By Slavoj Žižek
In the summer of 1989, Francis Fukuyama presented his vision of the end of history. Since liberal-democratic capitalism is the best possible social order, he argued, no further progress was possible, other than through the preferred order’s gradual realization around the world.
But the “end” lasted just three decades at most, and now we find ourselves at the opposite extreme: the predominant idea today is that the liberal-democratic capitalist world order, with its complex rules guaranteeing basic human rights (freedom of speech, universal health care, public education, and so forth), has disintegrated. It is being replaced by a brutal new world in which big fish eat small ones, and ideologies are no longer taken seriously, because what matters is raw economic, military, and/or political power.
Hence, US President Donald Trump did not intervene in Venezuela to restore democracy there; he did it, apparently, to get free access to the country’s immense oil and mineral reserves. Likewise, Russian President Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine to seize territory and restore the Greater Russia that existed before the Bolshevik Revolution and, in a different form, after it.
The predominant worldview is a realism shed of all illusions and ideals. If you are a small country, accept that you must live in fear. If you can enjoy obscene power, you should do so – just beware that principles don’t matter. In this new post-ideological world, it is often said, the mask of human rights, respect for other states’ sovereignty, and the rest have fallen away.
But nothing about this is true. Our post-liberal world is penetrated by ideology even more than the liberal-democratic order was. Trump’s MAGA vision is pure ideology, even if it is contradicted daily by its own acts. Steve Bannon, a key ideologist of Trumpian populism, describes himself as a Leninist working to destroy the state. But under Trump, the US state machinery has grown stronger and more overbearing than ever, regularly violating existing laws and intervening in democratic processes and markets. For MAGA, “freedom of speech” is the prerogative of the powerful to offend and humiliate the weak, not the power of the oppressed and exploited to have their voices heard.
The same holds for Israel and Russia, to mention just two examples. Israel is now beset by Zionist fundamentalism, which invokes the Old Testament to legitimize the brutal colonization of Gaza and the West Bank. Equally, Putin legitimizes his power with a Eurasian ideology that opposes Western individualist liberalism and supposedly prizes traditional Christian values. Giving priority to the community, individuals should be prepared to sacrifice themselves for the state.
Along these lines, Alexander Kharichev, a top Putin ideologist, has formulated the basic features of Homo putinus, with its supposedly “self-sacrificing nature”: “For us, life itself seems to mean much less than it does for a Westerner. We believe there are things more important than mere existence. That, in essence, is the foundation of any faith.”
In all these cases, we are as far as possible from seeing the world as it is: what the predominant “realism” ignores is the extreme ideology that the status quo needs to reproduce itself.
This tension underlies one of the key features of today’s world: more and more states rely on criminal armed gangs to sustain their power. Haiti, punished for more than 200 years for its successful slave-led revolution, is merely the most extreme case of a so-called failed state, with gangs controlling 80% of the territory. Now, similar things are happening in Ecuador (where gangs openly occupy parts of cities) and in those parts of Mexico that are totally controlled by drug cartels.
In this context, we should also mention the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran’s morality policy. They function as an ideological police force, and often go to extremes that appear to embarrass the government. Recall the murder of Mahsa Amini after she was arrested for allegedly wearing her headscarf improperly. Then there was the Wagner Group, which the Russian government used as a proxy to retain plausible deniability for military operations abroad. It ultimately turned against Putin’s regime.
But the most obvious case is the Israeli settlers who are openly terrorizing Palestinians living in the West Bank. They act as an independent movement, committing crimes that range from burning Palestinians’ houses and olive trees to beating and killing Palestinians themselves. Meanwhile, the Israel Defense Forces just watch, intervening only if Palestinians actively resist the settlers. Again, a criminal gang is tolerated and even solicited by a state that wants to maintain plausible deniability.
Then there is Trump. Previously the instigator of an insurrection against the constitutional seat of power in the US, he is now enacting his own inner colonization by deploying militarized Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (and no longer the National Guard) to Democratic-run cities to terrorize their inhabitants. ICE has increased its headcount by 120% since Trump returned to the White House, recruiting 12,000 new agents and officers through a campaign targeting white nationalists, and handing them guns after just 47 days of training. With their faces masked, they function like Trump’s own West Bank settlers, forcibly entering people’s homes without judicial warrants. A Mexican priest who works in Minneapolis described ICE as worse than his country’s drug cartels.
Still, there is a key difference: Unlike Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Putin, Trump is not maintaining any distance from his criminal gang. He is their direct commander, and he is ordering them to ignore democratic institutions and the wishes of local authorities.
Thus, as the chief executive, Trump is the top enforcer of US law and the top gang leader all in one. One is reminded of GK Chesterton’s insight that “Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king.” With some irony, we can say that Trump effectively tries to function like the Christian god: the de facto king of the US, running his country mostly by decree, and simultaneously the top rebel against the state.
Trump’s recent behaviour renders this paradox even more visible. He recently filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, demanding $10 billion in damages from a federal government agency that he oversees. Alleging that he’s been wronged in his personal capacity, it appears that he would have the final say on whether he walks away with a settlement, and of what size.
We have seen something similar before, not in reality, but in a movie: Woody Allen’s early masterpiece Bananas (1971). In a courtroom scene, the hero and defendant, Fielding Mellish, acts as his own attorney and interrogates himself, shouting aggressive questions at the empty witness stand, then scrambling to the seat and giving rambling, confused answers. A half-century later, reality has caught up with the joke.
The writer is Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School
