The Liberal Waterloo (Or, finally some good news from Washington!)
By Slavoj Zizek

The first reaction of progressives to Bush’s second victory was that of 
despair, even fear: The last four years were
not just a bad dream. The nightmarish coalition of big business and 
fundamentalist populism will roll on, as Bush
pursues his agenda with new gusto, nominating conservative judges to the 
Supreme Court, invading the next country
after Iraq, and pushing liberalism in the United States one step closer to 
extinction. However, this emotional reaction
is precisely what we should resist—it only bears witness to the extent 
liberals have succeeded in imposing their
worldview upon us. If we keep a cool head and calmly analyze the results, 
the 2004 election appears in a totally
different light.

Many Europeans wonder how Bush could have won, with the intellectual and 
pop-cultural elite against him. They must
now finally confront the underrated mobilizing power of American Christian 
fundamentalism. Because of its
self-evident imbecility, it is a much more paradoxical, properly postmodern 
phenomenon than it appears.

Take the literary bestsellers of U.S. Christian fundamentalism, Tim F. 
LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s “Left
Behind” series of 12 novels on the upcoming end of the world that have sold 
more than 60 million copies. The Left
Behind story begins with the sudden, inexplicable disappearance of millions 
of people—the saved souls whom
God calls to himself in order to spare them the horrors of Armageddon. The 
Anti-Christ then appears, a young, slick
and charismatic Romanian politician named Nicolae Carpathia, who, after 
being elected general secretary of
the United Nations, moves U.N. headquarters to Babylon where he imposes an 
anti-American world government that
disarms all nation-states. This ridiculous plot unfolds until the final 
battle when all non-Christians—Jews,
Muslims, et al—are consumed in a cataclysmic fire. Imagine the outcry in the 
Western liberal media if a similar story
written from the Muslim standpoint had become a bestseller in the Arab 
countries! It is not the poverty and
primitivism of these novels that is breathtaking, but rather the strange 
overlap between the “serious” religious
message and the trashiest conventions of pop culture commercialism.

My next reflection concerns the basic paradox of democracy as revealed in 
The History of the VKP(b)—the Stalinist
bible. Stalin (who ghost-wrote the book) describes the vote at a party 
congress in the late ’20s: “With a large
majority, the delegates unanimously approved the resolution proposed by the 
Central Committee.” If the vote was
unanimous, where then did the minority disappear? Far from betraying some 
perverse “totalitarian” twist, this paradox
is built into the very structure of democracy. Democracy is based on a 
short-circuit between the majority and the
“All.” In it, the winner takes all and the majority counts as All, obtaining 
all the power, even if this majority is
merely a couple hundred votes among millions.

“Democracy” is not merely the “power of, by and for the people.” It is not 
enough to claim that in a democracy the
majority’s will and interests (the two do not automatically coincide) 
determine state decisions. Today, democracy is
above all about formal legalism—the unconditional adherence to a set of 
formal rules that guarantee society’s
antagonisms are fully absorbed into the political arena. “Democracy” means 
that whatever electoral manipulation
takes place all politicians will unconditionally respect the results. In 
this sense, the 2000 U.S. presidential
election was effectively “democratic”: In spite of obvious electoral 
manipulations and the patent meaninglessness of
the fact that several hundred votes in Florida decided who would be 
president of the entire nation, the Democratic
candidate accepted his defeat. In the weeks of uncertainty after the 
election, Bill Clinton made an appropriate
acerbic comment: “The American people have spoken; we just don’t know what 
they said.” This comment should be taken
more seriously than it was meant. To this day, we still don’t know what they 
said—perhaps because there was no
“message” behind the result at all.

Those old enough still remember the boring attempts of “democratic 
socialists” to oppose the miserable
“really-existing socialism” by holding up the vision of authentic socialism. 
To such attempts, the standard
Hegelian answer provides the sufficient response: The failure of reality to 
live up to its notion bears witness
to the inherent weakness of the notion itself. Why shouldn’t the same hold 
for democracy? Isn’t it too simple
to oppose the “really-existing” liberal capitalist-democracy to a more true 
radical democracy?

This is not to imply that Bush’s victory was an accidental mistake, a result 
of fraud or manipulation. Hegel wrote
apropos Napoleon that he had to lose two times: Only after Waterloo did it 
become clear to him that his defeat was not
a military accident but the expression of a deeper historical shift. The 
same goes for Bush: He had to win two
times in order for liberals to perceive that we are all entering a new era.

