By SLAVEJ ŽIŽEK*
Trump’s election should teach the left to clearly distinguish itself from the “progressive” liberal center and its corporatism Woke
Where does Trump’s victory leave (what’s left of) the Left? In 1922, when the Bolsheviks had to retreat to the “New Economic Policy” of allowing a much greater degree of market economy and private property, Vladimir Lenin wrote a short text: About climbing a big mountain. He draws a parallel with a mountain climber who needs to return to point zero, to the base, to the point of his first attempt to reach the summit of a new mountain, to describe how one retreats without opportunistically betraying one's loyalty to the cause: communists “who do not give in to discouragement and who maintain their strength and flexibility to once again 'start from the beginning', when tackling an extremely difficult task, are not doomed”.
This is Vladimir Lenin at his Beckettian best, echoing the line of Worstward Ho: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better”. And this Leninist approach is more necessary today than ever, when communism is more necessary than ever as the only way to face the challenges we have (ecology, war, Artificial Intelligence…), when (what’s left of) the left is less and less capable of mobilizing people around a viable alternative.
With Donald Trump’s victory, the left has reached its zero point. Before we dive into the clichés about “Donald Trump’s triumph,” we should take into account a few important details. The first is the fact that Donald Trump did not get more votes than he did in the 2020 election, when he lost to Joe Biden. It was Kamala Harris who lost about 10 million votes compared to Joe Biden! So it’s not that “Donald Trump won by a landslide,” it was Kamala Harris who lost. All leftist critics of Donald Trump should start with some radical self-criticism.
Among the points to be highlighted is the unpleasant fact that immigrants, especially those from Latin countries, are almost inherently conservative. They did not come to the United States to change it, but to succeed in the system or, as Todd McGowan put it: “They want to have a better life for themselves and their families, not to improve their social order.”
So I don’t believe that Kamala Harris lost because she is a woman of color. Let’s remember that Kemi Badenoch, a black woman, was triumphantly elected the new leader of the British Conservatives three weeks ago. For me, the main reason she lost is that Donald Trump represented politics. He and his followers acted as committed politicians, while Kamala represented non-politics.
Many of Kamala Harris’s positions were quite acceptable: on healthcare, abortion… However, Donald Trump and his supporters have repeatedly made clearly “extreme” statements, while Kamala Harris has overdone it by avoiding difficult decisions and offering empty platitudes. (In this sense, Kamala Harris is close to Keir Starmer in the UK.) Just remember how she avoided taking a clear position on the war in Gaza and thus lost the votes not only of radical Zionists, but also of many young black and Muslim voters.
What Democrats have failed to learn from Trumpists is that in a heated political battle, “extremism” works. In her speech acknowledging Donald Trump’s victory, Kamala Harris said: “To the young people watching us now, it’s okay to be sad and disappointed, but listen: it’s going to be okay.” No, it’s not going to be okay, we shouldn’t trust that future history will somehow redress the balance. With Donald Trump’s victory, the trend that has brought the new populist right closer to power in many European countries has reached its climax.
Kamala Harris has been labeled by Donald Trump as worse than Joe Biden, not just as a socialist, but even as a communist. Conflating her position with communism is a sad indication of where we are today, a confusion clearly discernible in another oft-heard populist claim: “People are tired of far-left government.” An absurdity like no other.
The new populists describe the (still) hegemonic liberal order as “far left”. No, this order is not far left, it is simply the liberal-progressive center that is much more interested in fighting against (what is left of) the left than against the new right. If what we now have in the West is a “far left order”, then Von der Leyen is a Marxist communist (as Viktor Orbán effectively claims!).
The new populist right sees communism and corporate capitalism as the same thing. However, the true identity of these opposites lies elsewhere. About eight years ago, I was criticized for saying that Donald Trump is a pure liberal. How could I ignore the fact that Donald Trump is a dictatorial fascist? My critics didn’t get it.
