A crucial moment in the development of modern left-wing culture arrived some time in 2013, when Ta-Nehisi Coates, reading books about the ravages and aftermath of World War II by the historians Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, realized that he didn’t believe in God.
“I don’t believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice,” Coates wrote for The Atlantic then. “I don’t even believe in an arc. I believe in chaos … I don’t know that it all ends badly. But I think it probably does.” ...
For the stern-minded, pessimism of the intellect can coexist with optimism of the will. “I’m also not a cynic,” Coates wrote in the same 2013 essay. “Those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can’t guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us.”
But it should not be a surprise that some of those “night travelers on a great tundra” might incline a bit more than past left-wingers to despair. Nor should it be a surprise that amid the recent trend toward increasing youth unhappiness, the left-right happiness gap is wider than before — that whatever is making young people unhappier (be it smartphones, climate change, secularism or populism), the effect is magnified the further left you go.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post entitled, "It's the Nihilism, Stupid" that focused on why so many bright young people are attracted to the Right. As I said then, the Left that I grew up with was inspired by Gandhi, MLK, Nelson Mandela, and the Port Huron Statement. Coates rejects all that as unbelieveable. I hope for his sake it's a temporary moment in the longer trajectory of his life. I think he's an honest writer, and he acts in good faith, but I also believe that he's fundamentally wrong.
So while I don’t question Coates’s authenticity, his nihilism is rather typical of so much of the thinking on the Left today. It is no longer original or interesting to say that it's all meaningless and that chaos is the fundamental reality. That was edgy in 1880s, and became conventional thinking among intellectuals as the Techno-Capitalist Matrix grew stronger in the post-WWII period. Lots of intelligent, decent people are drawn into this nihilism because they don't understand how their thinking is captive of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, which is utterly nihilistic and founded in chaos.
And I have to wonder if people like Coates, while they must be taken seriously on their own terms, can be taken seriously as political actors. It's precisely this kind of nihilistic thinking that is driving so many young people to the Right. Politics now is all about how it's become "the Meaning, Stupid", and Coates and his fellow travelers are basically saying that it's all meaningless. That's not gonna win a lot of hearts and minds. Rather, it's more likely to abet the forces of chaos that he believes are the ultimate reality anyway. If it's all chaos, why bother?
So neither Coates nor the broader Left, no matter how sincere their nihilism, should be taken seriously as a political actors who actually believe that the arc of Justice is real. Nihilism cannot win because it cannot inspire. It does the opposite, which is to have a negative, depressing effect on normie Americans.
Nihilism is a siloed form of thinking that mostly within the confines educated elites in the corporate, cultural, and media worlds. It's repellent to everyone else. And if you cannot engage ordinary, mainstream Americans, you cannot win. In fact, all "honest nihilists" on the Left really accomplish is to push decent, normie Americans toward the "dishonest nihilists" on the Right who tell them what they want to hear.
We are living in a time when policy and programs don't matter as much as as whether one's politics feels meaningful. The Left's politics of meaninglessness cannot compete with the Right's politics of meaning, which, whether grounded in reality or not, inspires a passionate intensity with which a politics of meaningless cannot compete. Best is to restore the kind of politics of MLK and Gandhi that is both meaningful and sincere.
So if you believe that chaos is the ultimate reality, then your politics cannot be anything other than a politics of chaos, and as such it abets politicians of chaos like Trump, Gaetz, MTG et al. The nihilist on the Left should either keep their metaphysics to themselves or stay out of the political arena.They do more harm than good, and they give the Left a bad name with 80% of the country.