Umm…what? Like, this entire tirade is basically what coastal neoliberal elites say:
“poor Whites voted for Trump so they deserve to die”
“IDF actually cares about LGBTQ people and Hamas kills them”
and so on and so on.
I think a lot of the left actually agrees with this, but are able to deny pretty explicitly anti-populist positions by claiming to represent a hypothetical people who will learn to support the right positions at some unspecified time. Like consider the most populist position Bernie held was healthcare reforms that originated from the democrat establishment. The positions he adopted from left academia however were things the larger dem voting base often did not want, things that needed to be imposed from the top down. It was much the same with Corbyn where he was having to oppose existing populist energy in favor of the hypothetical populism that would exist after extensive social engineering.
This isn’t to say that anything that isn’t populist is inherently wrong, but it does seem like there’s a general state of confusion about what the left actually consist of. People have adopted the messaging of long dead movements that had very different bases of power and mixed it with existing movements that have contradicting aims and methodologies.
zizek often has :jesse-wtf: takes
why are you quoting thinga that werent in the video, and arent actual quotes. I watched the clip, he doesnt say anything like neolibs. I agree with him, in lots of places people need state authority or else they will kill half a million and not blink.
…I wasn’t quoting him, I was saying what neolibs say and wanted to know how what Zizek says in this video is different from that?
I was confused because those quotes arent really at all what hes talking about. He’s saying populism is bad. He says that nowadays European populists want rascist things. Therefore, not everyone should get what they want. He’s even offering a solution to populist democracy, totalitarianism, something a neolib would ring their hands over
Consider the fact that the reason why people portray this line of thinking as bad is mostly because it’s used by people they don’t like against people they like, and not because it’s intrinsically a bad thing.
Come on. You want people to not tell it like it is because things that are true can be used as an excuse for literal X Y and Z?
