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.
You have misread Zizek and misperceived the movie. The liberal center known as law and order is not impressed by either the far left or far right. Confrontations tend to end at all levels of privilege and class with imprisonment, hospitalization or police shooting! Furthermore, there is a standing military, a National Guard reserve and multiple levels of coordinated police in any given location. In other words, we have marines.
The movie depicts an insurrection against a 3rd term President which is illegal. The revolutionaries are represented as well armed soldiers several of whom are patently black. The war crime being committed was by white supremacists who not only had a mass grave under way but murdered folks based on where they were from and/or their ethnicity.
So, try to get a fix on what the show was trying to say aside from the relationship between Jessie and Lee!
Lastly, liberalism is not just about law and order, ie the Constitution, but also about healthcare. Programs like Social Security and Snap are larger than the defense budget. All of which fall within the liberal framework. Liberalism is also the foundation for the conservatives who do not even know it and therefore fail to form coherent policies. Where did they get their power to cut the taxes of the wealthiest? To devise regressive tax codes? To incarcerate over 2M Americans every year and supervise 5M? They got the power from the liberal framework of law and order, from the Constitution. The problem is that they have power without knowledge.
Any U.S. president who'd make a serious attempt at implementing truly humane, progressive policies — notably universal single-payer healthcare, a significant reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions, military spending, a genuine anti-war effort, and increasing the minimum wage while also reigning in Wall Street abuse/corruption, etcetera — would likely be assassinated.
Bernie Sanders and documentarian Michael Moore come to mind as good examples of such a theoretical presidency. But Western virtual corpocracies ensure that any genuine progressive — rather than the usual DNC-implanted neo or fake liberal — would effectively be banned from just about everything in mainstream society, especially politics.
For anyone who hasn't already noticed, the corporate news-media, both conservative and neo-liberal [including The New York Times], are subjectively hostile toward Sanders; or they at least are critical of his ideals and desires, which would actually help disenfranchised, low- and no-incomed Americans.
____
“If voting changed anything [in favor of the weak/poor/disenfranchised] they’d have made it illegal.” ('Calamity' Jane Bodine, Our Brand Is Crisis)
The great journalist Chris Hedges points out the similarities between pre-civil war Yugoslavia and the current situation here in the United States. These similarities are mainly:
1) the siloing of political opinions.
2) the proliferation of firearms
3) economic destitution
While we haven’t totally cratered economically, many would agree with the sentiment that we are on our way there. Most Americans can barely afford to keep their car running, using ever-ballooning personal debt as a means of financing even their most basic needs.
The tinder is dry and the sparks are getting increasingly less interspersed.
Doomsday prophecy has long been the practice of religious extremists, but when you have a country armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and an increasingly unstable political ecosystem, I would say caution is warranted.
Will we perish under despotism like so many other failed states, or be reborn anew by the courage of our best and brightest? Only time will tell, but surely Hobbes was right when he depicted life during civil war as “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Western virtual corpocracies ensure that any genuine socialist would be banned from just about everything in mainstream society, especially politics.
A few victorious social/labor uprisings notwithstanding, notably the Bolshevik and French revolutions, it seems to me that the superfluously rich and powerful essentially have always had the police and military ready to foremost protect their power/money interests, even over the basic needs of the masses.
Even today, the police and military can, and probably would, claim [using euphemistic or political terminology, of course] they had to bust heads to maintain law and order as a priority during major demonstrations, especially those against economic injustices.
Indirectly supported by a complacent, if not compliant, corporate news-media, which is virtually all mainstream news-media, the absurdly unjust inequities/inequalities can persist.
Therefore, I can imagine there were/are lessons learned from those successful social/labor uprisings — a figurative How to Hinder Progressive Revolutions 101, perhaps? — with the clarity of hindsight by the big power/money interests in order to avoid any repeat of such great wealth/power losses.
And the more they make, all the more they need to make next quarterly. It literally is never enough, and an increasingly corrupt corporate news-media will implicitly or even explicitly celebrate them.
If WWIII erupts, which seems inevitable at this point, do US citizens realize that martial law will become a reality? There will be no civil war other than small rebellions here and there. It matters not who the president is. I have seen martial law in action while attending university in the late 1960s, with curfews, tear gas and truncheons.
