Nihilistic or Just Sad?

Writer and blogger Rod Dreher kickstarted a media jamboree last November when, after a short whirl around Washington, he concluded that over half the city’s Republican apparatchiks were bitter-eyed Jacobins who long “to tear everything down.”

The response from the D.C. journoguard was orgasmic. A conservative admits his side is as cynical, destructive, and powder-keggingly dangerous as we’ve portrayed it since the Hooverville days! From one confirmation-bias-tickling anecdote, a thousand think-pieces bloomed, warning of a rabid pack of inbred, incult, incelish Republicans spoiling to raze American democracy like Troy.

Were Rachel Maddow still manning the bridge of USS Resistance five nights a week, she’d treat this bruit like a rearing MAGAReich. But is there a cohort of kitchen-sink rightists beavering away at Uncle Sam’s shins? Yes, they’re called interns, and, like Wodehouse’s Mr. Trout, they aren’t so much as mad at the world, but flustered by their inability to navigate the turbulent waters of adulthood. (Most often, they can’t complete the most perfunctory of tasks correctly, including asking a girl out to Wendy’s. Find a “John” or a “William” or a “Zachary” sitting in a corner IKEA desk of any congressional office, heatedly struggling to format an Excel doc, and you descry the America soushoku danshi.)

Every generation has its losers. But failing to launch is too often conflated with disjointed contempt. The Right, for all its myriad faults and failures, views basement-dwelling grievance-nursing as the nadir of existence. The Left, conversely, considers angry covetousness a virtue.

See progwonk Matt Bruenig’s glee about artificial intelligence’s impending decimation of remunerative coding jobs. “I don’t know how far [A.I.] will actually go, but I find the idea that it could destroy our current model of merit quite thrilling,” he slobbers on Substack. All those Silicon Valley-types—you know the ones, Steve Jobs epigones in holey hoodies—made flush from forging the binary numerical chain behind Candy Crush now won’t be able to afford their mortgage thanks to the very golems they calculated into life. Serves them right! gloats Bruenig. If the A.I. dégringolade “spread across a lot of highly-paid, high-intelligence type tasks and jobs,” Bruenig muses, “that would be a pretty amusing state of affairs.”

Oh, so you lost your paycheck thanks to the bots you birthed? Har Har! How amusing! Now, excuse me while I frolic to your indigent fate, keying away on the very digi-journal platform you helped program. Har Har!

Do you, discerning reader, spot the eensy, weensy qualitative difference between these forms of political nihilism?

The first takes imaginative form in the lonely, insecure boy striving for manhood, yet feels robbed of his birthright. The conservashlump is offered no sympathy, no understanding, no fellow-feeling. Just “chin up” bromides from those twice his age, making twice as much money, who own both a McMansion and a shoreside condo.

The second is considered not only whipsmart, but public-minded, even charitable to a fault, by culture-fashioning doyens. Yucking it up over entire swaths of keyboardists fleeced of their income overnight? Well, that’s just pointed observation by a learned labor litigator.

T.S. Eliot defined classical liberalism, with its emphasis on unclicking tradition’s binders, as a “movement…away from, rather than towards, something definite.” The scitzy rightoid who can’t toggle off Pornhub, but desperately wants to find a wife with whom to have children, is despondent that his potential horizon is delimited. The commie-mind who yearns to immiserate unworthy wagies is just engaging in theoretical study. It’s “sticking it to the man,” in pseudo-intellectual form, which masks bone-deep resentment.

A week after the slaying of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, historian David Betz and national-security scholar Michael Rainsborough wrote a piece through-lining how the romantic agitants of the ‘60s gave forth a more jaundiced youth that isn’t even bothering to plant daisy stems in rifle barrels. These Cluster B libbies are chiseling idols of Luigi Mangione, marching for tri-child-strangler Lindsay Clancy, hexing any unsuspecting sap who ever offered “God bless you” after a sounding sneeze. So endarkened, so aggrieved these radlibs have become, they don’t bother with kumbaya circles. Lexapro and the endless scroll are their rec drugs. “The progeny of flower power have become the children of a void, and in that void, savagery takes root,” Betz and Rainsborough despaired.

Is America threatened by a growing demo of a hairy precariat whose brightest career path is Amazon delivery driver and only romantic prospect is a Chinese-manufactured sex robot? Naturally. Any society unable to channel restlessness into estimable productivity courts calamity. Won’t someone think about the G.D.P.! a Goldman Sachs trader shrieks.

But as St. Augustine said, malum tendit ad non esse. We can make distinctions; in fact, clear thinking requires drawing bright lines. The Left’s flatteners don’t seem to desire anything beyond hammering out the country’s lally columns, and letting two hundred and fifty years of republican self-government fall into a bottomless black pit.