What Turgenev tells us about Trump and nihilism
How strange to learn that our next president was a “Manchurian candidate,” a person the Russian government worked hard to elect.
For honest Republicans, this is alarming. After all, Russia has traditionally been America’s opposite. As Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” (1820) famously explained, there are “two great nations in the world, which started from two points,” the United States by “the plowshare” and Russia by the “sword.”
In the Lincoln-Douglas debates (1858), Honest Abe suggested that Russia was at least honest in hav- ing no pretense at championing freedom, which was in contrast to those Americans who proclaimed liberty while advocating “popular sovereignty” for slavery expansionism.
Later, matters worsened after Russia turned communist. Who can look back on the Soviet years as being great? Certainly not Eastern Europe. But after communism, the end of the Yeltsin era began the authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin. The land grabs in Georgia and Ukraine, and the threat against the Baltic nations, demonstrated Russia’s old ways.
Spectacularly, in 2016 the United States had a Republican standard-bearer who, as an admirer of Putin, was soft on Russia.
Trump supporters wish to turn a blind eye to all of this.
Strangely, “Fathers and Sons,” a Russian novel by Ivan Turgenev, could be an advertisement for Trumpian politics. In this 1862 work the main character is Bazarov, a young nihilist. He would have favored fake news if it could help overturn the existing order.
As most people know, nihilism is a belief in nothing. Actually, the original nihilists were Russian and they believed in destroying the establishment. In the Turgenev novel, Bazarov is against the aristocrat snobs, which is another way of saying he was anti-establishment. “We shall destroy because we are a force,” Bazarov states, as if he were writing a speech for Trump.
Russian nihilism was a form of anarchism. Indeed, Turgenev was an admirer of Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian anarchist.
In “Fathers and Sons,” Bazarov had no plan for the ideal society. “At the present time,” he explains to a baffled member of the older generation, “negation is the most beneficial of all ...” Bazarov, who was representative of many radicals in pre-communist Russia, believed that the government and society were so rotten and corrupt that the best thing to do was tear down their pillars.
But like the Republicans who want to repeal Obamacare without first offering a viable alternative, the only prescription offered by Bazarov was destruction.
In Bazarov’s own words, “the ground wants clearing first.” With political nihilism, the belief is destruction. Solutions are never formalized.
What is sad is the trajectory that follows the publication of “Fathers and Sons”: baby-step reform, political assassinations, czarist reactionary behavior, Bloody Sunday of 1905, and finally the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
Americans must wake up and realize that the road to serfdom is via political nihilism.