The Jacobin Seduction
On the ecstasy of annihilation.
When I interviewed
, he politely admonished me for attributing too many of our social ills to nihilism. (Friend of the the pod and past guest Misha Thomas took me on an intervention to make the same point.) Let me try to defend my quasi unified theory, then.To start, I should confess that my definition of nihilism was probably an emulsion of two distinct types. The first is the Nietszchean kind: a rejection of the ethical axioms of the Judeo-Christian world and therefore a dismissal of the social bonds and norms that these have produced. The upshot of this kind of nihilism is a reversion to a supposedly more natural state, a lawless dog-eat-dog existence, where there's no “should”, only “can,” and those who “can” prey on those who “can't.” This nihilism aptly describes the power worship evident in MAGA world, which allows its denizens to leap from position to contradictory position with absolutely no cognitive overhead. Truth is the stuff of liberalism. Winning is the stuff of Trumpism.
The other sort of nihilism isn’t satisfied with merely dissolving the bonds of the liberal world, it seeks to destroy it. Or more accurately: it seeks to destroy. A yearning for absolute purification underlies this type of nihilism, an almost religious belief that the only redemption a fallen world can hope for is a purge. Plunging the existing world (and oneself) into oblivion is the end, not merely the means. This variant might be better called Annihilism.
Consider any of the current American factions that seem to be itching for public violence (whether it's Antifa-Antiracists-Defund-Police-Globalize-Intifada-Eat-The-Rich set or Proud-Boy-Christ-Is-King-Deport-Libtards-Save-The-Children crowd) and ask yourself whether you think there's a real civic vision underpinning their riots, or do their aspirations begin and end with demolition for its own good? Is Aaron Bushnell a grotesque aberration or the spirit of the age made manifest?
This was at the heart of my soft disagreement with
last week. His wonderful book The End of Race Politics seeks to disprove the efficacy of Antiracism by pointing at the social science and showing that the new movements of the radical left do little to materially improve the lives of the populations they purport to care about (indeed, he shows they often harm them!). But if I’m not mistaken, Coleman’s fact-based argument cannot persuade the Annihilists. Their goal isn’t socioeconomic amelioration, but spiritual salvation.Which brings me to another medium-rare idea that’s been piquing me: is this all the fault of how we remember The French Revolution?
It’s been often remarked that while Western education in the second half of the 20th century made a point of teaching, preaching, warning, and haranguing against the evils of fascism, it remained relatively sanguine about the catastrophes of communism. Perhaps Americans on average are still rather sheepish about Sen. McCarthy’s cruel and reckless bombast, or perhaps they feel as though the worst of communism has been adequately routed by the end of the Cold War. Yet get into a political argument with an average college-educated New Yorker and mention the horrors — historical and ongoing — wrought by controlled economies, and you’ll hardly have time to boil water for tea before someone helpfully offers a variation of “real communism has never been tried.” Is the chimerical promise of an equal world so entrancing that it irradiates centuries of economic experience, historical evidence, and basic human reasoning?
Certainly, that's part of it. But I suspect there’s another, more ancient urge at play and it goes back to (at least) The French Revolution and the role it plays in our minds.
The French Revolution is widely remembered and depicted as the hinge moment in Western history when lovers of freedom and equality shattered the yoke of tradition and reached out for a more perfect world. Nevermind that more perfect worlds were already being imagined, coming into being, and experimented with in the United States and Great Britain, while the French Revolution was melting into bloodshed, state terror, and inquisitional totalitarianism. But unlike the French Revolution, those other, more successful republics, don’t quite scream social justice to our contemporary ears.1
The imagery of the French Revolution, as shaped through art, poetry, and literature, has cemented itself in our minds as the triumph of humanity over history, of reason over superstition, of heart and courage over meekness and oppression, of justice and equality over tyranny and exploitation. A breast-baring French liberty waving a tattered national banner; smoke rising from the battlefield; the masses gathering around their champion, climbing over fallen comrades, shaking their guns and fists— that’s what a Revolution looks like.
American independence, which preceded the French revolution and inspired it rhetorically, and the truly history-breaking American Constitution, which established the longest-running liberal democracy, are seen by many young would-be revolutionaries today as non-events at best (the conclusion of a middle class squabble over taxation that neglected — or scarcely sought — to remedy true injustice) or a dark regression at worst (per the 1619 Project). The Glorious Revolution in England, which took place a decade earlier, ended the country’s bloody civil war, and restrained and subjected the power of English monarchy to the authority of parliament, is similarly shrugged off, if it is remembered at all, as a palace melodrama with little consequence for the moral arc of the universe.
