and those who take perverse satisfaction in annihilation. Between those who believe the future is worth investing in, and those who can only find meaning in wrecking what others have made.

Because in the end, these anarcho-progressives don’t actually want progress. They don’t want dialogue. They don’t want solutions. What they want, what they enjoy, is the chaos. The breaking. The smoke and the noise and the false feeling of power that comes from destruction. They have nothing to offer the world, and so they’ve convinced themselves that the world deserves nothing better than to burn.

This isn’t justice. It’s not democracy. It’s just vandalism, dressed up in slogans.

And until we stop pretending otherwise, the devils will keep dancing in the ruins.