Perhaps the best characterization of Donald Trump is that he is a liberal, that is, a liberal fascist, the definitive proof that liberalism and fascism work together, that they are two sides of the same coin. Donald Trump is not only an authoritarian, his dream is also to allow the market to function freely in its most destructive facet, from brutal speculation to the rejection of all ethical limitations in public spheres (against sexism and racism) because he considers them a form of socialism.
Here, too, we should begin with a critique of Donald Trump’s opponents. Boris Buden has rejected the prevailing interpretation that sees the rise of the new right-wing populism as a regression caused by the failure of modernization. For Boris Buden, religion as a political force is the effect of the post-political disintegration of society, of the dissolution of the traditional mechanisms that guaranteed stable community bonds. Fundamentalist religion is not just politics, it is politics itself, that is, it sustains the space for politics. And what is even more disturbing is that it is no longer just a social phenomenon, but the very texture of society.
So, in a way, society itself becomes a religious phenomenon. Thus, it is no longer possible to distinguish the purely spiritual aspect of religion from its politicization. In a post-political universe, religion is the predominant space to which antagonistic passions return. What has happened recently under the guise of religious fundamentalism is therefore not the return of religion to politics, but simply the return of the political as such. So the real question is: why has the political, in the secular sense, the great achievement of European modernity, lost its formative power?
David Goldman commented on the result with a “It’s the economy, stupid!” but, as he himself added, not in a straightforward way. The main indicators show that under Joe Biden the economy has been working very well (although inflation has hit most of the poor hard), so the mystery is: why did a sizable majority perceive their economic situation as dire? This is where ideology comes into play. Not just ideology in the sense of fundamental ideas and principles, but ideology in a more basic sense of how political discourse functions as a social bond.
Aaron Schuster has observed that Donald Trump is “an overly present leader whose authority is based on his own will and who openly disdains knowledge. It is this rebellious, anti-system theater that serves as a point of identification for people.” That is why Donald Trump’s serial insults and outright lies, not to mention the fact that he is a convicted felon, work for him.
Donald Trump's ideological triumph lies in the fact that his followers experience obedience to him as a form of subversive resistance or, as Todd McGowan put it: “It is possible to support the incipient fascist leader with an attitude of total obedience while feeling totally radical, a position adopted to maximize the almost de facto enjoyment factor.”
Here, we must mobilize the Freudian notion of “theft of enjoyment”: the enjoyment of another inaccessible to us (the enjoyment of a woman for a man, the enjoyment of another ethnic group for our group…) or our legitimate enjoyment stolen or threatened by another.
Russell Sbriglia has observed how this dimension of “theft of enjoyment” played a crucial role when Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021: “What better example of the logic of “theft of enjoyment” could there be than the mantra that Donald Trump supporters chanted as they stormed the Capitol: “Stop the steal!”? The hedonistic, carnivalesque nature of the attack on the Capitol to “stop the steal” was not merely secondary to the attempted insurrection. To the extent that it was all about recovering the enjoyment (allegedly) stolen by the nation’s others (Blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, LGBTQ+, etc.), the carnival element was absolutely essential.”
What happened on January 6, 2021 at the Capitol was not an attempted coup d’état, but a carnival. The idea that carnival can serve as a model for progressive protest movements – that these protests are carnivalesque not only in their form and atmosphere (theatrical performances, humorous songs), but also in their non-centralized organization – is deeply problematic. Isn’t late capitalist social reality itself already carnivalesque?
By chance, the sadly famous Kristallnacht Wasn’t the 1938 riots – that half-organized, half-spontaneous outbreak of violent attacks on Jewish homes, synagogues, businesses and people – a typical carnival? Besides, isn’t the obscene and hidden side of power, from gang rapes to mass lynchings, also called “carnival”? Let’s not forget that Mikhail Bakhtin developed the notion of carnival in his book on Rabelais, written in the 1930s as a direct response to the carnival of the Stalinist purges.
The contrast between Donald Trump’s official ideological message (conservative values) and the style of his public performance (saying more or less the first thing that comes to mind, insulting others and violating all the rules of good manners…) says a lot about our dilemma: what kind of world is this in which bombarding the public with indecent vulgarities presents itself as the last barrier to protect us from the triumph of a society in which everything is permitted and old values go to hell.
