Beating Trump? Possible. Beating polarisation? Not so much. And that's the real beast the U.S. has to deal with. Trump is merely a symptom of polarisation, not the root-cause.
As long as the US has basically a Two-Party-System, polarisation will never end.
Both parties are out for blood.
One counterpoint I would have to give is that:
For me it's clear Zizek writes about the political left and not the left leaning voters in general. There's a lot of socialists out there passionate about the project. Only the political left has already given up on it's former ideas.
Also; calling the democrats "liberal" is a joke to any liberal in the rest of the world. Most of the democrats policies would be considered right-wing and some even undemocratic in Europe.
Yes indeed. The worst form of governance is a one-party rule, the second worst is two-party. Or as the comedian and social critic George Carlin jokingly said about the illusion of choice in the US, ”There are two political parties but 23 flavours of donuts." That said, it's not really the two-party system that cause polarisation, we also see this fragmentation in Europe, even if the US is polarising faster than any other democracy. But polarisation is the outcome of a more deep-rooted structure that is flawed. This structural problem cannot be fixed, because its making was flawed from the beginning, and those flaws are emerging now because of a number of reasons, one of them being our fundamentally changed information environment.
Absolutely agree with every point you make. And you get even more points for mentioning George Carlin.
Democracy as it is, is on it's last steps and I strongly believe that if we can't find another system, western/modern society is doomed to collapse.
Climate crisis is just one of the biggest problems that democracy can't seem to fix.
Fascism, Fundamentalism, Authoritariansim and Totalitarianism won't fix any of these problems either.
I'm anxious about what comes in the next few years, because I'm honestly not able to conceptualise a future that solves the problems we already have today.
We all want polarization, we just want the right type of polarization, which just so happens to align with our ideologies. You know who doesn't want polarization? The markets. The markets want good, busy worker bees, but the queen bee is not popping them out fast enough. I honestly think the solution to this predicament we're in is more babies. The left must be the party that gets people pregnant (and makes it affordable).
Reminds me of Northrop Frye's idea of narrative modes and their historical repetition. Are we finally exiting the tired conventions of postmodern irony into a new mythic era, of great authoritarian heroes and, what inevitably follows, epic tragedies?
“Is this still possible in our era of total media manipulation?” Yes and no. It’s not possible if we continue to rely on social media which is the highest exponent of that manipulation (we have to divest from that, I don’t know that we can). But it will be possible once we get back outside and get back in each other’s actual human faces and back arm in arm and start (re)building back a viable socialist practice in our respective communities. The Bernie campaign almost achieved a version of that… So it’s going to get much worse before it gets better but it can and will get better.
Total media manipulation would require this substack to be manipulated too. Total is total. But you need manipulation to fight manipulation the same way you need ideology to fight ideology. There is no idillic unmanipulated state. My own hands manipulate me while I manipulate them to write this drivvel.
Seeing all of this, almost from a Jungian archetypal lense, we can recognize the some of the characters, the story we are living through, and so on.
Much of this was obvious and predicted. For example, in John Grey's 'False Dawn' (circa 1998) he predicts the hollowing out of middle class & the destruction of rust belt cities due to globalization, a society where money makes more money than work and all of this ultimately leads to a Right Wing back lash. The public not knowing who or what to blame get it half right in becoming anti-globization and anti immigration.
Stefan, your perspective on viewing our current situation through a Jungian archetypal lens is quite thought-provoking--John Grey’s predictions certainly seem to resonate with today’s societal shifts.
The key might be fostering understanding and collaboration to navigate through these challenges. What are your thoughts on possible solutions?
'Hegel’s motto “evil resides in the gaze which sees evil everywhere” fully applies here: the very liberal gaze which demonizes Trump is also evil because it ignores how its own failures opened up the space for Trump’s type of patriotic populism.'
By what logic is it possible even to assert this point without acknowledging that the position which sees evil both in liberalism and populism (as most readers of this substack do, myself included) must also have within it its own evil?