Interesting piece. I believe that if there is a Civil War here, a shooting war so to say, the disorganized ragtag heavily armed passionate January 6th revolutionaries will be slaughtered in short order by the U$ military, provided the U$ military does not join them and support their cause, a development which would be unlikely, in my quiet opinion.
I find it very doubtful there are many people out there gullible enough to genuinely believe Donald Trump was somehow cheated out of an election win.
Most of the Capitol Hill rioters likely maintain(ed) that line as an excuse for their attempt to overturn Biden’s electoral win — or at least make it as unpleasant as possible, as witnessed on January 6.
Long before the last presidential-election day, Trump was saying he may not respect a Biden win, as though preparing his voter base for his inevitable refusal to leave office, whatever the vote-count results may be.
The rioters and Trump may simply have been enraged enough at his defeat by the supposedly ‘socialist’ Biden (which he is not) that they were now going to go the immoral route.
Or they may have believed he has to remain in office for some perceived greater good (e.g., to 'save the nation', etcetera), regardless of Trump's democratically decided election loss. ... The ends justify the means.
A record number of people have to choose between which necessities of life they can afford: nutritious food or shelter.
Not surprisingly, there has been a proliferation of over-reliance on food banks. They’re unmet food needs that are exacerbated by unrelenting food-price inflation, all the while giant-grocer corporate profits and payouts to corporate officers correspondingly inflate.
The more that such corporations make, all the more they want — nay, need — to make next quarterly. It's never enough. Maximizing profits at the expense of those with so much less, or nothing, will likely always be a significant part of the nature of the big business beast.
Such big businesses are getting unaccountably even bigger, defying the very spirit of government rules established [at least up here in Canada] to ensure healthy competition by limiting concentrated ownership.
And as the corporate officers shrug their shoulders and say their job is to protect shareholders’ bottom-line interests, the shareholders shrug their shoulders while defensively stating they just collect the dividends and that the big bosses are the ones to make the moral and ethical decisions.
Yet, the common yet questionable refrain incredibly still prevails amongst supposedly-free-market capitalist nation governments and corporate circles: It claims that best business practices, including what's best for consumers, are best decided by business decision-makers. But that has been proven deadly false numerous times.
Also, increasingly problematic is the very large and growing populace who are too overworked, worried and even angry about food and housing unaffordability for themselves or their family — all while on insufficient income — to criticize or boycott big industry polluters for the environmental damage they needlessly cause/allow, particularly when not immediately observable.
>>>"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…"
An example of a "convincing" fictional depiction of the Second American Civil War is Catherine Lacey’s “Biography of X”.
In Lacey’s alternative history of 20th/21st century USA, America divided into three parts in 1945—the Northern, Southern, and Western Territories after the Southern Secession. The Southern Territory has become a theocracy, divided from the Northern and Western Territories by a huge wall.
In Lacey’s Northern USA Emma Goldman becomes the socialist governor of Illinois and then the chief of staff to FDR and manages to work into the New Deal same-sex marriage, prison abolition, and immigrant rights bills before she is assassinated.
““I Had to Have a Different America:” An Interview with Catherine Lacey about “Biography of X”
But what does it mean if in order to find a “convincing” account of the Second American Civil War, we are forced to turn to something like Lacey’s utopian/dystopian speculative fiction?
Contrary to Zizek’s assertion quoted above, isn’t Alex Garland’s “Civil War” a truthful reflection of contemporary American politics precisely because it depicts a confused miasmic maelstrom of bizarre, seemingly absurd groupings and alliances?
The old expression “A conspiracy theory is a poor man’s ideology” is incomprehensible to virtually everybody today as the word “ideology” has become almost always used in an insulting manner. Systematic and structural explanations of events and actions are routinely dismissed with an illogical reductio ad “conspiracy theory”. But a properly systematic understanding of the world, alongside the recognition that this systematic understanding is necessary, used to be described as a "world-view” or as an “ideology” in the neutral sense of the word. A neutral sense which has disappeared now that the word “ideology” is nearly wholly a pejorative label. This of course does not mean that we are free of yoke of being ideologically driven. It just means another barrier which occludes both the understanding of the role that ideologies play in human behavior and a barrier to the development of a systematic comprehension of the world. In such an epistemological vacuum, stupefying and madness-inducing conspiracy theories find a natural need that they can fulfil and in which they can lodge themselves.
