1) Epistemological failure: the recognition that there are now no objective, knowable truths; that all claims to authoritative knowledge are without foundation; that ‘reason’ as an autonomous capacity independent of presuppositions or free from any vested interests is a fiction.
2) Ethical incoherence: the recognition that we are at ‘the end of the moral interpretation of the world’; that there are no absolute moral or ethical values, but rather that right and wrong, good and evil are, in the end, nothing more than vague constructs tied to social circumstances and emotional states.
3) Existential despair, which denies any intrinsic meaning or ultimate value or purpose to individual or social life.
4) Political annihilation, which manifests itself in a will to obliterate all that obstructs the will to power, a will to bring enemies to nothing, to destroy completely.

Put like this, Hunter adds, there are very few genuine nihilists. So why is nihilism so pervasive in Western culture, and specifically in American political culture? The answer will be familiar to readers of Hunter’s To Change the World: “culture has a life of its own more or less independent of people’s intentions or will, and it is most powerful when the meanings or rules by which people live are taken for granted ... For my purposes, passive nihilism is the net effect of large, institutional dynamics intrinsic to the modern world - its technology, its bureaucracy, its markets, its pluralism, its entertainment - unfolding in the public sphere.”

What Hunter calls “nihilism without nihilists” is exacerbated by the conditions of late modernity: “the profound confusion that derives from the sense of multiple realities and multiple ways of knowing, the relativization of value through pluralism and choice, the absence of authority and with it the sense of meaninglessness in life and history, the diminution of the moral worth of all human beings (though some more than others) through their instrumentalization, and the absence of clear, coherent and common purposes to which individual and collective life might be directed.”