Looking back over one of my website essays (No. 7 in moralphilosophy.co.uk) from the perspective of 2024-5, one absence jumps out at me. No mention of Donald J. Trump. Although that omission does not - I think - affect the main thrust of the essay's argument, he would be a super illustration. At least in most ways: his supporters can say he does much of what he says he will do (infrastructure excepted?), which suggests a certain honesty. But that can actually link in with the shamelessness which enables him to ride over embarrassments and worse that would sink other politicians. So much so that Trump can enlist the support of evangelical Christians, regardless of his (openly) ignoring their professed ethics in just about everything he does. He holds negative authority by virtue not of what he is, but what he is not ('elitist', intellectual, woke, etc.). Like other negative authority figures, he fits to what the American political theorist Wendy Brown has called 'nihilistic times'.
But one further element of my argument in that essay was about markets being able to gain negative authority. Notwithstanding any social responsibility claims or acts of philanthropy, what businesspeople and even speculators do in the market both avoids moral (superiority) claims and keeps a connection with truth by putting their own resources behind what they think. Early advocates of reliance on markets - what now gets called 'neoliberalism' - including Reagan and Thatcher, thought they could bolt traditional morality onto free markets via personal responsibility and a work ethic. The phenomenon of negative authority shows that did not work, but we are not, after all, really in a 'post-truth' society. Markets still need truth even when other aspects of morality can stay out of sight. (They don't always; the project to restore lost species like mammoths and dodos is itself a business relying on markets for technology and education.) So Wendy Brown is not entirely right about nihilism; truth is still in play whatever else.