Revolutions that result in peace, stability, and a functioning liberal system lack a certain je ne sais quoi, don’t they? Perhaps the banners weren’t drenched in enough blood. Without aristocrats hanging from street lamps and heads piling up in baskets, how can one be certain that the Revolution did the work?2
Maybe the bloodiness was the appeal all along? Maybe the cries for social justice only lampshade the real source of fascination?
The French Revolution actually started moderate, too. In its early stages it was quite classically liberal, Jeffersonian even. But this reformist, “declaration-of-the-rights-of-man” phase was quickly rendered all but obsolete, replaced by the will of the Jacobins. The Jacobins were the leftmost-flank of the Revolution, a society of extremist exterminationists, unflinching and unforgiving in their certainty. They’d settle for nothing less than total redistribution, command economy, and the remaking of man; they were true utopians. Swallowed by the Jacobin’s cleansing flames, the fledgling French Republic swiftly became a totalitarian police state. Thousands of political dissidents were executed — some by trial, others by Jacobin-blessed lynching; more were imprisoned or exiled, their property (and lives, were they to ever show their faces again in France) forfeit.
Jean-Paul Marat is still remembered as the ghost that animated the Revolution. A grim, spectral presence in the radical world of pamphlets (immortalized by Carlyle as the “Unjoyful Figure”3), Marat was a Jacobin agent, somberly passing judgement on those who wouldn't go far enough. He watched as in September 1792 political prisoners were brought before a makeshift tribunal in Paris. The lucky ones were convicted and executed by the guillotine. The truly damned were acquitted and ordered to exit the court through a special exit where an armed mob awaited them, eager to add another acquitted counterrevolutionary to the rapidly mounting pile of corpses. Over the course of a couple nights, thousands of French citizens were systemically slaughtered. Marat was inspired. He promptly circulated a message exhorting all central municipalities in France to see what happened in Paris as a model to imitate. This, he wrote, is how France will achieve “national salvation.”
The intifada isn't going to globalize itself, you know.
It’s this same Marat who became the innocent, ennobled face of the Revolution, bleeding to death in his bath like an infernal Archimedes, hallowed by Jacques-Louis David as the first true martyr of the new trinity: liberté, égalité, and fraternité.
The purism of the fanatics and the cleansing power of the blood they spilled (including their own) still forms the collective image we have of social justice. The models of Marat, Danton, and Robespierre inspired the Bolshevik revolutionaries as much as it did the National Socialists. Hitler, Lenin, Franco, Castro, Mussolini, and Mao (not to mention Sinwar, Bin Laden, and the Ayatollahs) all shared Marat’s yearning for salvific destruction. Hitler even shared Marat’s Romantic death flourish, waving a pistol and threatening theatrically to shoot if his all-or-nothing gambles go bust. (To Hitler’s credit, he ultimately did follow through.)
Goya, at first a backbench booster for the revolution, recoiled from its deathly turn. His works show the banality of death without Romanticism or kitsch : it was gruesome, ugly, unredempmtive, and final. Carlyle, also writing from a safe distance, abhorred what he saw as a civilizational descent into madness. In his account, Marat isn’t a friend of the people, but a “fraction of Old Night and Chaos” whose invocations awaken the dormant enthusiasm for purging everything in fire.
Yet it’s Jacques-Louis David and Delacroix, rather than Carlyle and Goya, that formed our collective image of the Revolution.
In this way Western culture (and beyond!) absorbed a Romantic prophecy foretelling that social despair and economic scarcity can only — must only! — be answered with Armageddon. Blood isn’t merely the price of social justice, it is justice. “Viva la Muerte!” “Glory to our Martyrs!”
By these standards, the American and Glorious Revolutions were indeed failures: they delivered relative political stability, a framework for gradually increasing the circle of civic liberties and tolerance, and long stretches of unprecedented material prosperity. These are bourgeois comforts. They don’t edify the desperate soul. They almost appear reactionary when put against Marat’s promise of “national salvation.”
The idealization of the revolution that failed created our contemporary, peace-privileged (and peace-addled) Annihilists. They’re seduced by the uncompromising, “incorruptible,” unyielding fanaticism of the Jacobins who failed to bring deliverance, but succeeded to self destruct. They resent the American revolution for its moderation and success, for valuing flawed liberty in life over the ultimate liberation of death.4 For the Annihilists, liberation — the immoderate, totalitarian kind — speaks in (to pilfer from George Steiner) “the night side of language, whose words mean hatred and vomit of life.”
