In the preface to Zizek’s Plague of Fantasies, he points to the kind of paternal fantasy at work in many tyrannical social structures. He offers as evidence Josef Fritzl who basically trapped his children in his basement and exploited them and rationalized it as him simply doing his “sometimes uncomfortable” duty to protect his children, his duty to protect them even if means destroying them. Zizek then connects this to the case of Nicolae Ceausecu who brutally ruled Romania who, when asked about his travel ban, rationalized through an imagined paternal mandate to protect his children from the “evil world”, much as Fritzl did.
Now in the next week and a half I will be immersed in this book, I hope to go deeper into the more abstract and subtle aspects of Zizek’s thesis (think the push/pull effect of jouissance here). But for today, I have to apply it to the most prevalent issue in everyone’s life right now (can you guess it?): Trump.
I mean it: nothing could better prop up Zizek’s model of the tyrant than Trump’s style of public speaking. He clearly fancies himself some kind of paternal figure looking out for the interests of his children: disenfranchised white people. And no matter how ignorant it may seem , and no matter how much we dispel it, he will still experience it, in his head, as some kind of paternal wisdom: something that we, as his children, don’t yet understand.
Now some among us might dismiss my point as alarmist since, given the system we have that is pushing back, Trump will never be able to live out that fantasy. But that is really beside the point. What should really matter to us is a rather profound point made by Tony Schwartz on AM Joy today on MSNBC when asked about Trump’s coziness with brutal dictators such as Kim Jung Un and Putin:
The thing to understand is that Trump, to his frustration, has to deal with the institutions our democracy has built over the years. He has to play nice. But make no mistake about it: were he to have the lack of consequences that Un and Putin have, he has the perfect potential to be every bit as brutal and murderous as any dictator before him –that is given his outright narcissism, psychopathy, and, in general, mental illness. We can see this in his general comfort with the idea of separating children from their parents when they seek refuge in America.
I mean how close do you have to get to kicking babies and puppies to recognize how dangerous this asshole and his followers really are?