Therefore the liberal-technocratic solution of “fact-checking” is futile and useless when faced with alt-fact extremist rightist politics. Rightist “facts” are not accessed epistemologically in accordance to a criteria of truth or falsity but are instead assessed *affectively* in accordance to the agitational capacity of a proposition to grant permission to rightists to commit acts of violence. QAnon is a paradigm of the method by which rightists demonize their opponents with any lunacy that is ready at hand such that any and all violent means are justified to carry out their extermination.
(For further detail see e.g. Erich Fromm- “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness"; Amanda Marcotte - “Troll Nation”)
This loss of systematic understanding is a manifestation in the shape of an epistemological crisis of a paradigmatic-systemic historical crisis and period of profound historical transition. “The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
Immanuel Wallerstein describes this condition in the title of his book “The End of the World as We Know it”
“a state-of-the-world address, delivered by a scholar uniquely suited to the task. Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the most prominent social scientists of our time, documents the profound transformations our world is undergoing. With these transformations, he argues, come equally profound changes in how we understand the world. Wallerstein divides his work between an appraisal of significant recent events and a study of the shifts in thought influenced by those events. The book’s first half reviews the major happenings of recent decades-the collapse of the Leninist states, the exhaustion of national liberation movements, the rise of East Asia, the challenges to national sovereignty, the dangers to the environment, the debates about national identity, and the marginalization of migrant populations. Wallerstein places these events and trends in the context of the changing modern world-system as a whole and identifies the historical choices they put before us. The second half of the book takes up current issues in the world of knowledge-the vanishing faith in rationality, the scattering of knowledge activities, the denunciation of Eurocentrism, the questioning of the division of knowledge into science and humanities, and the relation of the search for the true and the search for the good. Wallerstein explores how these questions have arisen from larger social transformations, and why the traditional ways of framing such debates have become obstacles to resolving them. The End of the World As We Know It concludes with a crucial analysis of the momentous intellectual challenges to social science as we know it and suggests possible responses to them.”
Great piece thanks! Love the observations on the political horseshoe bending around linking far right and far left in some positions, like support for Ukraine. It is because both sides are now authoritarian and want to dominate their domestic foes rather than cooperate and compromise. Human rights and upholding the world order is just not a priority for the perpetually aggrieved.
Pls consider also however, that your point about “changing the world order” is exactly why Russia consistently advantages Trump with its messaging and actions on the international stage. Russia influences Iran who influences Hamas — the timing of their terrorist attack of Israel seems to me to be relevant to Russia’s shaping of a global conflict wherein US elections are the major turf war.
And here in the US, not nearly reported enough, African Americans have been the #1 targets of Russia’s influence operations (as everyone focuses on MAGA.) Russia uses every dispute we have against us, picking at our history of racial strife, to turn us authoritarian, so that we would abide Putin’s tyranny.
Russia’s hybrid world warfare is working, and we’d better wake up. The world order will indeed change if Trump is elected. Or if we fail to support Ukraine and it is overtaken.
There is some truth to the stillborn argument. But I don't think the criminal argument matters to anyone. I heard that Franjo Tudman spending time in prison after the Croatian Spring played a part in him rising to become independent Croatia's leader. Vaclav Havel was technically a criminal who went to jail, and yet he became president. .Slovenia got its independence based on a "crime:" breaking away from Yugoslavia. And Lenin (not to mention many other Communist butchers) was a big-time criminal: and yet the same people who claim to care so much about crime all of a sudden don't seem bothered by those criminals ruling over a country.
For this reason, Trump's conviction won't matter to his voters. It's political and they know it. They understand the perspective of those on the left who claim to care about crime and criminals out one corner of their mouth while defending the criminality of others out the other corner. Some animals are more equal than others. That's what this is all about.
1. It seems clear to me that film makers were intentionally ambiguous about linking the sides depicted in the movie to US political parties.
