American Paranoia and the Modern Legacy of Nihilism

The secret weariness of progressives and Trumpian conservatives

Judging from the cacophony emanating from the news coverage which drums up conflicts for ratings, American politics is a hotbed of zealots on the left and on the right who have sharply opposing viewpoints. It turns out, however, that those extremes reduce to the nihilism that drives also the political centrist’s machinations.

For all the heated rhetoric and fiery protests for social justice or for Trumpian paranoid fantasies, neither extreme worldview holds together. Spend some time examining the assumptions and the behaviour of these opposite camps and you find so many attempts to evade the implications of what they really believe.

Meanwhile, the neoliberal centrists who run both parties tell their noble lies to pretend that they, too, aren’t driven by amoral, Machiavellian realism. Despite the smugness on both sides, American politics is effectively hollow.

Conservative Savagery

Let’s begin with the Trumpian Party, that is, with the cult of anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, libertarian selfishness, social Darwinism, bad faith trolling, and white supremacy. Seemingly, there’s no shortage of ideology motivating so-called American “conservatives” and “Republicans.”

But notice how the Republican Party’s Reagan-era mantras about the free market and Christian morality vanished into the thin air when Donald Trump took over the party in 2016. Suddenly those convictions no longer mattered, possibly because they’ve been untenable all along.

The American economy is rigged, not free, because the government bails out the fraudsters who hijack the real economy from their lairs in the shadow financial economy. For its part, Christian morality is based on archaic myths that only the downtrodden take seriously, and seeing yourself as downtrodden is un-American.

All that mattered to these erstwhile conservatives when Trump ran for president was the prospect of humiliating the nation. The plan wasn’t to fix anything, drain the swamp, or reform the deep state bureaucracy, despite Trump’s campaign spin; rather, the only guaranteed effect of putting Trump in the White House was to assault American values or to troll the elites who had sold out the working class. Trump’s pseudo-presidency was the instrument of vengeance on behalf of the bigots and struggling labourers who had been left behind by globalization and who are repulsed by the veneer of cosmopolitanism.

Trump only mainstreamed his supporters’ penchant for swallowing ludicrous conspiracy theories. American paranoia can be counteracted by trying to understand the principles of critical thinking. But Trumpians have an ulterior motive for plunging down that rabbit hole, which is to empower the paranoid person so she can feel, at least, that she’s on top of things, that she hasn’t been hoodwinked or abandoned, because she’s catalogued the sinister forces that think they’ve won. Trumpian paranoia is about taking back control in a wholly illusory manner.

If we ask why so many millions of Americans would degrade themselves by surrendering to a clownish supervillain and by shirking their responsibility as democratic citizens, divorcing themselves from logic and from the reality of empirical facts, the answer is plain: it’s a case of desperation to avoid the stark reality that American conservatives and rural voters have been left behind. Theirs is the minority party that needs to cheat to win national elections, because the majority is repulsed by the Republicans’ outdated, falsified policies and savage pseudo-values.

American conservatism has effectively been left behind because it’s always been a con, a pretense for Gilded Age-style plutocracy and for anti-Jesus imperialism. The hope was to reinvent their party in neo-fascist fashion, under Trump. But to put all your faith in a monumental malignant narcissist who’s incapable of committing to any ideology is to confess that your convictions, too, are nihilistic. Belief in Trump amounts to a wish for total anarchic destruction, out of vengeance for those who fear they no longer matter according to America’s rugged, puritanical criteria for success.

Progressive Jadedness

Then there’s the side of “progress,” which seems at first glance to be diametrically opposed to the “right-wing extremists.” The leftists, after all, pride themselves on their intellectualism and urbaneness. These are the big-city professionals and guardians of political correctness. They accept the science of global warming, for example, and dismiss religious fundamentalism as a bastardization of Jesus’s inclusive message and of the elite Gnostic take on perennial philosophy.

But the moves towards totalitarian cancel culture and Twitter mobs, as well as the coddling of children, the retreat to safe spaces, the resort to postmodern hyperskepticism, and the overcompensation of hunting for micro-aggressors show that American liberalism, too, has curdled.

