Tragedy or Farce?

Slavoj Žižek, "First as a farce, then as a tragedy? Denying US divisions perpetuates Trumpism’s delusions"

President Joe Biden is indulging in an impossible dream of national “unity”, and the sooner we awaken from it the better for all of us. It was easy to defeat an obvious target like Trump — the real struggle begins now.

We all know Karl Marx’s remark that history repeats itself first as a tragedy and then as a farce — Marx had in mind the tragedy of the fall of Napoleon I and the later farce of the reign of his nephew Napoleon III. Back in the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse remarked that the lesson of Nazism seems to be the opposite one: first as a farce (throughout the 1920s, Hitler and his gang were mostly taken as a bunch of marginal political clowns), then as a tragedy (when Hitler effectively took power). The intrusion of the mob into the Capitol obviously also wasn’t a serious coup attempt, but a farce. Jake Angeli, a QAnon supporter known to all of us as the horned “shaman”, personifies the fakery of the entire mob of protesters.

What happened on 6 January at the Capitol was not a coup attempt, but a carnival. The sometime fashionable idea that carnival can serve as a model for progressive protest movements — that such protests are carnivalesque not only in their form and atmosphere (theatrical performances, humorous chants), but also in their non-centralised organisation — was always deeply problematic: is late-capitalist social reality itself not already carnivalesque? Was the infamous Kristallnacht in 1938 — this half-organised, half-spontaneous outburst of violent attacks on Jewish homes, synagogues, businesses, and people themselves — not a carnival if there ever was one?

Furthermore, is “carnival” not also the name for the obscene underside of power — from gang rapes to mass lynchings? Let us not forget that Mikhail Bakhtin developed the notion of carnival in his book on Rabelais, written in the 1930s, as a direct reply to the carnival of the Stalinist purges. Traditionally, in resisting those in power, one of the strategies of the “lower classes” has regularly been to use terrifying displays of brutality to disturb the middle-class sense of decency. But with the events on Capitol, carnival again lost its innocence.

Will, then, in this case too, the farce repeat itself as tragedy? Will it be followed by a serious violent — or not so violent — coup d’état? There are certainly ominous signs pointing in this direction. As Warren Montag recently put it:

A poll taken the day after the assault on the Capitol revealed that 45 percent of Republicans approve of the action and believe Trump must be imposed as president by force, while 43 percent oppose or least do not support the use of violence to achieve this end. The far Right has thus created a base of about 30 million people, an increasing number of whom explicitly reject the principle of democracy and are ready to accept authoritarian rule. We are lucky that the object of their veneration is crippled by narcissism and cognitive decline. It is only a matter of time, however, before a new Trump emerges, less delusional and more competent; the pathway to the installation of an authoritarian regime against the will of the majority of the electorate is now well established.But it is not that Trump is “crippled by narcissism and cognitive decline” — these two characteristics are the basis of his success. His followers’ basic stance is that of a “cognitive decline”: of denying the true impact of the pandemic, of global warming, of racism and sexism in the United States — if there are any serious threats to the American way of life, they must be the result of a conspiracy. (The way the pandemic affected Trump is ambiguous: Trump basically lost the election because of COVID-19, but his movement also gained strength from the way he reacted to the pandemic by denying its full impact.)

Out of this “cognitive decline” has emerged a substantial radical-right movement: a synergy of white supremacy, and pandemic-denying, conspiracy theories. Its class base is, as in Fascism, a combination of a lower-middle class white mob afraid of losing their privileges, and their discreet billionaire enablers.

Was the US state apparatus really disturbed by the Capitol intrusion? It may appear so. As CNN reported: “America's most senior general Mark Milley and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff ... issued a statement [on 12 January 12] condemning the violent invasion of the US Capitol ... and reminding service members of their obligation to support and defend the Constitution and reject extremism.” The FBI is now investigating and prosecuting the protesters, but hidden traces of solidarity remain: as it was frequently noted, just imagine how much more brutally the authorities would have acted if Black Lives Matter protesters had laid siege to the Capitol. The protesters, moreover, were not detained or defeated — they simply “went home”, as Trump advised them to.

We are told that most of the Capitol protesters “flew from their affluent suburbs to the US Capitol, ready to die for the cause of white privilege” — true, but many of them were also part of a lower-middle class which sees their privileges threatened by the imagined coalition of big business (new digital media corporations, banks), state administration (controlling our daily lives, imposing lockdowns, masks, gun control, and other limitations to our basic freedoms), natural catastrophes (pandemic, forest fires), and “others” (the poor, “foreigners”, LGBTQ+ persons, and so on) who are allegedly exhausting the state’s financial resources and compelling it to raise taxes. Central is here the category of “our way of life”: socialising in bars and restaurants or at large sport events, free car movement and the right to possess guns. These protestors reject everything that poses a threat to this “way of life” (like masks and lockdowns), just like they reject state control (unless it is the control of “others”). Everything that threatens their freedoms is denounced as part of a vast plot. But this “way of life” is clearly not class-neutral: it is the way of life of the white middle-class who perceive themselves as the true embodiment of “America”.

