Last week, at his website -- “The Blade of Perseus” -- Victor Davis Hanson wrote about the nihilism that’s destroying our society. Hanson surveys the American scene better than any observer. The recent acceleration of that destruction may surprise us but shouldn’t. The dam holding back these deadly forces has been under relentless assault for decades.

Hanson says that nihilism is the root of modern leftism. He is quite right. In fact, he’s frighteningly right. Yet, there’s nothing new about the connection between leftism and nihilism.

Nihilism is a school of thought – often expressed in political and social terms – holding that that traditional values are worthless and empty due to the meaninglessness of existence. The sole stance of nihilism is defiance, the sole goal the destruction of all that stands. Back in 1946, the great C.S. Lewis “warned that ‘post-Christian’ thought, a way of thinking that rejects absolute rights and wrongs, leads to nihilism.” In the mid-20th Century, existentialism was in full flower. It was mostly a movement among agnostics and atheists (Jean-Paul Satre and Albert Camus, notably) to urge invention of meaning to render a meaningless world livable. Fictions were needed to stave off the life-draining sense of purposelessness that atheists, in particular, are prone to.

Nihilism has always been at the heart of leftism. In 19th-century Russia, the nihilist movement grew in tandem with Marxism. Marx himself had nihilistic tendencies, and figures such as Nikolai Chernyshevski and Sergei Nechaev were a strong influence on Russian Marxists (Chernyshevski was likely Lenin’s greatest inspiration). That destructive thread has continued down to this day.

Marxism, throughout its history, has been a refuge for the resentful; for those who nurse grudges, for those who project their hurts, failures, and unfairness done them -- real or imagined -- on the societies in which they live and on others: rich men and the bourgeoisie earlier and now Whites, who are accused of inherent racism. And to a........

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