2. Trump's political power is due to an insurmountable percentage of the population (about 30% of voters) that are loyal Trumpists (it's absurd that there are that many). That's enough to take over the Republican party. Currently, Trump can't win without Republicans and Republicans can't win without Trump. Those people have no policy platform. Americans in general are much more aligned with centrists policies. The Biden campaign is betting on that plus the unpopularity of Trump to bring enough voters to him by November. It is likely the best strategy, but it is hurting him with voters that are further to the left at the time being.
3. A common misperception about America's two political parties is that they are monoliths. They are coalition parties made up of a number of factions. This is becoming more apparent and perhaps they get closer to breaking. It is more likely that there is a major break in one of the parties than a civil war.
Even that term, “transportation”, means different things to the opposing factions.
Leftists see “transportation” as public, government controlled conveyance; trains, busses & etc.
To the right, “transportation” means roads, bridges and fuel to allow us to convey ourselves.
This isn’t conjecture on my part. A look back at increased state taxation, promised to be used for “transportation” has resulted in light rail that one takes their lives in their own hands using.
There isn’t a light rail system in the country that isn’t a black hole financially and a battle octagon for riders.
See the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that mainly funded roads and bridges. Most would agree on investments in multimodal transportation that includes both rail and roads. Along with lots of other types of public investments. You've clearly been politicized and are part of the problem, but I guarantee you call yourself an "independent". Take more care with your own views.
dear Žižek, everything looks black; so it is, and it's shaky; but it can also be black; even a nuclear disaster we will survive, without worry; things will continue again with the surviving mass of states; the illusion is that the union of American states is indivisible; or that it is the EU and cannot cease to exist; or that the world will one day have a world government; and that there will be an end to wars; illusion; states will be created again and again, and split; and connect, and war, etc.; it is our POLITICAL DESTINY
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.
You have misread Zizek and misperceived the movie. The liberal center known as law and order is not impressed by either the far left or far right. Confrontations tend to end at all levels of privilege and class with imprisonment, hospitalization or police shooting! Furthermore, there is a standing military, a National Guard reserve and multiple levels of coordinated police in any given location. In other words, we have marines.
The movie depicts an insurrection against a 3rd term President which is illegal. The revolutionaries are represented as well armed soldiers several of whom are patently black. The war crime being committed was by white supremacists who not only had a mass grave under way but murdered folks based on where they were from and/or their ethnicity.
So, try to get a fix on what the show was trying to say aside from the relationship between Jessie and Lee!
Lastly, liberalism is not just about law and order, ie the Constitution, but also about healthcare. Programs like Social Security and Snap are larger than the defense budget. All of which fall within the liberal framework. Liberalism is also the foundation for the conservatives who do not even know it and therefore fail to form coherent policies. Where did they get their power to cut the taxes of the wealthiest? To devise regressive tax codes? To incarcerate over 2M Americans every year and supervise 5M? They got the power from the liberal framework of law and order, from the Constitution. The problem is that they have power without knowledge.
Any U.S. president who'd make a serious attempt at implementing truly humane, progressive policies — notably universal single-payer healthcare, a significant reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions, military spending, a genuine anti-war effort, and increasing the minimum wage while also reigning in Wall Street abuse/corruption, etcetera — would likely be assassinated.
Bernie Sanders and documentarian Michael Moore come to mind as good examples of such a theoretical presidency. But Western virtual corpocracies ensure that any genuine progressive — rather than the usual DNC-implanted neo or fake liberal — would effectively be banned from just about everything in mainstream society, especially politics.
For anyone who hasn't already noticed, the corporate news-media, both conservative and neo-liberal [including The New York Times], are subjectively hostile toward Sanders; or they at least are critical of his ideals and desires, which would actually help disenfranchised, low- and no-incomed Americans.
____
“If voting changed anything [in favor of the weak/poor/disenfranchised] they’d have made it illegal.” ('Calamity' Jane Bodine, Our Brand Is Crisis)
Brilliant article!
The great journalist Chris Hedges points out the similarities between pre-civil war Yugoslavia and the current situation here in the United States. These similarities are mainly:
1) the siloing of political opinions.
2) the proliferation of firearms
3) economic destitution
While we haven’t totally cratered economically, many would agree with the sentiment that we are on our way there. Most Americans can barely afford to keep their car running, using ever-ballooning personal debt as a means of financing even their most basic needs.