To say that liberal Democrats are the professional class, as Thomas Frank shows they are in Listen, Liberal, is to say also that these are big consumers. Liberals are bombarded by the performances playing out in mass culture, by the political tableaus and other daily distortions, and by the sleeker deceptions that are commonplace in corporate advertising. In a word, for all their sophistication by certain measures, these liberals have been fundamentally infantilized.

Theirs is the decadent party rather than the plainly savage one that’s home to American “conservatives.” These liberals talk the most about environmentalism while working the hardest to fuel the engine of the American economy which is rivalled only by China’s in being the world’s biggest polluter and consumer of unrenewable resources. The hypocrisy is staggering and can’t be reconciled with good intentions except by ignoring the reality.

The chief fantasy of the American political left is that postmodernity represents progress away from modernity. The modern period, of course, was that of science, industry, and the philosophy of individualism which overthrew Christian theocracies in Europe. According to postmodern critics, however, that transition into modernity was only superficial because the discrimination and imperialism reappeared in secular guises.

Inhumanity evidently ran deeper in the human mind than the idealistic leaders of the Enlightenment recognized. Thus, postmodernists became hyperskeptical to the point of resisting the pull of any myth or “metanarrative,” as Wittgensteinian relativists would put it. All our “discourses” are so many masks to conceal what’s really going on, which is that we’re constantly struggling for dominance. The philosopher Michel Foucault led the charge in this quasi-Nietzschean direction, showing that the elite intellectuals of modernity had formulated so many rationalizations for the ostracism of women and of “deviant” minorities.

The rabidness of the warriors for social justice, therefore, is an overcompensation for the nihilism that’s left by the uncompromising skepticism of postmodernity. If you ask a “progressive” person why she’s intolerant even towards microaggressions such as a man’s attempt to flirt with a co-worker, she’ll say it’s because the forces of injustice are systemic and omnipresent. If you overlook the injustice even in the smallest infraction, you must be ignorant of the dark reality laid bare by postmodern incredulity. You’re not jaded enough; you’re not “woke.”

Those demonic forces of injustice deprive us all of agency. Even the wokesters are prey to the systems that “construct” their social identities. What makes you woke is only that you have more reason for cynicism, because you’re awake to the futility of striving for justice or for progress, when none of the myths or ideals that might guide us is worthy of our faith.

You’d think these woke progressives should be young, bright-eyed idealists, and indeed many seem that way at first glance. But their moralistic bluster is a screen for nihilism. No moral or legal agenda withstands postmodern ennui and alienation.

You can test this by asking whether any value system has escaped mockery by the postmodern satire known as “The Simpsons” TV show. Indeed, no sooner would a progressive like Bernie Sanders attempt to build a socialist paradise than woke progressives would be forced to turn on him for perpetrating the sin of selling his system with idealistic fictions.

This is also why the Occupy Wall Street movement failed to achieve much: the young wokesters couldn’t agree on a policy platform because what they shared was only the negativity of postmodern hyperskepticism. Besides, progressives are so infantilized and enraptured by the consumer mindset that they could be expected to lurch from socialism to the next fad.

Either way, the “progressive” believes in nothing, like her Trumpian counterpart.

Centrist Machiavellianism

Neither the right nor the left has been in power in the US in many decades. So-called neoliberals or neoconservatives rule there, and they’re united by the “neo” part, by the embrace of realpolitik and Machiavellian amorality that remain after the myths of liberalism and conservatism have been duly recognized as fictions.

The closest the right-wing extremists have come to power in Washington was through Donald Trump’s pseudo-presidency, but Trump shut them out, being preoccupied with his petty self-aggrandizements. To be sure, the Trumpians succeeded in embarrassing their country, but Trump could allow for no vicarious sharing of that honour. It was all about Trump’s greatness, as far as he was concerned.

And the progressives are shut out by the “centrist” machinations of the Democratic National Committee, which tilted the 2016 nomination process in favour of Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders. The Democratic Party is a center-left party which has moved further rightward (to the center) by its Clintonian triangulations, compelling the Republicans to move further rightward, too, and leading to the latter’s grotesque decline from Bush II’s incompetence to the Trump cult.

