Theory & Event Vol. 22, No. 1, 92–114 © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press Nihilism as Rightwing Political Rhetoric Jason Blakely What’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution. — C. P. Cavafy Abstract This paper advances a critical analysis of the neocon- servative discourse on “nihilism” in the United States. The crisis of “nihilism” is tied to attempts to rollback civil rights, feminism, and multiculturalism. Manufacturing this crisis is part of a wider polit- ical theology that is in discontinuity with the philosophers most often evoked as its sources. Applying a hermeneutic approach to rightwing claims of nihilism reveals a defective philosophical anthropology and sociology of modernity. The paper concludes by arguing that rhetoric about nihilism helped buttress the surge of reactionary politics in America, which seeks to restore lost nation- al greatness. Beginning in the 1970s, with the rise of the neo-conservative move- ment, a discourse about the crisis of “nihilism” emerged and spread on the American Right. 1 According to this discourse, nihilism consisted of a crisis of extreme relativism, moral laxity and confusion plaguing American life. Nihilism was also said to be imperiling basic social and political institutions like the family, schools, universities, the press, Congress, and the parties. As belief in an objective moral code crum- bled and succumbed to nihilism, nothing short of the survival of civi- lization itself was at stake. Of course, many uses of nihilism do not ft this discursive pattern. For instance, some have theorized “nihilism” as politically useful. 2 But the aim of this essay is to critically deconstruct the discourse of “nihil- ism” as deployed by rightwing, American ideologists—revealing it to be a form of political rhetoric intent on excluding certain racial, reli- gious, and gender groups from full civic participation. Political rhet- oric in the sense I am using the term is different from philosophical discourse in that it is willing to intentionally forego veracity in a delib- erate bid for power. The fact that such rhetoric relies heavily on false and distortive political fctions does not mean it is irrelevant to real