For thirty-five years we have been told ad nauseam that America is deeply polarized. In Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, a book I published in 1991, I (for better or worse) contributed to this narrative. In that book, I noted what was then a novelty: the emergence in American political culture of two rival moral visions—one progressive, the other culturally conservative. The rise of these two all-encompassing ideologies cut across previous cultural hostilities. Culturally speaking, a conservative Catholic had more in common with an average evangelical than she did with her fellow communicant at Mass. What’s more, where we used to think that on political matters you could compromise (unlike on issues of moral truth), suddenly politics had become an arena where ultimate values were at stake. Compromise was now impossible, debate interminable.
A Common Culture, After All
Appearances, however, can be deceptive. And what is now true about the culture wars I have spent much of my career describing (and rebuking) is that beneath the apparent polarization, beneath our seemingly incommensurable differences, we increasingly inhabit a common culture.
Yet this common culture is not constructive. It is not a culture rooted in a shared positive vision of what America is, should be, can be. Exactly the opposite. Our emerging common culture is chillingly nihilistic.
“Nihilism,” according to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, is “not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one’s shoulder to the plough; one destroys.” A nihilistic culture is defined by the drive to destroy, by the will to power. And that definition now describes the American nation.
The evidence for this? Consider the pervasive negativity, demonization, and fearmongering of political campaigns. Or the effective attempts of both right and left to cancel those they deem ideologically impure. Or leaders no longer feeling the need to negotiate with the other side, or justify their platforms to their opponents, but instead seeking simply to impose their agendas on everyone. Or survey data that tell us that increasing numbers of Americans believe that political violence is justified; or, indeed, the fact that acts of political threat and violence are trending upward. Or when presidential candidates resort to demonization, one calling immigrants “vermin” and another branding her rival’s supporters “a basket of deplorables.”
Connect the dots among such familiar phenomena and what emerges is a picture of a politics that is fundamentally dehumanizing, in which the negation or annihilation of the ideological “other”—the coastal elites, the prairie pro-lifers, the “woke,” the rust-belt racists—is not incidental to the ongoing culture war. Annihilation—cancellation or erasure—is the point.
Nihilism Without Nihilists
Perhaps such a bleak diagnosis seems too histrionic? After all, where precisely in public life are the self-professed nihilists? Where are the active proselytizers of this perverse new religion?
We meet these characters onscreen, certainly. Recall the angst-ridden teenager Dwayne in the cult film Little Miss Sunshine. Dwayne has a painting of Nietzsche hanging on his bedroom wall. He wears a T-shirt that reads, “Jesus Was Wrong.” He loathes the world and everyone in it. Or there’s Rust Cohle, the protagonist of the (unsurpassed) first season of True Detective. Cohle is dead serious when he concludes: “I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing. Walk hand in hand into extinction.” A nihilist in real life, however, is a rarity. So if there are so few paid-up nihilists parading in politics, how can we say nihilism has come to dominate American public life?
A central paradox: Our contemporary culture is a culture of nihilism without nihilists.
Grasping this paradox requires acknowledging the sociological phenomenon I have spent my career wrestling with: What we call “culture” is not merely the sum of the beliefs and values of the countless citizens who live in a country; rather, culture is the reigning ethos and logic of the institutions at the center of power.
Most Americans still believe in God, for example, even in 2024. Yet our public culture is overwhelmingly and insistently secular in character. The same holds true for nihilism. Despite the intentions or motivations of individual actors, and despite the idealistic mantras our politicians and pundits chant to their children (and themselves) before they go to bed, nihilism is the operative reality of contemporary public life.
Running with Nihilism
The word nihilism—naming the belief that traditional values are baseless and that nothing (nihil in Latin) in our cold, comfortless universe is meaningful—is closely associated with Nietzsche. So closely, in fact, that many people assume that Nietzsche was a straightforward nihilist, that he endorsed what he diagnosed.
But the question of whether Nietzsche was “for” or “against” nihilism is much more complex—and critical to my argument. On the one hand, Nietzsche thought that the advent of nihilism, following in the wake of the death of (or the loss of belief in) God or any fixed, authoritative ideals, constituted a pathological cultural development. Nihilism was a pitiful fate to befall a civilization; it was a bad thing.
Why a bad thing? This was Nietzsche’s verdict because he could see so clearly the enervating effects of nihilism. What happens when people lose (correctly, in Nietzsche’s view) the courage of their metaphysical convictions? What happens when the stern commandments of religion are watered down into a bland and utilitarian code of ethics, a “a morality of shopkeepers,” as Nietzsche scornfully put it? What befalls a society prepared to acknowledge the (again, in Nietzsche’s view) futility of existence? Nietzsche’s stark answer: People end up losing the will to live. People end up giving up on life, at least in the sense of “life to the full”—life in all its vigor, passion, and energy.
Therefore, insofar as Nietzsche lamented—and reviled—this paralysis, Nietzsche was no nihilist. Nihilism was a fate Nietzsche sought to overcome.
