Trump as symptom of a dead democratic-welfare center

01:19:44 — Trump as symptom of a dead democratic-welfare center

Žižek’s farewell thesis aligns the analysis. Trump is real, dangerous, and not the primary target. He is a symptomatic expression of an older formation — the democratic welfare-state center — that has lost both its ideological content and its instinct for self-preservation. The spectacle of Democrats conceding more than Trump to end the government shutdown is, in his reading, the formation diagnosing itself. The real work is not defeating the symptom but reckoning with what died to produce it.