Burn that Mother Down!

"Conservative" Nihilism

I was teaching a class on Debate and Argumentation for Homeschool Connections during the 2020 election season. When teaching that course in previous election years, part of the assigned homework was having the students watch the Presidential Debates. I asked my students to do the same thing in 2020.

After the first debate, I emailed all students and their parents and apologized. I told them they were not required to watch any of the remaining debates.

In case you’ve forgotten, this was the debate where Trump, although he knew had tested positive for COVID, still showed up (potentially infecting Biden and others) and refused to shut up for the duration of the event. He refused to follow any rules. He spoke out of turn; he said outrageous things; he lied and spread chaos for two hours. Civilized behavior was thrown to the wind.

I asked my Trump-loving friend, who was a high profile leader of a Catholic organization, if that debate horrified him, as it did me.

“I thought it was hilarious!” he said.

“I thought it was the End of Civilization as we Know It,” I replied.

Max Boot writes …

There are many ways to describe this attitude — childish, irresponsible, destructive, nihilistic — but “conservative” isn’t one of them. Republicans, who once upheld authority, are now tearing it down. They give no indication of caring about the fate of American democracy, or about the fate of individual Americans. Their slogan might as well be “Burn, baby, burn.”

But is this merely nihilism? Is this merely incendiary politics?

My Trump-loving erstwhile friend lives in what is probably a $600,000 house in the suburbs. He is comfortably well off. He practices his Catholic religion without restraint of any kind. But he is convinced he and his ilk are persecuted.

Trump for these people has been a big middle finger to “the Man” - to the establishment - even though Trump is more establishment than any of the people he picks on; and even though many of the people who support him are very much part of the establishment themselves. But they feel disadvantaged and Trump offers them a chance to destroy everything that has been frustating them.

“Are they just spoiled brats throwing tantrums - violent tantrums, upsetting everything in the house because they feel (mistakenly) that they haven’t gotten their way?” I asked my wife, Karen.

“That’s it exactly,” she said. “They want-what-they-want-when-they-want-it.”

“And what do they want?”

“Power.”

“Are they stupid?” I asked. “Is this why they claim to believe that Trump won the election, that vaccines cannot be trusted, that COVID was fake, that global warming is a myth, that slavery was a good thing? Many of my ex-friends are very intelligent people in all other areas - but they claim to believe things like this. Are they simply stupid?”

“No,” she said. “They’re fucking stupid.”

Stupidity is actually a technical term here. It means the abuse of reason, with reason deliberately disconnected from reality. As Hannah Arendt writes …

Such an escape from reality is also, of course, an escape from responsibility.

There’s also the psychological liberation you feel - especially if you’re laboring under a persecution complex - that comes with the abandonment of reason, with the embrace of the freedom of stupidity - with the joy of “burn, baby burn!” and with the fun of having tantrums and breaking things. Peter Pomerantsev writes …

That enough Americans could vote for someone like Donald Trump, a man with so little regard for making sense, whose many contradictory messages never add up to any very stable meaning, was partly possible because enough voters weren’t invested in any larger evidence-based future. Indeed, in his very incoherence lies the pleasure. All the madness you feel? You can now let it out and it’s OK. The joy of Trump is to validate the pleasure of spouting shit and nonsense, the joy of pure emotion — most often anger — without any ultimate destination.

But of course there is an ultimate destination. And what happens when you get there? What happens when you are confronted with the consequences of such moral nihilism, with (for instance) 91 felony charges for your debased leader? What do you do then?

Arendt tells us, writing in 1950, what the Germans were doing after the War …

There is an almost instinctive urge to take refuge in the thoughts and ideas one held before anything compromising had happened. The result is that while Germany has changed beyond recognition—physically and psychologically—people talk and behave superficially as though absolutely nothing had happened since 1932.

You gaslight. That’s what you do.

It’s not 1945, with Germany in ruins around you and millions of people dead because of your country and your leader. It’s 1932, before Hitler came to power. Nothing to see here! Move along.

Or, as I wrote to my publicly Catholic former friends who wanted me to perform at their conferences after COVID and January 6 as if nothing had happened since 2019 …

This is our hour to own up to what it means to be a Christian, and we are ignoring that challenge, and pretending as if it's still 1995 and we are blithely busying ourselves with apologetics and Culture Wars - when our refusal to own up to what we've done and to repent for it condemns us - quite rightly - to irrelevance both in the Church and in the culture at large.

Our masks (which we refused to wear) have never come down. You did not see what you think you saw. You are crazy. We haven’t shown our unwillingness to love our neighbors, our disdain for the common good, our rejection of reason, our hatred of science, our willingness to support sedition and treason, our blatant religious hypocrisy; this isn’t 2023; the Great Unmasking has never happened. It’s 1995 and all we need

• is to make sure Mother Angelica is on more cable stations;

• all we need is more apologetics and free CDs by Fr. Corapi in the back of church;

• all we need is to keep pushing our sanitized versions of Catholic writers and half-true narratives of Church history.

There are no bombed out building around us; no gas ovens; nothing to be ashamed of or even to admit.

And even if you occasionally catch a glimpse of these things under the half-lit gaslight … well, why let a few facts get in the way of the Unreality we have built?

Arendt continues …

But perhaps the most striking and frightening aspect of the German flight from reality is the habit of treating facts as though they were mere opinions. For example, the question of who started the last war, by no means a hotly debated issue, is answered by a surprising variety of opinions. An otherwise quite normally intelligent woman in Southern Germany told me that the Russians had begun the war with an attack on Danzig; this is only the crudest of many examples. Nor is this transformation of facts into opinions restricted to the war question; in all fields there is a kind of gentlemen’s agreement by which everyone has a right to his ignorance under the pretext that everyone has a right to his opinion—and behind this is the tacit assumption that opinions really do not matter. This is a very serious thing, not only because it often makes discussion so hopeless (one does not ordinarily carry a reference library along everywhere), but primarily because the average German honestly believes this free-for-all, this nihilistic relativity about facts, to be the essence of democracy. In fact, of course, it is a legacy of the Nazi regime.