To paraphrase Stalin: They are
both worse.
http://inthesetimes.com/features/zizek_clinton_trump_lesser_evil.html
José Saramago’s Seeing tells
the story of the strange events in the unnamed capital city of an unidentified
democratic country. When the election day morning is marred by torrential
rains, voter turnout is disturbingly low, but the weather breaks by
mid-afternoon and the population heads en masse to their voting stations. The
government's relief is short-lived, however, when vote counting reveals that
over 70 percent of the ballots cast in the capital have been left blank.
Baffled by this apparent civic lapse, the government gives the citizenry a
chance to make amends just one week later with another election day. The
results are worse: Now 83 percent of the ballots are blank.
Is this an organized
conspiracy to overthrow not just the ruling government but the entire
democratic system? If so, who is behind it, and how did they manage to organize
hundreds of thousands of people into such subversion without being noticed? The
city continues to function near-normally throughout, the people parrying each
of the government's thrusts in inexplicable unison and with a truly Gandhian
level of nonviolent resistance. The lesson of this thought-experiment is clear:
the danger today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to “be active,”
to “participate,” in order to mask the vacuity of what goes on. People
intervene all the time. People “do something.” Academics participate in
meaningless debates, and so on. The truly difficult thing is to step back, to
withdraw. Those in power often prefer even a “critical” participation, a
dialogue, to silence, because just to engage us in dialogue, is to make sure
our ominous passivity is broken. The voters’ abstention is thus a true political
act: it forcefully confronts us with the vacuity of today’s democracies.
This, exactly, is how citizens
should act when faced with the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
When Stalin was asked in the late 1920s which deviation is worse, the Rightist
one or the Leftist one, he snapped back: They are both worse! Is it not the
same with the choice American voters are confronting in the 2016 presidential
elections? Trump is obviously “worse.” He enacts a decay of public morality. He
promises a Rightist turn. But he at least promises a change. Hillary is “worse”
since she makes changing nothing look desirable.
With such a choice, one should
not lose ones nerve and chose the “worst,” which means change—even if is a
dangerous change—because it opens up the space for a different more authentic
change.
The point is thus not to vote
for Trump—not only should one not vote for such a scum, one should not even
participate in such elections. The point is to approach coldly the question:
Whose victory is better for the fate of the radical emancipatory project,
Clinton’s or Trump’s?
Trump wants to make America
great again, to which Obama responded that America already is great. But is it?
Can a country in which a person like Trump has a chance of becoming president
be really considered great? The dangers of a Trump presidency are obvious: he
not only promises to nominate conservative judges to the Supreme Court; he
mobilized the darkest white-supremacist circles and openly flirts with
anti-immigrant racism; he flouts basic rules of decency and symbolizes the
disintegration of basic ethical standards; while advocating concern for the
misery of ordinary people, he effectively promotes a brutal neoliberal agenda
that includes tax breaks for the rich, further deregulation, etc., etc.
Trump is a vulgar opportunist,
yet he is still a vulgar specimen of humanity (in contrast to entities like Ted
Cruz or Rick Santorum whom I suspect of being aliens).
What Trump is definitely not
is a successful productive and innovative capitalist—he excels at getting into
bankruptcy and then making the taxpayers cover up his debts.
Liberals panicked by Trump
dismiss the idea that Trump’s eventual victory can start a process out of which
an authentic Left would emerge. Their favorite counterargument is a reference
to Hitler. Many German Communists welcomed the Nazi takeover in 1933 as a
chance for the radical Left as the only force which can defeat them. As we
know, their appreciation of Hitler’s rise was a catastrophic mistake. The question
is: Are things the same with Trump? Is Trump a danger that should bring
together a broad front in the same way that Hitler did, a front where “decent”
conservatives and libertarians fight together with mainstream liberal
progressives and (whatever remains of) the radical Left? Fredric Jameson was
right in a November
4 interview to warn against the hasty designation of the Trump movement as
new fascism: “People are now saying—this is a new fascism and my answer would
be—not yet. If Trump comes to power, that would be a different thing.”
(Incidentally, the term
“fascism” is today often used as an empty word when something obviously
dangerous appears on the political scene but we lack a proper understanding of
it. No, today's rightwing populists are NOT simply Fascists!) Why not yet?
First, the fear that a Trump
victory would turn the United State into a fascist state is a ridiculous
exaggeration. The United States has such a rich texture of divergent civic and
political institutions that their Gleichschaltung (the standardization of
political, economic, cultural and social institutions as carried out in
authoritarian states) cannot be enacted. Where, then, does this fear come from?
Its function is clearly to unify us all against Trump and thus to obfuscate the
true political divisions that run between the Left, as resuscitated by Bernie
Sanders, and Clinton who is the establishment’s candidate supported by a
rainbow coalition that includes neocon Iraq War advocates like President George
W. Bush’s Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and interventionists like
Ronald Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security
Policy Richard Armitage.
