Postmodernist Slavoj Zizek glad for Bush victory

In These Times - November 5, 2004

The Liberal Waterloo

(Or, finally some good news from Washington!)

By Slavoj Zizek

The first reaction of progressives to Bush's
second victory was that of despair, even fear:
The last four years were not just a bad dream.
The nightmarish coalition of big business and
fundamentalist populism will roll on, as Bush
pursues his agenda with new gusto, nominating
conservative judges to the Supreme Court,
invading the next country after Iraq, and pushing
liberalism in the United States one step closer
to extinction. However, this emotional reaction
is precisely what we should resist-it only bears
witness to the extent liberals have succeeded in
imposing their worldview upon us. If we keep a
cool head and calmly analyze the results, the
2004 election appears in a totally different
light.

Many Europeans wonder how Bush could have won,
with the intellectual and pop-cultural elite
against him. They must now finally confront the
underrated mobilizing power of American Christian
fundamentalism. Because of its self-evident
imbecility, it is a much more paradoxical,
properly postmodern phenomenon than it appears.

Take the literary bestsellers of U.S. Christian
fundamentalism, Tim F. LaHaye and Jerry B.
Jenkins's "Left Behind" series of 12 novels on
the upcoming end of the world that have sold more
than 60 million copies. The Left Behind story
begins with the sudden, inexplicable
disappearance of millions of people-the saved
souls whom God calls to himself in order to spare
them the horrors of Armageddon. The Anti-Christ
then appears, a young, slick and charismatic
Romanian politician named Nicolae Carpathia, who,
after being elected general secretary of the
United Nations, moves U.N. headquarters to
Babylon where he imposes an anti-American world
government that disarms all nation-states. This
ridiculous plot unfolds until the final battle
when all non-Christians-Jews, Muslims, et al-are
consumed in a cataclysmic fire. Imagine the
outcry in the Western liberal media if a similar
story written from the Muslim standpoint had
become a bestseller in the Arab countries! It is
not the poverty and primitivism of these novels
that is breathtaking, but rather the strange
overlap between the "serious" religious message
and the trashiest conventions of pop culture
commercialism.

My next reflection concerns the basic paradox of
democracy as revealed in The History of the
VKP(b)-the Stalinist bible. Stalin (who
ghost-wrote the book) describes the vote at a
party congress in the late '20s: "With a large
majority, the delegates unanimously approved the
resolution proposed by the Central Committee." If
the vote was unanimous, where then did the
minority disappear? Far from betraying some
perverse "totalitarian" twist, this paradox is
built into the very structure of democracy.
Democracy is based on a short-circuit between the
majority and the "All." In it, the winner takes
all and the majority counts as All, obtaining all
the power, even if this majority is merely a
couple hundred votes among millions.

"Democracy" is not merely the "power of, by and
for the people." It is not enough to claim that
in a democracy the majority's will and interests
(the two do not automatically coincide) determine
state decisions. Today, democracy is above all
about formal legalism-the unconditional adherence
to a set of formal rules that guarantee society's
antagonisms are fully absorbed into the political
arena. "Democracy" means that whatever electoral
manipulation takes place all politicians will
unconditionally respect the results. In this
sense, the 2000 U.S. presidential election was
effectively "democratic": In spite of obvious
electoral manipulations and the patent
meaninglessness of the fact that several hundred
votes in Florida decided who would be president
of the entire nation, the Democratic candidate
accepted his defeat. In the weeks of uncertainty
after the election, Bill Clinton made an
appropriate acerbic comment: "The American people
have spoken; we just don't know what they said."
This comment should be taken more seriously than
it was meant. To this day, we still don't know
what they said-perhaps because there was no
"message" behind the result at all.

Those old enough still remember the boring
attempts of "democratic socialists" to oppose the
miserable "really-existing socialism" by holding
up the vision of authentic socialism. To such
attempts, the standard Hegelian answer provides
the sufficient response: The failure of reality
to live up to its notion bears witness to the
inherent weakness of the notion itself. Why
shouldn't the same hold for democracy? Isn't it
too simple to oppose the "really-existing"
liberal capitalist-democracy to a more true
radical democracy?

This is not to imply that Bush's victory was an
accidental mistake, a result of fraud or
manipulation. Hegel wrote apropos Napoleon that
he had to lose two times: Only after Waterloo did
it become clear to him that his defeat was not a
military accident but the expression of a deeper
historical shift. The same goes for Bush: He had
to win two times in order for liberals to
perceive that we are all entering a new era.