The bureaucrats, politicians, and financiers who run the American government are the realists who have too much experience to be naïve ideologues. They fight for American supremacy or they act as parasites, using their powerful positions to enrich themselves. A disproportionate number of these deep state functionaries and political figureheads are sociopaths who are psychologically capable of thinking only in Machiavellian terms of conning those around them for tactical advantage.

These are the competent, informed brains behind the evisceration of the New Deal, from Ronald Reagan onwards. They’re anti-visionaries who prevent the government from intervening in the wholesale exploitation of the American masses by large banks, Wall Street, and transnational monopolies, since that degradation fuels the stock market and the economy’s “growth” while the American dream seems unobtainable by larger and larger portions of the working public.

These realists are the cheerleaders for the gig economy, for automation in the workplace, for dynamism and ingenuity in private enterprise and for efficiency and cutbacks in the government. These are the funders of socialist work projects for the military, and imposers of austerity on the middle class.

These centrists will profess to be individualists even as individualism has gone through a series of ironic reversals, as Adam Curtis explains in his series of documentaries. American society is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. But capitalism and technological advances have enslaved millions of Americans to debt and terrified them into deferring to the extravagant fictions of social progress, white power, Americanized Christianity, and all the rest.

Individuality is no longer a burden most people are even interested in having; after all, you distinguish your personal self only by standing out from the crowd, which entails alienation and independent thinking that subvert the myths that make happiness possible. Consequently, individualism is fit only for the corrupted leaders of society and for the losers who’ve been crushed and left behind. It’s only a myth, then, that individualism stands as a defining feature of American culture at large.

Rather, what the centrist managers and drones believe in, first, is the need to maintain America’s superpowerful dominance on the world stage. Secondarily, they’re eager to reward themselves for their loyalty to that cause. This Machiavellian realism is explicitly nihilistic, the point being that the talk of more uplifting values or goals than self-empowerment (by dominating your rivals) is naïve and fanciful.

Nihilism and American Paranoia

Therefore, again, contrary to what you find in the lively debates in the mass media, the participants in the American discourse are secretly weary and listless. True, the US isn’t a totalitarian state, and Americans are much freer than the Chinese or the Saudi Arabians. But that’s rather the point: totalitarian control is what you establish when you fervently believe in something such as the wisdom of Chinese collectivism or the truth of Islam.

Suppose you’re drinking tea and you see a drowning child in the river. The only thing that matters at that point is saving the child, so you don’t worry about multitasking; you drop your teacup on the floor and direct all your efforts to what’s paramount. Similarly, police states and mechanisms of totalitarian control are means of imposing a fierce will. Of course, that will can be evil or insane, as in North Korea’s Kim dynasty or the fascist regimes of the twentieth century. But as inhuman as theocracies and dictatorships may be, one thing they’re not is melancholy or nihilistic.

By contrast, since its complacency after the Cold War, the United States became too paranoid and muddled to throw its weight behind a vision for what all the hard work and fighting were for. The American vision of the individual’s right to own property and to pursue happiness is effectively the right to be disconnected from everyone, to work hard to enrich a minority that annexes the self-divided government, and to discover that owning things doesn’t make you happy after all.

That classic libertarian vision is a sham. The American political class knows as much because they see firsthand the amorality and absurdity at the root of their country’s economic and military might. The framers of the US Constitution divided the branches of government to prevent the outbreak of tyranny, but that’s to say that they were too overeducated and jaded to believe in the fantasies needed to sustain a unified kingdom or empire.

Americans are as tribal and divided against each other as are the branches of their government. This is due more to the paranoia of the heretical, pioneering mentality than to faith in the Renaissance Man’s spirit of “modern individualism.” Americans are divided because at heart they’re disenchanted, libertarian, and infantilized egotists, not prudent collectivists.

When you’re estranged from the rest of society, and when this process is exacerbated by social media which fragment knowledge and tribalize consumers of information, you bear the Ubermensch’s burden of creating your values. That burden is too much for most people, so they’re what Nietzsche called the “Last Men.” They become complacent, vulnerable victims of nihilism, of the legacy of modern enlightenment.