Political Cynic.
Aug 22, 2025
Editor: Reader here are the final paragraps of David Brooks wan public moralizing of August 21, 2025. David Brooks is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and cites Derek Thompson essay, as a source in his essay.
https://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-brooks/
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Apparently, the F.B.I. now has a new category of terrorist — the “nihilistic violent extremist.” This is the person who doesn’t commit violence to advance any cause, just to destroy. Last year, Derek Thompson wrote an article for The Atlantic about online conspiracists who didn’t spread conspiracy theories only to hurt their political opponents. They spread them in all directions just to foment chaos. Thompson spoke with an expert who cited a famous line from “The Dark Knight”: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
This may be where history is leading. Smothering progressivism produced a populist reaction that eventually descended into a nihilist surge. Nihilism is a cultural river that leads nowhere good. Russian writers like Turgenev and Dostoyevsky wrote about rising nihilism in the 19th century, a trend that eventually contributed to the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. The scholar Erich Heller wrote a book called “The Disinherited Mind” about the rise in nihilism that plagued Germany and Central Europe after World War I. We saw what that led to.
It’s hard to turn this trend around. It’s hard enough to get people to believe something, but it’s really hard to get people to believe in belief — to persuade a nihilist that some things are true, beautiful and good.
One spot of good news is the fact that more young people, and especially young men, are returning to church. I’ve been skeptical of this trend, but the evidence is building. Among Gen Z, more young men now go to church than young women. In Britain, according to one study, only 4 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds went to church in 2018, but by 2024 it was 16 percent. ‘From the anecdotes I keep hearing, young people seem to be going to the most countercultural churches — traditionalist Catholic and Eastern Orthodox.’
Editor: I’ve highlighterd pargarph four where Brooks opines about the return to ‘countercultural churches’. Can these churches identified as ‘countercultural’ have or share a propinquity with Judaism, in the muddled chatter of Mr. Brooks ?
They don’t believe in what the establishment tells them to believe in. They live in a world in which many believe in nothing. But still, somewhere deep inside, that hunger is there. They want to have faith in something.
Editor: It never occours to Mr. Brooks that many humans live without faith of any kind or description, or simply play the game their parents played, to keep peace in the family. In sum Mr. Brooks is a political conformist, who writes dismal prose!
Political Cynic.
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