Tag Archives: Fyodor Dosteyevsky

“’Are these the Nazis, Walter?’ ‘No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there’s nothing to be afraid of.’” -The Big Lebowski

Since the so-called insurrection of January 6, big media, big government, and big corporations have been demanding the collective scalp of the Trumpian alt-right. If we don’t somehow make those 70 million Trump voters disappear, the subtext goes, American democracy is doomed.

The alt-right agrees that American democracy faces an existential threat, but disagrees vociferously about the nature of the threat. Whereas Democrats and corporate media consider Trump’s cult of personality a fascist regime in the making, and his followers deluded and none-too-bright storm troopers, the deplorables, for their part, view the corporate Democrats as TDS-addled censorship-loving election thieves bent on establishing a “woke” dictatorship.

What does all this sound and fury really signify? What we are witnessing is a clash of barely-coherent yet increasingly frenetic ideologies—something the previous generation never imagined when it famously proclaimed the end of ideology. Its seems that Francis Fukuyama never read his Dostoevsky. If he had, he would have understood that the collapse of the grand récit of modernity would not lead to universal satisfaction under neoliberalism, but instead to ideological extremism, chaos, and bloodshed.