You're right, it's not possible. But there is another position, that of not seeing liberalism and conservativism as 'evil', but by understanding them as two sides of the same coin, a natural split into two uncustructive poles in reaction to the lack of progressive forces and reason.
“Clearness is so eminently one of the characteristics of truth that often is passes for truth itself” - Joseph Joubert
That Hegel quote “evil resides in the gazes of the one who sees evil everywhere” has quite a ring to it on first read - it tends to be the people ruled by fear who do the most harm to others. They are the pitchfork mobs. My mind flashes to the people calling for deaths of the Scottsboro 9, upending the court case with epithets and jeers, champing at the bit to lynch a group of perfectly innocent teenagers, kids really, without a trial.
The screaming crowd does not know not an inkling of the truth about what happened on the train, but are so blinded by their racism, their media-stoked-fear that the nine people’s innocence may as well be irrelevant. Almost 100 years later thinking about these people still makes me sick. If any group could be evil, I would think these racists would be on the list.
But does evil exist inherently in groups? Are we not making the same logical mistake by dehumanizing them as they are the teens?
Sartre wrote in “portrait of an antisemite”:
“[we decide] about evil so as not decide about good.
[the racist] canalizas revolutionary thrusts toward the destruction of certain men, not institutions […] it therefore represents a safety valve for the ruling class which encourages it.”
He points out the logical fallacy of decrying someone evil - whether as the jeering racist toward the teens or you and me recalling the racists with disgust - for someone to be evil means they cannot be anything but evil. They lack free will: evil is inherent, unchangeable, one either is or isn’t. There’s no gray area in evil. And if one is, one cannot be/do anything but evil. Thus they have no control over their actions. So how can we blame them for their nature which allows nothing else?
Certainly no more blame can be cast on Mother Nature when a maelstrom sinks a ship, lightning strikes someone dead, a tornado, an earthquake, a volcanic eruption. We do not hold up signs and torches and protest her behavior, write editorials about the inherent traits that resulted in her comportment and our tragedy. We may wail at what has happened, the absurdism, the meaninglessness. But how can something without free will be culpable?
Very good analysis. I’d never thought of reacting to injustice as merely a fetishisation. Hanan Awwad’s ludicrous privileging of her minor affront over the events of October last year is another excellent example. Thanks for making the connection.
Yes, "the way to beat Trump is not by shooting him dead but by offering the public a better and more engaging narrative that will appeal to the subjective experience of millions."
The problem is that it is difficult to imagine alternatives to fascism, war, capitalism and liberal democracy.
It's more entertaining to follow Trump on a screen than to imagine a decent world.
If fascism can come back, then so can Stalinism. But we should call it "Democracy with leftist values", to paraphrase the late Lee Kuan Yew. Basically bring the migrants in, but reject permissive multiculturalism. Defend welfare, but make the laws harsher to stop crime. Be the daddy that brings the bread, but whoops yo ass with a cane if you don't behave.
The left in the US is a stagnant monolith of consistently bad messaging. They’ve said the same things repeatedly since Lyndon Johnson. It’s tired and old, particularly for a nation that has the attention span of a three year old. Without actual substantive discussions or debates, we’re stuck in a cycle of leftist branding and rightist populism anyhow, Trump or no Trump. The very thing people hate about Trump is the thing that the US thrives on, drama. The media loves it because it drives ratings, the left loves it because it gives them an enemy, and the right loves it because it gives them access to power…some people may hate the iconic moment or may over analyze it or may fight against it or even think its over the top. But its usually iconic moments like this that retrospectively define moments that define generations. Think Kent State girl or the Tianemen square tank. Is it a fetish for the left, most certainly. But mostly because the ideology has been exposed. If anyone symbolizes the old left, bereft of ideas, its the barely functional Biden, and his room full of octogenarian cronies. The machine of DC will limit what Trump does. To his dismay, and to the left’s dismay. In the span of time, DC moderates all positions.
