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View all search resultsMAGA’s midterm defeat won’t change the course of history
The world must not succumb to euphoria following Donald Trump’s latest defeat. If anything, his lame-duck status deprives Americans and everyone else of an excuse for avoiding hard conversations about the truly radical changes that will be needed to avert future catastrophes.
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United States President Donald Trump disembarks Air Force One on Nov. 8, 2026, at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. (Reuters/Eric Lee)
M
y duty as a philosopher is to spoil the ecstatic sense of relief that has followed the United States midterm elections. Yes, at first glance, we all triumphed: Not only did Donald Trump’s Republican Party suffer a spectacular defeat, but Trump even accepted his loss and promised to work with the incoming Democratic Congress. We were spared the state of emergency or canceled results that so many had feared.
Still, my basic position hasn’t changed since 2016, when I told an interviewer that I would vote for Trump. The man may be absolutely “disgusting”, I explained, but his victory would trigger a “big awakening”: delivering a fundamental shock to the American political system and forcing long-needed realignments.
I preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton, a notorious war hawk with deep ties to big banks, not because he was any better but because he could be counted on to generate a fierce public response. You can well imagine the brutal attacks that my stance provoked. Still, I think I was right, albeit too early.
My own view is that this decade-long obsession with Trump reflects his elevation to the status of a fetish, in the psychoanalytic sense. As Jacques Lacan observed, even if what a cuckolded husband claims about his wife is true (she sleeps around), his jealousy is pathological because it represents the only way for him to retain his dignity, even his identity.
Equally, one could say that even if the Nazis’ claims about the Jews were true (they were not, to be clear), their anti-Semitism would still be pathological because it served to repress the true reasons for their ideological position. Longing to believe that German society was an organic blood-and-soil community of harmonious collaboration, they needed an external intruder to account for various undeniable divisions and antagonisms.
The anti-Semitic figure of the Jew takes on all these antagonisms and becomes the last thing an anti-Semite sees before he is confronted with the naked truth. In this sense, the fetishized image of Trump is the last thing a liberal sees before confronting the reality of class struggle.
Liberals remain fascinated and obsessed with him because he allows them to avoid the topic of class. Hegel’s observation that “evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself” is apt: The liberal gaze that demonizes Trump is itself evil, because it ignores how its own failures created the space for his brand of nationalistic populism.
