The Republican Party has suffered a crushing defeat in the US midterm congressional elections. However, according to leading Western philosopher Slavoj Zizek, it is too soon to rejoice over Donald Trump's defeat and speak of a "return to normality." In a new column for XAB.info, he explains why Trump has become a convenient fetish for liberals, the danger of the illusion of universal unity, and why the collapse of the old world order leads to global catastrophe.
A Defeat That Does Not Relieve Tension
"My duty as a philosopher is to spoil the ecstatic feeling of relief that followed the US midterm elections," Zizek begins. At first glance, a shared victory has been achieved: Trump's party suffered a resounding defeat, and Trump himself acknowledged it and promised to cooperate with the new Congress formed by the Democratic Party. The state of emergency and the overturning of results that many feared were avoided. Nevertheless, according to the author, this merely creates the illusion of a return to "liberal normality" while failing to address the deep crisis of American politics.
Trump as a Psychoanalytic Fetish
Zizek's position, by his own account, has not changed since 2016 when he stated he would vote for Trump: even if this man is "absolutely repulsive," his victory, in the philosopher's calculation, was supposed to trigger a "great awakening" and a fundamental shock to the American system. He preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton — a notorious warmonger with close ties to big banks — not because Trump was better, but because he could be counted on as a figure capable of provoking a violent public reaction. A decade-long obsession with Trump, according to Zizek, demonstrates that he has risen to the status of a fetish in the psychoanalytic sense: demonizing a single politician allows liberals to ignore their own failures and avoid the topic of real class struggle.
The Gaze That Generates Evil and the Trap of "Illusory Unity"
Citing Hegel's observation that "evil dwells in the very gaze that sees Evil around itself," Zizek argues that the liberal gaze demonizing Trump is itself evil, as it ignores how its own failures created the space for his brand of nationalist populism. In this vein, Joe Biden's inauguration in early 2021 appeared to him as a true "horror show," reducing Trump's first term to an anomaly — a brief interruption in liberal-democratic normality — a position embodied in Amanda Gorman's poem "The Hill We Climb." The philosopher calls calls for the unification of the establishment and progressives an ideological fantasy: populism can only be defeated by acknowledging the real divisions in society.
The Collapse of the Old Order and the Threat of the Future
The main challenge faced after removing Trump from the focus of attention is the "normal" course of history without systemic changes, leading to catastrophe: from techno-feudalism and new wars to ecological collapse. The old world order, Zizek emphasizes, was destroyed not by dissidents, but by the major powers themselves — particularly the US — which discarded international rules when they no longer guaranteed their hegemony. That is why, in his assessment, the relief from the midterms is deceptive: it does not abolish class struggle or systemic risks, but merely postpones them against the backdrop of the illusion of restored order.