What I don't understand about the american left is how powerful Obama's speech after Sandy Hook was but then Trump gets shot and they are unable to move the narrative towards gun-related violence. Are guns not also a fetish? What a missed opportunity to pressure the NRA and talk about the need for universal access to mental health services, regulate the use of social media by minors, etc. But I wonder if such a near-death experience will temper Trump's narcisssism and make him more empathic. The last thing he saw before getting shot was a graph of ilegal migration into the US, yet the shooter was not a migrant. Last night he spoke about how crime in Venezuela has gone down because the criminals are going tho the US, and he spoke about a specific case that the media censored live. Then he went on to say that the first thing he will do after returning to office is "drill, baby, drill". Their fetish is the "woke gay pride environmentalist attention seeker". Even if they are right, it's still a fetish. We can use that to do a lil cheeki breeki iv damke.
How could Trump be now "elevated" to a fetish when Zizek copied and pasted this quote from the Independent article he wrote about the Handmaid's Tale and uttered verbatim at the Jordan Peterson debate more than five years ago?
"Hegel’s motto “evil resides in the gaze which sees evil everywhere” fully applies here: the very liberal gaze which demonizes Trump is also evil because it ignores how its own failures opened up the space for Trump’s type of patriotic populism."
Edit: Good reads quotes Hegel: “Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself.” But it doesn't say wherefrom.
Yeah could never find it directly either. But in PoS, in the section on ‘Conscience; the beautiful soul, evil and its forgiveness’, Hegel says—
“The judging consciousness repels this community from itself and is the hard heart which is for itself and which rejects any continuity with the other.”
I feel Zizek has summarized some Hegel thought here into an aphorism. I had a similar experience with a great Todd McGowan Hegel quote—“the kingdom of God is on Mainstreet.” I was actually able to ask him about it on a TU livestream and he said that actually it was a condensation of his from Hegel’s thought.
Interesting. Next time ask him how much of his work does he copy and paste from other parts. It explains a lot about how he is able to produce so much quantity.
I spoke with McGowan not Zizek. He’s always plagiarizing himself in his books tho, it is a bit of comedy really at this point. Some are put off by it, but many enjoy the drum beat of such consistency, that he keeps the wagon circling around such rich psychoanalytical/philosophical concepts.
It's also, verbatim, in his book "A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name", but is it a real Hegel quote or motto? The only google searches that come up have to do with Zizek quoting him
A Lacanian Hegelianism: Slavoj Žižek’s (Mis-)Reading of Hegel, Anders Burman:
“Žižek explicitly defends a psychoanalytically impregnated Hegelianism. With an implicit but obvious reference to Marx’s eleventh thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach, he writes in The Plague of Fantasies that the motto of such a Lacanian reading of Hegel could be: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted Hegel; but the point is also to change him.’”
another brilliant essay. The question that arises here is once again a question of the struggle of good against evil, of the conscious against the impulses of the unconscious and of the victory of morality over immorality, or if we want the principle of reality with limits, or the principle of unlimited and destructive pleasure. The other day I read an interesting article in which it was argued that consciousness, in the sense of what emanates from the mind, is a way of keeping us capable of living in a gregarious way and in society. Could this kind of extreme right vs extreme left conflict represent the end of society as we know it? We'll see, because fortunately nowadays there are many mechanisms for social regulation.
Beating Trump? Possible. Beating polarisation? Not so much. And that's the real beast the U.S. has to deal with. Trump is merely a symptom of polarisation, not the root-cause.
As long as the US has basically a Two-Party-System, polarisation will never end.
Both parties are out for blood.
One counterpoint I would have to give is that:
For me it's clear Zizek writes about the political left and not the left leaning voters in general. There's a lot of socialists out there passionate about the project. Only the political left has already given up on it's former ideas.
Also; calling the democrats "liberal" is a joke to any liberal in the rest of the world. Most of the democrats policies would be considered right-wing and some even undemocratic in Europe.
