The defeat of the MAGA movement in the American elections will not change the course of history.
Kapitál
Trump’s defeat brought relief, but according to the author, a return to the liberal normal is impossible. What does his rise reveal about class antagonisms, the failures of the left, and the collapse of the old world order? And what alternatives await after him?
It is my duty as a philosopher to spoil the ecstatic feeling of relief that followed the American congressional elections. Yes, at first glance we all won: not only did Donald Trump’s party suffer a huge defeat, Trump even accepted his loss and promised to cooperate with the incoming Democratic Congress. We avoided the declaration of a state of emergency or the annulment of the election results — scenarios that so many people feared.
Nevertheless, my basic position has not changed since 2016, when I said in an interview that I would vote for Trump. I explained that the man may be absolutely “disgusting,” but his victory could lead to a “great awakening” that would deal a serious blow to the American political system and force the necessary changes in its political arrangement. I preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton, a notorious advocate of war with deep ties to major banks, not because he was any better, but because one could count on him to provoke a tumultuous public reaction.
It is not difficult to imagine how brutal the attacks my position provoked were. Nevertheless, I think I was right, although I said it too soon. Personally, I think that this decade-long obsession with Trump reflects his elevation to the status of a fetish in the psychoanalytic sense. As Jacques Lacan already observed, even if what the deceived husband claims about his wife (that she has lovers) were true, his jealousy would still be pathological, because for him it represents the only way to preserve his dignity – indeed, even his identity.
Likewise, one could say that even if the Nazis’ claims about the Jews had been true (which, of course, they were not), their antisemitism would still have been pathological, because it served to suppress the real reasons for their ideological position. In their desire to believe that German society was an organic community of “blood and soil” founded on harmonious cooperation, they needed an external intruder to explain the various undeniable contradictions and antagonisms. The antisemitic figure of the Jew assumes all these antagonisms and becomes the last thing the antisemite sees before finding himself face to face with bare fact.
In this sense, the fetishized image of Trump is the last thing the liberal sees before finding himself face to face with the reality of class struggle. Liberals remain fascinated and obsessed with him because he enables them to avoid the topic of class. Hegel’s remark that “evil lies in the very gaze that perceives it everywhere around itself” is apt: the liberal gaze that demonizes Trump is itself evil, because it ignores the fact that its own failures created the space for Trump’s kind of nationalist populism.
In this context, the real horror show for me was Joe Biden’s inauguration at the beginning of 2021. It reduced Trump’s first term to an anomaly – a brief interruption of the liberal-democratic normality. This attitude was embodied by the poem “The Hill We Climb,” recited to those present by the young poet Amanda Gorman. “And so we lift our gaze not to what stands between us, but what stands before us,” she recited. “We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.”
If the concept of “ideology” has any meaning, it is precisely this: the fantasy that the establishment and progressives joined together in a noble moment of unity. Absorbed in the present moment, many convinced themselves that Trump had never really existed. It would have been better if they had instead asked where Trump and his supporters actually came from. Does his rise not expose the falsity of the liberals’ alleged unity?
If we want to have any future, we must not put our differences aside. We must do the opposite: focus on our divisions and antagonisms, by which I do not mean a ruthless war between the liberal establishment and the MAGA movement, but the real class antagonism hidden behind it. Since Trump claims to represent “us” against “them,” the only way to defeat him is to show that he actually belongs among “them” (he is also a monster from the establishment “swamp”).
It is worth recalling Bernie Sanders, the solitary figure who drew attention at Biden’s inauguration simply by sitting there — an element of discord amid the “unity.” He was not excluded from the celebrations, but neither was he interested in joining them.
When Hegel saw Napoleon passing through Jena, he thought he was in the presence of the world spirit – history on horseback. Sanders, who became a social-media sensation merely by sitting there in huge mittens, embodied the world spirit of our time – the skepticism that persisted among millions of ordinary people. He and they understood that we need a much more radical change.
Therefore, we must not succumb to the euphoria following Trump’s latest defeat. His status as a lame-duck president rather frees us from the fetish and forces us to focus on the real struggle that awaits us. There is no normality to which we can return. Trump himself is a symptom of the disintegration of the liberal consensus and the failure of the left, which has been unable to offer a viable alternative.
The first step in the fight against populism is therefore a critical look at the weaknesses of the liberal project. Let us recall the widely celebrated speech by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Davos in January, in which he referred to Václav Havel’s 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel, as Carney explained, “asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself? And his answer began with the greengrocer. Every morning, this shopkeeper placed a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world, unite.’ He doesn’t believe it, no one believes it, but he puts the sign up anyway, to avoid trouble, to signal obedience, to get along with others. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system endures.”
Just as Havel’s greengrocer eventually decided to stop living a lie, Carney urged his audience to take down their own sign and openly renounce the old world order.
There is, however, a major difference between Havel’s story and today’s situation. Our sign has already been taken down, not by dissidents who stood up to the system, but by the great powers that created it. The US no longer sees much value in the order it imposed on the world. Free-market competition and other international rules were acceptable as long as they guaranteed American privileges, but were discarded as soon as it became clear that they undermined American hegemony.
The question now is what will come after the liberal order. The only alternatives on offer seem to bring morbid symptoms: chaotic economic warfare, new forms of fascism and techno-feudalism, a return to colonial land grabs, and genocidal violence. Worse still, the “normal” course of our history is driving us toward catastrophe — from ecological collapse and uncontrolled artificial intelligence to new global wars. If this is what the true culmination of our history represents, Trump’s defeat will mean nothing.
Published in cooperation with Project Syndicate.