Friedrich Nietzsche's grim answer, set down in 1887, anticipated Buchanan's dismay. Nietzsche wrote:

"What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently--the advent of nihilism."

Such is the collapse of all belief, of all moral and intellectual orderliness. It is a collapse that produces the following effect: "When Americans recall their history," explains Buchanan, "some find it glorious; others find it villainous and shameful."

Buchanan writes about "taking the country back." He means taking the country back from Liberals. Of course, one would also have to take the country back to an earlier time. Nietzsche commented on this idea in Twilight of the Idols, where he wrote that "even today there are parties whose goal is a dream of the crabwise retrogression of all things. But no one is free to be a crab. There is nothing for it; one has to go forward, which is to say step by step further into decadence."

Buchanan's presidential bid demonstrated the truth of Nietzsche's observation. We cannot go back but only forward into decadence and crisis. "So it may be," writes Buchanan, "that the Death of the West is ordained, and that there is no sense in prescribing new drugs or recommending painful new treatments, for the patient is dying and nothing can be done."

The Conservative Buchanan finds, at this twilight hour, that there is nothing left to conserve. Tradition has collapsed, along with mores, rules, manners, and beliefs. The Conservative looks about and finds that a great spiritual catastrophe has leveled our interior landscape. Imagine the chaos in the heavens when every star and planet breaks free from its path and orbit. What galaxy, then? What crashing and blasting of worlds then?

In this process, we have lost that most Conservative word, that most constricting word--the first serious word a human being can learn, which is the word "no." We Liberals, we decadents, do not want to acknowledge limitation. We do not want to accept what is fatal, what is necessary, what is inescapable. Here we find a thing that, heretofore, has disciplined all of humanity. But we don't want it.

The Conservative (without anything to conserve) analyzes the various forms that nihilism now takes. For example, why do some people want to change from a man into a woman (or from a woman into a man)? Perhaps, it is because self-loathing and self-disintegration bubble up when the word "no" falls into disuse. Shape and consistency being absent, shapeless obstinacy and arbitrariness take the disintegrated soul directly to Hell.

There are other questions along the same line: Why do so many Americans hate America? Why does the Christian no longer defend his beliefs? Why does the government adopt suicidal policies? In fact, our schools have given us "education to make us stupid"; our welfare state has encouraged poverty; our state-funded science has given us intellectual gangsterism; our CIA has given us three famous monkeys--See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Speak No Evil; our courts have become a mockery; our media is biased; and our superpower status no longer protects us.

This is nihilism in action. It is the self-destructive course of those who have lost their way. It is inevitable because we no longer adhere to transcendental values. Instead, the nihilistic instrumentalism of science has displaced our faith in higher things. In other words, "scientism" has become the decisive idea of our time (as the point of departure for modern Communism and Liberalism).

"Once an ideology takes hold of a society," writes Buchanan, "only a superior force or ideology can exorcise it. To defeat faith, you must have faith. What, other than Christianity, is the West's alternative faith?"

The anti-Christian Nietzsche, who called himself "the first perfect nihilist of Europe who ... has even now lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself," forecast a coming age of dictatorship and war. Buchanan essentially agrees that, "if Christianity has lost its appeal and Christianity 'is not an option,' the revolution will accelerate until we hit the retaining wall of reality."

And what do we suppose that retaining wall is made of in the nuclear age?

It is my contention that destructive warfare, distress, and disorder will inevitably occur. But this is no reason to despair. If we are faithful and determined, we can persevere and become stronger. Buchanan says, at the end of his book, that we must continue to fight for the country. "This is a beautiful country," he writes. "And that is why we must never stop trying to take her back."

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