Yes indeed. The worst form of governance is a one-party rule, the second worst is two-party. Or as the comedian and social critic George Carlin jokingly said about the illusion of choice in the US, ”There are two political parties but 23 flavours of donuts." That said, it's not really the two-party system that cause polarisation, we also see this fragmentation in Europe, even if the US is polarising faster than any other democracy. But polarisation is the outcome of a more deep-rooted structure that is flawed. This structural problem cannot be fixed, because its making was flawed from the beginning, and those flaws are emerging now because of a number of reasons, one of them being our fundamentally changed information environment.
Absolutely agree with every point you make. And you get even more points for mentioning George Carlin.
Democracy as it is, is on it's last steps and I strongly believe that if we can't find another system, western/modern society is doomed to collapse.
Climate crisis is just one of the biggest problems that democracy can't seem to fix.
Fascism, Fundamentalism, Authoritariansim and Totalitarianism won't fix any of these problems either.
I'm anxious about what comes in the next few years, because I'm honestly not able to conceptualise a future that solves the problems we already have today.
Well Christopher, is there anything we can do about it?
We all want polarization, we just want the right type of polarization, which just so happens to align with our ideologies. You know who doesn't want polarization? The markets. The markets want good, busy worker bees, but the queen bee is not popping them out fast enough. I honestly think the solution to this predicament we're in is more babies. The left must be the party that gets people pregnant (and makes it affordable).
Reminds me of Northrop Frye's idea of narrative modes and their historical repetition. Are we finally exiting the tired conventions of postmodern irony into a new mythic era, of great authoritarian heroes and, what inevitably follows, epic tragedies?
We just might, Haukyn.
“Is this still possible in our era of total media manipulation?” Yes and no. It’s not possible if we continue to rely on social media which is the highest exponent of that manipulation (we have to divest from that, I don’t know that we can). But it will be possible once we get back outside and get back in each other’s actual human faces and back arm in arm and start (re)building back a viable socialist practice in our respective communities. The Bernie campaign almost achieved a version of that… So it’s going to get much worse before it gets better but it can and will get better.
Total media manipulation would require this substack to be manipulated too. Total is total. But you need manipulation to fight manipulation the same way you need ideology to fight ideology. There is no idillic unmanipulated state. My own hands manipulate me while I manipulate them to write this drivvel.
Seeing all of this, almost from a Jungian archetypal lense, we can recognize the some of the characters, the story we are living through, and so on.
Much of this was obvious and predicted. For example, in John Grey's 'False Dawn' (circa 1998) he predicts the hollowing out of middle class & the destruction of rust belt cities due to globalization, a society where money makes more money than work and all of this ultimately leads to a Right Wing back lash. The public not knowing who or what to blame get it half right in becoming anti-globization and anti immigration.
Now, that were are here. Where do we go next?
How does this type of story typically end?
Stefan, your perspective on viewing our current situation through a Jungian archetypal lens is quite thought-provoking--John Grey’s predictions certainly seem to resonate with today’s societal shifts.
The key might be fostering understanding and collaboration to navigate through these challenges. What are your thoughts on possible solutions?
You know, now with Biden dropping out what we have is a type of closure.
First the Right, via Trump wanted to go back to a simpler time and to make 'America Great Again'
Then the Left had their own version by going back to a more dignified, diplomatic and conventional way of politics via Biden.
Both of them being very old and an attempt to recapture the past in some way.
Perhaps what comes next is the "New".
The next part of the story might be that a new leader emerges, a leader who looks forwards into the future instead of the past.
Coincidentally, we have a candidate whose very name represents this.
This might happen this cycle or next but at and point, we will have to turn the page and address our collective futures.
'Hegel’s motto “evil resides in the gaze which sees evil everywhere” fully applies here: the very liberal gaze which demonizes Trump is also evil because it ignores how its own failures opened up the space for Trump’s type of patriotic populism.'
By what logic is it possible even to assert this point without acknowledging that the position which sees evil both in liberalism and populism (as most readers of this substack do, myself included) must also have within it its own evil?
