Tuesday, September 09, 2003
(11:45 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Revolution was televised
Today during my off time between classes, I spent a great deal of time looking around the Seminary Co-op Bookstore. I glanced at a few of Zizek's works from the early 1990s that I hadn't read yet, and though I did consider purchasing them, I finally decided to get something completely different (Derrida's Politics of Friendship). While some understandable Zizek fatigue did play a role, the main problem I had was that it all already seemed so out of date. The book descriptions kept mentioning the rise of nationalism and racism after the collapse of Cold War stabilities, particularly in Zizek's native Yugoslavia. Certainly back then, when all this was first going down, those issues seemed very urgent, but now, I thought, things have changed.
On my drive back to Bourbonnais, however, I realized exactly how things have changed: now nationalism and racism are on the rise here. Although our stable democratic institutions have cushioned the blow somewhat, let's look at the record of the last ten years or so. A vast right-wing propaganda machine has arisen, which has used its considerable power and money to silence what was previously a broadly liberal media. This propaganda machine relies on overly simplified half-truths that any reasonable person wouldn't even bother going to the trouble of disproving, yet a vast segment of the population finds these ridiculous arguments deeply compelling. Christians and rich people have now effectively become (often strongly allied) interest groups in the postmodern game of identity politics. And again, although our stable democratic institutions made it seem not so bad, we could fairly say that the conduct of the Bush administration in 2000 was tantamount to seizing power (the question of whether they were entitled to that power is not really relevant, because they behaved in a way that clearly indicated they would use whatever means necessary to gain power). Under this administration, we have policies that are often aggressively opposed to addressing the public interest, we have constant attempts to narrow the range of possible opinions, and we have racist policies under which resident aliens are secretly detained at the caprice of the government.
We basically have baby fascism. Since the broadly liberal tradition in America is so strong, I think it would be a huge exaggeration to say that we're in immediate danger of an outright takeover, although the Republican party's transparent attempts to dominate every institution might have the effect of rendering most of our governmental structure irrelevant -- if everyone, on every level, is a Republican, you're going to get basically the same policies everywhere, no matter what. I think that Al Gore's relative wimpiness in 2000 might have some symbolic value: the "radical center" position cannot stand up to right-wing aggression once the left wing has been completely evacuated. While Clinton was able to hold things together for 8 years, he could only survive by adopting progressively more right wing policies. (We can see this also in Tony Blair, the former "Bill Clinton, Jr." who has now become the Republican party's bitch).
The only change that has taken place since Zizek's early-1990s writings is that things have gotten worse because the sickness has spread more aggressively to the US. This might account for the difference between that Zizek and the current Zizek -- whereas formerly, he seemed to believe that the bland liberal democratic option was the least bad option politically, now he seems to realize that that position is a compromise formation that cannot stand up to real aggression from the right. Thus his desire to disrupt the liberal democratic concensus. The message seems to be: "We're screwed either way. We're going to lose our comfortable liberal democratic lives either way. We owe it to ourselves to give socialism another solid try."
