Nihilism is a major problem facing the United States and other liberal democracies with advanced economies. The lure of nihilism arises out of a sense of grievance besetting large segments of the population. The experience in Wisconsin and the law known as Act 10, which stripped public employees of many collective bargaining rights and protections, is an example. Many residents of Wisconsin supported Act 10 based on the viewpoint that since private sector employees had fewer protections and poorer benefits than public sector employees, it was appropriate to reduce public sector employees’ protections and benefits to a level similar to the average private sector employee. Many of the persons who supported Act 10 who would have benefitted from collective bargaining in terms of better wages, benefits, and job security, did not use Act 10 to make the case that they deserved more. From an economic perspective, it would have made more sense for private sector employees to express outrage at they way their employers had eroded their wages, benefits, and protections over the years instead of expressing outrage at the wages, benefits, and protections that public sector employees received. The position that many residents of Wisconsin took in supporting Act 10 was a nihilistic one in the sense that it had no positive effect on their situation. In essence, many Act 10 supporters were saying, “if my employer screws me, employees paid by my taxes should get screwed too.” The private sector employees’ grievances about their wages, benefits, and job security gave rise to an impulse to harm or destroy others. This nihilistic move or ethos should worry those who support functioning liberal democracies because this sort of nihilistic impulse and the policies that may arise out of it will chip away at the protections of individual freedom that we associate with legitimate, contemporary representative democracies.
The reasons we should be concerned about the growing nihilist impulse and ethos are myriad. Chief among them are the distinct but related problems of categorizing population groups into normatively ordered hierarchies, the diminished respect for or outright abolition of the rule of law, the growing perception that civil society is an anarchic competition between population groups to obtain and exercise power and dominance, and the perception that society is in a lapsarian, collapsing state. To this may be added the irrational sense of general fear that is becoming increasingly more pervasive. This constellation of attitudes, impulses, and beliefs and the political policies and ideologies they spawn are troubling because they lead to government policies that favor arbitrary exercise of state authority, reduce or eliminate the idea and practical enforcement of equal protection under the law, create a hierarchy of rights based on group identity within the state, and condone or at a minimum are hospitable to ethnonationalism.
The assumption, amply justified by every page of history, is that some agents of government will behave lawlessly or brutally in small or big ways most of the time unless they are prevented from doing so. Judith Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” (10).
As Americans, we often think Shklar’s assumption simply does not apply to us, either as a people or at least to those of us who share our political persuasion. Recent history, however, is filled with examples of Americans who behaved lawlessly and brutally despite having no history of criminal or cruel behavior. The incidents that occurred after American forces took control of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are one example. A U.S. Army report found many instances of American soldiers abusing their authority and brutalizing Iraqi prisoners:
Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after he was slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick, and using military dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
Seymour Hersh, “Torture at Abu Ghraib.” Hersh further discussed photographs taken by guards and broadcast on 60 Minutes that show “leering G.I.s taunting naked Iraqi prisoners who are forced to assume humiliating poses” including a photograph in which “Private [Lyndie] England, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, is giving a jaunty thumbs-up sign and pointing at the genitals of a young Iraqi, who is naked except for a sandbag over his head, as he masturbates.” Lest we think that this was an extraordinary instance, Hersh writes, “the 372nd’s abuse of prisoners seemed almost routine--a fact of Army life that the soldiers felt no need to hide” as evidenced by witness testimony in the numerous hearings related to the abuse. Further demonstration that American government agents will act unlawfully and brutally when left unchecked is supported by the fact that higher ranking officials in Military Intelligence and the C.I.A. instructed the G.I.s at Abu Ghraib in at least some of the torture techniques, including how to humiliate prisoners.
We needn’t look beyond the territorial limits of the United States to find government agents acting unlawfully and brutally. On October 24, 2004 a Milwaukee man named Frank Jude briefly made national headlines when it was learned that he was beaten at the hands of off-duty Milwaukee police officers while attending a party in one of their homes. In addition to Jude’s face being pummeled almost beyond recognition, “Jude's pants were also cut off his body. He says he was kicked repeatedly in the groin, his fingers were yanked back and a pen was jammed in both of his ears,” as reported by ABC News. Through the course of investigations, hearings, and trials, it appears that the motivation for beating Jude is that he and one of his companions at the party were African American. Most of the involved officers were convicted in federal court of unlawfully violating Jude’s civil rights under color of state law. The City of Milwaukee paid a $2 million settlement to Jude as a result of the incident.
More recent examples of unlawful and brutal behavior by government agents abound. On October 20, 2014, a Chicago police officer shot Laquan McDonald 16 times when he was not threatening police. The incident was recorded on a police car dashcam. Seven officers have been charged with attempting to cover up the investigation into the incident, which included lying about the dashcam video. On April 3, 2015, a Philadelphia man, Tyree Carroll, was beaten and repeatedly tasered by as many as 26 Philadelphia police officers long after he had been subdued and was clearly not resisting arrest. In 2012 the Orleans Parish Prison signed a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice stemming from a class action lawsuit over prison conditions in which included, among other allegations of abuse and neglect, prisoners “in need of mental health treatment or protection from suicide” being “held practically naked in overcrowded cells that reeked of human waste.” Abusive practices are not restricted to the criminal justice system either. Nine public officials and employees have been charged with misconduct, neglect, or similar crimes related to falsifying, misleading, or failing to report dangerous lead levels in Flint, Michigan’s drinking water and evidence of lead poisoning in the community related to the water quality. The abuse in this case may not have been violent; nevertheless, the consequences to the health of Flint residents is no less severe.