You're right, it's not possible. But there is another position, that of not seeing liberalism and conservativism as 'evil', but by understanding them as two sides of the same coin, a natural split into two uncustructive poles in reaction to the lack of progressive forces and reason.
“Clearness is so eminently one of the characteristics of truth that often is passes for truth itself” - Joseph Joubert
That Hegel quote “evil resides in the gazes of the one who sees evil everywhere” has quite a ring to it on first read - it tends to be the people ruled by fear who do the most harm to others. They are the pitchfork mobs. My mind flashes to the people calling for deaths of the Scottsboro 9, upending the court case with epithets and jeers, champing at the bit to lynch a group of perfectly innocent teenagers, kids really, without a trial.
The screaming crowd does not know not an inkling of the truth about what happened on the train, but are so blinded by their racism, their media-stoked-fear that the nine people’s innocence may as well be irrelevant. Almost 100 years later thinking about these people still makes me sick. If any group could be evil, I would think these racists would be on the list.
But does evil exist inherently in groups? Are we not making the same logical mistake by dehumanizing them as they are the teens?
Sartre wrote in “portrait of an antisemite”:
“[we decide] about evil so as not decide about good.
[the racist] canalizas revolutionary thrusts toward the destruction of certain men, not institutions […] it therefore represents a safety valve for the ruling class which encourages it.”
He points out the logical fallacy of decrying someone evil - whether as the jeering racist toward the teens or you and me recalling the racists with disgust - for someone to be evil means they cannot be anything but evil. They lack free will: evil is inherent, unchangeable, one either is or isn’t. There’s no gray area in evil. And if one is, one cannot be/do anything but evil. Thus they have no control over their actions. So how can we blame them for their nature which allows nothing else?
Certainly no more blame can be cast on Mother Nature when a maelstrom sinks a ship, lightning strikes someone dead, a tornado, an earthquake, a volcanic eruption. We do not hold up signs and torches and protest her behavior, write editorials about the inherent traits that resulted in her comportment and our tragedy. We may wail at what has happened, the absurdism, the meaninglessness. But how can something without free will be culpable?
Are you certain that you didn't pull that quote outta GHW Bush's ass rather than Hegel's?
Call Timothy Morton "Tim" on twitter. I dare you.
Yeah, I saw this.
What did you see?
Very good analysis. I’d never thought of reacting to injustice as merely a fetishisation. Hanan Awwad’s ludicrous privileging of her minor affront over the events of October last year is another excellent example. Thanks for making the connection.
I'm still unsure if this is the genuine Zizek account...
Haha same but he did say in an interview he had a substack
Oh okay
Imagine it was Chomsky all along.
😭😭😭😭
On any given day, Zizek could not verify that with any degree of certainty either. And the aura recedes even further into the mist.
Yes, "the way to beat Trump is not by shooting him dead but by offering the public a better and more engaging narrative that will appeal to the subjective experience of millions."
The problem is that it is difficult to imagine alternatives to fascism, war, capitalism and liberal democracy.
It's more entertaining to follow Trump on a screen than to imagine a decent world.
Imagination can create better narratives.
If fascism can come back, then so can Stalinism. But we should call it "Democracy with leftist values", to paraphrase the late Lee Kuan Yew. Basically bring the migrants in, but reject permissive multiculturalism. Defend welfare, but make the laws harsher to stop crime. Be the daddy that brings the bread, but whoops yo ass with a cane if you don't behave.
The left in the US is a stagnant monolith of consistently bad messaging. They’ve said the same things repeatedly since Lyndon Johnson. It’s tired and old, particularly for a nation that has the attention span of a three year old. Without actual substantive discussions or debates, we’re stuck in a cycle of leftist branding and rightist populism anyhow, Trump or no Trump. The very thing people hate about Trump is the thing that the US thrives on, drama. The media loves it because it drives ratings, the left loves it because it gives them an enemy, and the right loves it because it gives them access to power…some people may hate the iconic moment or may over analyze it or may fight against it or even think its over the top. But its usually iconic moments like this that retrospectively define moments that define generations. Think Kent State girl or the Tianemen square tank. Is it a fetish for the left, most certainly. But mostly because the ideology has been exposed. If anyone symbolizes the old left, bereft of ideas, its the barely functional Biden, and his room full of octogenarian cronies. The machine of DC will limit what Trump does. To his dismay, and to the left’s dismay. In the span of time, DC moderates all positions.
