JD Vance as Supreme Censor: Battles and Deals between the New Right and the Woke Left, According to Slavoj Žižek

In an executive order signed on March 27, 2025, Trump put Vice President J.D. Vance in charge of halting government spending on “exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy.” This order targets the Smithsonian Institution , the world's largest museum complex:

“The Smithsonian Institution, once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, has in recent years fallen under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology . This shift has promoted narratives that present American and Western values ​​as inherently harmful and oppressive.” (1)

It is crucial that we properly situate this direct act of censorship, worthy of the darkest Stalinist purges directed against "bourgeois cosmopolitanism": it is decidedly not a simple regression from the anti-racist and feminist achievements of Political Correctness . Rather, it is its symptom, the brutal surfacing of what was actually wrong with what Trumpists call the madness of PC .

The constellation that predominated until the rise of the new right-wing populism was excellently described by Jean-Claude Milner (2), who postulated that what we call “the West” is today a confederation under American hegemony. The US reigns over us intellectually as well, but here “we must accept a paradox: American domination in the intellectual field is expressed in discourses of dissent and protest and not in discourses of order.”

The global university teaches us "to partially or totally reject the economic, political, and ideological functioning of the Western order, in part or in its entirety. Inequality plays the role of an axiom, from which all ultimate critique derives. Depending on the situation, one or another specific form of general inequality will be privileged: colonial oppression, cultural appropriation, the primacy of white culture, patriarchy, gender conflicts, etc."

Along the same lines, Remi Adekoya points out that research has uncovered a strange fact: when voters were asked what value they valued most, in the developed West the vast majority chose equality, while in sub-Saharan Africa the vast majority largely ignored equality and put wealth first (regardless of how it was acquired, even through corruption).

This result makes sense: the developed West can afford to prioritize equality (at the level of ideological self-perception), while the main concern of the poor majority in sub-Saharan Africa is how to survive and overcome devastating poverty.(3) Here we have another paradox: this fight against inequality is self-destructive to the extent that it undermines its own foundations and is therefore unable to present itself as a project for positive global change:

“Precisely because the cultural heritage of the West cannot free itself from the inequalities that made its existence possible, those who condemned inequality in the past are seen as benefiting from one or another previously unrecognized inequality. /.../ all revolutionary movements and the very notions of revolution are now subject to suspicion, simply because they belong to the long line of dead white males.”

It is crucial to note that the New Right and the Woke Left share this self-destructive stance . In late May 2023, the Davis School District, north of Salt Lake City, removed the Bible from elementary and middle schools, while keeping it in high schools after a commission reviewed the Scriptures in response to a complaint from Parents United of Utah, dated December 11, 2022, stating: “You will no doubt find that the Bible (under state law) has no ‘serious values ​​for minors’ because it is pornographic by our new definition.”(4)

Is this just a case of Mormons versus Christians? No: On June 2, 2023, a complaint was filed regarding the scriptures of Utah’s predominant faith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . District spokesperson Chris Williams confirmed that someone had submitted a request for a review of the Book of Mormon . What political-ideological option is behind this request? Is it the Woke Left (exerting an ironic revenge against right-wingers who ban courses and books on US history, Black Lives Matter , LGBT+, etc.) or is it the radicalized Right itself, which (very consistently) applied its family values ​​criteria to its own founding texts?

Ultimately, it doesn't matter. What we should point to is rather the fact that the same logic of banning (or at least rewriting) classic texts has taken hold of both the New Right and the Woke Left , confirming the justified suspicion that, despite their strong ideological animus, they often formally proceed in the same way. While the Woke Left systematically destroys its own foundations (the European emancipatory tradition), the Right has finally mustered enough courage to question the obscenity of its own tradition. In an act of cruel irony, the Western democratic tradition, which usually praises itself for including self-criticism (democracy has flaws, but it also includes the effort to overcome its flaws...), now takes this self-critical stance to the extreme: “equality” is a mask for its opposite, etc. So all that remains is the tendency toward self-destruction. But there is a difference between the Western anti-Western discourse and the anti-Western discourse that comes from outside:

“While an anti-Western discourse is being deployed within the West (and the West is proud of it), another anti-Western discourse is being maintained outside the West. Except that the first sees inequality as a defect that one has no moral right to exploit; the second, on the contrary, sees inequality as a virtue, provided it is oriented toward one's own benefit. Consequently, the defenders of the second anti-Western discourse see in the first an indication of the enemy's decadence. They do not hide their contempt.”

And their contempt is fully justified. The result of Western anti-Western discourse is what one would expect: the more Western liberal leftists delve into their own culpability, the more Muslim fundamentalists accuse them of being hypocrites trying to hide their hatred of Islam . Such a paradigm perfectly reproduces the paradox of the superego: the more you obey what the pseudo-moral agency demands of you, the more guilty you are: it is as if the more you tolerate Islam, the stronger its pressure on you. The same is undoubtedly true of the influx of refugees: the more Western Europe opens itself to them, the more guilty it will feel for not having accepted more; by definition, it can never accept enough. The more tolerance one shows toward non-Western ways of life, the more one will be made to feel guilty for not practicing enough tolerance.

The radical Woke response to this is: the non-Western critics are right, Western self-abasement is false; the non-Western critics are right to insist that, whatever the West grants them, “this isn’t that”; we maintain our framework of superiority and expect them to integrate, but why should they? The problem is, of course, that what the non-Western critics expect is, to put it bluntly and brutally, that the West will renounce its way of life. The alternative here is: will the West, as an end result of the anti-Western critical stance, succeed in self-destructing (socially, economically) as a civilization, or will it succeed in combining self-destructive ideology with economic superiority? Milner is right: there is no great paradox in the fact that the self-abasing critical mode is the best ideological stance for ensuring that there will be no revolutionary threat to the existing order.

However, their assertion should be complemented by a renewal of the (false, but nonetheless real) revolutionary stance of the new populist Right: their entire rhetoric is based on the "revolutionary" claim that the new elites (large corporations, academic and cultural elites, government services) must be destroyed, with violence if necessary. In Varoufakis's terms, they propose a class war against our new feudal masters: the worst nightmare here is the possibility of a pact between the Western populist Right and anti-Western authoritarians. It is easy to argue against Trumpist ideology: never in the entire history of capitalism has the state been more closely tied to neo-feudal corporate elites. But this is by no means sufficient: the real task is not to crush Trumpist pseudo-revolutionary energy, but to redirect it toward the appropriate target: the techno-feudal masters.

This means that we must unconditionally resist any temptation to return to the state of affairs described by Milner—that is, to reassert cancellation and other similar ideological (and institutional) mechanisms. As we have already noted, Trumpist populism is a reaction to the liberal-democratic welfare state, which came close to self-destruction (as well as incapacity) by focusing on identity politics. Trumpist pseudo-class struggle is the return of the repressed of left-liberal identity politics . The task is thus clear: from left-liberal CP, we must take its broad goals, but without its staunch spirit of censorship and its logic of de facto exclusion. From Trumpist populists, we must take their irreverent will for change.

Notes: 1 . Trump targets 'improper ideology' at the Smithsonian in latest effort to reshape the arts and history | CNNPolitics. 2. All Milner quotes are from Jean-Claude Milner, “On Some Paradoxes of Social Analysis,” Crisis&Critique Volume 10, issue 1 (2023), p. 243-245. 3. See Remi Adekoya's outstanding It's Not About Whiteness, It's About Wealth (London: Constable 2023). 4. Utah primary schools ban Bible for 'vulgarity and violence' - BBC News.

©Slavoj Žižek and Ñ Magazine. Translation: Elisa Carnelli