AFTER MIDTERM ELECTIONS: THE TRUE STRUGGLE LIES AHEAD

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My duty as a philosopher is to spoil the ecstatic relief after the US midterm elections. At first glance, we all triumphed: not only has Trump lost, but he has even accepted his loss and promised collaboration with the Democratic majority – no state of emergency, no cancelled elections…

In an interview published in 2016, I declared that I would vote for Trump. The victory of Trump, despite Trump being absolutely “disgusting”, would trigger a “big awakening”. It would cause a fundamental shock to the American political system and force realignments and the emergence of new political phenomena. I preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton, who was a war hawk deeply linked to big banks; Trump is not any better, but with Trump you can at least count on (or perhaps hope for) public resistance… You can imagine the brutal attacks on me this stance provoked. But I think I was right, although with a delay. Back in 2016, Trump made a notorious statement: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Now he would not only lose voters – he would be instantly arrested.

However, at this very point, we should raise the question: where do the obsession and fascination with the figure of Trump come from? To cut a long story short, Trump is now elevated to the status of a fetish in the psychoanalytic sense of the term. What is a fetish? Jacques Lacan wrote that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological: the pathological element is the husband’s need for jealousy as the only way to retain his dignity, even his identity. Along the same lines, one could say that, even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German girls…) – which they are not, of course – their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) a pathological phenomenon because it repressed the true reason why the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position. In the Nazi vision, their society is an organic Whole of harmonious collaboration, so an external intruder is needed to account for divisions and antagonisms. The anti-Semitic figure of the Jew is a displacement and condensation of social antagonisms; it is the last thing an anti-Semite sees before being confronted with a naked social antagonism. In this sense, the image of Donald Trump is the last thing a liberal sees before confronting class struggle. That’s why liberals are so fascinated and horrified by Trump: to avoid the class topic. 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.