By one of those unfortunate coincidences proving history is not rational, Francis Fukuyama took to his Substack last week to warn about the dangers of right-wing nihilist extremism. This came just days before America’s largest cities were plunged into violent chaos by mobs of left-wing nihilists.

Fukuyama, who launched to fame 30 years ago by declaring “The End of History,” criticized me in his last book for writing in 2021 that those who “do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people” are not really Americans, though they may technically be citizens. Fukuyama was appalled at what he called my “unwillingness to tolerate diversity.”

In retrospect, it is Fukuyama’s words, not mine, that look foolish. We are now seeing, in Los Angeles and elsewhere, the consequences of the left’s heedless celebration of diversity, which culminated in the Biden administration’s full-scale assault on American sovereignty and identity through unlimited immigration.

Of course, right-wing intellectuals have been warning for decades about the “barbarians inside the gate.” Today, the barbarians are not merely inside the gate, they command the citadels. Left-wing congressmen, mayors, and governors actively work to overturn American self-government.

The current protests in several of America’s major cities—though ostensibly directed at ICE—are almost certainly organized, funded, and manned by the same entities that have perpetrated all leftist mayhem in recent years, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter/George Floyd riots.

As with the 2020 violence, a mixture of motives seems to be at work in the current protests. The wealthier constituents of California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass certainly benefit from cheap imported labor. But the rioters themselves—mostly young men, including many American-born whites—are not burning cars and destroying buildings to keep their low-wage housekeepers and landscapers. For them, this is an ideological war.

But to what end? What is their ultimate goal?

This brings me back to Fukuyama’s Substack essay and his tendentious use of Leo Strauss. Fukuyama quotes from Strauss’s famous 1941 essay titled “German Nihilism,” in which Strauss notes the justifiable cynicism and disillusionment of those young men in Weimar Germany who were repulsed by the shallow consumerism and hedonism of modern liberal democracy. On a superficial level, Strauss’s critique could seem to apply equally to the extremes of left and right:  

[The] only thing of which they were absolutely certain was that the present world and all the potentialities of the present world as such, must be destroyed…. literally anything, the nothing, the chaos, the jungle, the Wild West, the Hobbian state of nature, seemed to them infinitely better….

But Strauss makes perfectly clear that what these young men found intolerable and wanted to avoid at all costs was “the communist-anarchist-pacifist future.” They were appalled at the “debasement” of modern life. They yearned for something meaningful in their lives, a nobility which could justify “real, unmetaphoric, sacrifice.”

Is that wish for a noble and meaningful life what we see in the anti-ICE protests? On the contrary, today’s violent left (increasingly the tail wagging the whole Democratic Party) seems to have no affirmative concept of a worthwhile life, no understanding of a common good. In another essay, Strauss captured the far more destructive and anti-human nihilism of the left, which long ago abandoned God, tradition, and morality, but found no substitutes to satisfy its spiritual emptiness. “They are haunted men,” Strauss declared.

Deferring to nothing higher than their selves, they lack guidance…. Their screams are accusations hurled against ‘society’; they are not appeals to human beings uttered in a spirit of fraternal correction…. Their screams remind one of the utterances of the damned in hell; they themselves belong to hell. But hell for them is not society as such, but ‘life in the United States….’ They condemn contemporary American society; their selves constitute themselves by this condemnation; they are nothing but this condemnation or rejection.

The political lesson to draw from Strauss’s insight is that attempts at negotiation or persuasion with such people are pointless. One cannot reason with irrationalism. One cannot persuade people who wish to destroy society in order to destroy themselves. What they demand is complete and abject surrender; they want the rest of us to join them in their hell.

Trump is the first, and perhaps the only, politician of our time who will not surrender to this nihilism. That means things will probably get uglier before they get better. Of course, our political leadership has put Trump in this unenviable position—forcing him to use extreme measures—largely because its own neglect and cowardice has made the problem infinitely worse.

Trump, to his credit, recognizes that a long war over the future of Western civilization has come to a head. It is no exaggeration to say that these riots ultimately turn on the question of whether America will remain a sovereign nation. To no small degree, the answer to that question will determine the fate of the West.

Trump will endure terrible denunciations for doing what is necessary, perhaps most of all from the army of “normie” conservatives who have done so much to exacerbate the problem in the first place. Let us pray that he maintains his courage and his convictions to carry on the fight. The alternative is what Strauss called “the nothing, the chaos, the jungle.”

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/ice-and-the-screams-of-the-damned/