The tinder is dry and the sparks are getting increasingly less interspersed.
Doomsday prophecy has long been the practice of religious extremists, but when you have a country armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and an increasingly unstable political ecosystem, I would say caution is warranted.
Will we perish under despotism like so many other failed states, or be reborn anew by the courage of our best and brightest? Only time will tell, but surely Hobbes was right when he depicted life during civil war as “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Western virtual corpocracies ensure that any genuine socialist would be banned from just about everything in mainstream society, especially politics.
A few victorious social/labor uprisings notwithstanding, notably the Bolshevik and French revolutions, it seems to me that the superfluously rich and powerful essentially have always had the police and military ready to foremost protect their power/money interests, even over the basic needs of the masses.
Even today, the police and military can, and probably would, claim [using euphemistic or political terminology, of course] they had to bust heads to maintain law and order as a priority during major demonstrations, especially those against economic injustices.
Indirectly supported by a complacent, if not compliant, corporate news-media, which is virtually all mainstream news-media, the absurdly unjust inequities/inequalities can persist.
Therefore, I can imagine there were/are lessons learned from those successful social/labor uprisings — a figurative How to Hinder Progressive Revolutions 101, perhaps? — with the clarity of hindsight by the big power/money interests in order to avoid any repeat of such great wealth/power losses.
And the more they make, all the more they need to make next quarterly. It literally is never enough, and an increasingly corrupt corporate news-media will implicitly or even explicitly celebrate them.
If WWIII erupts, which seems inevitable at this point, do US citizens realize that martial law will become a reality? There will be no civil war other than small rebellions here and there. It matters not who the president is. I have seen martial law in action while attending university in the late 1960s, with curfews, tear gas and truncheons.
Interesting piece. I believe that if there is a Civil War here, a shooting war so to say, the disorganized ragtag heavily armed passionate January 6th revolutionaries will be slaughtered in short order by the U$ military, provided the U$ military does not join them and support their cause, a development which would be unlikely, in my quiet opinion.
I find it very doubtful there are many people out there gullible enough to genuinely believe Donald Trump was somehow cheated out of an election win.
Most of the Capitol Hill rioters likely maintain(ed) that line as an excuse for their attempt to overturn Biden’s electoral win — or at least make it as unpleasant as possible, as witnessed on January 6.
Long before the last presidential-election day, Trump was saying he may not respect a Biden win, as though preparing his voter base for his inevitable refusal to leave office, whatever the vote-count results may be.
The rioters and Trump may simply have been enraged enough at his defeat by the supposedly ‘socialist’ Biden (which he is not) that they were now going to go the immoral route.
Or they may have believed he has to remain in office for some perceived greater good (e.g., to 'save the nation', etcetera), regardless of Trump's democratically decided election loss. ... The ends justify the means.
There would probably be some mutinies that would disappear with "a whiff of grapeshot."
A record number of people have to choose between which necessities of life they can afford: nutritious food or shelter.
Not surprisingly, there has been a proliferation of over-reliance on food banks. They’re unmet food needs that are exacerbated by unrelenting food-price inflation, all the while giant-grocer corporate profits and payouts to corporate officers correspondingly inflate.
The more that such corporations make, all the more they want — nay, need — to make next quarterly. It's never enough. Maximizing profits at the expense of those with so much less, or nothing, will likely always be a significant part of the nature of the big business beast.
Such big businesses are getting unaccountably even bigger, defying the very spirit of government rules established [at least up here in Canada] to ensure healthy competition by limiting concentrated ownership.
And as the corporate officers shrug their shoulders and say their job is to protect shareholders’ bottom-line interests, the shareholders shrug their shoulders while defensively stating they just collect the dividends and that the big bosses are the ones to make the moral and ethical decisions.
Yet, the common yet questionable refrain incredibly still prevails amongst supposedly-free-market capitalist nation governments and corporate circles: It claims that best business practices, including what's best for consumers, are best decided by business decision-makers. But that has been proven deadly false numerous times.
Also, increasingly problematic is the very large and growing populace who are too overworked, worried and even angry about food and housing unaffordability for themselves or their family — all while on insufficient income — to criticize or boycott big industry polluters for the environmental damage they needlessly cause/allow, particularly when not immediately observable.
