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Below, a belated comment on the film Civil War and Donald Trump’s conviction.
Slavoj,
After Donald Trump was found guilty on all 34 felony charges by a Manhattan jury, he announced that he will remain a presidential candidate and that, if he wins, he is ready to act as a President from prison. But the situation is crazy enough even if we ignore such an extremity: Trump is the first former president to be found guilty of a crime, as well as the first major-party nominee to become a convicted felon. Much more is at stake in this case than who will win next election. Since even some critics of the US perceive it as the model of a rich and free society that attracts millions of immigrants, the disarray around Trump’s election not only brings closer the spectre of an actual civil war; it will also elicit a change of the global world order. I want to approach this momentous topic through a belated note on Alex Garland’s Civil War – fiction enables us to see much more clearly the underlying social trends blurred by the confusion of actual events.
The movie takes place in the middle of a civil war between the federal government led by a third-term president and multiple secessionist movements, the strongest among them the "Western Forces" (WF) led by Texas and California; it ends with WF occupying the White House and killing the President. The story is told through the perspective of a small group of journalists travelling from New York City to Washington, D.C. to interview the besieged President, principal among them a veteran war photographer Lee Smith and Jessie Cullen, a young aspiring photojournalist. Jessie berates herself for being too scared to take photos; gradually her nerve and photography skills improve as she becomes desensitized to violence. When the two enter the half-abandoned White House, Jessie steps into the line of fire while taking photos; Lee intercedes and takes a fatal gunshot. Jessie captures Lee's death as she pushes her to safety, and then unemotionally continues into the Oval Office where a group of WF soldiers are getting ready to kill the President. Jessie is allowed to photograph the murder of the President and then the soldiers posing with their feet on his corpse.
Immediately after I saw the film two reproaches popped up in my mind. First, the story can be seen as a redoubled Bildungsroman in the course of which Lee and Jessie change places. At the beginning, Lee is a desensitized reporter just interested in making good photos, while Jessie feels too much compassion to adopt such a neutral stance; at the end, Lee is shot dead while trying to protect Jessie, while Jessie fully adopts the distance of an observer and even takes a photo of Lee dying while trying to protect her. Such neutral reporting is a fake, a trap to be avoided at any price: today, engagement is more needed than ever, to be desensitized to violence means we already are part of a violent system. In Ukraine, in Gaza and the West Bank, and in hundreds of other places, only an engaged view will find the truth we are all looking for.
The second reproach concerns a feature noted by many of the film’s critics: the political divisions that propel the civil war are totally muddy. The military alliance between liberal California and conservative Texas is a patent absurdity; the authoritarian third-term President combines features of a Biden liberal and of a Trump populist; apart from some casual racist remarks, soldiers that the journalists meet on their way to Washington never make a single statement that would clarify what they are fighting for… However, it would be wrong to dismiss this feature as part of a commercial strategy not to lose viewers who would be opposed to a clear political line advocated by the film. What remains and stands out when we ignore concrete political struggles is the prospect of a civil war that haunts American public life in the last decade or so, the growing disintegration of a shared social substance.
And this is more and more our reality. We don’t just have the big opposition between the liberal centre and the populist Right, plus some elements of a new Left (student protests), but a series of strange diagonal alliances (extreme Left and extreme Right both oppose supporting Ukraine, etc.), plus a series of new splits (the pro-Palestinian Left is split between peaceniks opposed to terror and those who support Hamas as an authentic resistance group that should be exempted from criticism; etc.). My premise is that all these conflicts are pseudo-conflicts, so we should as a rule refuse to simply take sides. Trump’s populism is a reaction to the failure of the liberal-democratic welfare state, so while we could and should support some measures advocated by the liberal centre (pro-abortion laws, equality of races, etc.), we should always bear in mind that in the long term the liberal centre is at the root of our crises. This brings us to the well-known Gramsci’s remark from his Prison Notebooks: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”[i] Struggles we are fighting today, from the populist Right to cancel culture, are mostly such morbid symptoms.
In this messy situation, we can react in multiple ways. Recall Serpico (1973, Sydney Lumet): the film’s hero is not simply an honest policeman fighting police corruption. His basic stance is a more subtle one: he just wants to stay out of the circle of corruption, refusing to accept his part of money offered to him by his colleagues, and he even asks repeatedly to be transferred back onto the street as a plain uniformed policeman where corruption is mostly absent. I don’t underestimate such a stance: by way of ignoring corruption, by acting as if the system functions normally, he is an even stronger thorn in the heel of the corrupted policemen than those who openly fight corruption. What would a Serpico stance mean in a civil war? Is “Serpico” the small town in Civil War where journalists briefly stop to buy provisions: people pretend that life goes on as normal, with fashion cloth stores open? (On the roofs, we of course see gunmen protecting the town.) Many voters do act like this: they just want to survive the political storm in their safe haven, continuing their daily life as if nothing big is going on.
