Existential Choice in the Time of Trump, 2

Cognitive and Human Divides

The Two Faces of Democracy: Decentering Agonism and Deliberation | Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (iasculture.org)

In Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? the constitutionally contrarian Slavoj Žižek argues that totalitarianism, “far from being an effective theoretical concept” is actually a “stopgap” against thinking. Well, we all have our peculiar little upsurges of anti-liberal, disruptive theorizing. A little less daringly, and closer to right, I claim that the phrase partisan divide is such a stopgap. Even today, after eight years of Trumpism, some in the journalistic wisdom pool and among the collected sages of the commentariat will gather themselves up in waves of sameness to lament the “partisan divide” between Trump supporters and those who are – well, let’s say just for now, not Trump supporters. A pat mediocrity of thought, limp with facile moralizing, an empty dress of virtue with a Church bonnet on it, the phrase misses almost everything.

The question occurs in the …