the ziz

Slavoj Zizek wrote this article (alternate link) that is ostensibly a review of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas but is really a thought-provoking critique of the left/liberal conception of populist conservatives. It’s a typical Zizek piece — slippery, uneven, and smart.

His primary point is that populist conservatives are not on the wrong side of things but rather not radical enough. That is, if they desire freedom then they lean towards conservatism only because they do not see the lack of freedom inherent in capitalist domination; and if they abhor the contemporary degradation of morals, they lean towards conservatism only because they do not see how capitalism drives the desire for depravity through it’s need for new demands.

There’s a lot more in the article, esp. concerning the class and classist foundation of the culture war. I’ve been trying to summarize it for a while with little success — it may well be impossible. Zizek’s popular writing is often filled with gaps that are difficult to fill. Someday I will write something that has my own thoughts (*gasp*) on the topics he raises and, hopefully, say something more complete than he. Until then, here’s a great quote from the article:

We should thus not only refuse the easy liberal contempt for the populist fundamentalists (or, even worse, the patronizing regret of how “manipulated” they are); we should reject the very terms of the culture war.