After 2020, anyone can be a nihilist

Covid was everything's Chernobyl—it tested everything, and found it fake.

Gray Mirror is an unusual publication for unusual tastes. You probably shouldn’t be here. But you are, so why not keep reading? Here, as the banner says, we are nihilists—we believe in nothing; and monarchists—we expect the next regime to be a monarchy.

There are not a lot of nihilist monarchists in the world—though enough, apparently, to earn a surely-brief appearance in the basement of the Substack leaderboard. (A leader is one thing—an early adopter, another.) But if you’re not one of us, you have no reason at all to be afraid of us! Not only do we believe in nothing, we believe in doing nothing.

Believing in nothing just means we believe everything is fake. Or to be more precise: everything in the United States is either fake, broken, a hack or a miracle. If you agree with this, you’re doing great—you’ve already done the first half of the work.

Since it’s New Year’s Eve, I feel entitled to extend my 2020 review in which I explained that everything is fake. While this poast has been popular, in a way it failed—because it tried to use a rhetorical microscope. So people just thought it was about Covid.

But by showing that Covid proved our prestigious public-health institutions fake, it meant to prove its full point a forteriori—because, in fact, these institutions are some of the healthiest parts of the government. The point is that everything else is even more fake. But our public-health infrastructure was the only part that reality tested.

Let’s branch out, therefore, and look at what else Covid proved fake. For example: Donald Trump. Donald Trump is, or was, even more fake. (While I never write a man off while he still has a mathematical chance, a Trumpist who believes in Mike Pence has some real thinking to do.)

To be more intellectual, Trump was elected—and nearly reelected, however that meal was made—as a gesture of pure Baudrillardian monarchism. Intuitively and in spirit, Trump voters wanted to elect a king. But since they were neither nihilists nor cynics, since they believed in the spectacle, they could elect only a king of the spectacle.

So what they got was not a king—but an actor. A character actor, whose one character is a king. Casting Donald Trump as Claudius, Oberon, Henry V or Henry VIII, is a no-brainer. He would just have to act naturally.

Unfortunately, when you act on the screen or stage, your profession is legitimate—if arguably scurrilous. But when you act in real life—you are a con man. Next time, these same voters will have to take a tip from Hamlet, and write a play that makes itself real. But unfortunately, they will probably get conned again.

Of course, when Covid gave the President a chance to be an actual leader, he punted. Suppose the set of John Wick 5 is attacked, because of some sordid financial squabble between sketchy Russian producers, by Chechen hitmen. Suppose Keanu grabs a Glock from a terrified, incompetent security guard, and calmly pops them all, leaping like a ballerino over a C-stand to strafe the bad-guys from a rolling camera-dolly.

Or suppose he heads for the exit at Johnny Utah speed. Or hides in a trunk full of bras. Which would you expect? Which would you recommend? Of course Trump punted—and of course he chose a Covid ideology that told him he should punt. He was never a king. He was always an actor playing a king. He was, and is, just naturally good at it.

Any such real-life masquerade is called a “con.” And the worst thing about his con was that all the worst people could see it clearly; while many of the best were taken in. To them, what Trump meant was right; but what he was was wrong.

Of course it goes without saying that, just as all Trumpists believe, “conservatism” is a con as well. (This is why you should call them “conservacons.”) Even the “alt-right,” at least whatever is left of it, seems to consist entirely of grifters. After such a whipping, who can blame them? But I can blame them. I can blame all of them; or blame none.

Covid was everything’s Chernobyl. It tested everything and found it fake. It is not one point on the political spectrum that is fake; it is not even a segment of that spectrum; it is the whole spectrum, from end to end. Our historical period is fake. And the true task before us is not to correct it, but to emerge from it. Obviously, this is what a nihilist monarchist would say—but is it obviously wrong?

Not to harp on Covid—but here is another Covid example. You may have noticed that, even after your government took almost a year to decide to use the vaccines—because it had to decide by the proper process—it did not have enough for everyone.

Now, what’s becoming clear is that, slow as vaccine manufacturing (which also has to use the proper process) may be, the current bottleneck is distribution. Your government cannot even inject the stuff as fast as it is made—in fact, some doses may well expire. Like the rest of 2020, it’d be funny if it wasn’t so fucking funny.

Worse: the official, unbelievably bureaucratic and inevitably labyrinthine, priority schedule for Americans does not prioritize old, sick people—for a virus that kills old, sick people. No other country in the world seems to be making this decision—and worst of all, the motivation for the decision is explicitly based on racial conflict. Not even the coronavirus is too sacred to be made into a weapon in America’s cold race war.

But this isn’t actually the worst of all. Let me explain the worst of all.

Anyone who knows American political science, or thinks he does, thinks of American governmental decisionmaking in real life as a process that (a) mainly happens in Congress, and (b) mainly involves various interest groups—lobbyists and activists. While this may be cynical, it is nowhere near cynical enough.

Sherlock Holmes once solved a murder because of a dog. Dogs often catch bad guys by barking. This dog did not bark in the night—so the dog must have known the killer. Here are a couple of dogs that, in 2020, did not bark in the night—two of the most powerful interest groups in DC, as all political scientists will agree: guns and seniors.

Yet the gun lobby never seems to slip gun-rights riders into unrelated Covid bills—a feat apparently not beyond the much smaller UFO lobby. Yet the senior lobby, the fanatical Gray Panthers guarding every hundredth of a point in their Social Security COLAs, the mighty AARP, utters not even a peep when the Trump administration sets out a plan to let its dues-paying members drown horribly in their own lung-juice.

Why did the dog not bark? Because there is no dog. Because everything is fake. Do you think this is as fake as it gets? I give you an academic paper, by Ivy League political scientists, from 2020, titled The Majoritarian Threat To Liberal Democracy. Full abstract:

Incumbents often seek to wield power in ways that are formally legal but informally proscribed. Why do voters endorse these power grabs? Prior literature focuses on polarization. We propose instead that many voters are majoritarian, in that they view popularly elected leaders’ actions as inherently democratic—even when those actions undermine liberal democracy. We find support for our argument in two original survey experiments, arguing that this desire to “let the majority-elected incumbent rule” is an important but under-studied threat to liberal democracy in the United States, and arguably elsewhere.

So America’s top political scientists tell us that democracy is the opposite of democracy. Comrades, we would be foolish not to listen.

Why did the AARP not complain about deprioritizing old people? Because the AARP doesn’t really care about old people. Does the NAACP care about persons of color? None of it is real. But this is not even the worst thing.

The worst thing is not that these institutions do not care about their constituencies. The worst thing is that the constituencies do not care about themselves. This is the only reason that their interest groups can betray them this way—without even intending to.

Actually, there are no constituencies anymore. A constituency is a group of people which acts collectively, on its own behalf, for its own collective interests. Since this literally means acting selfishly, there is nothing more contemptible to any aristocracy. A glance at San Francisco is proof sufficient that collective action centered in group self-interest is a way of thinking utterly foreign to our most fashionable social class.

An apparent exception to this absence of constituencies is our client class, which is of course encouraged to think and act in its own self-interest. But a clientele is not a constituency, because it is not acting on its own behalf. Without any encouragement from a patron class, the same people will be completely submissive, even obsequious. But rebellion and even outright crime can be the highest possible act of obedience.

When a permanent government is subjectively infallible and objectively incompetent; when even elections are undemocratic, unless they leave the same old gang in power; when even lobbies and interest groups are running on autopilot, because there are no real constituencies or spontaneous political opinions—how can you not be a nihilist?

Everyone believes in nothing—but only the nihilist knows it is nothing. Which is the only possible first step in replacing it with something.

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