On the other hand, however, Nietzsche was a nihilist, since his constructive solution to the crisis of meaning did not involve providing fresh proof of God’s existence, as, for example, Descartes had done in the earlier period of modernity. Nietzsche is not famous for attempting some philosophical recovery, for exhorting his readers to believe again—or even to pretend to believe—that “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.” Not at all. Nietzsche was convinced that once you had reached (inevitably nihilistic) conclusions about the world, you could not go backward. And what did it mean to go forward? Going forward meant running with nihilism.
Let’s concede, Nietzsche was basically saying, that fictitious beliefs about God’s providential plans for humanity were only ever attempts by some human beings to control other human beings. Let’s agree all that interminable talk of the Will of God was only ever the expression of some people’s will to power. So what? The solution isn’t to renounce but to embrace the will to power!
Paradoxically, then, Nietzsche’s solution to passive nihilism (or the crisis of meaning endemic to the modern world) is active nihilism (or the will to power).
Narratives of Injury
So “active nihilism” best describes the noxious way the forces of left and right have come to engage each other in American politics. But we see active nihilism at a deeper level too—in the identitarian turn of social movements and political parties. This, of course, is not only a phenomenon on the left but on the right as well. After all, what are Christian nationalists or MAGA conservatives but identity groups?
In this identitarian turn, what matters most is the universally shared cultural logic rooted in what political philosopher Wendy Brown has called “wounded attachments.” All of these groups to which people attach themselves, these tribal affiliations in and through which they present themselves in public, typically as threatened and therefore deeply aggrieved, constitute a very wide swath of the American public. Indeed, it is increasingly hard to name an American who does not at least perceive himself to belong to a besieged, existentially threatened minority?
To speak of wounded attachments returns us to Nietzsche again and his obsession with what he called “ressentiment.” Ressentiment, to be clear, is not the same thing as resentment. Resentment is a personal experience of anger and even outrage at having been treated unjustly. But it is neither pathological nor immoral, because it can lead to resolution of the injustice through the righting of wrongs, reconciliation, or forgiveness. In this way, resentment always envisages a reckoning that will allow us to say we have “moved on.”
Ressentiment, by contrast, is a disposition that builds on a narrative of injury—a story of woundedness that can be real or imagined, even just anticipated. And that woundedness is lived and relived, and duly etched into individual and collective consciousness.
According to Nietzsche, every victim “instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering.” Every victim seeks a culprit, someone “upon whom he can release his emotions, actually or…on some pretext.” On some pretext… This is key, since very often the cause may remain unspecified—too broadly construed and vaguely formulated to allow for an actual reckoning with injustice.
So, we find in a particular president or a particular social class or a particular ethnic group or a certain historical trend or a freshly unleashed set of ideas the supposed source of “all our woe.” In the late twentieth century, for example, both conservative Christians and secular progressives invested a huge amount of energy in a series of demonizations. For evangelical Christians, all that was wrong with the world could be traced back to “secular humanism.” Or, to take a different example, for those on the left, all that impeded progress and social justice could be laid at the feet of capitalism and racism.
Today, too, groups across the ideological spectrum seize upon several abstract causes—a series of opaque simplifications or selective stories—in order to explain why they think ill fares the land. For left-leaning groups, ressentiment feeds on such abstractions as the “radical right,” “toxic masculinity,” “white supremacy” (or just “whiteness”), or “Christian nationalism.” For right-wing factions, the cause of all evil is “the radical left,” “socialism,” “woke elitism,” “the deep state,” “cultural Marxism,” or “secular humanism.”
Politicized identity, then, is formed and sustained by way of negation. Its emergence as well as its persistence depend on an active and hostile enemy. What naturally follows is rage, hatred, and a thirst for “a capable and wide revenge” that, in a twisted way, becomes a source of meaning—a raison d’être—for those who see themselves as victims. Here is a revenge that renders forgiveness or even democratic compromise impossible. What is new about ressentiment in America is not only its ubiquity but also its insatiability, its desire for a purity that cannot abide the existence of the other.
A Counterpoint
Ressentiment is so commonplace today that it is difficult to imagine a politics not rooted in a narrative of injury. But must injury—and not just imagined but real injury—lead to such ressentiment? Consider a powerful counterpoint in our own history.
The nightmare from which America is still trying to awake is its historical treatment of marginalized minorities. We cannot afford to forget that the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and in our Constitution typically functioned as precisely that: ideals. Yes, liberals might have paid lip service to the notion of “the public sphere”—an inclusive space where we come together to hammer out the common good. But was that all-encompassing “we” ever more than a strategic fiction? Did advocates of the public sphere ever truly appreciate how their own position masked their own interests, effectively excluding the participation of Catholics, Mormons, Jews, and, of course, enslaved African Americans? How could America square for so long its cherished ideals with the reality of black children barred from public education in the nineteenth century? Or women barred from voting until 1920? Or Native Americans barred from citizenship until 1924?