As Alenka Zupančič has said, Donald Trump is not a relic of the old mainstream moral conservatism. To a much greater extent, he is the caricatured mirror image of the postmodern “permissive society” itself, a product of that society’s own internal antagonisms and limitations.
Adrian Johnston proposed “a complementary twist on Jacques Lacan’s dictum that ‘repression is always the return of the repressed’. The return of the repressed is sometimes the most effective repression”. Isn’t this also a concise definition of the figure of Donald Trump? As Freud said about perversion, in it everything that is repressed, all repressed content, comes to light in all its obscenity, but this return of the repressed only reinforces the repression. And so there is nothing liberating in Donald Trump’s obscenities either; they only reinforce oppression and social mystification. Donald Trump’s obscene actions thus express the falseness of his populism. To put it brutally and simply, while acting as if he were concerned about ordinary people, he promotes big capital.
How do we explain the strange fact that Donald Trump, a lecherous and needy person, the very opposite of Christian decency, can serve as the chosen hero of Christian conservatives? The explanation we often hear is that although Christian conservatives are well aware of the problematic nature of Donald Trump’s personality, they choose to ignore this dimension of things because what they really care about is Donald Trump’s agenda, especially his stance against abortion. If he can get more conservative members of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, then that act will erase all their sins…
But are things really that simple? What if the very duality of Donald Trump’s personality—his high moral standing coupled with his personal lewdness and vulgarity—is what makes him appealing to Christian conservatives? What if they secretly identify with that same duality? This does not mean, however, that we should take too seriously the images that abound in our media of the typical Trumpist as an obscene bigot. No, the vast majority of Donald Trump voters are ordinary people who seem decent and speak in a normal, calm, rational manner. It is as if they externalize their madness and obscenity in Donald Trump.
A few years ago, Donald Trump was unflatteringly compared to a man loudly defecating in the corner of a high-profile cocktail party, but it is easy to see that the same is true of many prominent politicians around the world. Didn’t Erdoğan defecate in public when, in a paranoid fit, he branded those who criticized his policy towards the Kurds traitors and foreign agents? Didn’t Vladimir Putin defecate in public when (in a well-calculated public vulgarity designed to boost his national popularity) he threatened a critic of his Chechen policy with medical castration? Not to mention Boris Johnson…
This revelation of the obscene background of our ideological space (to put it more simply: the fact that we can now increasingly openly make racist, sexist, etc. statements that until recently belonged to the private sphere) does not in the least mean that the time for mystification is over, that ideology is now openly showing its cards.
On the contrary, when obscenity enters the public arena, the ideological mystification is stronger: the real political, economic and ideological stakes are more invisible than ever. Public obscenity is always sustained by a covert moralism; its practitioners secretly believe that they are fighting for a cause and it is on this level that they must be attacked.
Remember how many times the liberal media announced that they had caught Donald Trump with his pants down and that he had publicly committed suicide (mocking the parents of a dead war hero, bragging about grabbing women by the genitals, etc.). The arrogant liberal commentators were surprised that their continued, vitriolic attacks on Donald Trump’s vulgar racist and sexist outbursts, factual inaccuracies, economic nonsense, etc., did not hurt him at all, but perhaps even increased his popular appeal.
They didn’t understand how identification works. As a rule, we generally identify with the weaknesses of others, not only or even mainly with their strengths, so the more they mocked Donald Trump’s limitations, the more ordinary people identified with him and perceived the attacks on him as attacks on them.
The subliminal message of Donald Trump’s vulgarities to ordinary people was: “I am one of you!”, while ordinary Donald Trump supporters felt constantly humiliated by the liberal elite’s condescending attitude towards them. As Alenka Zupančič succinctly put it, “The extremely poor are fighting for the extremely rich, as was made clear by the election of Donald Trump. And the left does nothing but berate and insult them.”
Or, we should add, the Left does something even worse: it condescendingly “understands” the confusion and blindness of the poor… This liberal arrogance of the Left emerges in its purest form in the new genre of political-comedy talk shows (Jon Stewart, John Oliver…) which for the most part put into practice the pure arrogance of the liberal intellectual elite.
