The other day I recollected as an oddly fond memory the days when George W. Bush was President of the US, and when people in his orbit would refer to people such as I as ‘nihilists’ because… well, I’m not sure why, but it sounded intellectual and anarchic. Presumably the accusation would have rested on my respect for Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault and other people that administration probably hadn’t even heard of, who argued that the stuff that Bush et al. insisted was ‘reality’ was way more complicated and less real than they wanted to suppose. Bushian nihilists hypothetically believed that nothing means anything, that we can do whatever we want (you know, the way I’m always going on about the virtues of selfishness). Since they were on the side of ‘reality’, people who disagreed with them — such as I — must have been denying reality, hence ‘nihilists’.
These memories came to mind because of my profound shock, and sorrow, that a large part of the current Republican leadership seems simply not to care about how their actions appear to the rest of the world, or how they will appear to future generations, or how they will be judged by a righteous God, or karma, or some other cosmic principle. Even allowing that they might be self-deceived about the righteousness of their actions (and I can hardly do that), they apparently can’t even allow the possibility that they be found to have fallen short of a critical standard of justice and decency.
The policies and public remarks of the current administration with its fellow-travellers raise group cynicism to heretofore unattained levels. Caring nothing for the eventual (to say nothing of the ‘eternal’) consequences of their actions, they are in it to win it, Katie bar the door, He who dies with the most gold bars, wins. If that’s not nihilism, we need a new word with a different history of usage, that can stand in for ‘believes in nothing, no principles, no ideals, no moral compass other than “what I want”’ — cos that’s what I thought nihilism was all about.