Critically, of course, these marginalized minorities did not suffer in silence. Abolitionists and suffragettes did not simply acquiesce in the unenviable status quo. No, blessed were the organized. Members of these minorities came together—in their churches and their synagogues, in their associations and their colleges—to plot what shape their protests would take.
Now, looking back, why should we not equate the profound grievances of these groups with ressentiment? Answer: The historic protests of these oppressed minorities were forged out of their disenfranchisement from the mainstream of political and economic life. Harassed at every turn, these men and women nevertheless managed to entertain a picture of what inclusion might look like. They sought to be enfranchised. Their dogged hope was for a day of vindication when they would assume a place at the table in their own right. And that’s really the point: To hope for a day of vindication was to hope for a day when your grievances would be resolved through enfranchisement. (And if a resolution is imaginable, then we’re not talking about ressentiment.)
Consider David Walker, the African American clothes merchant, Methodist, and abolitionist born (free) in the Carolinas in 1796. In one of the most important polemics of the early nineteenth century, his pamphlet Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829), Walker lit into the grotesque and unacknowledged contradictions at the heart of the new Republic:
Do you understand your own language? Hear your language, proclaimed to the world, July 4, 1776—“We hold these truths to be self-evident—that ALL men are created EQUAL!! …” Compare your own language…with your cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel and unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us—men who have never given your fathers or you the least provocation!!!!!!
Walker did not stop there. Walker refused to settle for sheer rebuke. Instead, he dared to envision a different future, for his own people and for America. Addressing his white oppressors, he wrote:
Throw away your fears and prejudices then, and enlighten us and treat us like men, and we will like you more than we do now hate you.… Treat us like men, and there is no danger but we all will live in peace and happiness together.… Treat us then like men, and we will be your friends. And there is not a doubt in my mind, but that the whole of the past, will be sunk into oblivion, and we yet, under God, will become a united and happy people.
Walker’s fury is not rooted in ressentiment, because he envisages a world in which the past is “sunk into oblivion.” In this future, the horrendous evils of slavery will not have been explained away or ignored. No, those horrendous evils will have been thoroughly “worked through.” Such a working through—durcharbeiten in German—provides the only credible hope for overcoming man’s inhumanity to man. Such a reckoning is the only possible foundation for the making of “a united and happy people.”
Needless to say, this is not the picture of justice and inclusion we have now. As Wendy Brown has argued, people are so heavily invested in their own woundedness and marginalization that they cannot give those up without losing their identity. Identity groups are wedded to their sense of impotence, exclusion, and subordination. Even while these groups seek to avenge injuries, they reaffirm injuries as their sine qua non. Absent a transcending telos, overarching framework of meaning—unavailable in the late-modern era—and absent the moral logic of restitution and forgiveness, these groups lack the capacity to imagine a future either for themselves or for their nation that overcomes the injuries.
The Specter of Coercion
In 1920, Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, “Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.” It is hard to imagine a more pessimistic prognostication. What happens next, Holmes was asking, when a people no longer hold in common any core convictions about truth, reality, human nature, public ethics, or the shared purposes of their culture? When there’s no longer a common story a people can tell themselves about their shared identity (who they are) and no common means by which they can figure out their destiny (where they are going)? When there are no longer any cultural sources for solidarity? When there’s no longer anything binding us together? Holmes’s bleak conclusion was in that awful eventuality the only thing left to order collective life is coercion.
Which is where, increasingly and tragically, we are headed, given how polarization underwrites our common nihilistic political culture. Let me be clear: This is not an argument for the moral equivalence of left and right. Nihilism does not manifest itself in the same ways on the left and the right. Nor do the authoritarian tendencies find the same expression on both ends of the spectrum. Rather, the point is that nearly all partisans share a common culture rooted in identitarian tribalism, fueled by ressentiment and guided not by differences over shared ideals but a fervid determination to annihilate the opposition—indeed, the evil enemy—in the never-ending contest over position and power. Until we take the measure of this challenge, we will fail to understand the depths of democracy’s crisis.
And then? How on earth can we reclaim a vision for an authentically humane political order? The first challenge may be the hardest: refusing to see our political opponents as enemies but instead choosing to see them as fellow citizens with whom we are bound together in a common fate.
In his extraordinary 1958 memoir, If This Is a Man, the Italian chemist and writer Primo Levi recalls an incident that occurred immediately upon his arrival at Auschwitz:
Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me.
“Warum?” (Why?”) I asked him in my poor German.
“Hier ist kein warum” (“Here there is no why”), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.
To be a Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe was to be someone no longer owed an answer. This evil—largely unforeseen before its eruption, impossible to fathom in its aftermath—triumphed because Nazi Germans no longer felt compelled to give answers to the human beings who they saw as their enemies. Which is why citizens of a democracy must never feel that their opponents, partisan or otherwise, are enemies undeserving of reasons. To yield to that temptation would be the ultimate triumph of nihilism.