Perhaps finally we will act like the animals we truly are and bite back.
Why do you use terms like populism and populist?
>>>"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…"
An example of a "convincing" fictional depiction of the Second American Civil War is Catherine Lacey’s “Biography of X”.
https://1lib.sk/book/24552499/cf8635/biography-of-x-a-novel.html
In Lacey’s alternative history of 20th/21st century USA, America divided into three parts in 1945—the Northern, Southern, and Western Territories after the Southern Secession. The Southern Territory has become a theocracy, divided from the Northern and Western Territories by a huge wall.
In Lacey’s Northern USA Emma Goldman becomes the socialist governor of Illinois and then the chief of staff to FDR and manages to work into the New Deal same-sex marriage, prison abolition, and immigrant rights bills before she is assassinated.
““I Had to Have a Different America:” An Interview with Catherine Lacey about “Biography of X”
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2023/03/22/biography-of-x/
But what does it mean if in order to find a “convincing” account of the Second American Civil War, we are forced to turn to something like Lacey’s utopian/dystopian speculative fiction?
Contrary to Zizek’s assertion quoted above, isn’t Alex Garland’s “Civil War” a truthful reflection of contemporary American politics precisely because it depicts a confused miasmic maelstrom of bizarre, seemingly absurd groupings and alliances?
The old expression “A conspiracy theory is a poor man’s ideology” is incomprehensible to virtually everybody today as the word “ideology” has become almost always used in an insulting manner. Systematic and structural explanations of events and actions are routinely dismissed with an illogical reductio ad “conspiracy theory”. But a properly systematic understanding of the world, alongside the recognition that this systematic understanding is necessary, used to be described as a "world-view” or as an “ideology” in the neutral sense of the word. A neutral sense which has disappeared now that the word “ideology” is nearly wholly a pejorative label. This of course does not mean that we are free of yoke of being ideologically driven. It just means another barrier which occludes both the understanding of the role that ideologies play in human behavior and a barrier to the development of a systematic comprehension of the world. In such an epistemological vacuum, stupefying and madness-inducing conspiracy theories find a natural need that they can fulfil and in which they can lodge themselves.
Therefore the liberal-technocratic solution of “fact-checking” is futile and useless when faced with alt-fact extremist rightist politics. Rightist “facts” are not accessed epistemologically in accordance to a criteria of truth or falsity but are instead assessed *affectively* in accordance to the agitational capacity of a proposition to grant permission to rightists to commit acts of violence. QAnon is a paradigm of the method by which rightists demonize their opponents with any lunacy that is ready at hand such that any and all violent means are justified to carry out their extermination.
(For further detail see e.g. Erich Fromm- “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness"; Amanda Marcotte - “Troll Nation”)
This loss of systematic understanding is a manifestation in the shape of an epistemological crisis of a paradigmatic-systemic historical crisis and period of profound historical transition. “The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
Immanuel Wallerstein describes this condition in the title of his book “The End of the World as We Know it”
“a state-of-the-world address, delivered by a scholar uniquely suited to the task. Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the most prominent social scientists of our time, documents the profound transformations our world is undergoing. With these transformations, he argues, come equally profound changes in how we understand the world. Wallerstein divides his work between an appraisal of significant recent events and a study of the shifts in thought influenced by those events. The book’s first half reviews the major happenings of recent decades-the collapse of the Leninist states, the exhaustion of national liberation movements, the rise of East Asia, the challenges to national sovereignty, the dangers to the environment, the debates about national identity, and the marginalization of migrant populations. Wallerstein places these events and trends in the context of the changing modern world-system as a whole and identifies the historical choices they put before us. The second half of the book takes up current issues in the world of knowledge-the vanishing faith in rationality, the scattering of knowledge activities, the denunciation of Eurocentrism, the questioning of the division of knowledge into science and humanities, and the relation of the search for the true and the search for the good. Wallerstein explores how these questions have arisen from larger social transformations, and why the traditional ways of framing such debates have become obstacles to resolving them. The End of the World As We Know It concludes with a crucial analysis of the momentous intellectual challenges to social science as we know it and suggests possible responses to them.”
http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=582C96F5E94FF97B88959900C2001468
Great piece thanks! Love the observations on the political horseshoe bending around linking far right and far left in some positions, like support for Ukraine. It is because both sides are now authoritarian and want to dominate their domestic foes rather than cooperate and compromise. Human rights and upholding the world order is just not a priority for the perpetually aggrieved.