Government agents are not uniformly bad actors or inherently unethical. This, however, does not vitiate Shklar’s point that some government agents will behave lawlessly and brutally if they are left unchecked. Hence, it is critical that we stand up to nihilistic impulses that seek to impair or destroy the political and legal structures that ensure government agents behave lawfully and hold them legally accountable when they don’t. Nihilistic impulses may arise from a feeling of grievance with the government, but such impulses cannot be allowed to turn a government of laws into one of men. Put less idealistically, we cannot allow nihilistic impulses to turn government into a mere tool of those who hold power.
Donald Trump offers a unique opportunity to examine the effects of nihilism in American politics because of the brashness with which he has embraced it and the confidence his rise to and assumption of power has given segments of the electorate prone to or explicitly supportive of nihilistic policies and positions, all of which are furthered by the widespread and intense media coverage President Trump and his supporters receive. One theme President Trump repeated during his campaign was his characterization of majority minority urban neighborhoods as lawless, chaotic zones out of control and almost beyond repair. His favored term for these neighborhoods is the “inner city.” President Trump’s characterization of specific geographic areas as lawless potentially enables him to treat residents of these areas as outside the law. If this occurs, it would be a literal ghettoization of minority majority neighborhoods in a way that differs only in degree from the ghettos the German General Government created in the occupied territories during World War II. If a specific place is carved out from the rest of the polity and is seen as no longer functioning within existing laws, then it is a short step to argue the place need not be subject to existing law when being governed or “brought under control.”
Minority majority communities have been subject to such supra legal government action before. The disparate sentences for powder and rock cocaine is an example. Despite evidence that rock cocaine is no more addictive than powder cocaine and that whites and blacks use cocaine at roughly similar rates on a population level, the public bought into a hysteria over “crack” cocaine, portraying minority neighborhoods in which crack was sold as lawless, which led to significantly harsher sentences for delivery and possession of crack compared to powder cocaine. In addition to the differences in sentencing, police and prosecutorial agencies pursued radically different enforcement strategies to combat crack cocaine distribution and use compared to powder cocaine distribution and use. The strategy applied to crack cocaine, and hence majority minority neighborhoods, was paramilitary: aggressive, coercive, and often violent. The strategy applied to powder cocaine, and hence majority white neighborhoods cannot even be described as a strategy because there was none. Powder cocaine was simply treated as one illicit drug among others used in majority white neighborhoods and communities - neither a scourge to be eliminated nor evidence of lawlessness to be quellled.
Another instance of supra legal government action being applied to majority minority neighborhoods and communities was the redlining and discriminatory housing policies and practices that arose in the wake of the post-World War II G.I. bill. Huge amounts of wealth were created in America under this income redistribution welfare program that enabled veterans to obtain home loans for which they otherwise would not have qualified. Unfortunately, the benefits of this welfare program were not distributed fairly. Lenders, builders, realtors, buyers, sellers, and city governments engaged in a pattern and practice of excluding minorities from the program and shunting those who managed to participate into majority minority neighborhoods, creating the segregated communities which President Trump considers to be lawless, chaotic zones. In effect, the discriminatory housing policies and practices of the postwar years created the geographic zones President Trump seemingly wants to ghettoize in a formal manner. It is especially galling since the economic disadvantages that have beset and accrued in majority minority neighborhoods and communities can in significant part be traced to the intentional exclusion of these neighborhoods and communities from the wealth and income redistribution of the G.I. bill.
The rhetoric of President Trump regarding the “inner city” should give us pause because it characterizes whole communities in a way that delegitimates entire populations, thereby removing their entitlement to be treated in accordance with the ordinary application of existing laws. In lawless zones, supra legal measures are allowed because such zones are characterized as being in a state of emergency. Hence, extraordinary, i.e., supra legal, measures are necessary to rescue or stabilize the zones. This typically takes the form of increased military-style policing.
The view that majority minority neighborhoods are dangerous, lawless, chaotic, or out of control is nihilistic. The view implies that something is wrong with the communities themselves, that politics and socioeconomics do not explain the real problems besetting many majority minority neighborhoods. If the communities themselves are somehow inherently deficient, the argument then implies that the members of the communities are not capable of self-governance. It follows that individuals who are not entitled to the same individual rights, freedoms, and protections as individuals who are capable of self-governance. The effect is to treat such communities and their members as wards of the state. The nihilistic impulse is to deny full citizenship based on ethno-geography and then use the force and authority of the state to control the ethno-geographic communities deemed outside of the law. The common racist trope exemplifying this nihilistic point of view is the animal/zoo which regards supra legal action as necessary because individuals who are minorities are not considered fully human and thus are both dangerous and incapable of behaving lawfully without physically (read “brutally”) controlled. Society itself becomes a struggle between ethno-national groups to control and exert the authority of the state rather than a political contest among legal equals against the backdrop of equal protection and the rule of law.