As Stephen March said in the newspaper Los Angeles Times: “Parodying Donald Trump is, at best, a distraction from his real politics. At worst, it turns all politics into a joke. The process has nothing to do with the artists or the writers and their choices. Donald Trump built his candidacy on acting like a comical scoundrel. That has been his persona in popular culture for decades. You simply cannot effectively parody a man who is a conscious self-parody and who became president of the United States on the basis of that performance.”
In my previous work, I used a joke from the good old days of real-life socialism, popular among dissidents. In 15th-century Russia, occupied by the Mongols, a farmer and his wife are walking along a dusty road. A Mongol warrior on horseback stops beside the farmer and tells him that he will now rape his wife. Then he adds: “But since there is so much dust on the ground, you must hold my testicles while I rape your wife, so that they do not get dirty!” When the Mongol finishes the act and leaves, the farmer begins to laugh and jump for joy; his wife, surprised, asks him: “How can you jump for joy when I have just been brutally raped in your presence?” The farmer replies: “But I tricked you! Your balls are full of dust.”
This sad joke tells of the situation of the dissidents. They thought they were dealing heavy blows to the nomenklatura of the party, but all they did was throw some dust in the testicles of nomenklatura, while the nomenklatura kept raping the people. And can't we say exactly the same about Jon Stewart and company when they mock Donald Trump – don't they just throw dust on his balls or at best scratch them?
The problem is not that Donald Trump is a clown. The problem is that there is an agenda behind his provocations, a method to his madness. The vulgar obscenities of Donald Trump and others are part of their populist strategy to sell this agenda to ordinary people, an agenda that (at least in the long run) works against them: lower taxes for the rich, less health care and protections for workers, etc. Unfortunately, people are willing to swallow a lot of things if they are presented with obscene laughter and false solidarity.
The final irony of Trump's project is that MAGA (Make America Great Again) effectively amounts to its opposite: transforming the United States into part of the BRICS, a local superpower that interacts on an equal footing with other new local superpowers (Russia, India, China). An EU diplomat was right to point out that with Trump’s victory, Europe is no longer the “fragile younger sister” of the United States. Will Europe find the strength to counter MAGA with something that could be called MEGA: making Europe great by resurrecting its radical emancipatory legacy?
The lesson of Donald Trump’s victory is the opposite of what many liberal leftists have been advocating: (what’s left of) the left must rid itself of the fear of losing centrist voters if it is seen as too extreme. It should clearly distinguish itself from the “progressive” liberal center and its corporatism. Woke. Doing so carries its own risks, of course: a state could end up in a three-way split, with no grand coalition possible. However, taking this risk is the only way forward.
Hegel wrote that through its repetition, a historical event asserts its necessity. When Napoleon lost in 1813 and was exiled to Elba, this defeat may have seemed contingent: with a better military strategy he could have won. But when he returned to power and lost at Waterloo, it became clear that his time was up, that his defeat was based on a deeper historical necessity. The same is true of Donald Trump: his first victory could still be attributed to tactical errors, but now that he has won again it should be clear that Trumpist populism expresses a historical necessity.
A sad conclusion is thus drawn. Many commentators expect Donald Trump’s reign to be marked by new and shocking catastrophic events, but the worst case scenario is that there will be no major shocks. Donald Trump will try to end the ongoing wars (by imposing peace in Ukraine, etc.), the economy will remain stable and perhaps even flourish, tensions will ease, and life will go on…
However, a series of federal and local measures will continually weaken the existing liberal-democratic social compact and change the basic texture that binds the United States together, what Hegel called Ethical Life, the set of customs and unwritten norms that have to do with courtesy, truthfulness, social solidarity, women's rights, etc. This new world will appear as a new normality and, in this sense, Donald Trump's reign may very well bring about the end of the world, of what was most precious in our civilization.
*Slavoj Žižek, professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School, he is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. Author, among other books, of In defense of lost causes (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/46TCc6V]
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