The audience roars as the stage lights reveal the panel of judges. Smiling broadly and bumping fists, Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, and Flannery O’Connor wave at the crowd. The cameras then cut to a figure, jutting his chin nervously and shifting in a chair across from them. A deep voice purrs: “Welcome to The Celebrity Nihilist, with tonight’s guest, Donald Trump.”
Given the headlines over the past year, this scenario is less surreal than it first appears. Typing the words “Trump nihilism,” a quick Google search uncovers more than 200,000 results. From the Washington Monthly’s “Trump and the Epitome of Post-Policy Nihilism,” Esquire’s “Trump’s Raging Nihilism” and The American Interest’s “The Nihilistic Populism of Trump,” to The Huffington Post’s “Trump: The Nihilist We Deserve,” the Washington Post’s “The Dangerous Nihilism of Trump Voters,” and the Wall Street Journal’s “The Nihilist in the White House” -- oops, sorry, that was Peggy Noonan on Barack Obama -- Trumpism has become the new nihilism.
Understandably, commentators are scrambling to find the words to describe a phenomenon as unprecedented as it was, at least until now, unthinkable. Equally understandable is that they are invoking the notion of nihilism in order to do so. Few isms, after all, carry connotations as dark and dim. But they may well be missing the target. As unsettling and unwholesome as Trumpism is, it has little to do with what one of the panel’s judges, Nietzsche, called “the uncanny guest.” By getting the meaning of nihilism right, we will better understand what is wrong with Trump -- and, perhaps, with our own selves.
Derived from the Latin nihil, or “nothing,” the term was popularized in 1862 with the publication of Ivan Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons.” Embodied by the novel’s hero, Bazarov, the term first signified the rejection of the leaden and oppressive political and social systems of Czarist Russia. “We repudiate everything,” Bazarov announces. As for what follows, he couldn’t care less: “That is not our affair: the ground must be cleared first.”
By the end of the century, nihilism came to mean much more: the rejection not just of an old form of government or society, but of the very possibility of moral or philosophical foundations on which to build a new one. It was, for Nietzsche, the discovery that “the world is not worth what we believed.” Whether filtered through religious faiths or moral codes, the truths we had been taught, gradually undermined by scientific progress, were revealed to be empty. We endure life, Nietzsche wrote, only because we believe it has meaning. Once the possibility of meaning evaporates, so too does our reason to live.
The repudiation of everything is no small matter. In the past, nihilism’s presence disturbed and distressed – decentered -- those who encountered it. Nietzsche’s “uncanniest of monsters” seemed to be both cause and consequence to the political and ideological upheavals of the 20th century, from the trenches of the First World War through the bloodlands of the interwar period to the death camps of World War II. It gave life to the deadly isms of the age, fascism and totalitarianism; it gave voice to its literary chroniclers like Louis Ferdinand Céline, whose work embarked us all on a voyage to the end of night; and it gave cause to theologians like Karl Barth to announce the impossibility of faith and absence of God from our world.
But a funny thing happened to nihilism on the way to the 21st century. The guest is as uncanny as ever, but what has changed is our response to it. From the heroic challenges issued by a Bazarov, or Zarathustra, we live in an age where meaninglessness is, well, meaningless. We have become either oblivious or indifferent to the loss of absolutes; we are at home in a universe where the very notion of home has been swallowed by a metaphysical black hole. When we now look into the Abyss, as Lionel Trilling observed, the Abyss smiles back and says: “Interesting, am I not?” With the loss of absolutes, either moral or religious, comes neither howls of protest nor calls to resistance, but instead sighs of relief or shrugs of indifference. We find ourselves unburdened not only of the weight of meaning, but also the sense of loss that once accompanied it.
Uncanny guests no longer haunt us; instead, unwanted guests like Trump hound us. True explorers of nihilism -- like the panel’s judges -- not only plumbed the depths of the abyss, but also found different paths back out. As Monday’s presidential debate reminds us, Donald Trump is many things: an opportunist, a narcissist, an arsonist, and a racist. But he is not a nihilist. He has neither the moral intelligence nor the historical grounding to recognize the void, even if it bit him. Given the towering challenge it represents, nihilism deserves better than to be yoked to the Trump brand -- a product of an age that threatens to make nihilism banal.
It is not hard to imagine our panel of Celebrity Nihilist, after briefly conferring, turning to the overweight and under-prepared contestant and announcing in one voice: “You’re fired!”