So when we hear that the particular agent of this conspiracy — Joe Biden and the Democrats — did not just steal the election but is taking from us our way of life, we should apply here another category: that of the theft of enjoyment. To quote Russell Sbriglia (in private communication):

Could there possibly be a better exemplification of the logic of the “theft of enjoyment” than the mantra that Trump supporters were chanting while storming the Capitol: “Stop the steal!”? The hedonistic, carnivalesque nature of the storming of the Capitol to “stop the steal” wasn’t merely incidental to the attempted insurrection; insofar as it was all about taking back the enjoyment (supposedly) stolen from them by the nation’s others (i.e., Blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, LGBTQ+, etc.), the element of carnival was absolutely essential to it.

Jacques Lacan predicted way back in the early 1970s that capitalist globalisation will give rise to a new mode of racism focused on the figure of an “Other” who either threatens to snatch from us our enjoyment (the deep satisfaction provided by our immersion in our way of life), and/or who possesses and displays an excessive enjoyment that eludes our grasp (suffice it to recall the antisemitic fantasies about secret Jewish rituals, or the white supremacist fantasies about superior sexual prowess of black men, or the perception of Mexicans as rapists and drug dealers). Enjoyment is not be confused here with sexual or other pleasures: it is a deeper satisfaction in our specific way of life or paranoia about the Other’s way of life — so what disturbs us in the Other is usually embodied in small details of daily lives (smell of their food, the loud sound of their music or laughter). (Incidentally, was not a similar mix of fascination and horror present in the left-liberal reaction to the protesters breaking into the Capitol? “Ordinary” people breaking into the sacred seat of power, a carnival that momentarily suspended our rules of public life — there was a little bit of envy mixed in with all the condemnation.) 

The dimension of what the Trumpist protesters are denying is truly terrifying. Despite the existence of a vaccine, the pandemic is still spreading. As for our environment, climate scientists warn that the planet is facing a “ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals” which “threaten human survival because of ignorance and inaction”; and that “people still haven’t grasped the urgency of the biodiversity and climate crises.”

But what we should focus on now is elements of a similar denial that continue into the presidency of Joe Biden. Here, for instance, are S.E. Cupp’s reflections on his inauguration:

It was almost as if none of it really happened. Except, of course it did. The last four years have tattooed a trauma on so many Americans, and it won’t fade overnight. There’s healing to do, and Biden has a long journey ahead. But at least for an hour or so at the United States Capitol, there was finally a much-needed respite from the madness, the moment of demarcation that will forever be 2020. 

Not only the Trump presidency happen, it emerged out of the very world celebrated in “The Hill We Climb”, the poem read by Young Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman. Describing herself as “a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother” who dreamt of becoming president “only to find herself reciting for one”, Gorman extoled:

And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.

We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.

We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.

We seek harm to none and harmony for all.

We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it.

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.

This effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated. 

 If the term “ideology” has any meaning, this is it: the fantasy of the establishment and progressives all joined together in a sublime moment of unity. When we are immersed in this unity, it effectively appears as if Trump never really happened.

The question remains, however: where did Trump and his followers come from? Does his rise not signal a deep crack in that very unity? If we want to have any future, we must not put our differences aside but do precisely the opposite: focus on our divisions and the antagonisms which run across US society — not what Biden called the “uncivil war” between the liberal establishment and Trump followers, but the actual class antagonism and all its implications (racism, sexism, ecological crises).

That’s why the calls for “unity” and the “healing of divisions” are false: Donald Trump as such stands for radical division, for us against them (the “enemies of the people”), and the only proper way to defeat him is to demonstrate that his division is a false one, that he is really one of “them” (a creature of the establishment “swamp”), and to replace this division with a more radical and authentic unity: the establishment, with all its expressions, and the broad solidarity of all emancipatory forces.

So will the farce repeat itself as tragedy? There is no answer to this question in advance — it depends on all of us, on our political mobilisation (or the lack of it). “Be careful what you wish for!” Trump warned Biden apropos of the idea of having Trump deposed by evoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment; and maybe Trump himself should have been careful what he wished for when it comes to the support of Capitol protesters. However, maybe, in the long term, Trump made a pertinent point: Biden is indulging in a contradictory, impossible dream, and the sooner we awaken from it the better for all of us. It was easy to defeat an obvious target like Trump — the real struggle begins now.