Hollow Rebellion: How Performative Politics and Identity Fetishes Empower the New Right

I.

So, we’ve observed a significant rise in the new right, as well as a more extreme right. It’s fitting to describe these movement as populist and reactionary.

A prime example is Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, which is a nationalist and right-wing populist group in France.

Here’s a graph from the Financial Times that illustrates this shift:

Anyway, I recently read an essay by

Slavoj Žižek, “The “Worsting” of France” that brings in a Jacques Lacan seminar or Worse, that got me thinking.

Here’s the point I want to focus on:

“Lacan’s point is that when such an authority is gradually undermined, it tries to redeem itself by way of “worsting itself” — the focus of Lacan’s line of argumentation is this process of “worsting,” or, as he puts it in verbalizing the term “pire,” “ça s’oupire,” “it makes itself worse.””

Zizek connected this to our current populist right movement occurring in the US…

“The struggles we are fighting…