Highbrow nihilism

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"Highbrow nihilism" is subtype B of the fourth type of contributors to Trumpism, in the Trumpological taxonomy espoused by Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, who spends today implicitly walking back last Sunday's theory that Trumpism is caused by Obama in favor of a new theory, that it's caused as it were by all of us sinners, himself not excluded, since he seems to be one of the highbrow nihilists.

At least a "little bit". You see, type 4 in the taxonomy are the "inevitabilists", who did not support Trump but enabled him

by acting and talking as if the support of 35 percent of the primary electorate means Trump Cannot Be Stopped.

Of these, subtype 4A are the intoxicated:

Some inevitabilists are intoxicated with celebrity and star power. Cable news is riddled with such voices, who daily manifest Orwell’s dictum, “Power worship blurs political judgment,” so that, “Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”

 I love that link, suggesting that Ross just happened to be thumbing (electronically) through Orwell's 1946 review of James Burnham's 1943 The Machiavellians, although the quotation is in fact a conservative staple (Jonah Goldberg alone has deployed it in the periodical press seven times since 1999). The passage is about the way certain English intellectuals during World War II kept assuming that the way things were going in the war was the way things would continue to go. I don't watch a lot of TV, but I'm pretty sure I would have heard if people were claiming Trump's celebrity power made him the inevitable nominee.

Everything I've heard about it over the past several months was about how each annoying thing he said about anybody from Megyn Kelly to the Pope was going to finish his campaign and it was only after he had been emerging unscathed from these episodes and winning quite consistently for quite a while that they began calling him "inevitable". It was more about, like, actual power than "celebrity" power and, like, why are you even bringing that up? (It's a squeezed-in reference to last Sunday, where he was trying to attach Trump to the "celebrity-saturated Obama effort" in 2008 with its participation by people like Oprah and Will.i.am, I wonder what made him choose those two, by the way, as opposed to, I don't know, George Clooney or Sarah Silverman, but I digress.)

So subtype 4B:

Others, especially in the intelligentsia, have a kind of highbrow nihilism about our politics, a sense that American democracy’s decadence — or the Republican Party’s decadence, in particular — is so advanced that a cleansing Trumpian fire might be just the thing we need.

Heighten the contradictions and hasten the revolution! Let a new, purified Party be reborn from the ashes of the old one!

I have a little bit of the last vice, which is why I spent a long time being anti-anti-Trump: not rooting for him to win, but appreciating his truth-telling on certain issues, his capacity to upset the stagnant status quo.

While the 4As thought Trump was inevitable because they think whatever is happening now will go on forever, the 4Bs thought he was inevitable because it was the end of the world, or hopefully might be. The second link is to a Douthat column from last December where he praised Trump for criticizing the Iraq invasion, giving Douthat an opportunity to blame the subsequent "multiplication" on Obama ("just saying"):

Of course one can dispute how much of this was actually Obama’s fault, and argue over what might have been done differently. But he has been the president during these multiplying disasters...

Also Douthat-lovable is the care he takes to deny what he's acknowledging. He didn't support Trump with his "especially in the intelligentsia" high-tone double-negative nihilicity, he just opposed not supporting him.

Type 3 was the "institutionalists", Republican politicians and operatives who fail to go all out against Trump because they don't want to make trouble, and "party apparatchiks" who hope to be able to control him if he wins; type 2 the "opportunists"

Sarah Palin and Steve Forbes, Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie; he has anti-immigration populists and Wall Street supply-siders, True Conservatives and self-conscious moderates, evangelical preachers and avowed white nationalists. The only common threads are cynicism, ambition and a sense of Trump as a ticket to influence they couldn’t get any other way.

And type 1 the actual misbegotten voters who have been voting for Trump, who

have entirely legitimate grievances. The core of that support is a white working class that the Democratic Party has half-abandoned and the Republican Party has poorly served — a cohort facing social breakdown and economic stagnation, and stuck with a liberal party offering condescension and open borders and a conservative party offering foreign quagmires and capital gains tax cuts.

Link there to a big piece by Sean Trende which doesn't as far as I can tell say anything about "condescension" but merely analogizes Trump's possible sources of white male support to those of Ross Perot:

secular, blue-collar, often rural voters who were turned off by Bill Clinton’s perceived liberalism and George H.W. Bush’s elitism.

If anything it's Republicans, in the person of old George, who are being tarred with condescension in the Trende piece. So Ross's maneuver is kind of the opposite of plagiarism, where you want to communicate your little bit of poison, that the Democrats are condescending to poorly educated white men, but you don't want to say it, so you fabricate a source to say it for you.

Long story short, anyhow, if you think this is boring, imagine how the Monsignor feels about it. He doesn't even pretend to take it seriously, but opens, and closes, with assertions that Trump isn't going to win:

God willing — he’s doing it in a way that’s sufficiently chaotic, ridiculous and ultimately unpopular that he will pass from the scene without actually taking power, leaving us to absorb the lessons of his rise. (paragraph 5).... Fortunately Trump’s fire should still be contained, by the wider electorate if not by his hapless party. Fortunately he’s still more a comic-opera demagogue than a clear and present danger. (paragraph 14)

So no harm done! What's a little highbrow nihilism between friends? Though I don't know about you, but when I think of comic-opera demagogues...

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