On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers were hit. Twelve years earlier, on 
November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.
November 9 announced the “happy ‘90s,” the Francis Fukuyama dream of the 
“end of history,” the belief that liberal
democracy had, in principle, won, and that the only obstacles to this 
ultra-Hollywood happy ending were merely local pockets of resistance where 
the leaders did not yet grasp that their time was over. In contrast, 9/11 
symbolizes the end of the Clintonite happy ‘90s, heralding
an era of new walls—between Israel and the West Bank, around the European 
Union, on the U.S.-Mexico border.

In their recent The War Over Iraq, William Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan 
wrote, “The mission begins in Baghdad,
but it does not end there … We stand at the cusp of a new historical era … 
This is a decisive moment … It is so
clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the 
Middle East and the war on terror. It is
about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the 
twenty-first century.” One cannot but agree with
them. It is effectively the future of the international community that is at 
stake now—the new rules that will
regulate it, what the new world order will be.

A new vision of the New World Order is thus emerging as the effective 
framework of recent U.S. politics: After
September 11, America basically wrote off the rest of the world as a 
reliable partner. The ultimate goal was no
longer the Fukuyama utopia of expanding universal liberal democracy, but the 
transformation of the United States into
“Fortress America,” a lone superpower isolated from the rest of the world, 
protecting its vital economic interests
and securing its safety through its new military power. This new military 
not only includes forces for rapid
deployment anywhere on the globe, but also the development of space weapons 
that enable the Pentagon to control the
global surface from above. This strategy throws a new light on the recent 
conflicts between the United States and
Europe: It is not Europe that is “betraying” the United States. The United 
States no longer needs to rely on its
exclusive partnership with Europe. In short, Bush’s America pretends to be a 
new global empire but it is not. Rather,
it remains a nation-state ruthlessly pursuing its interests. It is as if 
U.S. politics is now being guided by
a weird reversal of the ecologists’ well-known motto: Act globally, think 
locally.

Within these coordinates, every progressive who thinks should be glad for 
Bush’s victory. It is good for the
entire world because the contours of the confrontations to come will now be 
drawn in a much starker way. A Kerry
victory would have been a kind of historical anomaly, blurring the true 
lines of division. After all, Kerry did
not have a global vision that would present a feasible alternative to Bush’s 
politics. Further, Bush’s victory is
paradoxically better for both the European and Latin American economies: In 
order to get trade union backing,
Kerry promised to support protectionist measures.

However, the main advantage involves international politics. If Kerry had 
won, it would have forced liberals
to face the consequences of the Iraq war, allowing the Bush camp to blame 
Democrats for the results of their own
catastrophic decisions. In her famous 1979 Commentary essay, “Dictators and 
Double Standards,” Jeanne Kirkpatrick
elaborated on the distinction between “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” 
regimes in order to justify the U.S. policy
of collaborating with Rightist dictators, while actively subverting 
Communist regimes. Authoritarian dictators are
pragmatic rulers concerned with power and wealth and indifferent towards 
ideological issues, even if they pay
lip service to some big cause. In contrast, totalitarian leaders are 
selfless, ideology driven fanatics who put
everything at stake for their ideals. So while one can deal with 
authoritarian rulers who react rationally and
predictably to material and military threats, totalitarian leaders are more 
dangerous and must be directly confronted.
The irony is that this distinction encapsulates perfectly what went wrong 
with the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Saddam
was a corrupt authoritarian dictator striving for power and guided by brutal 
pragmatic considerations (which led him to
collaborate with the United States throughout the ’80s). But in removing 
him, the U.S. intervention has led to the
creation of a “fundamentalist” opposition that precludes any pragmatic 
compromises.

Bush’s victory will dispel the illusions about the solidarity of interests 
among the developed Western
countries. It will give a new impetus to the painful but necessary process 
of strengthening new alliances like the
European Union or Mercosur in Latin America. It is a journalistic cliché to 
praise the “postmodern” dynamic of
U.S. capitalism against the “old Europe” stuck in its regulatory Welfare 
State illusions. However, in the domain
of political organization, Europe is now going much further than the United 
States has toward constituting itself as an
unprecedented, properly “post-modern,” trans-state collective able to 
provide a place for anyone, independent
of geography or culture.

No reason to despair, then. The prospects may be dark today, but remember 
one of the great Bushisms: “The future
will be better tomorrow.”