Pls consider also however, that your point about “changing the world order” is exactly why Russia consistently advantages Trump with its messaging and actions on the international stage. Russia influences Iran who influences Hamas — the timing of their terrorist attack of Israel seems to me to be relevant to Russia’s shaping of a global conflict wherein US elections are the major turf war.
And here in the US, not nearly reported enough, African Americans have been the #1 targets of Russia’s influence operations (as everyone focuses on MAGA.) Russia uses every dispute we have against us, picking at our history of racial strife, to turn us authoritarian, so that we would abide Putin’s tyranny.
Russia’s hybrid world warfare is working, and we’d better wake up. The world order will indeed change if Trump is elected. Or if we fail to support Ukraine and it is overtaken.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-87845512
Well that was depressing and probably very accurate.
There is some truth to the stillborn argument. But I don't think the criminal argument matters to anyone. I heard that Franjo Tudman spending time in prison after the Croatian Spring played a part in him rising to become independent Croatia's leader. Vaclav Havel was technically a criminal who went to jail, and yet he became president. .Slovenia got its independence based on a "crime:" breaking away from Yugoslavia. And Lenin (not to mention many other Communist butchers) was a big-time criminal: and yet the same people who claim to care so much about crime all of a sudden don't seem bothered by those criminals ruling over a country.
For this reason, Trump's conviction won't matter to his voters. It's political and they know it. They understand the perspective of those on the left who claim to care about crime and criminals out one corner of their mouth while defending the criminality of others out the other corner. Some animals are more equal than others. That's what this is all about.
1. It seems clear to me that film makers were intentionally ambiguous about linking the sides depicted in the movie to US political parties.
2. Trump's political power is due to an insurmountable percentage of the population (about 30% of voters) that are loyal Trumpists (it's absurd that there are that many). That's enough to take over the Republican party. Currently, Trump can't win without Republicans and Republicans can't win without Trump. Those people have no policy platform. Americans in general are much more aligned with centrists policies. The Biden campaign is betting on that plus the unpopularity of Trump to bring enough voters to him by November. It is likely the best strategy, but it is hurting him with voters that are further to the left at the time being.
3. A common misperception about America's two political parties is that they are monoliths. They are coalition parties made up of a number of factions. This is becoming more apparent and perhaps they get closer to breaking. It is more likely that there is a major break in one of the parties than a civil war.
4. Civil War was a great film.
"Americans in general are much more aligned with centrists policies"
Oh really? And where, pray tell, are those centrist policies? Can you give us an example from the current year?
Investments in transportation infrastructure.
Even that term, “transportation”, means different things to the opposing factions.
Leftists see “transportation” as public, government controlled conveyance; trains, busses & etc.
To the right, “transportation” means roads, bridges and fuel to allow us to convey ourselves.
This isn’t conjecture on my part. A look back at increased state taxation, promised to be used for “transportation” has resulted in light rail that one takes their lives in their own hands using.
There isn’t a light rail system in the country that isn’t a black hole financially and a battle octagon for riders.
See the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that mainly funded roads and bridges. Most would agree on investments in multimodal transportation that includes both rail and roads. Along with lots of other types of public investments. You've clearly been politicized and are part of the problem, but I guarantee you call yourself an "independent". Take more care with your own views.
Most haven’t had the experience of “multi modal” public transportation.
You want to get on a train full of drug addicts, armed robbers, drunks, bums and other assorted vermin? Be my guest.
TDS
dear Žižek, everything looks black; so it is, and it's shaky; but it can also be black; even a nuclear disaster we will survive, without worry; things will continue again with the surviving mass of states; the illusion is that the union of American states is indivisible; or that it is the EU and cannot cease to exist; or that the world will one day have a world government; and that there will be an end to wars; illusion; states will be created again and again, and split; and connect, and war, etc.; it is our POLITICAL DESTINY