“Nihilism,” according to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, is “not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one’s shoulder to the plough; one destroys.” A nihilistic culture is defined by the drive to destroy, by the will to power. And that definition now describes the American nation.

The evidence for this? Consider the pervasive negativity, demonization, and fearmongering of political campaigns. Or the effective attempts of both right and left to cancel those they deem ideologically impure. Or leaders no longer feeling the need to negotiate with the other side, or justify their platforms to their opponents, but instead seeking simply to impose their agendas on everyone. Or survey data that tell us that increasing numbers of Americans believe that political violence is justified; or, indeed, the fact that acts of political threat and violence are trending upward. Or when presidential candidates resort to demonization, one calling immigrants “vermin” and another branding her rival’s supporters “a basket of deplorables.”

Connect the dots among such familiar phenomena and what emerges is a picture of a politics that is fundamentally dehumanizing, in which the negation or annihilation of the ideological “other”—the coastal elites, the prairie pro-lifers, the “woke,” the rust-belt racists—is not incidental to the ongoing culture war. Annihilation—cancellation or erasure—is the point.