And as political strategy “[T]he American right wing is trying to create a Hobbesian state of nature where violence and fear of death is everywhere and the rule of law is increasingly meaningless,” writes Chauncey DeVega, Salon’s senior politics writer. Who needs random squads of brownshirts when everyone, everywhere is armed, anxious, and primed to go to guns at the slightest provocation? That’s “primed” in the psychological sense. As a political tactic. DeVega walks readers through how German legal philosopher and political theorist Carl Schmidt’s views of “sovereign authority.” Per the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Legal norms, Schmitt argues, cannot be applied to a chaos.” Thus the need for a sovereign. In post-Weimar Germany, read “dictator,” who might rule this “state of exception.” That’s not unlike the book of Revelation’s return of Jesus at Armageddon. It’s something that makes Christian nationalists and a self-described “Leninist” like Steve Bannon shiver with antici … pation. Exception justifies all those guns stockpiled by coup plotters in preparation for the reign of Donald Trump. As I’ve written time and again, they are at heart royalists not small-d democrats. They hunger for a strongman to guarantee their dominion over perceived enemies. Chaos paves his way: Social psychologists have repeatedly shown that the political decision-making of conservative-authoritarians is largely motivated by fear and death anxieties. The Republican Party’s opposition to effective gun control is a strategic decision because they know that more death and more killing from guns and other causes (such as COVID) enhances their…