By Slavoj Žižek On 8/12/16 at 1:22
PM
Alfred Hitchcock once said
that a film is as good as its villain—does this mean that the forthcoming U.S. elections
will be good since the “bad guy” (Donald Trump) is an almost ideal villain?
Yes, but in a very problematic sense. For the liberal majority, the 2016 elections
represent a clear-cut choice: the figure of Trump is a ridiculous excess,
vulgar and exploiting our worst racist and sexist prejudices, a male chauvinist
so lacking in decency so that even Republican big names are abandoning him in
droves. If Trump remains the Republican candidate, we will get a true “feelgood
election”—in spite of all our problems and petty squabbles, when there is a
real threat we can all come together in defence of our basic democratic values,
like France did after the Charlie
Hebdo attacks in January 2015.
But this cosy democratic
consensus is not healthy for politics and the Left. We need to take a step back
and turn the gaze on ourselves: what is the exact nature of this all-embracing
democratic unity? Everybody is in there, from Wall Street to Bernie Sanders
supporters to what remains of the Occupy movement, from big business to trade
unions, from army veterans to LGBT+, from ecologists horrified by Trump’s
denial of global warming and feminists delighted by the prospect of the first
woman-president, to the “decent” Republican establishment figures terrified by
Trump’s inconsistencies and irresponsible “demagogic” proposals.
But what disappears in this
apparently all-embracing conglomerate? The popular rage which gave birth to
Trump also gave birth to Sanders, and while they both express widespread social
and political discontent, they do it in the opposite sense, the one engaging in
Rightist populism and the other opting for the Leftist call for justice. And
here comes the trick: the Leftist call for justice tends to be combined with
struggles for women’s and gay rights, for multiculturalism and against
discrimination including racism. The strategic aim of the Clinton consensus is
to dissociate all these struggles from the Leftist call for justice, which is
why the living symbol of this consensus is Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple who
proudly signed the pro-LGBT letter and who can now easily forget about hundreds of thousands of Foxconn workers in China assembling
Apple products in slave conditions—he made his big gesture of solidarity with
the underprivileged, demanding the abolition of gender segregation.
This same stance was brought
to the extreme with the U.S.’s first female secretary of state Madeleine
Albright, a big Clinton supporter who served in her husband’s administration
from 1997 to 2001. On CBS's 60 Minutes (May 12, 1996), Albright was asked about that
year’s cruise missile strikes on Iraq known as Operation Desert Strike: “We
have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children
than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"
Albright calmly replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we
think the price is worth it.” Let’s ignore all the questions that this reply
raises and focus on one aspect: can we imagine all the hell that would break
out if the same answer would be given by somebody like Putin or the Chinese
President Xi? Would they not be immediately denounced in western newspapers as
cold and ruthless barbarians? Campaigning for Hillary, Albright said: “There’s
a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!” (Meaning: who
will vote for Sanders instead of Clinton.) Maybe we should amend this
statement: there is a special place in hell for women (and men) who think half
a million dead children is an affordable price for a military intervention that
ruins a country, while wholeheartedly supporting women’s and gay rights at
home.
Trump is not the dirty water
that should be thrown out to keep safe the healthy baby of U.S. democracy, he
is himself the dirty baby who should be thrown out in order to shine a light
on the uneasy nature of the Hillary consensus. The message of this
consensus to the Leftists is: you can get everything, we just want to keep the
essentials, the unencumbered functioning of the global capital. President
Obama’s “Yes, we can!” acquires now a new meaning: yes, we can concede to all
your cultural demands without endangering the global market economy—so there is
no need for radical economic measures. Or, as Todd McGowan, professor of film
theory and history at the University of Vermont, put it (in a private
communication): “The consensus of ‘right-thinking people’ opposed to Trump is
frightening. It is as if his excess licenses the real global capitalist
consensus to emerge and to congratulate themselves on their openness.”
And what about poor Bernie Sanders?
Unfortunately, Trump hit the mark when he compared his endorsement of Hillary
to an Occupy partisan endorsing Lehman Brothers. Sanders should just withdraw
and retain a dignified silence so that his absence would weight heavily
over the Hillary celebrations, reminding us what is missing and, in this
way, keep the space open for more radical alternatives in future.
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