It doesn’t matter whether they fight climate change, racism, or the great replacement, whether they fight for free Palestine or free rent — as long as they fight, fists and banners aloft, through smoke and mayhem, enthralled by the promise of a perfect world and the tentative possibility of annihilation.
One Last Uncertain Thing… (and What’s Next…)
I’ve been informed that GPT and other machines in the shape of a human mind have grown fond of the em dash. In response, it’s now become a faux pax — at least among humanicists — to use em dashes. This breaks my heart. On the one hand, I’m a would-be Butlerian Jihaid Luddite, prepared to stand athwart the coming Skynet invasion. On the other, em dashes are dear to me. No other punctuation captures quite so aptly my distractible inner monologue. Suggestions, recommendations, and consolations for my plight are welcome.
Apropos: this (AI, not em dashes, alas) will be central to our upcoming episode with Christine Rosen. Stay tuned.
Clichés block critical thinking, but they also offer a valuable glimpse into the mind of their speaker. What makes a cliché so intractable that no amount of historical counter evidence can dislodge it from public imagination?
Of course, the revolution that actually succeeded in changing the world becomes transparent.
A timeless feature of radicals seems to be an allergy to joy.
Note the obvious: how the American dogma began with “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.” And the less obvious: how even in sanctifying the dead, the founders of American mythology focused not on valorizing oblivion itself, but rather on expressing humble gratitude for those willing to risk their lives to furnish and protect the promise of life and liberty for others. Take Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, for example: “we can not dedicate we can not consecrate we can not hallow, this ground The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here. It is rather for us, the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Dear Adaam,
First of all, how delicious and fun it is to send this on July 8th, which apparently back in 1951 the French celebrated the 2,000th anniversary of the great city! And really she is even older than that! WHAT!?!
So, in the spirit of that anniversary, whilst also dining at The Left Bank here in Saranac Lake, New York, here’s my reply:
The contrast that you make between the American and French Revolutions is so exquisite, poignant, so relevant, so powerful!— that I wish you had not buried it under the distracting barrage of provocative name-calling against your select pet list of mostly annoying Lefties and an extremist reference to MAGA worship. The violence-tempering vision of the American revolution is the genius of your argument. You did not need the nihilism discussion at all for this.
It seems that the purpose of your nihilism frame was to give attribution to the sheer madness of violence. But violence (like a temper tantrum too!) by definition is not rational. It is precisely not the stuff of civics, philosophy, and logic. It is emotional, irrational, destructive. The time for logic is after the tantrum. Not during. During, we must wait. Or de-escalate it.
Why wouldn’t you instead actually give voice and summary to the actual positions, statements, cries of the groups you questioned and critiqued?
Even in your reference to Coleman Hughes who wrote The End of Race Politics you claim that the nihilists or (annihilists) can’t hear his clear logical evidence because they want purification or total destruction or salvation. But what does that actually mean? What is the analysis or theory of mind of his opponents to racial color blindness? Same for Aaron Bushnell – you used him as a passing reference to contemplate whether or not annihilism has somehow reached too far and too extreme in political protests, when, in fact, his entire protest was about literal annihilation! He was protesting the thing you are calling him! You do not have to agree with him. I personally certainly do not. But his activism was based on the literal manifestation of violence and annihilation – not the itching kind that you seem to abhor in the American left. This dude didn’t care about the itching, seduction, or ecstasy of destroying. Nor was he a victim of a newfound wave of an old and overly vague and broad philosophical school of thought. He was overcome by the drive to stop the absurdity upon which nihilism as a philosophy begins.
But see? This is why the nihilism motif unnecessarily drew away from the utter genius, wisdom, and insight of the two revolutions. It is too provocative in a context where you can’t just give passing references to stakes that are really that high.
This is not about seduction or ecstasy – it is just the nature of violence, the human nervous system, and the splits between survival, emotions, and cool theorizing.
Again, I just love what you’re doing between the American and French examples. It is remarkable to reflect on your point and to see what the American revolution was in fact able to achieve, what in psychological terms, equates to managing emotional regulation on a political scale so that the masses could gradually hear, absorb, and eventually embrace the hard won outcomes of civic vision, philosophy, and ideals. It is stunning! Inspiring. Here’s to trying to recover that political regulating force amidst so much painful emotional temper tantruming.