“out of the foaming ferment of finitude, spirit rises up fragrantly”
What I don't understand about the american left is how powerful Obama's speech after Sandy Hook was but then Trump gets shot and they are unable to move the narrative towards gun-related violence. Are guns not also a fetish? What a missed opportunity to pressure the NRA and talk about the need for universal access to mental health services, regulate the use of social media by minors, etc. But I wonder if such a near-death experience will temper Trump's narcisssism and make him more empathic. The last thing he saw before getting shot was a graph of ilegal migration into the US, yet the shooter was not a migrant. Last night he spoke about how crime in Venezuela has gone down because the criminals are going tho the US, and he spoke about a specific case that the media censored live. Then he went on to say that the first thing he will do after returning to office is "drill, baby, drill". Their fetish is the "woke gay pride environmentalist attention seeker". Even if they are right, it's still a fetish. We can use that to do a lil cheeki breeki iv damke.
How could Trump be now "elevated" to a fetish when Zizek copied and pasted this quote from the Independent article he wrote about the Handmaid's Tale and uttered verbatim at the Jordan Peterson debate more than five years ago?
"Hegel’s motto “evil resides in the gaze which sees evil everywhere” fully applies here: the very liberal gaze which demonizes Trump is also evil because it ignores how its own failures opened up the space for Trump’s type of patriotic populism."
Edit: Good reads quotes Hegel: “Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself.” But it doesn't say wherefrom.
Zizek is my fetish.
Yeah could never find it directly either. But in PoS, in the section on ‘Conscience; the beautiful soul, evil and its forgiveness’, Hegel says—
“The judging consciousness repels this community from itself and is the hard heart which is for itself and which rejects any continuity with the other.”
I feel Zizek has summarized some Hegel thought here into an aphorism. I had a similar experience with a great Todd McGowan Hegel quote—“the kingdom of God is on Mainstreet.” I was actually able to ask him about it on a TU livestream and he said that actually it was a condensation of his from Hegel’s thought.
Interesting. Next time ask him how much of his work does he copy and paste from other parts. It explains a lot about how he is able to produce so much quantity.
I spoke with McGowan not Zizek. He’s always plagiarizing himself in his books tho, it is a bit of comedy really at this point. Some are put off by it, but many enjoy the drum beat of such consistency, that he keeps the wagon circling around such rich psychoanalytical/philosophical concepts.
It's also, verbatim, in his book "A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name", but is it a real Hegel quote or motto? The only google searches that come up have to do with Zizek quoting him
We need to make new cliches.
What's the cliche?
A Lacanian Hegelianism: Slavoj Žižek’s (Mis-)Reading of Hegel, Anders Burman:
“Žižek explicitly defends a psychoanalytically impregnated Hegelianism. With an implicit but obvious reference to Marx’s eleventh thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach, he writes in The Plague of Fantasies that the motto of such a Lacanian reading of Hegel could be: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted Hegel; but the point is also to change him.’”
So overused and unoriginal....wtf lol.
Defanging the myths of Hegel as an absolutist panlogical monster by reading him and Lacan in the void together is unoriginal?
another brilliant essay. The question that arises here is once again a question of the struggle of good against evil, of the conscious against the impulses of the unconscious and of the victory of morality over immorality, or if we want the principle of reality with limits, or the principle of unlimited and destructive pleasure. The other day I read an interesting article in which it was argued that consciousness, in the sense of what emanates from the mind, is a way of keeping us capable of living in a gregarious way and in society. Could this kind of extreme right vs extreme left conflict represent the end of society as we know it? We'll see, because fortunately nowadays there are many mechanisms for social regulation.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
The Sleeper must awaken?
Well put