On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers were hit.
Twelve years earlier, on November 9, 1989, the
Berlin Wall fell. November 9 announced the "happy
'90s," the Francis Fukuyama dream of the "end of
history," the belief that liberal democracy had,
in principle, won, and that the only obstacles to
this ultra-Hollywood happy ending were merely
local pockets of resistance where the leaders did
not yet grasp that their time was over. In
contrast, 9/11 symbolizes the end of the
Clintonite happy '90s, heralding an era of new
walls-between Israel and the West Bank, around
the European Union, on the U.S.-Mexico border.

In their recent The War Over Iraq, William
Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan wrote, "The
mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end
there ... We stand at the cusp of a new
historical era ... This is a decisive moment ...
It is so clearly about more than Iraq. It is
about more even than the future of the Middle
East and the war on terror. It is about what sort
of role the United States intends to play in the
twenty-first century." One cannot but agree with
them. It is effectively the future of the
international community that is at stake now-the
new rules that will regulate it, what the new
world order will be.

A new vision of the New World Order is thus
emerging as the effective framework of recent
U.S. politics: After September 11, America
basically wrote off the rest of the world as a
reliable partner. The ultimate goal was no longer
the Fukuyama utopia of expanding universal
liberal democracy, but the transformation of the
United States into "Fortress America," a lone
superpower isolated from the rest of the world,
protecting its vital economic interests and
securing its safety through its new military
power. This new military not only includes forces
for rapid deployment anywhere on the globe, but
also the development of space weapons that enable
the Pentagon to control the global surface from
above. This strategy throws a new light on the
recent conflicts between the United States and
Europe: It is not Europe that is "betraying" the
United States. The United States no longer needs
to rely on its exclusive partnership with Europe.
In short, Bush's America pretends to be a new
global empire but it is not. Rather, it remains a
nation-state ruthlessly pursuing its interests.
It is as if U.S. politics is now being guided by
a weird reversal of the ecologists' well-known
motto: Act globally, think locally.

Within these coordinates, every progressive who
thinks should be glad for Bush's victory. It is
good for the entire world because the contours of
the confrontations to come will now be drawn in a
much starker way. A Kerry victory would have been
a kind of historical anomaly, blurring the true
lines of division. After all, Kerry did not have
a global vision that would present a feasible
alternative to Bush's politics. Further, Bush's
victory is paradoxically better for both the
European and Latin American economies: In order
to get trade union backing, Kerry promised to
support protectionist measures.

However, the main advantage involves
international politics. If Kerry had won, it
would have forced liberals to face the
consequences of the Iraq war, allowing the Bush
camp to blame Democrats for the results of their
own catastrophic decisions. In her famous 1979
Commentary essay, "Dictators and Double
Standards," Jeanne Kirkpatrick elaborated on the
distinction between "authoritarian" and
"totalitarian" regimes in order to justify the
U.S. policy of collaborating with Rightist
dictators, while actively subverting Communist
regimes. Authoritarian dictators are pragmatic
rulers concerned with power and wealth and
indifferent towards ideological issues, even if
they pay lip service to some big cause. In
contrast, totalitarian leaders are selfless,
ideology driven fanatics who put everything at
stake for their ideals. So while one can deal
with authoritarian rulers who react rationally
and predictably to material and military threats,
totalitarian leaders are more dangerous and must
be directly confronted. The irony is that this
distinction encapsulates perfectly what went
wrong with the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Saddam
was a corrupt authoritarian dictator striving for
power and guided by brutal pragmatic
considerations (which led him to collaborate with
the United States throughout the '80s). But in
removing him, the U.S. intervention has led to
the creation of a "fundamentalist" opposition
that precludes any pragmatic compromises.

Bush's victory will dispel the illusions about
the solidarity of interests among the developed
Western countries. It will give a new impetus to
the painful but necessary process of
strengthening new alliances like the European
Union or Mercosur in Latin America. It is a
journalistic cliché to praise the "postmodern"
dynamic of U.S. capitalism against the "old
Europe" stuck in its regulatory Welfare State
illusions. However, in the domain of political
organization, Europe is now going much further
than the United States has toward constituting
itself as an unprecedented, properly
"post-modern," trans-state collective able to
provide a place for anyone, independent of
geography or culture.

No reason to despair, then. The prospects may be
dark today, but remember one of the great
Bushisms: "The future will be better tomorrow."