A note on nihilism

 

Looking back a bit, but not too far, this op-ed by Peter Wehner in the New York Times has some pithy truth to tell.

Republicans have chosen nihilism

Referring to Trump: 

"No other president has been as disdainful of knowledge or as untroubled by his benightedness. No other has been as intentional not just to lie but to annihilate truth. And no other president has explicitly attempted to overturn an election and encouraged an angry mob to march on the Capitol.

In other words, no matter how much wrongdoing Mr. Trump engages in, however outrageous and brutish his conduct, he remains wildly popular. His indecency and sulfuric rhetoric are a plus; his most loyal supporters are galvanized by the criminal charges against him, which they consider political persecution."

And about conservatives, especially the far-right ones:

"Many of those on the right, dependent on the web of lies and the nihilism, have twisted themselves into knots in order to justify their behavior not just to others but also to themselves. It’s too painful for them to acknowledge the destructive movement that they have become part of or to acknowledge that it is no longer by any means clear who is leading whom. So they have persuaded themselves that there is no other option but to support a Trump-led Republican Party, even one that is lawless and depraved, because the Democratic Party is, for them, an unthinkable alternative. The result is that they have been sucked, cognitively and psychologically, into their own alternative reality, a psychedelic collage made up of what Kellyanne Conway, a former counselor to Mr. Trump, famously called “alternative facts.”

OK, so now it's my turn. Those "alternative facts" are dangerous. Not only do people believe things that are wrong, they act on those beliefs. And Trump and all of those who surround him KNOW this. They are using lies and misinformation to organize their followers behind them.

I'm not the first to say that democracy is in danger.