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Parisians fill the Place del Republique on July 7, 2024, to celebrate the rout of the far-right National Rally party in the general election. (AP/Yonhap)

By Slavoj Žižek, Global Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University

The most important thing to note about the current resurgence of rightist populism is how this resurgence is regularly perceived by its partisans: A single rhetorical figure returns again and again in different variations. The new populists advocate moderate normality against the violent imposition by the corporate media and by the extreme left. The constant pressure of “LGBT+ ideology,” which makes them feel somehow guilty if they are just a normal “cis” woman or man, as if being “binary” is in itself an act of oppression; the constant threat to be “canceled” for some act or statement where the rules that make you blameworthy are never clearly formulated in advance — a speech act or a gesture which was acceptable a week ago is all of a sudden prohibited; the urge to exercise constant self-humiliation, as if racism and sexism are not just your properties but are inscribed into your very existence. All of this effectively seems to create a stale and suffocating atmosphere, in contrast to many marginal and allegedly “subversive” identities that you are solicited to enjoy fully.

An extreme case of such a burst of fake fresh air into the suffocating pressure of wokeism was recently provided by Michael Millerman, an American Heideggerian who sympathizes with Aleksandr Dugin. He recently published on YouTube a podcast episode titled, “Why is everything normal called fascist?” Here is his own resume of his stance:
“What’s up with the ‘everyone I don't like is Hitler’ phenomenon? It’s strange but not incomprehensible. Post-war liberal zealotry (combined with leftist antifascism) coded a lot of things as ‘far-right’ and made them taboo, including some important things that we need in order to understand political and human life well.”

We should also pay attention to the numerous reactions to Millerman’s podcast, which clarify the context: “If they call me fascist I know I’m doing something right.” “My friend chose a surgeon on principles of diversity and inclusion. She died.” “Every normal person was ‘fascist’ prior to WW2. Blood and soil, love of ones own, wariness of the other is how we are wired. Perfectly healthy.” “I’ve been called a fascist for being ex-Muslim and criticizing Islam publicly.” “If everything normal is Fascist, then Fascism is...” “The best definition of ‘extreme Right wing’ is anything which isn't wrong.” 

Marine le Pen and people around here amply rely on this logic, although they firmly reject that they are neo-fascists. They claim that it is the leftist liberals who confuse their healthy normality with fascism. But there are some who followed the logic to the end: “If everything normal is fascist, then fascism is normal.”

When in the July 4 elections, the Labour Party won triumphantly, almost obliterating the Conservative Party, many liberals thought that the UK proved a bright exception to this trend. However, one should not underestimate that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party got over 4 million votes (although, due to the UK voting system, this translated into five members of parliament). It is quite possible that if the Conservative Party is effectively marginalized, what will occupy its place will be a much more openly racist and populist new rightist movement. 

It is all too easy to attribute the widespread appeal of the new populism to ideological mystification and manipulation — things are more subtle. The rise of new populists demonstrates how there is a whole stratum of dissatisfaction that we, the liberal “enlightened” guys, ignore, a stratum that cannot be reduced to deeply embedded traditional racism.

So we should “de-naturalize” or de-normalize the new fascism, but not by just rejecting its topics. There is nothing immanently false or “fascist” in patriotism, or in the attachment to one’s own specific way of life — just recall George Orwell’s celebration of the British pub as an embodiment of the working-class way of life. What the new rightist populism does is that it gives patriotism a paranoiac twist: instead of confidently enjoying one’s own community, it focuses on envy and resentment directed at what it perceives as the external threats to it, from foreigners and to “deviant” sexual practices.

The problem with the so-called TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) is that the way they oppose this multiplicity of fluid identities is firmly entrenched within the confines of identity politics. Their targets are those men who pretend to be trans women but, in the TERF view, remain men who pretend to be women without effectively participating in the dense material processes which in our societies define a woman. In short, the TERFs desperately endeavor to protect feminine identity from unwanted intruders.

That’s why the new populist right is not a homogeneous formation — its patriotism is a fake, it is not sure of itself. Here we encounter the first paradox: The new populist right is not too patriotic, it is not patriotic enough. It is a mystified form of resistance to global capitalism, reacting to the fact that, economically and ideologically, the mass of so-called ordinary people is under pressure from the establishment (state, big corporations, media, education). New populists perspicuously and obscenely intervene here, presenting themselves as the voice of the ordinary working people against the establishment. The new populist right pretends to be a radical resistance to the established order — the Trump ideologist Steve Bannon even calls himself a Leninist — but it is far from being this. Supported by many billionaires, it leaves the basic edifice of capitalism untouched.

However, those who resist the new populist right should first turn a critical gaze upon themselves since they are caught in a homologous paradox. The wokeist left is effectively beset by imposing a crippling superego regime that is correctly experienced as a manipulation by the ruling elite. Even if they present themselves as the protectors of the (sexually, racially, economically) excluded and marginalized, the very form of their activity is deeply oppressive and thus undermines their official goal. What permeates “cancel culture” is a “no-debate-stance”: a person or position is not only excluded, what is excluded is the very debate, but the confrontation of arguments, for or against this exclusion.

Hegel would have mobilized here what Lacan called the gap between enunciated content and the underlying stance of enunciation: You argue for diversity and inclusion, but you do it by excluding all those who do not fully subscribe to your own definition of diversity and inclusion, so all you do is permanently exclude people and stances. In this way, the struggle for inclusion and diversity gives birth to an atmosphere of Stasi-like suspicion and denunciation where you never know when a private remark of yours will lead to your elimination from the public space.

Don’t we get here an extreme version of the joke about eating the last cannibal? “There are no opponents of diversity and inclusion in our group — we’ve just excluded the last one…” The only enjoyment available to you is thus to identify with your superego oppressors, to be more severe than others and resign yourself to the fact that the more you try to comply with the superego rules the more you will feel guilty. There will never be a moment when you will be able to say: “I finally did it, now I can relax and be what I am!”

The basic move of the new populist right is precisely to tell you: “Relax, be proud of what you are” — just saying this clearly seems to break the stalemate and bring fresh air into the situation. But while the populists want to maintain the predominant existing way of life, they are forced to intervene brutally in the dynamic world that is our reality today. And while the wokeist left advocates radical change, the change they envisage perfectly fits the old wisdom: change things constantly so that nothing will really change.

So let’s conclude with a double paradox: the new populist right is not patriotic enough while the wokeist left is not radical enough. The new populist right is openly Eurocentric, while the wokeist left remains Eurocentric in its very form: they act like a privileged stratum which protects the marginalized and excluded. They act in a patronizing way, pretending to know better than the oppressed what is in the interest of the oppressed, and scolding them without any restraint when they do not act as they should. In short, the “politically correct” woke discourse is ultimately telling the oppressed Others what they truly are, locating them to their proper place within the ideological universe (even if that place is presented as a place of no-place), and the Others are thus pushed towards a hysterical reaction: “Why am I what you are telling me that I am?”

There is thus a deep complicity that unites the new populist right and the wokeist left: they are the two sides of the same coin, the two ways to avoid the tremendous problems we are all confronting today. They both ignore the antagonisms inscribed into the very heart of today’s global capitalism.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]