By Slavoj Žižek. *
Ljubljana — My duty as a philosopher is to spoil the ecstatic sense of relief that has followed the US midterm elections. Yes, at first glance, we all triumphed: not only did Donald Trump’s party suffer a spectacular defeat, but Trump even accepted his loss and promised to work with the incoming Democratic Congress. We were spared the state of emergency or canceled results that so many had feared.
Still, my basic position hasn’t changed since 2016, when I told an interviewer that I would vote for Trump. The man may be absolutely “disgusting,” I explained, but his victory would trigger a “big awakening,” delivering a fundamental shock to the American political system and forcing long-needed realignments. I preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton, a notorious war hawk with deep ties to big banks, not because he was any better, but because he could be counted on to generate a fierce public response.
You can well imagine the brutal attacks that my stance provoked. Still, I think I was right, albeit too early. My own view is that this decade-long obsession with Trump reflects his elevation to the status of a fetish, in the psychoanalytic sense. As Jacques Lacan observed, even if what a cuckolded husband claims about his wife is true (she sleeps around), his jealousy is pathological, because it represents the only way for him to retain his dignity—even his identity.
Equally, one could say that even if the Nazis’ claims about the Jews were true (they were not, to be clear), their anti-Semitism would still be pathological, because it served to repress the true reasons for their ideological position. Longing to believe that German society was an organic blood-and-soil community of harmonious collaboration, they needed an external intruder to account for various undeniable divisions and antagonisms. The anti-Semitic figure of the Jew takes on all these antagonisms and becomes the last thing an anti-Semite sees before he is confronted with the naked truth.
In this sense, the fetishized image of Trump is the last thing a liberal sees before confronting the reality of class struggle. Liberals remain fascinated and obsessed with him because he allows them to avoid the topic of class. Hegel’s observation that “evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself” is apt: the liberal gaze that demonizes Trump is itself evil, because it ignores how its own failures created the space for his brand of nationalistic populism.
In this context, the true horror show, for me, was Joe Biden’s inauguration in early 2021. It reduced Trump’s first administration to an anomaly—a brief interruption to liberal-democratic normality. This stance was embodied in “The Hill We Climb,” which the young poet Amanda Gorman read to those in attendance. “And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us,” she intoned. “We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.”
If the term “ideology” has any meaning, this is it: the fantasy of the establishment and progressives joined together in a sublime moment of unity. Immersed in the moment, many convinced themselves that Trump never happened. They would have done better to ask where Trump and his followers came from. Does his rise not belie the liberals’ supposed 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 mean not the “uncivil war” between the liberal establishment and MAGA, but the actual class antagonism beneath. Since Trump claims to represent “us” against “them,” the only way to beat him is to demonstrate that he is really one of “them” (an establishment “swamp” creature).
It is worth recalling the lone figure who stole the show at Biden’s inauguration by just sitting there, an element of discord amid the “unity”: Bernie Sanders. He had not been left out of the party, but nor was he interested in joining it.
When Hegel saw Napoleon riding through Jena, he thought he was in the presence of the world spirit—history on horseback. Going viral just by sitting there in outsize mittens, Sanders embodied the world spirit of our own time—the skepticism that millions of ordinary people still harbored. He and they understood that far more radical change was still needed.
That is why we must not succumb to euphoria following Trump’s latest defeat. If anything, his lame-duck status deprives us of a fetish and forces us to focus on the true struggle that lies ahead. We have no normality to return to. Trump himself is a symptom of the disintegration of the liberal consensus, and of the left’s failure to offer a viable alternative.
The first step in fighting populism is therefore to cast a critical glance at the weaknesses of the liberal project. Recall Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s widely celebrated speech in Davos in January, where he referred to Václav Havel’s 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel, Carney explained, had “asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself? And his answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite.’ He doesn’t believe it, no one does, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists.”
Just as Havel’s greengrocer eventually decided to stop living the lie, Carney urged his audience to take down its own sign and openly renounce the old world order.
But there is a big difference between Havel’s story and the situation today. Our sign has already been taken down, not by dissidents who opposed the system but by the big powers who created it. The US no longer finds much use in the order it imposed on the world. Free-market competition and other international rules were fine as long as they guaranteed America’s privileges, but they were discarded as soon as they were seen to be undermining its hegemony.
The question now is what will follow the liberal order. The only alternatives on offer seem to produce morbid symptoms: chaotic economic warfare, new forms of fascism and techno-feudalism, a return to old-school colonial land-grabbing, and genocidal violence. Worse, the “normal” process of our history is driving us toward catastrophe, from ecological collapse and uncontrolled machine intelligence to new global wars. If these represent the true ends of our history, defeating Trump will mean nothing.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2026.
www.project-syndicate.org
