Nihilism, considered

David Brooks wrote a column last week which feels half wrong, and half right:  The Rise of Right-Wing Nihilism.

He starts with what most people in comments agree is an overblown apologia for the Right wing culture wars (and their never-ending claim to victimhood, while simultaneously claiming that it's Lefties who are all about their "feelings"):

Democratic friends, let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine you woke up one morning and all your media sources were produced by Christian nationalists. You sent your kids off to school and the teachers were espousing some version of Christian nationalism. You turned on your sports network and your late-night comedy, and everyone was preaching Christian nationalism.

That’s a bit how it feels to be more conservative in the West today — to feel drenched by a constant downpour of progressive sermonizing. What would you do in such circumstances? Well, at least at first, you’d probably grit your teeth and take it while silently seething.

In 2018, I happened to watch the Super Bowl at a sports bar in West Virginia. President Trump was about a year into his first term, and the corporate advertising world was churning out ads with vaguely progressive messages. I watched the guys in the bar sort of hunch over, grim-faced, their body language saying: This is the crap we have to put up with to watch a football game. 

He also makes this somewhat surprising claim:

This progressive/conservative disconnect — which is also, frequently, an elite/non-elite disconnect — is a problem across the West. For reasons I don’t fully understand, educated elites are more socially progressive than non-elites. 

I haven't had time to look it up, but I am pretty sure the social progressiveness/higher education link has been well studied?

Anyway, am I complaining too much, because I have made it clear here that I agree that aspects of the gender and sexuality culture wars have been taken too far?   I don't think so, because the HUGE point skipped over by Brooks is the poisonous nature of Right wing media and information network aligning itself with evangelical Christianity to directly demonise one side of politics as being literally evil, and replacing trust in expertise with endless conspiracy crap just because they think any policy endorsed by "elites" (who are usually liberal) is out to control and hurt them.

But the part that does ring a bit true is the rising appeal of nihilism to right wing numbskulls:

Other people, of course, don’t just cope; they rebel. That rebellion comes in two forms. The first is what I’ll call Christopher Rufo-style dismantling. Rufo is the right-wing activist who seeks to dismantle D.E.I. and other culturally progressive programs. I’m 23 years older than Rufo. When I was emerging from college, we conservatives thought we were conserving something — a group of cultural, intellectual and political traditions — from the postmodern assault.

But decades later, with the postmodern takeover fully institutionalized, people like Rufo don’t seem to think there’s anything to conserve. They are radical deconstructors. In a 2024 dialogue between Rufo and the polemicist Curtis Yarvin, published by the magazine IM-1776, Rufo acknowledged, “I am neither conservative by temperament nor by political ambition: I want to destroy the status quo rather than preserve it.” This is a key difference between old-style conservatism and Trumpism.

But there’s another, even more radical reaction to progressive cultural dominance: nihilism. You start with the premise that progressive ideas are false and then conclude that all ideas are false. In the dialogue, Yarvin played the role of nihilist. He ridiculed Rufo for accomplishing very little and for aiming at very little with his efforts to purge this university president or that one.

“You are just pruning the forest,” Yarvin said dismissively. He countered that everything must be destroyed: In general, Yarvin is a monarchist, but in this dialogue he played a pure nihilist. One version of nihilism holds that the structures of civilization must be destroyed, even if we don’t have anything to replace them with. He argued that all of America has been a sham, that democracy and everything that has come with it are based on lies.

He goes on:

I was reminded of an essay the great University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter wrote last year for The Hedgehog Review. He, too, identified nihilism as the central feature of contemporary culture: “A nihilistic culture is defined by the drive to destroy, by the will to power. And that definition now describes the American nation.”

He pointed to our culture’s pervasive demonization and fearmongering, with leaders feeling no need to negotiate with the other side, just decimate it. Nihilists, he continued, often suffer from wounded attachments — to people, community, the truth. They can’t give up their own sense of marginalization and woundedness because it would mean giving up their very identity. The only way to feel halfway decent is to smash things or at least talk about smashing them. They long for chaos.

