Trumpian Conservative Nihilism

You know how during the Vietnam War our leaders would explain that we had to destroy a village to save it? That's the principle at work when the nihilistic Trump-led Republicans say they want to make America great again.

UPDATE: 10-26
As if on cue I just came across this stellar essay by Garret Keizer at the New Republic. Reading it I thought of our handyman  - a great guy and honest businessman - who declared very early in 2016 that he was voting for Trump because he wanted to "blow everything up." Keizer explains:

"Leaving nuanced definitions to the philosophers, I would define nihilism as a combination of three basic elements: a refusal to hope for anything except the ultimate vindication of hopelessness; a rejection of all values, especially values widely regarded as sacrosanct (equality, posterity, and legality); and a glorification of destruction, including self-destruction—or as Walter Benjamin put it, 'self-alienation' so extreme that humanity “can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure.” Nihilism is less passive and more perverse than simple despair. 'Nihilism is not only despair and negation,” according to Albert Camus, “but, above all, the desire to despair and to negate.'

"A nihilist is someone who dedicates himself to not giving a shit, who thinks all meanings are shit, and who yearns with all his heart for the 'aesthetic pleasure' of seeing the shit hit the fan. Arguing with a nihilist is like intimidating a suicide bomber: The usual threats and enticement have no effect. I suspect that is part of the appeal for both: the facile transcendence of placing oneself beyond all powers of persuasion. A nihilist is above you and your persnickety arguments in the same way that Trump fancies himself above the law."

I recommend you read the whole thing, but I especially like how this passage resonates with what I was trying to get at in my brief posting.

"Of the relevant causal emotions, perhaps the most primal is fear, and the impulse to overcome fear through recklessness. (It goes without saying that Trump’s presidency is simultaneously a response to fear, a stoker of fear, and a reason to fear.) 'All men kill the thing they love,' Oscar Wilde writes, and perhaps most ruthlessly when the thing they love—or have convinced themselves they no longer love—is under threat. Need I say that 'the thing' being killed is America?"