The new century does have a name and that name is Nihilism. We have entered the Nihilist Age.

Nihilism was last politically expressed a century ago in Russia where it took the form of rejection of the overbearing social order topped by the nobility that had rotted Russia from the inside out over the previous three decades. The Nihilists were roundly condemned by authorities and other dissidents alike, but they had a point: one decade and a devastating war later, the country was convulsed in a series of revolutions whose effects came to utterly dominate global history for a hundred years thereafter.

And now, with the communist answer to the rot of the modern age having been fully discredited as of 1989, we are back to where we got started before Communism and Facism were tried: we’re back to the Nihilists.

The situation in Russia a hundred years ago is very much the same as the situation around the world today. A locked-in elite class has so thoroughly engineered their own security at the top, the entire evolutionary flow of humanity has ground to a halt at all levels below. Religious solutions to the suffocating stasis spark fundamentalist fevers that sweep the people one way and the other threatening to engulf us all in the fires of somebody’s God or another’s. And the governing authorities to whom both sides of the widening divide look, one for security, the other for succor, plays games of distraction and bait-and-switch. The cultural class, meanwhile, both wallows in despair at the unshakable conviction that major tectonic rumblings are in the offing to unlock the plates, and delights in the excesses of celebrities manic depressive-like.

The description is of Russia in 1905 as accurately as it is a description of the world today. The Nihilists were forgotten after the great conflagrations of war and “permanent revolution,” and nihilism is remembered today only as some vague nonsense put up by a bunch of louts who seem to want nothing at all.

But the Nihilists are back. There is one element that unites George Bush to Jeff Wall and, like a massive gillnet, catches up everything in the apparent gulf between: our widely shared nihilism.

Bush was a born nihilist, exhibiting all the traits of the young Nihilists so derided by Russian commentators like Dostoysovsky and Lermentov a century ago: in the face of losing wars and riots in the cities, Bush, the son of a noble family, escaped all responsibility and ingested alcohol and drugs to self-destructive excess. He remains to this day a Nihilist, having learned how to fake piety to the religious fanatics while he joins in wars called for by industrial behemoths who find nothing amiss in general slaughter of humans for the good of their corporate investors (just like in World War I).

Most educated sophisticates today declaim any interest in politics because, as is so well known it hardly needs pointing out, official party politics is a lose-lose game where nothing good can ever be done. No one proposes a superior or even just a different political system; they are Nihilists no less than Bush. They see only deserved and definite breakdown with nothing on the other side, nor even an obligation to create something to contain effects on the other side of the breakdown they imagine. How is the typical Commercial Drive ex-professor any different from the typical ex-Secretary of Defense like Donald Rumsfeld, who saw so clearly the need to destroy the social order of the Middle East, beginning in Iraq, but who didn’t even think how to hook up traffic lights or run the water system in Baghdad on the other side of his nihilistic destruction?

The neo-cons, famous for having taken over the Bush presidency to engineer their map-of-the-world wipe, have always been assumed to be descendents of Leo Strauss and ultimately of disillusioned ex-Trotskyites alarmed by the violent course the Russian revolution ultimately took. But they are in fact descendents of the Nihilists who filled the cafes of St Petersberg before all the hot-head revolutionaries with their grand visions showed up.

Nihilists get along well with Christian fundamentalists: both have clear visions of Armageddon. They only part ways on what comes after, the Christians seeing Jesus coming down from the sky, while the Nihilists see nothing in particular. Which of these best describes the members of the Bush regime and their fellow travelers at the National Review, the Standard, and so on?

And are the intellectuals of this day who for good reason can trust no authority, can buy into no program, or can believe in no cause, not aligned exactly with what literate Nihilists of 1905 Russia were trying to express? Then as now, the intellectuals were correct to warn that any proposed solution to the stasis of society offered by church, business, or scientists of the day would lead to grief. Science-based solutions, in particular social science, lead to Communism; business-based solutions, in particular corporatism, lead to Fascism; and Church-based solutions, in particular fundamentalism, well, we’re seeing what that leads to at the present moment.

This is why the Nihilists backed off from any solution to the problem of choosing what to replace the order with that they proposed to break down. To follow one broken-down order with another would be a worse disaster. Its why the Nihilists in Russia in 1905 had no friends and were attacked on all sides: they endorsed no one’s plan.

Today the Nihilists made it to power and have begun their systematic breakdown of order. It gets mistaken as Straussian-ism, that cynicism regarding false authorities in the church and state supposedly secretly constructed to give the people proper guidance. In reality, Strauss and his disciples didn’t believe in either church or state, and deployed these as mere tools useful to carry out their destructive agenda. Like the denizens on cafes on Commercial Drive, the Straussians—the neo-cons—also see no reason for themselves to vote or to go to church.

Warn a genuine Christian that making war on Iran will bring nothing but trouble, or warn a businessman , a liberal, or a conservative, and all will take a step back and consider the wise choice. Only a Nihilist would rub his hands and charge forward anyway, all the more enchanted with warnings of destruction all around.

Which reaction best describes the occupants of the seats of power in Washington today? Those aren’t Christians, or business people or liberals or conservatives in Washington, those are the Nihilists, back again after so long.

Warn a real intellectual, a student, a journalist or an artist that staying out of party politics will lead to destruction of democracy and individual and group rights and will give rise to the police state, and they will sit up and take notice. Only a Nihilists would sneer and scoff and feign aloofness.

Which reaction best describes the mood of the current occupant of the seat across from you right now? Maybe that isn’t an intellectual, a student, a journalist or an artist, maybe that’s a Nihilist too.

Top to bottom, Nihilists hold sway. It’s the Nihilist Age.