But when the state itself and its organs get directly involved in crime, a Serpico strategy no longer works. Recall the scandal with Jacob Zuma, the ex-president of South Africa: after he was condemned to a prison term, he simply ignored the summons to go to prison, and the state authorities were not ready to send police to arrest him. The media was abound with comments on the inefficiency of the rule of Law in a Third World country… but what are we to call a country with a President in prison? And what if the mere possibility of this happening renders visible the half-concealed truth of our (whatever we call it: global neo-feudal or…) system?
Immediately after he left the courtroom, Trump said: "The real verdict is going to be [on] 5 November, by the people." It’s clear what he meant – to quote the pollster Doug Schoen: “While it’s not a great thing to be convicted of a crime, what voters will be thinking about in November is inflation, the southern border, competition with China and Russia and the money that is being spent on Israel and Ukraine.”[ii] True, “it’s not a great thing to be convicted of a crime,” but such a conviction does make you a criminal, and it is a great bad thing when a criminal can be elected the President of the (still) strongest state in the world. There is no middle way, no compromise between the two options in view – one can even doubt if the all-out-war can be endlessly postponed.
Schoen’s point is, of course, how the conviction will affect Trump’s standing with the voters, and in this respect, both options are catastrophic. If Trump wins, it means the end of the rule of Law as we understand it, including the separation of powers… Trump already announced what radical measures he will impose if he wins – these measures will limit our freedoms to such an extent that our common notion of democracy will become ridiculously inadequate in describing our social life, not to mention the international consequences (no support for Ukraine but full support of Israel, etc.) which will de facto amount to the US becoming another BRICS state. If Trump loses, it might be even worse: a large part of the population will perceive itself as excluded from the public space – they will be pushed towards civil war, secessionist tendencies will explode since the federal state power will not be accepted by them as legitimate (now, already, more than half of Republicans do not consider Biden a legitimate President).
So is there hope? Franz Kafka wrote in a letter to Max Brod: “There is infinite hope - just not for us.”[iii] An ambiguous statement which can also mean: not for us as we are now, so we have to change radically, to be reborn. Kafka noticed apropos the October Revolution: “The decisive moment in human development is everlasting. For this reason the revolutionary movements of intellect/spirit that declare everything before them to be null and void are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.”[iv] Today, the fact that nothing has yet happened means that all the main options – new Right populism, liberal centre, old social-democratic welfare-state, religious fundamentalism, and also the naïve idea that the strengthening of the BRICS powers will usher a new multi-centric world – are stillborn. The true utopia is the idea that a new world order able to cope with our crises, from the decaying environment to global war, will gradually emerge from the options that are available today. What Theodor Adorno wrote decades ago - “Nothing but despair can save us.”[v] – is today more true than ever. This doesn’t mean that we should just sit down and hope: we should act in all possible ways without hope.
[i] Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, London: Lawrence & Wishart 1971, p. 276.
[ii] What Trump's guilty verdict means for the 2024 election (bbc.com).
[iii] This saying was first reported by Max Brod, in “Der Dichter Franz Kafka,” Die Neue Rundschau 32 (November 1921), p. 1213.
[iv] Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, ed. by Max Brod, Cambridge, MA: Exact Change 1991, p. 41.
[v] Quoted from Steven Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, Cambridge: Polity Press 2005, p. 438.
Slavoj Zizek': "we should always bear in mind that in the long term the liberal centre is at the root of our crises. " Really?? In a country in which the center is about to disappear, replaced by the Far Right and the Far Left, the problem is the center? The problem is precisely the opposite: there is no more center, this is why the Civil War is near. A society in which the center vanishes is at war against itself. The Center is precisely what neutralizes the extremes. How can one write an essay warning about a Civil War, while preaching the destruction of the very thing that protects us against the war? Prior to this essay, I used to think that Zizek has something to say that may be worth considering. But this essay makes me reconsider. To SZ:
The fact that your (SZ's) interpretation is wrong is also proven by your misreading of Kafka's words, "There is hope, just not for us." You interpret that as "hope is only possible if we accept that we need to be reborn." Oh, the eternal obsession with rebirth that utopian intellectuals, these failed Christians, have been preaching for centuries, and in the name of which millions of people have been sacrificed! You still hope you are going to be reborn & Christ will come dressed up as a Revolutionary! Deep down you hope for a Civil War that will destroy the current and old (liberal) America. Just like Susan Sarandon who voted for Bernie hoping that he will bring about the Revolution, in the end, you wouldn't mind a Civil War if your Revolution could finally happen. Never mind that in the process countless lives will be sacrificed. This is the Utopia preached by intellectuals like you: human beings are nothing more than casualties to the Promised Land. That's why you can't see Kafka's (Kafka for whom the Promised Land was Not-of-this-World) wisdom--his words meant, "there is hope FOR OTHERS, not for us." For Kafka-the-Jew, only the Christian is hopeful that there is salvation. "Us" represents the Jew, for whom there is no hope because there is no salvation on earth..--see also Blanchot's reading of Kafka. It was a Jewish joke. Kafka the Jew didn't believe in rebirth (A Christian idea, if there ever was one), neither for him, nor for society. He doesn't negate the existence of hope as such, yet he knows that hope is not for him. You turned his Jewish wisdom into (pseudo) Christian ideology. Like all who preach a Revolution, you are no philosopher, you are a Christian ideologue.
Brilliant article!