Slavoj Žižek — Democracy: Is This The End?

Žižek contends that the Culture War raging in the developed West is a false war, a war between two versions of the same global capitalist system: its unrestrained pure version and its “neo-Fascist” conservative version which tries to unite capitalist dynamism with traditional values and liberties. As Žižek argues, the paradox is here double: Western Political Correctness is a displacement of the old class struggle – the liberal elite pretends to protect the threatened racial and sexual minorities to obfuscate the basic fact of their privileged economic and power position. This allows the alt Right populists to present themselves as a defense of the “real” working class against the big corporations and “deep state” elites. The implication to be drawn is not that Left and Right are today outdated notions but that both poles of today’s Cold War can only be properly grasped as a displaced class struggle: neither of them really stands for those exploited. What is becoming more obvious is the in