Second, the fact remains that
Trump draws support from the same rage out of which Bernie Sanders mobilized
his partisans. The majority of his supporters view him as the
anti-establishment candidate. And one should never forget that popular rage is
by definition free-floating and can be re-directed. Liberals who fear the Trump
victory are not really afraid of a radical Rightist turn. What they are really
afraid of is actual radical social change. To repeat Robespierre, they admit
(and are sincerely worried about) the injustices of our social life, but they
want to cure them with a “revolution without revolution” (in exact parallel to
today's consumerism which offers coffee without caffeine, chocolate without
sugar, beer without alcohol, multiculturalism without conflict, etc.): a vision
of social change with no actual change, a change where no one gets really hurt,
where well-meaning liberals remain cocooned in their safe enclaves. Back in
1937, George Orwell in The
Road to Wigan Pier wrote:
We all rail against
class-distinctions, but very few people seriously want to abolish them. Here
you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of
its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed.
Orwell’s point is that
radicals invoke the need for revolutionary change as a kind of superstitious
token that should achieve the opposite, i.e., prevent the only change that
really matters, the change in those who rule us, from occurring. Who really
rules in the United States? Can we not already hear the murmur of secret
meetings where members of the financial and other “elites” are negotiating
about the distribution of the key posts in the Clinton administration? To get
an idea how this negotiations in the shadows work, it suffices to read the John
Podesta emails or Hillary Clinton: The Goldman Sachs Speeches (to appear soon
by OR Books with an introduction by Julian Assange).
Hillary’s victory would be the
victory of a status quo overshadowed by the prospect of a new world war (and
Hillary definitely is a typical Democratic cold warrior), a status quo of a
situation in which we gradually but inevitably slide towards ecological,
economic, humanitarian and other catastrophes. That’s why I consider Ian
Steinman’s “Leftist” critique of my position extremely cynical. He writes:
Yet while we can do little to
predict how the pieces will fall, we know that to intervene in a crisis the
left must be organized, prepared and with support among the working class and
oppressed. We can not in any way endorse the vile racism and sexism which
divides us and weakens our struggle. We must always stand on the side of the
oppressed, and we must be independent, fighting for a real left exit to the
crisis. Even if Trump causes a catastrophe for the ruling class, it will also
be a catastrophe for us if we have not laid the foundations for our own
intervention.
True, the left “must be
organized, prepared and with support among the working class and oppressed”—but
in this case, the question should be: Which candidate's victory would
contribute more to the organization of the Left and its expansion? Isn’t it
clear that Trump's victory would have “laid the foundations for our own
intervention” much more than Hillary’s?
Yes, there is a great danger
in Trump's victory, but the Left will be mobilized only through such a threat
of catastrophe. If we continue the inertia of the existing status quo, there
will for sure be no Leftist mobilization. To quote the poet Hoelderlin: “Only
where there is danger the saving force is also rising.”
In the choice between Clinton
and Trump, neither “stands on the side of the oppressed,” so the real choice
is: abstain from voting or choose the one who, worthless as s/he is, opens up a
greater chance of unleashing a new political dynamics which can lead to massive
Leftist radicalization. Think about Trump’s anti-establishment supporters who
would be unavoidably upset with Trump’s presidency. Some of them would have to
turn towards Sanders in order to find an outlet for their rage. Think about the
disappointed mainstream Democrats who would have seen how Clinton’s centrist strategy
failed to win even against an extreme figure like Trump. The lesson they would
learn would be that sometimes, to win, the strategy of “we are all together”
doesn’t work and we should instead introduce a radical
division.
Many poor voters claim Trump
speaks for them. How can they recognize themselves in the voice of a
billionaire whose speculations and failures are one of the causes of their
misery? Like the paths of god, the paths of ideology are mysterious. When Trump
supporters are denounced as “white trash,” it is easy to discern in this
designation the fear of the lower classes so characteristic of the liberal
elite.
The title and subtitle of a Guardian
report of a recent Trump electoral meeting puts it this way: “Inside a
Donald Trump rally: good people in a feedback loop of paranoia and hate.
Trump’s crowd is full of honest and decent people—but the Republican’s
invective has a chilling effect on fans of his one-man show.” But how did Trump
become the voice of so many “honest and decent” people? Trump single-handedly
ruined the Republican Party, antagonizing both the old party establishment and
the Christian fundamentalists—what remains as the core of his support are the
bearers of the populist rage versus the establishment, and this core is
dismissed by liberals as the “white trash”—but are they not precisely those
that should be won over to the radical Leftist cause (this is what Bernie Sanders
was able to do).
One should rid oneself of the
false panic, fearing the Trump victory as the ultimate horror which makes us
support Clinton in spite of all her obvious shortcomings. Although the battle
seems lost for Trump, his victory would have created a totally new political
situation with chances for a more radical Left—or, to quote Mao:
“Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is
excellent.”
Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian
philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher at the the Institute for
Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London. He has also been a visiting
professor at more than 10 universities around the world. Žižek is the author of
many books, including Living in the End Times, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce,
The Year of Dreaming Dangerously and Trouble in Paradise.
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