Apparently, the F.B.I. now has a new category of terrorist — the “nihilistic violent extremist.” This is the person who doesn’t commit violence to advance any cause, just to destroy. Last year, Derek Thompson wrote an article for The Atlantic about online conspiracists who didn’t spread conspiracy theories only to hurt their political opponents. They spread them in all directions just to foment chaos. 

Brooks then reminds us that this isn't the first time nihilism has been on the rise, even though I don't think we are ever reminded of this in schooling:

Nihilism is a cultural river that leads nowhere good. Russian writers like Turgenev and Dostoyevsky wrote about rising nihilism in the 19th century, a trend that eventually contributed to the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. The scholar Erich Heller wrote a book called “The Disinherited Mind” about the rise in nihilism that plagued Germany and Central Europe after World War I. We saw what that led to.

It’s hard to turn this trend around. It’s hard enough to get people to believe something, but it’s really hard to get people to believe in belief — to persuade a nihilist that some things are true, beautiful and good. 

Yeah, I didn't now that about that Heller book, and am not familiar with the problem with the inter-war period being described as an attack of nihilism before.  I should look it up.

Brooks' column then swings into the dubious again, by noting this:

One spot of good news is the fact that more young people, and especially young men, are returning to church. I’ve been skeptical of this trend, but the evidence is building. Among Gen Z, more young men now go to church than young women. In Britain, according to one study, only 4 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds went to church in 2018, but by 2024 it was 16 percent. From the anecdotes I keep hearing, young people seem to be going to the most countercultural churches — traditionalist Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. 

First, those figures sound very dubious.  And secondly, it's not like the most conservative Churches are helping with the dire rise of Trumpian authoritarianism in the US or some Eastern Eurpoean countries.  To the contrary, they are prone to hyping the culture wars and forgiving anything as long as they get their way with their pet obsessions (such as abortion and gay marriage).

As you might imagine, lots and lots of comments criticise the column along the lines I have indicated.  For example:

Brooks parachutes into a red area, puts together a couple of disparate groups, forms an opinion and jets away. I am a full throated, unapologetic liberal, well educated Democrat who lives in a VERY red part of Northern Michigan. What Brooks does not realize, or ignores, is how right wing media has indoctrinated rural communities for decades. I walk  into a car parts store where the radio is blaring Mark Levan or some such fool while attempting to buy a car battery. At a gas station after the 2020 election two nut jobs were commiserating over how the Dems stole the election and that they had proof! These are not isolated incidents. Sinclair, Fox, Murdoch and the Kochs, dominate the airwaves up here, laughing at the rubes  they influence and prey on, whereby they have effectively brainwashed a huge swath of the American public by turning lies into “facts”. Brooks, an educated elite himself, seems to imply that education is the problem! I know several well educated people that voted Trump and generally it centered around tax breaks, or their deep hatred of equal rights. Even education can’t always eliminate racial ignorance. The GOP is now a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of our democratic institutions, full stop. And Brooks shallow dive into socialization has way too many blind spots as regards indoctrination, which he ignores,  to take him seriously. Study Nazi Germany for a relevant comparison. 

 And:

A disappointing read in a few ways, David. First, as a contemporary of yours (ok, a few years older) who attended two of the most so-called liberal schools, I can tell a diversity of thoughts are taught and shared (see what I did using that divisive word "diversity"). Sadly, the conservatism of our past, articulated thoughtfully by George Will, William Buckley, and Bill Kristol (to name a few) is gone. Since the 90s it has been replaced by the blatant lies, hate and ignorance of Rush Limbaugh (was there ever a less deserving recipient of the Medal of Freedom? he should have buried with the Stone of Shame) and Hannity, Carlson, and Watters.   
Second, you did not articulate what the progressives have taught that has the conservatives wanting to destroy everything. Complain? Empathy? Come on. Those are great values that those young kids that you are so happy are now going to church are, sadly, likely not learning.

 There was a comment I saw earlier on that made reference to the problems all starting with the enlightenment in 1650 (or around then!), but I am having trouble finding it now.  It reminded me that I should really try to essay ideas that have been bumping around my head about the unfinished effects of a slow burn enlightenment that we are still not finished with, but there is always something else to do.