Slavoj Žižek, ever the firebrand philosopher and provocateur, has once again yanked at the frayed threads of liberal democracy in a bombshell interview with the BBC. Declaring the arrival of a “new age of shamelessness,” Žižek throws politeness out the window and hurls intellectual Molotovs at the complacency of the left, the hypocrisy of liberal elites, and the dangerous illusions of the political centre. In his words, “Trump is nonetheless a symptom, a reaction to the failure of the mainstream welfare state, liberal democratic…” And Žižek doesn’t flinch when he suggests that what the world really needs now is a leftist Trump.
Žižek opens with a tragicomic summary of the moment: “The situation is tragic but it gives some hope.” His optimism is laced with irony. The tragedy? That the left spent decades crying wolf over neoliberalism, only to be outpaced by a figure they loathe: Donald Trump. “Trump did it! Something radically new is emerging,” Žižek asserts with trademark bluntness. It’s not praise; it’s a wake-up call. For Žižek, Trump is less a leader than a symptom—“a change-maker” who exposed the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of both centrist liberals and a complacent left.
He’s merciless when it comes to the Democrats. “The people who did some of the best work for Donald Trump are the US Democrat Party,” he quips, accusing them of playing “upper middle class games of identity politics” while ignoring the real material discontent of the working class. “Why do we criticise voters for choosing the change-maker?” he asks. “The voters were offered this change-making Trump or Joe Biden who could not talk, walk or ride a bicycle.”
His critique is razor-sharp: the Democratic Party became obsessed with symbolism, “a fake false spectacle” at Biden’s inauguration while failing to present any serious structural alternative. Žižek ridicules the liberal belief that Trump was a mere blip, an “abomination” soon to be erased by the return of establishment sanity. But Trump didn’t vanish—he merely revealed the rot beneath the surface.
Žižek’s own controversial stance in 2016—that a Trump presidency might awaken the left—earned him scorn. But he’s unrepentant. “I still keep it,” he insists, although he admits the wager didn’t entirely pay off. “If we let him take power now, before he fully formulated his reason, maybe people will feel what he is and turn against him. But it didn’t work.” Instead of an awakening, Žižek saw a vacuum.
And into that vacuum stormed the far right—because the left, in his view, had nothing to offer. What Žižek sees in Trump is not a political programme worth emulating, but a method: an unashamed, charismatic force who acts decisively. “I think the left needs, sorry for saying this, a leftist, not dictator, but charismatic, authoritarian person.”
That’s not to say Žižek longs for a Stalinist redux. His model is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “who de facto ruled as not as a dictator, but he was so strong that he ignored the Congress.” FDR, Žižek reminds us, didn’t just throw money at problems—he militarised the economy without undermining civil production. “If you do militarisation in an intelligent way, it can help boost production.” This is where Žižek parts company with the latte-sipping left. “I don’t believe in this pseudo-leftist bullshit… You have to choose either arms or butter or whatever.”
He’s just warming up. Žižek takes aim at postmodernist leftists whose political climax is a million-person protest. “What interests me is what you call, I think in English and American, the morning after. How will actual people feel the difference three months later?” This, he argues, is the real challenge for the left—translating spectacle into substance, protest into policy.
Yet his ultimate target isn’t Trump—it’s the failure of liberal globalism. Žižek describes the neoliberal order with bitter precision: “American oligarchs exploiting Chinese workers. And American workers at the same time.” He identifies Trump’s nostalgic fantasy of restoring 1950s-style American manufacturing as delusional, but at least it was a fantasy rooted in real pain. The liberal elites offered no vision at all—just a smug sense of superiority.
And here’s the twist: Žižek argues that in today’s realpolitik, Trump, Putin, and even Xi Jinping speak the same language. “Big powers do what they want because they can,” he warns. “They don’t even feel this hypocritical need to somehow justify it.” It’s pure Orwell—not the internal surveillance of 1984, but its international logic: “Three big superpowers, each has its sphere of influence.” Žižek points out that Trump and Putin might be enemies on paper, but ideologically, they’re in sync: transactional, authoritarian, and utterly unashamed.
In the midst of this, Europe flounders. “Europe is caught in between, divided,” Žižek laments. His prescription? A paradoxical one: Europe must become a superpower, even if it means aligning temporarily with China. It must develop a “clear political vision” and embrace “militarisation, arms and so on.” In this, Žižek flips the old leftist script. He sees no future in the “old welfare state social democratic dream”—which, he argues, ends in centrists like Keir Starmer. “Can I be very brutal here?” he asks. “Isn’t it that the UK has today one big centre-centre-right moderate party, it’s called Labour Party?”
Brexit? For Žižek, it’s an illusion of sovereignty. “The alternative to Europe is not big sovereign United Kingdom. It’s United Kingdom as de facto, in some sense, a colony of the United States.” Far from freeing Britain, Brexit made it geopolitically irrelevant.
But again, he returns to the void: the gaping emptiness of political vision. “What gives me hope is this very chaos,” he says. “Because this chaos, it’s a tragic situation, people are aware of it.” That awareness, Žižek believes, could catalyse something genuinely new—but only if the left dares to reimagine itself. “The first thing for the left to realise is… to quote Lenin… you have to descend back to zero point and start to climb the mountain for a totally different direction.”
And that direction, for Žižek, is paradoxically moral, even conservative. He wants a “neo-conservative left,” one that speaks for “moral majority, common decency,” and abandons the self-sabotaging irony of postmodernism. “The new right is obscene enough,” he snaps. “It’s time… for the left to stop with this subversive bullshit.”
His final provocation? January 6th. “My friends were crying because they said, isn’t this the leftist dream? United people penetrate the seat of power. Yes, sorry, they took even this from us.” In this topsy-turvy world, Žižek notes the paradox that “Donald Trump as a person, isn’t he a pure post-modern relativist, making jokes of himself, changing position. Bernie Sanders is a common, decent, consistent man.”
And that, for Žižek, is the real tragedy: that consistency and decency—hallmarks of the left—are no match for the shamelessness of the right. Unless the left learns to fight fire with fire, to act boldly and speak clearly, it will remain, at best, a moral commentary. “We are entering with this new Orwellian order. It’s a new age of shamelessness,” Žižek says, voice heavy with warning.
The question he leaves us with is as bracing as it is simple: will the left dare to get its hands dirty? Or will it keep losing to those who already have?
