Meaning Matters: Education and the Nihilism of the Neocons‪.‬

Nihilist Maneuvering in Relation to Meaning His observations on the prevalence of nihilism and its consequences will surely stand as one of the most enduring legacies of Cornel West's still vibrant career as a public intellectual. West first began addressing nihilism as it impacted the lives of too many African-American citizens in his 1994 work Race Matters. There, he defined nihilism as the "lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness" (West 2001, 23). In Democracy Matters, published 10 years later, West (2004) would expand the scope of his analysis in describing how three variants of, what he calls, political nihilism--"the unprincipled abuse of power," in combination with three related "antidemocratic dogmas" are destroying American democracy. Regardless of what form political nihilism takes, the fundamental meaninglessness that underlies what we might call philosophical nihilism characteristic of the "postmodern condition" remains central.