On Monday evening, the eve of the midterm elections, the controversial Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek discussed his new book, “Signs from the Future,” at the Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University in the U.S. capital.
The audience consisted largely of young students who found Žižek’s arguments and ideas provocative and who were encouraged to think and debate.
As usual, Žižek moved freely between cinema, philosophy and everyday politics, seasoning his remarks with jokes, anecdotes and quotations to make his ideas more accessible.
While discussing political change around the world, and particularly in the United States, Žižek borrowed a line from the film “Munich: The Edge of War” that seemed to capture the essence of his thinking.
The film is set in 1938, during the negotiations that preceded the signing of the Munich Agreement, an effort to rein in Hitler and avert World War II. In it, one character says there is still hope of preventing war through diplomacy. Another responds: “Hope is waiting for someone else to do it. We’d all be much better off without it.”
For Žižek, what the world needs today to bring about change is despair, not hope. In his view, hope can stand in the way of genuine change. He sees it as a sedative that keeps people sitting on the sidelines, waiting for institutions to fix themselves.
From there, Žižek turns to the phenomenon of Donald Trump. Despite his biting mockery of Trump and strong opposition to his political project, Žižek does not hide his admiration for the president’s ability to unsettle established assumptions and alter the structural realities of America and the world.
Žižek seeks to distinguish between admiration for authority and decisiveness on one hand and authoritarianism on the other. The historic problem facing the left and forces seeking change, he argues, is their reluctance to exercise executive power decisively, while their opponents have no hesitation about turning the table upside down.
This argument is not unique to Žižek. It also appears to be gaining traction in other intellectual circles, most notably in the work of seminal American political thinker Francis Fukuyama, author of “The End of History.”
A few weeks ago, at a public library in Washington, Fukuyama, discussed his new book, “The Realm of the Last Man” and advanced a similar argument about political change in the United States in the event of a “blue wave” in the midterm elections and the election of a Democratic president in 2028.
For Fukuyama, any incoming president, even one swept into office by a Democratic landslide, will be unable to accomplish anything or repair what Trump has “damaged” unless he adopts Trump’s own tools. That means governing through executive orders and having the courage to overcome the crippling slowness of the U.S. bureaucracy to deliver tangible promises to the public, provided such actions remain within the law and the Constitution.
The implicit message from both Fukuyama and Žižek is that Trumpism is no longer merely a political movement but a way of doing things that has been imposed on everyone.
According to Žižek, New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, offers a model for what future Democratic Party leadership should look like. That includes his willingness to work in alignment with Trump himself to keep government functioning and avoid paralysis.
Amid these discussions in Washington about change, hope and despair, I found myself thinking of a familiar Arab saying: “Life would be unbearable were it not for the glimmer of hope,” attributed to the poet al-Tughrai.
Perhaps now, when thinking about change and finding a way out of the impasse of war and politics in the labyrinthof the Middle East, it is time to reconsider the possibility of despair.
